Archive 24.1.2011 - 16.2.2011

MobileMe sucks hamsters through straws

Twitter / Search - mobileme. It's really shitty when you have to search on Twitter to find out that MobileMe is crap again and you can't log in - because the stupid Apple status page provides no information again. The way Apple operates MobileMe is highly unprofessional. Unfortunately, sync methods other than MobileMe are pretty crap if you want to sync various Macs and iOS devices. And since I naturally searched on Twitter too late again, and had already tried to fix my problem with the support information provided by Apple, I will probably have to reconstruct my MobileMe access on my Air tomorrow or so. Because of course, checking various problems with MobileMe is only possible in a destructive way. Thanks Apple for this waste of time.

LR/Blog - Send images to your blog from Adobe Lightroom. I had already found another plugin for this, but this one is more flexible and supports other blog types as well (down to "naked" MetaWeblogAPI). However, I don't know if it works with Lightroom 3 and newer WordPress versions ...

Tom Otterness: Superwoman

And here are a few examples with the same M8 and the 2.8/50 Elmar - but in the use for which I bought the camera. Black and white, as photos should be. Straight out of the camera, just the standard "B&W with blue filter high contrast" preset from Lightroom. Normally I would spend a bit more time on it, but I just wanted to put a few pictures online. It's silly to only use cameras but never show photos ...

Organ Pipes

I just love the pattern of organ pipes. And hey, if you want to test a camera in Münster, organ pipes are always ready as a subject. And they won't run away if the photographer is too slow to focus again ... (Leica M8 with the 2.8/50 Elmar and yes, I have to get used to the parallax again, the M8 only shows a very small section in the viewfinder at greater distances, you have to mentally calculate)

Contador can get back in the saddle - and Spain is systematically making cycling even worse than it already is. The whole thing is just a joke and an insult to every cycling fan, what the Spanish cycling federation is pulling off.

Bracketeer: Exposure Processing Software. Hmm, I've only played with the built-in HDR in the Sony NEX so far, and with HDRTist (I think in the free version). But I could try this one as well. Currently available for 5 Euros in the AppStore.

KammaGamma » Articles » Solving the Leica M8 DNG riddle. Interesting because Leica still claims the M8 is a 16-bit camera - but only 8 bits per pixel are actually stored. The article sheds light on what this means for the images. Short version: reserves in the shadows, but fewer reserves in the highlights. Should be taken into account when photographing. What remains, however, is the dynamic range - because the LUT maps the entire dynamic range, it simply creates holes in the highlight gradations. Nevertheless, I would prefer it if Leica offered an optional DNG format in which all the RAW data would be stored. It would be possible with a firmware update. (By the way, the M9 offers compressed and uncompressed DNGs as a format)

Main Page - Esolang. You should bookmark this blog because Wikipedia keeps deleting programming languages because they are supposedly completely uninteresting ... (currently deleted: Nemerle, Alice ML and Factor is also up for deletion again). What bothers me the most about the whole thing: Google and others now rank Wikipedia so heavily that it's almost impossible to find other programming wikis beyond these deletion pages.

Working Leica M8 Created Using Lego. And while we're at it, crazy cameras ...

- 3D Portfolio of Michael Grote -. If you like fantastic 3D renderings and want to take a peek behind the scenes (he often includes wireframe and concept renderings), just click. Really great work - I particularly like the Steampunk camera ...

Cameras. Specifically folding bellows view cameras, not old ones, but newly produced in various formats. Beautiful devices. Completely impractical, but hey, if I had the money and a realistic chance to overcome my anti-chemistry pig dog, then that would really be something exciting. So for me it's just nice to look at (the website - I wouldn't even buy a camera just to look at it).

'The Beast' Electric Bike: 50mph, $33,500. Ok, you can't really call this a bicycle anymore, it's more like an electric motorcycle-light or something. But still quite fascinating. Seems to be the week of Electro-Bikes or something: the eRockit is also a hybrid (and much cheaper than the Beast, but still very expensive)

Leica M Lens Codes. Since I bought a used M8 (yes, yes, quiet, no chatter) and now don't want to spend money on lens adapters (hey, you in the back, I heard you giggle!) - they cost around 100 euros per lens. Maybe later, but in the meantime, I might get by with a stencil, a black permanent marker, and this table.

SourceTree | Mercurial and Git GUI for Mac OS X. Hmm - it's not exactly cheap at 45 Euros in the AppStore. But sometimes I would already have a GUI for working with Mercurial, especially when I work with foreign repositories and possibly have local changes. Maybe I'll play around with the trial sometime.

JSTalk is a JavaScript editor with an integrated runtime and preprocessor to give JavaScript an Objective-C-like syntax for accessing Objective-C classes and a bridge to Objective-C underneath. Basically, something like FScript, but with JavaScript. Can also be used to script applications instead of AppleScript. Or just for playing around with Cocoa APIs. Somehow pretty cool, even if it initially seems quite inconspicuous.

"Press Kit" « Lucs Journal. A plugin for Lightroom that can export directly to the Wordpress Media Library or a NextGEN Gallery. However, of course again via xmlrpc.php, which I only reluctantly enable due to the more frequent security issues with it.

Advanced sign-in security for your Google account - Official Gmail Blog. Generally a good idea, as it makes the login - when used correctly - really more secure. But whether one overcomes one's inner laziness and actually uses it ... (I'm not even sure if I want to do this for my email)

ongoing by Tim Bray · Broken Links. Why these overused #! fragments in URLs are a big mess and why you shouldn't use them. And yes, it's annoying to rape the web - especially since there's absolutely no reason to do so, dynamic servers can easily map various URL structures. And yes, I know about the problem that you can only switch the URL in the browser in the fragment part via JavaScript, without forcing a reload - but that's no reason to convert all URLs to such a stupid fragment format.

Beginners GH1 Custom Firmware Guide - EOSHD. Maybe I should take a look at custom firmware for the GH1. However, it's very video-heavy, and so far I haven't done much with it.

Secret texts 'key to Julian Assange case' - or "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't trying to fry you". It's looking more and more like a campaign by the currently investigating prosecutor and less and less like a legal procedure. But as a Swedish acquaintance laconically commented: "we also throw people in jail for posting links to files that contain links to illegal downloads".

scgi-wsgi 1.1 released - Allan Saddi's projects blog - so far we have been using its FLUP-based server that comes with Django, but the option to switch to mod_prox_scgi would be interesting because we could effectively save one server in between and no longer have to work with ajp. Although ajp is not that bad either - so maybe just do a few tests. For simple web services, however, I will continue to use the wsgi server based on gevent that I have been using in deezeit, because it is simply incredibly fast and uses almost no resources.

Streitfall: Telekom will einheitlichen De-Mail-Domainnamen per Gesetz - state-subsidized scam free from technical expertise. The entire de-mail debacle can hardly be surpassed in absurdity.

Carl Zeiss joins Micro Four Thirds System - and this makes things more interesting for my Panasonics again, as the Zeiss video lenses could really be great additions to the system. And what Schneider-Kreuznach will bring is not yet known, but they have already delivered interesting things for the field of digital large format cameras. I say photography technology is really exciting at the moment.

Gravatars: why publishing your email's hash is not a good idea. And it also explains why avatars have disappeared again from my blog for commentators - not that I suffer from paranoia, but why open up the possibility of determining an email address for a gimmick?

IN-12 / IV-12 Nixie / VFD Clock. Well, tubes are just awesome. However, I would rather go for the "ready-assembled clock" option, my fingers often end up on the wrong (hot) end of the soldering iron ...

RUR-PLE is something like Logo, only with Python instead of Logo as the language. So actually just the graphical environment of typical Logo implementations. In any case, a nice toy.

using negotiate authentication (GSSAPI Kerberos) with Firefox. We have looked at this from time to time and wondered how to link Firefox to Kerberos logins.

Newcomer: Kenko to offer system camera with C-mount lenses. Simply interesting because this brings another somewhat unusual system camera - C-mount are compact video lenses, there are also some from Zeiss (so with quite good quality) and the image circle of these optics is rather suitable for compact camera chips. This naturally means worse low-light capability, but chances for very compact bodies (although my NEX with its APS-C chip already delivers a very compact body). It's a bit like the heyday of analog photography in the 35mm format again, when the market became really colorful with the Olympus Pen, the Pentax 110 and other camera exotics. I like it.

what a superb owl

Probably from here (I only heard about it indirectly via Twitter).

Lenzig

Played around with the Auto-HDR of the Nex-3 in Cafe Lenzig, also used the Zeiss 50/1.4 via Novoflex adapter. Somehow, I really like this.

How to write vim plugins with python. Because I like Python, because I like Vim and because you always want to build smaller things that make life easier. And because Vim's own scripting language is rather awful.

It seems that the Sony Alpha NEX-Open-Source-Firmware is Linux-based. I can't yet say exactly what's behind it, but Sony has Linux Kernel downloads (and the usual embedded tools) for the NEX on the server. If there's really a Linux running on it, this could become a hacker's paradise in the long run!

Layout Experiments

Since I'm still figuring out where my new blog is going, there are always some layout experiments. The first iteration was a bit too dark for me, so everything is now a bit lighter. I also noticed that I write a lot of asides (short articles without titles), which can be a bit hard to read, so I've adjusted the font size and line height of asides to match regular posts. Overall, I think it looks a bit more relaxed now.

In response to a question: no, I still don't plan to make the links colorful again - in fact, I've even removed the color from the small date tags. For some reason, color just doesn't seem to work well in my layout right now - except in my pictures, of course. But maybe the darker links are now better to read due to the larger font.

I usually test with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari - so if something doesn't work with IE, I won't notice. If something is broken, you can let me know via my contact form.

WorkingWithSubversion - Mercurial. Since I keep encountering outdated SVN repositories and clearly prefer Mercurial, I should take a closer look at hgsubversion.

Because I'm not looking for something like this for the first time and it looks quite practical: Sorting elements with jQuery – James Padolsey.

SLR Magic 35 1.7 Lens review on the Sony NEX-5. Interesting - cheap - lens for the Sony NEX. Basically, this is a lens like those used in surveillance cameras, adapted to the E mount. The optical quality is "interesting" - basically a fun lens for experiments.

Ricoh developing M-mount module for GXR system: I ended up with the Sony Nex 3 to revive my Leica lenses. And I am very satisfied with the new firmware for the Nexes. But the GXR with such an M module would certainly also be quite interesting (though probably not price-wise).

Vimari - Keyboard Shortcuts extension for Safari - GitHub. A bit like Vimium for Chrome, but can do significantly fewer tricks (and the links seem to be affected by the page CSS, which is why the QuickLinks look weird on my website)

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results. Interesting article, if this is true, Microsoft has made a pretty big (and embarrassing) mistake.

Java Hangs When Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308. PHP too. The solution to the puzzle in both cases: the number is the smallest representable number in double floats and approximations are determined for the conversion in Java and PHP, but unfavorable values are assumed as starting points - and thus infinite loops result because the target value is never reached. And yes, this is critical because you can send servers into a loop if you enter these number values in input fields that convert to double float. I also tried it with Python (CPython and PyPy), but they don't run into a loop, they simply deliver a slightly different value.

mobl is more my thing, a programming language that compiles to HTML5+JavaScript and comes with IDE support in Eclipse. Since HTML5 also includes client-side databases, and the entire application can be cached on the device via manifest files, you can also build offline-capable applications. And incidentally, it's also useful for Android.

Three20 - check it out if I want to give iPhone programming another try. It has some interesting concepts, especially regarding persistence and internal structure (uses internal URLs and URL routing to bring models and views together).

Introduction to Pharen. A Lisp that compiles to PHP. Weird. Okay, could be practical if the host only offers PHP as a server language. But still. Weird.

cfbolz / Pyrolog. Interesting project because it implements Prolog in Python, but uses the PyPy toolchain for JIT - this gives a nice insight into what is possible with PyPy besides Python.

Sho - Microsoft Research. A bit like SciPy and Sage (the part of Sage that deals with data analysis and visualization), but based on IronPython and .NET.

eMIPS - Microsoft Research. Yes, Microsoft does other things besides windows. And some of it is quite interesting - such as extensible MIPS, essentially a processor architecture with loadable microcode. We had something like this before with the Xerox machines (the Alto of course and later also the D systems).

live-processing is something like Impromptu - so a live coding environment - in Clojure. It naturally focuses more on graphics, as it is based on Processing, and does not yet have the full scope of Processing available, but hey, it should be enough to play around with a new language.

Optimizing Crajsh – Part 1 « #ponce's blog. A lot of information (also read the linked second part!) about efficient use of JavaScript in the browser for game development.

don't code today what you can't debug tomorrow: PhantomJS: minimalistic headless WebKit-based JavaScript-driven tool. Way cool - I definitely have to check this out, could be interesting for many experiments.

linq.js - LINQ for JavaScript. Quite an interesting hack to provide LINQ in JavaScript.