Geek stuff – Page 142 – a sibilant intake of breath

Back in the UK

Back in the comparative warmth of Oxford, I am enjoying how it feels to be on a computer with a properly calibrated screen and a keyboard familiar enough to require no peeking. It is gratifying to see how much better my photos look when properly displayed.

Since this is my father’s last night in England, I am not going to spend the three hours or so that it will take to sort through my photos from Turkey, just now. You can expect my previous entries to start getting illustrated as of tomorrow, as well as additional batches on Facebook and Photo.net.

PS. Both my iPod Shuffle and my USB flash drive picked up a few viruses over the course of visiting hostel and internet cafe computers. Thankfully, they are all viruses that only affect Windows machines. Travelers with laptops (or computers running Windows back home) beware. I do feel bad about spreading viruses between all those machines; no wonder they were so slow.

Irksome spammers

My spam problems have become very acute, with five or so spam comments appearing on commonly visited posts each day. In response, I have kicked up the sensitivity of Spam Karma 2 by a couple of notches. My apologies if this makes it more difficult to leave legitimate comments.

Judging by some of the search strings that are leading people to the site, I think blogs that use Spam Karma 2 are being specifically targetted. I may need to adopt a new system once I get back to Oxford on the 16th or 17th.

[Update: 29 December 2006] I am having two spam problems now. One is annoying and one is just odd. The first is that some spam comments are getting through Spam Karma 2, even with the Akismet plugin. They have karma values of over 1000, which I think must be the result of a clever hack. I changed the page footer with the number of spams caught, to make it less obvious that I am running SK2. The odd thing is that the number of spams caught figure just doesn’t go up anymore. I have no idea why, or how to fix it.

[Update: 31 December 2006] For no comprehensible reason, the spams caught count has started rising again: jumping immediately by forty points. The best thing to do seems to leave it alone.

[Update: 2 January 2007] For some reason, today involved a veritable cascade of comment spam. At midnight yesterday, my filters had caught 870 spam comments. 24 hours later, they have caught 1065. That is 22% of all the comments received thus far, all on a single day. I am impressed that my new combination filtering system (details top secret) managed to catch every single one, without catching any real comments by mistake.

[Update: 21 January 2007] Because of aggressive spammers, I had to disable the ability of people in general to register accounts with the WordPress installation for a sibilant intake of breath. People who want one should ask me by email, and I will set one up on their behalf.

[Update: 15 April 2007] I am surprised to see that I thought five spam comments a day was a large number, back in January. Now, I get more like 50. Thankfully, I have some better protections in place. As such, I am allowing user registration again. We will see how it goes.

Photo backup

I’ve copied the 160 or so digital photos that I have taken so far onto this internet cafe computer. Due to a less-than-zippy internet connection, it would take about ten hours to transmit the 155 megabyte file. As such, I have squirreled it away in a system folder, to return to when I can come back with my USB memory stick. The only alternative would be sacrificing all the music on my iPod Shuffle, which would hardly be wise with another noisy fourteen hour bus ride in a few days’ time. Simon & Garfunkel, along with my noise isolating Etymotic ER6i headphones, are the only reason I got any sleep last night.

The reason for burying the folder with my images is mostly an observation that dozens of people have left similar little caches of Turkish holiday snaps in more conventional places. There is some voyeuristic pleasure to be gleaned from skimming over them. They range from shots so professional that I am tempted to steal them to those that would prompt me to offer the photographer a few basic lessons.

With the sun down, it is now well and truly too cold to type in this unheated and open-doored cafe. Adieu until tomorrow.

Data protection

After another serious failure of a computer used by a friend or family member, I feel obliged to remind people that Oxford provides excellent free comprehensive data backups. If you are basing your entire M.Phil or D.Phil project on files in a (theft-vulnerable and breakable) laptop, this is something you really must do.

I already wrote about it here.

As a special bonus – prompted by passing the 40,000 visitor mark on the blog – I will personally configure the Oxford backup system for the first graduate student friend of mine who leaves a comment requesting it. Call that a special bonus for people who are reading the blog in syndication.

[Update: 22 January 2007] Bad news for people with Intel-based Macs: the TSM backup client for Mac OS does not yet support them. Supposedly, a new one is being released in February. Until then, keep making backups to external hard disks or optical discs.

New interface for comedic news

Comedy Central has rolled out a new interface for showing Daily Show and Colbert Report clips. The player seems to be rather more stable than the previous version, with no errors discernible in Firefox 2.0 and Mac OS X. The videos themselves are a bit bigger and seem to load faster. Perhaps the biggest improvement is that clip videos now play in sequence, in the order in which the bits were included in the actual episode.

The two biggest new problems are that the window in which the videos now play is very large and cluttered, and that video advertisements are now shown before the first clip you watch and sometimes in between them. For me, this is an acceptable price to pay for an improved viewing experience. It was very annoying to have to go through them one by one before, especially given how about one in three would encounter an error that prevented it from loading.

It would be better to just have it all on YouTube, but I can understand that Comedy Central needs to extract advertising dollars from we web-viewers. Of course, I won’t be de-activating my AdBlock extension or the Filterset G updater for it anytime soon. After a few weeks of using it, the web seems truly garish when viewed in a normal web browser. You need never be troubled by annoying banners again. Flashblock is also a godsend, since almost all the flash on the web is either advertising or potentially malicious.

Recommendation for moderately priced digicams

In the last couple of days, three people have asked me for recommendations on point and shoot digital cameras (must be on account of Christmas approaching). In the $250-$350ish range, I don’t think you can beat the Canon Powershot A series. The digital camera that I use is an old Powershot A510 (3.2 megapixel). Nowadays, I would choose one of these:

(Model – Price in C$ – Megapixels – Largest Good Prints)
A530 – $249.99 – 5MP – 6 x 8″ at 300 DPI
A540 – $299.99 – 6MP – 7 x 10″ at 300 DPI
A630 – $399.99 – 8MP – 10 x 14″ at 300 DPI

All are far more than would be required to take photos to put online. If you start uploading images much bigger than 1024×768 pixels (half the maximum resolution on my 3.2MP camera), few people will thank you.

Aside from the number of pixels in the sensor, these cameras are all very similar. The reasons I recommend them are that they have good image quality, decent lenses, and a nice combination of manual and automatic controls. They are easy enough to use if you know nothing about photography, and flexible enough that they can be used quite creatively. Dollar for dollar, my A510 is surely the best camera I have ever owned (a fact that would remain true even if I bought a snazzy digital SLR like the Rebel XTi).

Every photo in the following albums was taken using my A510, though they have been scaled down from the maximum resolution (2048×1546) to just 800 pixels, measured along the longer edge:

Other recent albums include both film and digital shots. Look at the details below, for Photo.net hosted images, to see what equipment was used.

[Update: 30 November 2006] This was the photo previously at the top of this post (thumbnail). It was one of very few photos that I have that include the A510, but it isn’t very good. The photo now atop this post was originally posted here. Because this one page of the blog was getting so much traffic, I decided to make the switch. It helps to not seem photographically inept, when you are trying to give people advice about cameras.

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it

Make, a community of tinkerers and open-source affectionados, has published a list of gift suggestions. Some of their projects look really cool. Among them:

Making your own battery-powered iPod charger
Making some open source beer: a joke based around the “free as in speech” – “free as in beer” distinction
Playing around with free planetarium software (for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X)
Making a persistence of vision display for your bike wheels (parts less than $40)

They are also selling a neat Leatherman warranty voider, in case you know a geek that does not yet have a multi-tool. (I have two: a Swisstool X and a little SOG Crosscut on my keychain). Their philosophy of “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” is increasingly relevant in a world where manufacturers are allowing fewer and fewer things to be done by those who purchase their products.

I have long been a huge fan of open source software. The blog runs on Redhat Linux, using Apache Server, and both WordPress and MediaWiki are open source projects. All of these pieces of software can be used for free, even more usually, your right to take them apart and rebuild is limited only by your creativity. Wikipedia is probably the best website ever created, and it is all about collective effort and shared information.

Old v. new economy

Google, a company with 9,378 employees, now has a stockmarket capitalization of $155 billion: about $16.5 million a person. General Motors has about 326,999 employees and a stockmarket capitalization of about $19 billion: about $58,000 a person.

It is impossible for me to believe that Google has enough good ideas to justify such a huge amount of capital per employee. That said, they did earn $1.47 billion in 2005, compared to a loss of more than $10 billion at GM. Also, everybody has known for years that GM’s pension and health care obligations are going to bury the company, barring some massive default.

Living with low light

For those interested in digital photography, you can find a good set of very comprehensible suggestions on the Lens & Shutter website. Judging by the photos you see on Facebook, I would say that the one on flash use is the most essential piece of reading for most amateur digital photographers. As highlighted in Philip Greenspun’s good free tutorial, awareness of light is critical to all good photography.

Reading about photography frequently makes me miss my tripod, which is back in Vancouver. (It makes a cameo in a relatively bad photo of Astrid.) I should get a little one so that I can actually aim my camera when I use it in timer mode on a solid surface, rather than just shooting straight up or at whatever angle the surface allows.

PS. Despite my love of wide angle, and hence aversion to digital SLRs with small sensors, my heart is definitely softening towards something like the Rebel XTi. That said, my dSLR fund is only worth about 36% of the price of that kit, and seems unlikely to expand prior to my departure from Oxford.

Cognitive boundaries

Sometimes, I wonder whether I should be disturbed that there are dozens of video games I know by heart. I mean that, after not playing them for five years or more, I know exactly which block needs to be pushed, what sequence of answers needs to be given in a run of questioning. The situation is altogether uncanny: you see the little girl made of thirty pixels and you know the instant you see her that she will ask you about her cat: this in a game that you last played in your friend’s basement when you had never had a sip of beer or wine and didn’t know what continent Oxford was on. It is like some kind of insane mockery of my inability to remember the three or four main points in the forty page article that I just read.

Human brains have not evolved for this ‘unknown person 31’ said ‘position 16/34’ on ‘topic 8041D’ style of interaction with data. I would venture to say that we are better suited to the ‘if it flashes, hit it with that weapon more’ style of interaction with data.