24 Oct 2005
I had a dream last night where my house had a kinda different layout (but the contents were the same…, and all the computers were downstairs and the front opened up some more/had really cool glass doors. There were a few people around so I left the house with someone and went for a drive [in a 4WD, go figure… was most odd], not bothering to lock the doors because I figured other people were around and were going to stay there. I don’t actually remember who any of these people were, but meh :P
Anyway, we get back about half an hour later and there’s no-one there anymore, and someone has stolen two LCD screens (but left all the old ones — I felt bad because I hadn’t packed away the 19″ and 17″ boxes, so that made it quicker/easier for them to take stuff), as well as my computer (but no others… there’s probably no rational reason for this, aside from that it was my dream. Possibly because a few days back I’d been asked what one thing I would take out of my house if it was burning down, and I said my computer because it’s got a few years worth of photos, work, and music on it — and not all of those things are completely backed up offsite.)
In actual fact, I didn’t particularly care. Insurance would pay for the screens, and having to get a new computer meant not only that I didn’t have to worry about the inevitable bloat of my home directory (and my Desktop is a living example of chaos theory — I’ll clean it up, only to find it absolutely full three days later), but also that I could get an iBook instead! Yay!
Of course, none of this actually happened. But I was pleased to realise how little I’d actually care! And, for a few short moments, I was convinced I was going to get an iBook. Then I woke up.
23 Oct 2005
Last night at St Thomas’ in North Sydney there was a concert called “Freedom“. There were two acts, being Mike McCarthy and The View (pictured below), as well as a short talk on true freedom through Jesus.
Geek aside: They were using a Jands 4 PAKc and two sets of 4 pars on either side of stage, and it looked as though the op managed to get them to chase in pairs (even though they were paired on the dimmer by colour on either side of stage)… as in, 2×2 alternating rather than 1×1 alternating across the four channels. Was most bizarre. It’s a pretty neat console for small band things and other places where there’s no [convenient] access to 32A power, plus they’re painless to setup and transport. Oh, yeah, and if all you need is a couple of pars then there’s no excuse for spending more on a console and dimmer: these things are sub-$800AU.
22 Oct 2005
Last night we had our second “Cook Off” event, which involves a bunch of ingredients and four teams competing against each other to create something delicious edible.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from the cook-off, so… go check them out. Credits to Sarah for… about half of the shots. I did the food macro ones. Also managed to accidentally over-write source images when copying, so the scaled images you see in the album are all I’ve got, sorry.
21 Oct 2005
An interesting article from CNet reporting Marc Andreessen’s (of Netscape fame, amongst other things) comments on the future of PHP and Java. Personally, I think the whole thing is overplayed. So what, we’re seeing a diversion between where the technologies are applied? Okay… PHP has the higher level closer-to-the-browser layers, and Java does the hardcore stuff. It is, as the article suggests, a pretty complex language, and it’s being used accordingly.
At the end of the article (second page), Andreessen is quoted as saying “I think Flash is one of the most exciting technologies out there that’s almost on the verge of great success and never quite achieving it.”
What on earth is his definition of success? Flash has 97% market penetration, which is higher than any operating system on the planet, let alone browser or scripting language. He’s decrying the peril of Java as it shifts away from prominence on the web — and who needs Java applets, anyway? Google, if you try and get into that whole thing, damn you too. They’re slow to load, and generally crap. Newer versions are looking more and more like Flash clones, with video support leading the way in this area — to where? Why, to the systems that sit behind the web. It still fits with Sun’s infamous “the network is the computer” paradigm, albeit slightly differently.
Me, I don’t particularly care about the backend tools. I’m a frontend person. However, if we can reduce complexity of systems closer to the delivery layer, we should — if this means choosing PHP for something over Java, so be it. PHP, however, doesn’t run on the desktop (unless you’re someone with BSD and too much time on your hands ;-), and Java does. This, admittedly, is slightly apart from Sun’s proclaimed strategy — but it isn’t really such a bad place to be. The places this technology is/has a stronghold is the enterprise desktop. I can only see Java in this field moving in the direction of desktop apps as a gateway to the network, as that (so it seems to me) has always been one of the platform’s core advantages — it has great connectivity powers.
Java, for a standalone app, seems a little… lonely. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like a real compiled app, only probably more complex and slower. Once you introduce the network, it starts to make sense. I think Eclipse’s director Mike Milinkovich has a quote that surmises the article flawlessly: “Java and PHP compete at some level. Get over it.”
20 Oct 2005
UPDATE: Maybe I was wrong. See the bottom of this article for more.
The sensor on this must be an absolute piece of trash. It hasn’t even got the excuse of a slowly dying sensor due to a manufacturing defect/humidity… it’s just really poor quality.
The above image has just been scaled, and carefully compressed so as not to exacerbate the problem (in actual fact, JPEG compression artifacts reduce the severity of it). It looks as though it’s had a posterize filter applied to it (reducing the number of colours in the palette, similar to what indexed GIF photos look like), but it hasn’t. That’s straight out of the camera… so far as I can tell, no other software has touched it.
Maybe it just looks worse to me than it is because I’ve got three sets of images here, the other two of which come from a Canon EOS-300D — or Digital Rebel in US-speak — (or maybe a pair of them, judging from time delay between shots, but last I heard they were junky consumer versions of the EOS-10D with plastic casing, and “special” lens options, so why anyone would buy two of them is beyond me). I don’t know, I was just pretty appalled this was coming straight of a camera — ANY camera, regardless as to the brand. It’s not overexposed, or blurred, or grainy (well, it is, but you can’t see it particularly well in the scaled version and that’s not what I’m complaining about — I understand low-light does that to photos), it’s just really bad colour. Incidentally, it was shot as a JPEG. So, it’s not like I or anyone else has screwed up RAW processing — the camera has done that for us.
Oh, and incidentally, what’s with 3:2 ratios? I think it’s nicer than 4:3, but it bugged me to look shots from the Canon before I figured out what was going on!
Update: Perhaps they have been processed a little. One or two of the Rebel’s photos are exhibiting similar qualities, so that leads me to believe someone was being a tool with saturation in Photoshop or the like. And unhelpfully left the EXIF data intact so I thought it was unchanged. :-( I guess I’m often guilty of much the same thing with the GIMP, but oh well. Doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while!
