brainstorms

Friday April 29, 2005

a useful os review

it is nice to see ars technica's relatively useful review of mac os x 10.4 tiger. it goes to show that these operating system reviews can be done a little bit more seriously [in contrast to, say the zdnet uk "review" of solaris]. always interesting and amusing to find a section titled performance that is innocent of any quantification whatever, and prefers to work the adjectives instead.

Wednesday April 27, 2005

notes on scigen

sure, mit's scigen is a cute toy, but i am disappointed that it did not enhance/reuse dada engine. not invented there? dada has proven track record; generates pretty good postmodern text as well as other kinds of drivel, and so far as i can tell from the conference scigen had targetted and succeeded, it would have done just fine:

WMSCI 2005 might be perceived as a research corpus callosum, trying to bridge analytically with synthetically oriented efforts, convergent with divergent thinkers and focused specialists with non-focused or multi-focused generalists.

[hmm, that sentence alone may have been generated by dada]

i know scigen was supposed to be a re-enactment of the sokal affair, but there are important differences: sokal was producing a document in a field flooded with years worth of pseudo-scientific gibberish and abstract nonsense. [there are volumes of this stuff; a sharp analysis can be found in sokal and bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science] leaving aside things like open-source license discussions and high-level architecture documents, computing field tends to be a bit more analytical; from what i have looked at, scigen output has no chance against most peer-reviewed journals or respectable conferences like usenix. the output is easy to spot nonsense.

related readings: rob's bimmler prank
rob and bruce ellis's mark V shaney prank
a.c. bulhak, On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks, Monash University Technical report CS 96/264.

While at a conference a few weeks back, I spent an interesting evening with a grain of salt. -- mark v shaney

[image note: gears of an old grain grinder, distillery district, toronto]

Monday April 25, 2005

must read: success of open source

i rarely miss important books related to computing, but somehow i managed to not get a copy of steven weber's the success of open source the instant it hit the shelves. how annoying. my friend peter roosen-runge told me about it, and i am now reading. my impression from initial pre-reading: it is the rare kind of book that is smart, well written and deep at the same time. it is a must-read for anyone having anything to do with open-source.

an interesting tidbit i found early on:

In the autumn of 1993, Larry McVoy at Sun Microsystems captured the core of the problem in a memo called "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal" that he prepared for Sun CEO Scott McNealy. The memo began with the proclamation that "Unix is dying" because of duplication of effort around different implementations, leading to high prices; poor compatibility; and worst of all, slower development as each separate Unix vendor had to solve the same kinds of problems independently. [...]

McVoy made radical suggestions for a Unix resurrection. Sun should give away the source code for SunOS 4, its proprietary version of Unix, or simply drop the Sun operating system altogether and adopt Linux instead.

peter wayner's very funny aphorism:

how many open source developers does it take to change a light bulb? 17. 17 to argue about the license; 17 to argue about the brain-deadedness of the light bulb architecture, 17 to argue about a new model that encompasses all models of illumination and makes it simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same easy-to-extend mechanism, 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial conspiracy that ensures that light bulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally change the light bulb, and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the time being.

weber's eight general principles of open source process [based on raymond's earlier analysis and his own interviews and observations]

1. make it interesting and make sure it happens
2. scratch an itch
3. minimize how many times you have to reinvent the wheel
4. solve problems thorugh parallel work processes whenever possible
5. leverage the law of large numbers
6. document what you do
7. release early and release often
8. talk a lot

i expect to have a detailed review of this book soon.

open source software is always in beta.

Sunday April 24, 2005

nikon: a raw attitude part deux

nikon released a clumsily written advisory that is supposed to clarify matters with facts and explanations. it is basically a spin document that manages to badly say very little. [also see photoshopnews discussion] it several times refers to bona fide developers [a very strange qualification these days] and nikon's proprietary sdk such developers are allowed to get if they ask nicely enough. this is the line i find the most interesting:

Nikon’s preservation of its unique technology in the NEF file is employed as an action that protects the uniqueness of the file.

very strange. no technical details on how this is supposed to work, except perhaps through obscurity.

[evidently, this line of reasoning did not occur to (say) canon. here is a discussion of canon's published crw/ciff format.]

related links: openraw - digital image preservation through open documentation.
adobe dng resources (adobe: whatever happened to that open source dng library?)

[image note: multiple exposure spinning top, from a series of images for holzmann's spin. nikon equipment, velvia.]

Friday April 22, 2005

notable comics [cont]

[i seem to have dropped a part of my comics notes on the floor. sigh]

batman: hush is undoubtedly one of the comic masterpieces of the last decade. part of the acclaim for these volumes comes from jim lee's powerful, moving, dark art. other part is jeph loeb's writing of course. sadly i did not come across this until last year's trade pbk releases. [this will be reissued in an oversize/boxed format this september, and will be on my bookshelf the instant it appears]

last year, brian azzarello, jim lee and scott williams started on a superman sequence, for tomorrow which is very well written, thoughtful and superbly(!) illustrated. [it is now complete, and first volume is available in hc.]

i really like alan davis and mark farmer's work. [they are fan favorites so that makes me a fan] last year i was able to get their earlier work, and also found jla: nail an alternate story/history arc. they also started and completed another arc, appropriately called another nail. both are highly recommended. [davis and farmer also did an uncanny x-men sequence last year, written by claremont, and is very very good.] there was also a modern masters volume for alan davis which is worth getting, even though i find it much less than what a good illustrator like alan deserves.

when jeph loeb, ed mcguiness and dexter vines were doing superman/batman: public enemies i was not paying attention. happily it came out in hardcover last year. this is very good story telling (with inner dialogues!) and superb art by mcguiness and vines.

a worthless solaris review...

slashblot desperately needs some class. it just linked to a zdnet uk "comprehensive" review of solaris that is essentially a page-long hit-and-run incident. i refuse to provide a link to this junk, but here is the scorecard, in case you were wondering:

Features 9
Setup & ease of use 3
Performance 8
Service & support 7

so at 6.8 do we get a thumbs up or thumbs down? does the computing community deserve a wagging finger of shame [thanks roger] for being so shallow?

Thursday April 21, 2005

nikon: a raw attitude

not sure what to make of nikon's recent chance to NEF (nikon's raw format) on D2X bodies [and i expect the change to come down to other cameras as well]. i am assuming it is the kind of temporary loss of consciousness that inflicts large corporations from time to time.

photoshopnews discussion is interesting to read. i think the issue that concerns me the most is ownership; i have noted in the past that unshared digital camera raw image files are the only way to guarantee image authenticity and ownership. what i had not thought about was that a raw format could be hijacked by the camera vendor, be obscured, and may be subject to manipulation i have no knowledge or control over.

this is seriously bothersome. it is easy to switch to a less stupid vendor, or to reverse engineer the format (some people think that is an inalienable right.) alas, that is just evading the issue. unless nikon recovers soon and fixes this, it should be challenged in the courts.

related links: dave coffin's excellent open-source dcraw converter
an interesting discussion on various aspects of this raw format: is NEF format truly lossless?
for future: adobe digital negative

Tuesday April 19, 2005

on groklessness...

people seem to generally respect groklaw. it is said to be a strong defender of open source. not being a regular reader, i assumed that meant a fair, literate and rational approach to debates around open source. i must be mistaken, or jonathan's groklaw debate link is pointing to a bad imitation.

[highly recommended related reading: jamie whyte, crimes against logic, 2004]

notable comics from last year

i will remember 2004 as the year for my comics interests: i have found material from many good writers, pencillers and inkers, some of whom i wish i had known sooner. here is a quick tour of comics that i thought were very well written, drawn & inked or both. sometimes, storylines grew too complex with many genre references [and in the case of horror, religious - almost always christian - and occult references i am familiar from some distance] but still remained enjoyable, and when the storyline faltered, good art kept me going.

i knew about kurt busiek (i think henry mentioned him first when i asked about some of the top writers in the field) and had read about him in writers on comics scriptwriting. i did not know what a potent combination he would make with carlos pacheco and jesus merino: Arrowsmith: So Smart in Their Fine Uniforms is about war and its costs.

writer/illustrator kazu kibuishi's daisy kutter is steampunk/western masterpiece; his art is as different from superhero comic book art as sumi-e is different from western watercolors; trade pbk should be out soon. when i last checked, amazon had not heard of kibuishi, but barnesandnoble at least has an entry.

joss whedon [of buffy fame], karl moline and andy owens produced the remarkable fray: good story with sharp and dynamic art to match.

not sure how i found out about the witching hour by jeph loeb, chris bachalo, art thibert (may have been mentioned in wired or entertainment weekly) but that was my first encounter with chris bachalo's magnetic, complex work.

here he is again in morales, bachalo, campbell's captain america, and his own glorious if somewhat confused steampunk.

[since i wrote the draft of this blog, bachalo nearly completed drawing a beautiful sequence in x-men: age of apocalypse by writer akira yoshida]

karl kesel, skottie young in human torch [which should be out in trade pbk soon]. i really like skottie's style. [still trying to find a copy of his sketchbook.] daniel way, skottie young, rick ketcham in venom: twist [i think this follows a venom volume by humberto ramos]

brian augustyn, humberto ramos, sandra hope in remarkable crimson loyalty and loss (1-6) heaven and earth (7-12) earth angel (13-18) and redemption (19-24) weird and wonderful story of alex elder, a teenage vampire.

one of last year's good surprises is majestic while you were out: i was not that familiar with abnett and lanning so i did not know what to expect; also this is the first time i encountered neil googe's work. every panel is well composed and drawn; add sharp inking (a calligraphic/cut nib?) by trevor scott, and good coloring, and that is a sequence (now complete) well worth getting.

Friday April 15, 2005

register no longer registers.

there is something to be said for living upto [or downto] one's logo. the register used to be (by and large) incisive and smart (and somehow made me think this was dissonant with the logo) but have been slowly regressing back to its vulture character. [this is no doubt a result of increasing irrelevance in the face of blogtorrent. why would i really bother with register when there are sun bloggers and slashblot to read?]

latest evidence of this regression is the piece by andrew orlowski: torwalds knifes tridgell. there is little to be said for this nasty piece [an orlowski specialty] with its made-up quotes, except its title keyword is curiously apropos to the situation: bitkeeper issue seems to have produced enough knives for a large and bloody roman drama. alas it is discouraging to see so many are intended for torwalds...

O mighty Casar ! dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?

[musical recommendation: the anne russell album, how to write your own gilbert and sullivan opera and the ring of the nibelungs(an analysis), sony masterworks, 1972.]

[addendum: an interesting discussion with larry on this topic is found in bmc's blog. i have heard bruce perens jumped in as well, with a big thud through another orlowski piece.]

Monday April 11, 2005

make (zine) can be addictive

just saw the first issue of o'reilly's make magazine. kite aerial photography (with good images), magnetic stripe reader, wicked desktop rail gun (using neodymium iron-boron magnets), video camera stabilizer, fun ipod tricks, a primer on soldering and de-soldering... this is 181 pages of neat stuff. contributors include sterling, doctorow. TOC is here.

well done, o'reilly. count one canadian subscriber.

Friday April 08, 2005

macs and essayists

earlier i had blogged about graham's mac essay and made a few points contra his romantic hand-waving. mac fan john gruber also has a discussion of that essay here with lots of self-quotes. gruber also takes on our tim bray for his unswitch essay. [he even compares stock charts. now there is an innovative argumentative technique!]

The core difference between Mac OS X and the old Mac OS isn’t that it is flat-out better, but that it is good in (mostly) all the ways the old Mac OS was good, and but is also good in entirely different ways. It is the Mac and it is Unix, at the same time.

[what a nicely twisted, diplomatic sentence. a more blunt, accurate version would have said it is good in the ways old Mac OS was awful. would a venn diagram help?]

[musical recommendation: tbd.]

a loss of bitkeeping...

recent news about the bitmover's plans to phase out the free bitkeeper product came as a bit of a shock. [there is a detailed kerneltrap article on this, and has already been slashblotted, so i will not bother re-iterating the details.] now here is an interesting challenge: what makes bitkeeper special [says a regular bk user] and can it be cloned [without running into any patent troubles with bitmover] for the open source community? i expect there will be some fun times ahead in the source code control area. [i am reminded of that great line from the golem lectures about a negative gradient]

I decided to bite the bullet and just see what life without BK looks like. So far it's a gray and bleak world ;) -- linus

[musical recommendation: julian bream, guitar recital: wonderful, thoughtful pieces by sor, turina, de falla and torroba]

[linus mentions monotone in his message; latest version does not configure on stock sol10 due to libboost_unit_test_framework failure. clunk.]

Tuesday April 05, 2005

photographing a snow storm in april

an unusual april snowstorm in toronto. it is too warm in the southern parts for any significant accumulation, but snow coming down in large flakes (really clumps of flakes) and getting whipped around by a strong north-westerly wind. since there is not much snow left in toronto, these huge flakes are in stark contrast to the landscape; a rare special effect of nature, like an old tv with a really spotty reception.

good time to go out and make some pictures. [note to fair-weather photographer: do not miss this.]

there was enough daylight to shoot at reasonably fast shutter speeds, which freezes the motion of the flakes in the air. that alone makes an interesting image, shown on the right. [without these notes, people will wonder if this is a photoshop trick.] closing the aparture down for slower shutter speeds, we have white streaks against the trees and the brush; a more surrealist view not easily visible to the naked eye.

rest of my images were made with a combination of slower shutter speeds and zooming from mid to upper end of a 28-105 lens. [note on technique: first zoom out to the wider angle, compose/frame the image, and zoom in with slow shutter.] added zoom/motion makes the images much more abstract, but in my mind's eye, a good visual representation of the storm; lots of movement with strong gusts of wind, white streaks everywhere.

i have made some good images in about half an hour, but i really should have stayed longer and looked for better nature locations. [too worried about the equipment. sigh] a snowstorm without significant accumulation provides some strong contrasts, and good possibilities for nature abstracts.

related reading: freeman patterson and andre gallant, photo impressionism and the subjective image, sept. 2001

[all images made with a nikon D70 (200 iso, NEF) and nikon 28-105 f/3.5-4.5 AF D. rudimentary color correction in photoshop.]

Friday April 01, 2005

the concrete jungle

The death rattle of a mortally wounded telephone is a horrible thing to hear at four o'clock on a Tuesday morning.

good reading: hugo-nominated novella by charlie stross, the concrete jungle [and not surprisingly, it is under a creative commons license.]

[of course, you also have to read about charlie's posthuman condition]