Category Archives: OCD

ISO: The Next Frontier?

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In photography, there are a few key variables in determining exposure. The first is the aperture of the lens: basically, how much light is let in. Really serious (or rich) photographers carry around very “fast” lenses–they’re enormous and let in a ton of light. Notice the huge lenses that you see on the sidelines as sporting events, for example. (Err, not the length, but the width–these things are huge in both dimensions.) Of course, these lenses (we call them “fast” lenses, or lenses with wide apertures) are very heavy, and insanely expensive: for a really good one, you’d pay at least $1,000, and that’s pocket change compared to some lenses.

Another control is ISO sensitivity. Back in the days of film, some film was more sensitive to light than others. For example, ISO100 produces great pictures, but requires a lot of light. It’s superb for outdoor pictures on a sunny day. On the other hand, if you’re getting shots indoors, you might be at something like ISO1600. The problem is that, as you increase the sensitivity, you also increase the noise. ISO1600 will get decent shots indoors, but they’ll be grainy. (This is especially bad if you’re like me and tend to try to boost details in the shadows in Photoshop.)

The two come together to control the third important variable, shutter speed. In some cases, it doesn’t matter a ton. If it’s bright and sunny, and I’m taking a picture of a building, I really couldn’t care whether it’s 1/100th of a second or 1/4,000th of a second. And, if I’m using a tripod, it’s not uncommon to have shutter speeds lasting several seconds. But the problem is that, if the shutter speed is too low, you get a lot of blur. There are two reasons–the first is that people rarely hold still. I use 1/60 as a general rule of thumb: below that and you risk some blur if people are moving a lot. This is a really rough guess: I’ve gotten great portraits at 1/8, and sometimes 1/125 isn’t fast enough.

The bigger consideration, though, is camera shake, especially with longer zoom lenses. The rule of thumb there is 1/length. For example, shooting with a telephoto 200mm lens, it’s recommended that I shoot a 1/200 of a second or faster.

Putting it all into practice… Bill Clinton was speaking tonight at an event we went to. I have a 55-200mm telephoto lens, and tended to stay right around 200mm. I stayed at ISO1600; I can go to ISO3200 but it’s very grainy so I don’t use it. Unfortunately, though, my lens can’t go wider than f/5.6 at that length, which meant that the fastest I could get shots was around 1/60th of a second. At 200mm, this really was inadequate: most of the shots came out okay because I have a steady hand, but they’re not all that sharp. Example:

title=”IMG_1795 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>IMG_1795

It’s okay, but now compare it to this picture:

title=”Autumn Colors by n1zyy, on Flickr”>Autumn Colors

Granted, the subject isn’t that interesting, but every time I see that shot I took, I think, “Wow, that’s sharp!” Not so for the Clinton photo. If you view it in larger detail (click on it), its subtle blur becomes increasingly obvious.

There was a professional photographer about ten feet away from me. She was shooting a 70-200mm lens, which is a similar length to mine. But hers is an f/2.8 lens, which lets in twice as much light as mine does. So while I was getting 1/60 shutter speeds, she could have been getting 1/120. (Hers had Image Stabilization, too, but that’s a story for another day.)

The thing is, taking telephoto portraits indoors isn’t all that rare of a thing to do. To get good shots, you need to get that shutter speed up. There are two ways to do it, as you should now know: raise ISO or get a better lens. The problem is that getting a better lens will set me back $5,000 or so. And it’s an insanely heavy lens as well.

The other option is one that, until recently, wasn’t feasible: raise ISO some more. ISO1600 is good. You can do ISO3200, but it’s decent on only a few cameras. But I really have to give Nikon credit with their D3. It’ll go to ISO25600. Check out some samples. I’ve seen some higher-res images at ISO6400, and it’s just about perfect! Its ISO6400 rivals my ISO1600. The thing is, that’s a huge increase to be able to shoot at 6400 and have a perfectly usable image. It would have helped a lot with getting better shots.

I truly hope this is the direction camera makers go in now, and that Canon and Nikon get into an “ISO war” trying to outdo each other.

Defragging for the OCD

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My Windows hard drive is a 60GB drive, and is always full-ish. With 8% free space (really good for this drive!), a defrag doesn’t get a lot accomplished. The small files are reassembled, but none of the big ones.  There’s not enough room to piece together the paging file.

So here’s how I, a definite OCD-sufferer, am cleaning up my Windows machine:

  • Create a desktop folder, “Crap,” and drag everything on the desktop into it, except for things that I know should definitely stay.
  • Plug in external 500GB hard drive.
  • Move the Crap folder to the external drive.
  • Move everything in My Documents to the external drive.
  • Empty the trash bin.
  • Run CCleaner.
  • Fire up your paid version of Diskeeper (it’s worth it, I promise: and I hate paying for software). Set up a boot-time defrag, and have it get the paging file and MFT as well.
  • Move everything back. Or, realize that you don’t need 3/4 of it and don’t move it back.

Warning: I’m somewhat concerned that some things might not take well to being moved around, like my iTunes Library. I’m posting this as I’m finishing up copying everything over, so it’s possible that this isn’t going to work out as I planned. We’ll see…

Crappy Apps

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Am I the only one that has to put up with terrible interfaces all day, every day?

The work order system for submitting requests to facilities management (Datastream) has a number of irritating flaws:

  • It only works in IE… I just happened to be in Windows right now, so it didn’t require anything other than switching browsers.
  • It requires pop-ups. SP2, by default, doesn’t allow them. It’s simple enough to allow them, but it’s a nuisance.
  • The link isn’t at all easy to find from the main Bentley site.
  • You need to log into this specific URL that specifies what building you’re in. The problem is that this information is tied to your username anyway, so you really don’t need to specify it in the URL. Except that, apparently, you do.
  • You log in with your student ID. Our student IDs begin with an @, and are then an eight-digit number. I never got the @ sign, but you can’t log in with it. It’d take a one-line script to strip the @ out if provided.
  • It’s some obnoxious Javascript/Flash interface that requires double-clicking on page elements. There is no reason this can’t be done with HTML forms? Which would also allow the interface to be used outside of IE.
  • You can view tickets, past and present, for anyone in your building. I suppose it’s not exactly confidential information, but why do you let me see that the guy on the first floor has to have someone come spray for ants?

In all seriousness, I could write the code to do this in a day, by myself?

And then our library has this interface to schedule meeting rooms. We have about 20 rooms. It’s terrible. It seems to connect to about 20 IPs when loading, which gives me strong reason to believe that every page load goes out and connects to every room. (Haven’t they ever heard of caching?!) There are always 2 or 3 rooms that don’t load, and often the tables load all funky. And it takes about 30 seconds to load. The problem is that it auto-refreshes every minute or so. So you’ll finally get the room to finish loading, and as soon as you lay eyes on an open room and go to click on it, the page refreshes and starts the whole process all over again.

And even when it does work, if you try to click on a certain date, instead of you showing you the room schedule for that day, it takes you to a little page with a picture of one of the rooms. How this isn’t a bug I don’t quite understand.

Again, this is a Programming 101 assignment.  Any of us on here could write something that would work better in a spare afternoon.

But then I started thinking… That’s maybe 5 web interfaces I use, 2 of which are unbearable. That’s 40% garbage. That’s a pretty bad statistic?

Prevention

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Tonight I interviewed a sergeant with the campus police department. He’s starting a community policing division, and some of what he had to say was neat. When he first started doing it years ago, his supervisors thought he was slacking off. He’d spend hours in the residence halls, chatting with students. At first, he told me, students were suspicious. Why were the police asking them about the football game? What were the police really there for? Soon, they got to realize that there was no hidden motive. His job was to patrol the campus and keep a presence in the dorms, and, as long as he was doing that, he figured he might as well make sure people knew his name and that people knew he wasn’t out to get them.

After a while, his supervisors realized that the officer that seemed to waste his shifts chatting with students was one of their top officers. He was solving crimes no one else could, until soon there really weren’t many crimes for him to solve. The crime in the buildings he patrolled dropped sharply. And the reason, he told me, is pretty simple: people knew he was there all the time, so they thought twice about doing anything stupid. And when people observed someone else doing something that affected them, they felt comfortable reporting it to him, whereas they might not want to call the police ordinarily.

But this reminds me a lot of the “Broken Windows Theory.” For those not familiar, some researchers somewhere watched an abandoned building for a while. Nothing much happened. One day, the researchers smashed out one of the windows, and kept watch. In a matter of days, people smashed in all the other windows. The reason put forward is that, when people see things in disrepair or decay, they don’t see as much of a problem with making the problem worse. As a very minute example, consider a trashcan in the bathroom. Would you ever throw your paper towel on the floor? If you’re the least bit civilized, no, it’d never cross your mind. But what if the trashcan was overflowing? You could probably fit your paper towel in. But you just throw it on the floor, partially because you have no choice and partially because you’re dismayed at the level of disrepair. And extrapolate that feeling to the people who would go around committing more egregious acts. I think it’s the exact same thought process.

At work, I probably drove the maintenance people nuts. I considered it a complete disaster if a light in the bathroom was out for more than a day, for example. There were nine bulbs in each bathroom, but a single flickering bulb is all it takes to make the bathroom seem like a run-down place. Pretty soon, I’d tell my coworkers, we’d have graffiti and people breaking the mirrors. We never did find out if I was right, because we never let the chance present itself. (I won’t lie: OCD was another factor that I insisted that burned-out bulbs be replaced ASAP.)

Sometimes we’d be insanely busy. And it felt like the building would be nice and clean for hours and hours, and all of a sudden, the floors were a mess. People would drop crumbs, and, as long as there were crumbs on the floor, why bother picking up the napkin you dropped? And when the people at the next table saw napkins on the floor, why should they bother picking up the plate they dropped? And when the kids a few tables down finished their soda and knocked the bottle over, why not leave it on the floor?

As Malcolm Gladwell would say, there’s a tipping point. Things would be nice and clean for hours on end, until all of a sudden there’s a subconscious signal that it’s no longer necessary to be tidy. And I’m not sure how many of my coworkers understood it on a scientific level, but I think most them intuitively got it. Even though we were really busy, we’d try to find an employee who could spare 15 minutes to go around and pick up. Not only did this have the positive effect of solving the “broken windows” problem, but I think it even went the other way: they saw that, not only were the windows not broken, but we were actively addressing the issue. And every once in a while, you’d get someone who would pick up the trash under their table when you got near them. You’d basically reversed the problem.

Our toilet in our dorm room was getting really gross. In addition to the predictable filth, the top of the toilet had become really dusty, and there were probably about five cardboard rolls from finished-off rolls of toilet paper. The other day, I couldn’t take it any more, so I cleaned the toilet bowl and the seat. I didn’t really have the energy to do the whole thing, so only half the toilet got cleaned. There was still considerable room for improvement, but you were no longer afraid to use it. Today, our toilet is sparkling clean. I don’t know who did it. I never asked anyone to, and I didn’t do it. But I take partial credit. I think I sent a subconscious signal by cleaning half the toilet. All of a sudden, the other part of the toilet was thrown into contrast, and the message was sent that we don’t like our things to be filthy. Someone else picked up on that, and finished the job. And I think the toilet’s going to stay clean for a while.

And now that I’ve talked about sending subconscious messages with my toilet, I think it’s time I acknowledged that I’m up way too late and went to bed.

Tech Tricks

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Here are a few low-tech computer tricks I’ve started doing lately:

  • I’ll periodically bump the wrong keys and find keyboard shortcuts that I didn’t know existed for sending an e-mail mid-sentence. It’s one thing when you’re e-mailing a friend ramblings about cheese (they may even be glad the e-mail got cut short?), but when you start e-mailing important people, it becomes a bigger deal. The last thing you want to do is e-mail the chief of police and say, “I’m working on an article and I’d like to mee”… The simple ‘fix’ is to not let your e-mail program dictate how you compose a message. The “To:” line comes first. Do it last, so you can’t mess up.
  • When attaching files, do it before you write the e-mail. I can’t believe how often people (myself very much included) send e-mails referring to attachments, but forget to add the attachment. If you can get in the habit of making attaching the file first, it’s a lot harder to mess up.
  • When downloading things from the Internet, always, always, always click “Save” instead of “Open.” I tend to do Open instead, because it seems like a needless step to save it to the Desktop and then open it. But in the past week I’ve lost two files because I click “Open” on a draft someone sends me. I spend a long time revising it, and hit Save every minute or so. But it gets saved to a temp directory that’s virtually impossible to find. Today I spent considerable time poking around the directories, and found that what’s stored is VERY limited. If you’ve visited any sites after you last saved the file, it’s practically assured that your file is 100% gone, because the cache will get purged. As I’ve said before, I’d consider this a fatal design flaw, and I can’t believe more people don’t have problems with this. So always, always, always save to your Desktop and then open. And, if you’re working on a file and about to close, don’t close it unless you’re positive you know where the file is being saved.

All of these are things that take some time getting used to. But I think they’re like, say, using a PDA: you have to commit to doing it 100%, or it’s utterly useless. If your calendar doesn’t contain everything you’re doing, it’s worse than having no calendar at all. I need to work on automatically clicking that “Save” box when downloading a file, and I need to work on re-ordering, into a non-intuitive way, the way I write e-mails. But if I can get the habit down right, the first time, in mid-sentence, I get an error that I can’t send an e-mail with no recipient named, it’s paid off. And the first time I don’t lose an hour’s worth of revisions and additions, it’s paid off.

Mirror Idea

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My server is allowed 1 terabyte of transfer a month. I would be shocked if I exceeded 10 GB any month.

Lots of services need mirrors. I’m becoming re-interested in streaming radio stations. Some of the good ones have limited bandwidth and fill up. Most open-source packages have a series of mirrors, too. Most distributions have elaborate mirror networks, in fact.

Here’s what someone should do. Set up a mirror ‘controller.’ I hit a generic name like us.something.com wanting to download something from a US mirror. This goes on all the time, and DNS does round-robin ‘load balancing’ across mirrors.

But you take it a little further. As a site admin with 900+ GB of bandwidth going unused each year, I can sign up and say, “I’ll take up to 25 GB a day,” and “I can spare 6 GB of disk space for mirrors,” and select a list of matching projects. I might end up hosting an Ubuntu mirror. I install a daemon on my server that communicates with the mirror network, but when someone someone hits the us.whatever.com pool, I’m in the list. But, it’ll detect that it’s forwarded me enough traffic for the day and pull me out. Furthermore, the daemon on my machine can also send a “temporarily remove me” notice, either for a duration of time or until further notice. That alleviates my final fear: that I won’t exceed disk quotas or bandwidth, but that serving all those files will really tax my system. When to send the signals is entirely up to me.

I’d like to volunteer to help, but I don’t want to blindly commit to something. And because I don’t see any good way to let me commit to help within my means, I have at least 20 GB of disk space and 900 GB of bandwidth that the community can’t use.

It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard, either. It might require a little more CPU power on the part of the mirror network management, but it’s not exceedingly complex. I think a simple PHP script might be easiest… You load, say, us.project.com/project/latest.tar.gz, but latest.tar.gz is actually a script that grabs a list of available mirrors and throws a redirect to the file on one of the mirrors.

The irony is that the argument against this idea — that it’d require more servers — is exactly what the problem is trying to solve.

E-mail Gates

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This is surely not a revolutionary idea, but I’ve never seen references to it before. I forward my mail to my GMail account. I do own two domain names with mail services, though, but I just forward what I need to my GMail account.

Some sites require an e-mail address to sign up, and they send you a confirmation e-mail, so it needs to be real. However, I have no interest in letting them e-mail me long-term. The general solution is a “throw-away address.” You use it once and then delete it.

Here’s an idea that seems a little less wasteful to me. I call it an e-mail gate. I can set up a forwarder pretty easily. As long as I’m logged in, it’s just a few seconds of work. I can also remove a forwarder in a few second’s time.

So you might have an address like matt@gate01.ttwagner.com. (This sub-domain doesn’t even exist right now, so don’t bother trying it.) I can “open the gate” (turn the forwarder on), sign up on the site, get my confirmation e-mail, and then “close the gate” by turning the e-mail off. Consequentially, any crap they send will bounce back with a “No such address” message. But when I want to get e-mail or a lost password reminder, I can just turn the gate on for a minute. Unless you’re getting inundated with spam (e.g., tens of thousands a day), opening the gate for under a minute won’t be enough time for much crap to get through. Unlike throwaway addresses, you can use the same address as multiple sites, making it easy to remember what address you used.

It’d be neat to write some code to give a web-based interface to this. I think I need to get it working with some mail daemon that supports a MySQL database of users, though, since it currently involves putting the address in a text file, updating the address cache, removing it, and then updating the cache again. It’s quick if you’ve got a shell open, but it’s a bit of a pain to script.

I Live in a Web Browser

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I don’t know why I keep eying quad-core systems. With the exception of playing music, copying files from my camera, some word processing, and IM, I live in a web browser. Here are some of the big uses:

  • GMail, my mail client. When I’m at my computer, I almost always have GMail up. I have a client for my Treo that lets me check it there. My school e-mail forwards to GMail. My ttwagner.com and n1zyy.com mail forwards to there.
  • Google and Wikipedia. I rely on Wikipedia way too much. But between Google and Wikipedia, I feel like I can do anything.
  • Google Docs is slowly winning me over. I move between my laptop, ‘public’ Office 2007 computers, and an office computer with Office 2003, so I’m hardly sold on any one particular interface. Google Docs is word processing (and spreadsheets) without the crap, although sometimes I do prefer to have it locally. But honestly, my life depends on the Internet, so ‘safety’ of files (in case I lose Internet access) really isn’t even one of the big issues.
  • Google Calendar has proved way more useful than I expected. It integrates nicely with GMail, sending me reminders and offering to let me schedule things that get e-mailed to me. And Goosync gives me an app on the Treo to sync my Treo calendar with my Google calendar. Bliss!
  • All my good photos end up on Flickr, and I buy and sell stuff on eBay often. I get my news through BBC and Google News.
  • I run a private Wiki. This is more useful than I ever imagined. I’m not quite as committed to it as I’d like, but I’m trying to keep all my class notes up there, which has a lot of benefits. During research, it’s a handy link dump. When drafting a constitution for a club here, I used that to allow collaborative editing.
  • I host a few mailing lists. Trying to keep a text file with 90 names and e-mail them and remove bounces and find people is a pain. Mailman is a savior.
  • I host multiple blogs. These are obvious, but there are some more I’m starting.
    • One, that never caught on, takes a pretty literal definition: a web log. I wanted a way for us to keep track of petty things that were going on, and have everything logged somewhere and searchable.
    • I’m also drafting one for the Democrats. A big part of what we do is outreach/publicity, and a blog is ideal for this.
  • Tonight I realized that none of my ‘task management’ systems worked. So I set up Mantis. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well. Setting up Bugzilla is pretty intense, but no so with Mantis. The “problem” is that it was intended for software bug tracking, not keeping track of work I have to do, so I have fields like “Reproducibility” and other holdovers from software. I may do a little tweaking. But my plan is that anything I have to do should end up in there. Everything is in one place, and I can slice the data a million different ways, by priority, by category (one for each class, one for each club, one for each major class project, one for “Life”), etc.

Truly, without Firefox and a browser on my Treo, I don’t think I could get by. And I sometimes wonder if it’s worth paying monthly for a dedicated server. But I get so much benefit from the services I host for myself that it definitely is.

Business School

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Kyle’s ending sentence reminded me of something I’ve noticed before: we at Bentley are not normal. Even those of us who aren’t obsessed with starting the next big company still have business on our minds all the times.

The other day one of my friends here remarked, “I want a Gap T-shirt.” Or at least, that’s how you’d have heard it. But what we heard, especially since a lot of my friends here are accounting majors, was, “I want a GAAP T-shirt,” which is actually what he meant. He just said it and we all cracked up laughing. I think I’m going to try to whip one up in Photoshop.

I came across this book on Amazon today. It’s called “Amtrak Privitization: The Route to Failure.” And my first thought was, “That’s not at all what I’m looking for,” (I was looking for a book about car maintenance by someone with a similar name), “but it sounds really interesting.”

The problem is, if you asked a sane person what their opinion of the book was, I think they’d tell you that it was the most boring topic they could imagine. And here’s another book that makes the opposite argument: the government should ditch Amtrak and let the private market “fix” it.

Of course, Railroad Law a Decade after Deregulation doesn’t grip me quite as much, especially at 50 cents a page.

As an aside, there’s one copy for $71.81 on half.com. The next is $101.98. In theory, you could buy it, read it (or use it as a doorstop), and then relist it around $95. It seems like it’s not a hot seller, but $71.81 is unnecessarily low on the part of that seller.