Monthly Archives: December 2007

Why I’d Go Nikon

Posted on by
Reply

Andrew’s biased me. I’m a Canon fan. I own a Canon body, and now, two Canon-mount lenses. And this brings in switching costs: the lenses would be useless to me if I had a Canon. And, while I think it’s mostly irrational, I’ve come to love everything about Canon cameras and see any difference as a flaw in Nikons.

But I’m still excited about the Nikon D3. And it turns out that I’m far from the only one. The D3 has a ton of people anticipating its release. And even at 5 grand, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re sold out at first. I don’t have that much to spend on a camera, but if I were a serious photographer, I’d have pre-ordered mine already.  Why?

  • Higher ISOs mean you can get shots that you otherwise couldn’t. Or that you can buy cheaper (and lighter) lenses and still get good shots. Everything in photography is a trade-off: to increase shutter speed, you need to either raise the ISO (which raises grain), or use a wider aperture (which usually hits hard limits: your lens is only so good, and you pay through the nose for faster ones). Increases in usable ISO, though, come “free”–if you can suddenly take clean shots at ISO6400, as you apparently can with the D3, you can get shots that, frankly, were impossible on other cameras.
  • Higher ISOs can mean increased savings. To get really good shots when I can’t shoot above ISO1600 (or ISO800 if I want clean shots), I pretty much have to buy a faster lens. Pros have tens of thousands in high-end lenses for just this reason. They can get the shots I can’t. Suddenly, at ISO6400, I’d be on par with them.
  • A lot of cameras are using “cropped” sensors… The sensor is smaller than 35mm film, so only the center of the image coming through the lens falls on the sensor, effectively cropping the image. This is beneficial if you’re using telephoto lenses, as it’s essentially a “bonus” zoom. (A 200mm lens on my camera is equivalent to a 320mm lens on a full-frame camera.) But for people who shoot at the wide end, it’s a major pain. The crop gave rise to things like Sigma’s 10-20mm lens, which is ridiculously wide. The reason is that, on a 1.6x crop sensor, it’s 16mm equivalent at the wide end: right on par with existing lenses. A lot of lenses are being built just for these cropped sensors, which permits them to be lighter and cheaper. But people still prefer the full-frame sensors, so now there are two types of lenses floating out there. Nikon nailed it here: their camera will work with both. If you mount a lens for ‘cropped’ cameras, it’ll only use part of the sensor. If you mount a full-frame lens, it uses the whole frame.
  • They built a longer-life shutter. Bravo. (Actually, Canon did too…)
  • They improved the LCD to over 900,000 pixels. One thing that drives me nuts on the 10D is that the image is tiny and low-resolution. You have to spend time zooming in to see if it came out alright. And when you’re shooting live action, this means missing a ton of shots. So you shoot blindly, and then realize that the whole thing came out unusable.
  • They have a built-in guide, so you don’t have to carry the manual around. Again, brilliant! The menu also looks a little bit less like it was made in 1982.
  • When I talk about high ISOs, 6400 is just their ‘normal’ upper. As with most cameras, you can enable “Expanded ISO” mode, which gives you some more settings, with the catch that they’re somewhat noisy. But you can shoot at ISO25,600. This is just obscene, and I’m fairly certain that, until Nikon came out with this, no one had ever even thought about a camera being this fast.
  • They kept up a high shutter speed… Between 9 and 11 frames per second, in fact.

Something tells me that the folks at Canon are scrambling to develop a sensor this good.. I hope they are. Because I hate those stupid circular viewfinders on Nikon cameras.

Aside: I really hope the folks at Canon are also scrambling to develop a camera that ditches the shutter… I’m still at a loss to explain why it’s even in a digital camera.

Aside: Maybe they can steal my ideas and include a useful integrated WiFi chip… Or a built-in intervalometer. That’d be trivial to implement?

Separation of State and Church

Posted on by
7

Note the title: I’m not talking about politicians staying clear of religion. That’s a separate issue.

My local church has announced that next week it’ll hand out a “Catholic Voter’s Guide.”

I find this an insidious abuse of religion. Not so much because I think it’s wrong for the church to leverage its power to influence politics (although I do), but because church is about God, not about politics. While I’m not one to quote scripture, consider Matthew 21:12, where Jesus can fairly be described as flipping out when people try to sell stuff in church. It’s not about politics, true, but I think the point is the same: church is about worshiping God. Attempting to campaign in a church strikes me as an unacceptable practice, and really, an affront to religion.

Granted, it could be worse. We don’t have enormous TV screens and invite candidates to our church to speak about politics as you sometimes see happening in the South. But I still can’t bring myself to support the church handing out political leaflets. Am I crazy to think this?

Misery

Posted on by
4

Tonight Oprah and Obama spoke at the Verizon Center. I went, both as a fan (of Obama, not Oprah) and to try to get some great shots.

I’ve heard Obama speak before. He’s really good. I went in tonight with Obama being my likely pick, but with Edwards still having some chance, and with the idea that Richardson would rock, too, but that he doesn’t stand a chance right now. I came out convinced that, without a doubt, Obama’s my guy.

Oprah also turned out to be an amazing speaker. I generally don’t have anything positive to say about TV celebrities, but she turned out to be great. She spoke about how, when she’s not on TV, she’ll often say, “Somebody should do something about that…” to all the things wrong in America right now. So, for the first time in her career, she stepped up and endorsed a political candidate, the one she thinks will “do something about that” to all our contemporary problems.

Michelle Obama spoke, too. Granted, she’s biased, but she had nothing but good things to say about her husband. She spoke about how when she first met him, they were both lawyers. While she was focused on wanting to be the next millionaire with her law degree, Obama received his degree and then went into destitute, rural areas to help.

And of course, Obama spoke. While he called himself the third-best of the three when it comes to speaking, his speech didn’t disappoint. Hearing him talk almost gives me goosebumps. I’m so focused on all that’s wrong with America: millions don’t have health care (as soon as I graduate from college, I’ll join the ranks of the uninsured), we keep botching things like Katrina, maybe because all of our National Guard / military is tied up with Iraq’s civil war. Our economy heads further south and shows no signs of stopping…

But when he talks, I suddenly have a vision of what America should be: veterans coming back from Iraq receiving a hero’s welcome and receiving veteran’s benefits, restored relations with the world community, health care for everyone*, the end of a pointless war, and the end of the clash between blue states and red states–a United States, if you will.

So why is my post entitled Misery? Because my camera died.

Here’s Cameron, a 10-year-old student, reading a letter to Obama, imploring him to provide more aid to the autistic:

10 year old!

He received (much-deserved!) hearty applause.

NH Governor John Lynch

There’s our beloved John Lynch addressing the crowd. We were near the back of the Verizon Center, so we didn’t have the best angle, but I knew from past experience that Senator Obama was very cognizant of the fact that the crowd wasn’t just directly in front of him, so he would turn around and make sure all the crowd got his attention. So I was excited. Obama would surely come around to the other side of the podium at some point, and I’d get some great shots. The lighting was good enough that I was getting 1/100 and better shutter speeds at ISO800 (on a slow f/5.6 lens); the only thing I could have wished for was a faster lens to throw the background out of focus a bit more. But I was golden. A lot of people say photography’s all about light. To me, it’s all about angles. And we’ve all seen head-on shots of politicians. They’re boring. I had a good perch.

So, you might ask, where are all the shots of Oprah, or Michelle and Barack Obama?

Err 99. Canon’s catch-all error message.

For a lot of people, it’s a bad connection between the camera and the contacts on the lens. For others, it’s a CF card error. But I tried it all in vain. I “reseated” the lens. No luck. I tried taking a shot with no lens. No luck. I tried shooting without a CF card. (That wouldn’t do me much good, but it’d tell me if the CF card was the problem.) Still Err 99. I tried reseating the battery, which apparently sometimes resolves the error. No luck. I even took the battery out and removed the little CMOS battery. No luck.

All indications are that it’s the worst possible fate: a shutter problem. There do look to be some small scratches on the shutter, although I wasn’t about to stick my hand in and try. (Because then it’s guaranteed to become a shutter problem…) The shutter isn’t really user-serviceable. Taking the camera apart is very involved. You have to send it back to Canon, for what’s apparently a $200 repair.

Is this a sign that I should get the Rebel XTi I’ve been eying? Or just a sign that I should give up photography?

The worst part, though, wasn’t sitting there knowing that my pride and joy of a camera had just become little more than a paperweight. It was knowing that I was missing some great shots. Initially, I kept just powering it back off and on trying to get some good shots. As Obama walked out, there was a huge sign blocking a lot of people from seeing him as he walked out. So he ducked down and waved underneath the sign. I had a nice, clear shot, and was at 1/100. I clicked the shutter. If all I had gone well, I’d have held it down and gotten three off in rapid succession, ensuring that at least one came out well. But all didn’t go well. Err 99. I got nothing.

A bit later on, he was speaking, and I noticed that Michelle Obama had her arm across Oprah’s back as they sat there. 200mm was just enough length to just about fill the frame with the two of them and Barack at the podium to the left. Err 99.

I spent a long while trying to see if I could resuscitate it, but eventually gave up.

* Before you fault this for the cost, consider that we’re spending many, many billions more than any nation in the world. As President Clinton remarked last month, if we were to put all the other country’s health care systems up on a board, throw a dart and pick whatever it hit, we’d save billions. And yet, despite paying billions more than we should be, we can’t even cover everyone!

The Time…

Posted on by
Reply

I’m pretty OCD and thus run an NTP server on this server. (It should respond to any hostname on this box.) Despite the server being in Texas, I keep the timezone set to EST.

So here’s a page displaying the time. Granted, having a clock that’s accurate down to a fraction of a second (synced to the atomic clock) is no longer that impressive. But tell me you’ve never wished for an easy way to find the correct time… Now you know.

Instincts

Posted on by
Reply

I was just trying to play some Team Fortress 2 on my laptop… Without a mouse. It wasn’t going so well. Plus, I couldn’t find anyone on the map. (It was a big map with only a few people on it.)  So I’m just moving around trying to find where everyone is.

And all of a sudden a Scout comes through the door and fires his shotgun. I don’t think he even hit me on the first shot.

But I totally panicked. I jumped back in my seat and began flailing my arms. He proceeded to shoot me again and I died.

Me: 0. Pathetic: +1.

Lost in Translation

Posted on by
Reply

Check out this radio‘s description. It’s got excess value and pettiness! And a phrase-lock-loop. And “LCD aphellotropic lights of showing screen,facile operation in dark” has got to mean “backlit screen.” (Facile is Spanish for “easy,” no your mom jokes.) Oh, and you can’t forget the Auto-charger rabbet. And it comes with a chargeable battery.

Anyone else confused? (Bonus points: I tried to copy-and-paste a quote, and it carried over the HTML tags, which included <font face=”Wingdings”> at one point….?!)

memcached

Posted on by
3

On my continuing series of me poking around at ways to improve performance…

I accidentally stumbled across something on memcached. The classic example is LiveJournal (which, incidentally, created memcached for their needs). It’s extraordinarily database-intensive, and spread across dozens of servers. For what they were doing, generating HTML pages didn’t make sense that often. So it does something creative: it creates a cache (in the form of a hash table) that works across a network. You might have 2GB of RAM to spare on your database server (actually, you shouldn’t?) and 1GB RAM you could use on each of 6 nodes. Viola, 8 GB of cache. You modify your code to ask the cache for results, and, if you don’t get a result, then you go get it from the database (or whatever) as usual.

But what about situations like mine? I have one server. And I use MySQL query caching. But it turns out it’s useful. (One argument for using it is that you can just run multiple clients on a single server to render moot any problems with using more than 4GB on a 32-bit system… But I’m not lucky enough to have problems with not being able to address my memory.)

MySQL’s query cache has one really irritating “gotcha”–it doesn’t catch TEXT and BLOB records, since they’re of variable length. Remembering that this is a blog, consisting of lots and lots of text, you’ll quickly see my problem: nearly every request is a cache miss. (This is actually an oversimplification: there are lots of less obvious queries benefiting, but I digress.) (WordPress complicates things by insisting on using the exact timestamp in each query, which also renders a query cache useless.) I just use SuperCache on most pages, to generate HTML caches, which brings a tremendous speedup.

But on the main page, I’m just hitting the database directly on each load. It holds up fine given the low traffic we have, but “no one uses it” isn’t a reason to have terrible performance. I’ve wanted to do some major revising anyway, so I think a rewrite in my spare time is going to experiment with using memcached to improve performance.

Simple English

Posted on by
Reply

I had someone on a forum I frequent ask me a question. It’s in broken English and he explained that he’s not a native speaker. In my reply, I tried to be sensitive to that by speaking somewhat simply. Not in a demeaning way, but in my attempts to learn Spanish, I learned very quickly that short sentences expressing one simple idea are much simpler than elaborate sentences conveying a complex range of thoughts, such as this one.

And that reminded me of the Simple English Wikipedia project, which I think should get more attention. They treat it like another language: there’s English, Spanish, Simple English, etc. A really awesome idea in my opinion. (Although the sexual intercourse page–warning, has an illustration of the process–is still pretty sketchy… Maybe because it’s not a topic that lends itself to being explained in simple, direct terms?)

I think “Simple English” is something everyone should practice, though. As some of the pages on the simple.wikipedia.org site show, writing in a simple manner does not necessarily require coming across like a dimwit.

Mnemonic

Posted on by
3

I don’t think there’s a mnemonic aid for “mnemonic,” but I’m studying for a law exam, and it’s insanely conducive to various visual associations:

  • Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 case that ruled that mandatory school prayer was an Establishment Clause violation. (You think?) Remember angels and that some thought it was vital to pray.
  • A trio of conscientious objector laws:
    • Welsh v. US: you needn’t have organized religious beliefs to object, if your beliefs are held with the strength of organized religion.
    • Gillette v. US: you can’t be a CO if you only object to one war; it has to be war in general
    • Clay v. US: it’s based on individual beliefs, not your whole sect’s beliefs. In particular, you must remember 3 prongs:
      • Oppose war in any form
      • Religious, not political, beliefs
      • There must be evidence that your beliefs are sincere
    • Remember Welsh grape jelly (and eating it individually, not in church), Gillette stadium (and protesters there opposing the Iraq war but supporting the war in Afghanistan), and, well, Clay is easier if you know that it’s Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali). The three items are pretty easy to remember on their own.
  • There was a Pinette case where the KKK wanted to put up a cross. It was for pretty intimidating purposes, but the court “had to live with its own precedent” that it was protected free speech. Imagine that the cross was made of pine.
  • VA v. Black: you can’t ban cross-burning, but if it’s used as intimidation, it’s illegal anyway. Remember that cross-burning was usually done as intimidation against black people.
  • Loving v. VA: essentially struck down anti-miscegenation laws. After all, marriage is about loving, not skin color.
  • Baehr v. Anderson and Brause v. Board of Vital Stats were two cases with a lot in common:
    • They both had the state’s anti-gay-marriage laws ruled violations of the state constitution
    • They both resulted in the state constitution changing to define marriage differently, banning gay marriage and doing it in a way that can’t be unconstitutional (since it’s in the constitution)
    • They both occurred in “Western extremity” states (Alaska and Hawaii)
    • They both involved people with strange B-names

Of course, we’ll see in an hour if this helps, or if I just sit there thinking that I could really go for some Welsh grape jelly having no idea why I’m thinking about it.