What I thought yesterday...

Yahoo Account Theft... hohoho_christmas_hohoho

2006-09-21T18:42:04Z

Just received a couple of yahoo messages askign me to go to a link on geocities 'hohoho_christmas_hohoho'.

It appears to be a phishing site designed to steal your yahoo id and password when you enter them, posing as a photo site.

If you've done so, I recommend logging into yahoo asap and changing your password.

A 160 Mp digital camera.. and a very cool battery

2006-09-21T18:03:30Z

I came across this 160 Mp camera today. A real digital replacement for the film 6x17 camera, yielding a 950 Mb file (uncompressed) for the full 6x17 format. At 30k Euro, I don't imagine I'll be getting one any time soon - but it's a damn cool idea.

On a more affordable level is the rather wonderful USBCELL which produces a AA rechargeable battery which has a flip off head to reveal a USB socket. So you can recharge the battery by simply plugging it into a pc USB port. They have plans to produce specific versions for mobile phones and cameras, which would do away with the swag of custom battery chargers we all have to carry around.

Some shots from Lisbon trip

2006-09-15T20:34:07Z

Taken on the M7 with B&W film, then machine scanned and touched up in Photoshop Elements 4. These are lower resolution jpeg's than the actual scans I worked on.

I'd appreciate constructive criticism, especially on my PS skills which are very basic ;)

Girls in costume in the Barrio Alto

The Santa Justa elevator

Men in a doorway in the Avenida area

Cobblestones above the Alfama

First review of Leica M8 (Digital)

2006-09-15T20:24:12Z

So here's the first online review of a real Leica M8, due to be officially launched at Photokina this year. Looks like it will retail for around USD $5k, or GBP £3k... painful - but not as bad as some predicted.

Released alongside it will be a Tri Elmar M 16-18-21 mm F4 ASPH lens, which will work on film based M's as well. They won't be available in retail until November apparently, leaving a little more time to see actual image files and more review before parting with your money.

It's a beautiful camera - I hope it handles as well as the M7 and that the image quality lives up to the film cameras. The only thing I can't find any reference to is how it allows exposure compensation, hopefully it's a little more useable than the M7's dial.

What can you do with Picasa?

2006-02-03T09:38:04Z

So I finally started playing around with the editing tools in Picasa. I've found it to be a great tool for managing lots of shots, but a little light on serious editing tools. However, I thought I'd try to see what could be done, using some of the shots I took in Austria last year.

This image uses the Focal B&W tool to desaturate around the lady in the red top. I also cropped it down from the full 35mm negative.

This one has had quite a bit of work, cropped down from full 35mm. I also used the Graduated Tint tool to darken the sky and pushed up the contrast.

Cropped again... and I warmed the rocks up a bit by inverting the image and using a Graduated Tint.

Glazed fruit buns considered harmful

2005-01-15T01:19:56Z

So this morning I happily toasted one of the delicious fruit buns I brought home from Benito's last night. I idly wondered whether the sugar glaze would make a mess inside the toaster, but decided that it should be fine.
Went back to chat with my colleague James on Yahoo, only to smell the telltale burning odour of too thick a slice of bun in the toaster. "If I whip that out quickly it should still be edible and the smoke alarm won't go off..." oops... all that sugar glaze was now molten, and sticky, and pretty much glued to my hand.

Now I'd heard before that when making candy one has to be very careful with the molten sugar. Well, now I know from personal experience - molten sugar is sticky, it keeps on burning, its only redeeming feature is that it's soluble in cold water.

Am I glad that I know that the best first aid for a burn is to put it under running cold water - oh yes I am.

So if there's a moral to this story it could be that one should beware of grabbing hot buns, in case one ends up in a sticky situation and gets ones fingers burned. (sorry, I couldn't resist)

On another note - I read Joel's blog entry on software pricing last night, after it was forwarded to me by a colleague. He goes into some detail regarding demand curves, profit maximisation and price discrimination. It's a good read, and I agree with Joel that studying at least first year microeconomics is a damn handy thing to do, just in case you're a CompSci student wondering what filler subject to take to make up the points. Just don't sweat the daft graphs... you're really not allowed to use trivial algebra to solve the problem, you really do have to draw the four complementary graphs to get full marks on the exam ;)

Polaroid of my brother Jim

2004-12-11T12:25:06Z

Found this old polaroid while clearing out boxes in my apartment. It was taken around ten years ago, in a warehouse in Fitzroy where Jim and I were living. I must have come by a pack of colour pola film cheap, would have been shot on the Hasselblad 503cx I had then.

Polas weren't as immediate as digital is, however I think they were more exciting to use. There was some of the alchemical mystery that you get in the darkroom around the process. At the time the most significant downside was that unless you used the posneg film, they were not really able to be reproduced. Guess thats not really such a problem now.

Where do complicated solutions come from?

2004-12-08T14:15:06Z

I've been confronted recently with the need to come to grips with a rather complicated software solution. The complication in this case isn't just a particular piece of code, or in fact even just the code - peripheral things like the build process and the deployment are complicated too. The general justification for all this complexity is that the problem is complex, and therefore demands a complex solution. I'm not sure that a complex solution is quite the same as a complicated one, but leaving that aside, I just don't really buy it as an argument.

]]> I think the arguments against software and process complexity are legion, and I don't really think I need to enumerate them here. What I'm more interested in is how does it get that complicated in the first place.

The answer I think is that clever people, left to their own devices, will naturally come up with complicated solutions to complex problems. The reason being that a complicated solution is intellectually the easiest thing to produce. It's hard to discover a simple solution when the problem is complex, and if you don't have to explain your solution to anyone - the complicated one works just fine. It's only when someone else has to work on the code, or follow the process, that the cost of complexity becomes apparent. I've often found this to be the case with ant build scripts for example.

So what do you do about this if you'd rather not end up with a complicated solution? Well, I think the answer lies in the phrase 'left to their own devices'. Simply put - don't let people develop code or processes in isolation. No matter how clever or productive they are, make sure that they have to at least explain their solution to their peers. Ideally have them collaborate on at least the design, if not the coding.

Pragmatically sometimes it's just not going to be possible to find a simple solution within the time available. In a nicely componentised system or process, this isn't so bad - you just encapsulate that complexity and leave it for another day. So if you're in a world of complexity, and you're pressed for time - concentrate on encapsulation, isolate that complexity so that you can come back later and clean it up.

Flamenco, Manolo and Laura

2004-08-31T16:05:02Z

This was shot years ago in a club in Fitzroy. Laura was (and probably still is) a very passionate flamenco dancer. I used fast colour transparency film, I forget which one - I think there was a 1000 ISO extachrome around at the time.

]]> this shot is cropped quite a bit - as i recall it was difficult to get a good vantage point, so most of the shots i took have a bit too much extraneous detail. I've also blacked out some distracting inclusions from the top.

Dave at the European, taken by May.

2004-08-04T15:14:16Z

This Image is actually black and white, shot on 3200 TMax. I accidentally scanned it as a colour neg in my film scanner and I liked the effect so here it is.
This was taken the same evening that I took the shot of the wine bucket that I posted previously.

New scanner - Epson 4870

2004-07-22T13:49:08Z

]]> This is a full 6x6 cm negative scanned on the Epson 4870 scanner I bought a couple of days ago. I think that I made the scan a little dark, I'm going to play a little and see how it works out.

The subject is an Atomic espresso machine, I think circa 1950's. This is one that a housemate from my warehouse days owned. I've since rescued one for myself from a second hand shop. I think it's the most beautiful coffee maker I've ever come across - and the coffee is pretty good for a stovetop too. It's sitting on a cupboard in the kitchen of the warehouse I was living in at the time, lit from a window. The image was shot on a Hasselblad, with the standard 80mm lens.

I also purchased an Epson R800 inkjet printer - and I'm absolutely impressed with it. The images are hard to pick from a photo print, only a slight 'thinness' in the midtones - but this might just be my inexperience. They're certainly a hell of a lot better than the first darkroom prints I made, with a darn sight less mess and inconvenience. I'd still prefer to use a darkroom, since nothing beats the sight of a beautiful print fresh from the tray - but my transient lifestyle has ruled that out for years. Thankfully the Epson is a very acceptable alternative, even the matte prints are great - and the results from a scanned 4x5 transparency are stunning.

Theory of Constraints (Agile Management For Software Engineering, David J. Anderson)

2004-07-19T15:52:44Z

I've just started reading Agile Management for Software Engineering, by David J. Anderson. In the very beginning he talks about the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which he characterises as finding the constraint in your process (the slowest link) and tuning the entire process to that speed. The effect is to minimise inventory by achieving a continuous flow of production.

]]> I started to wonder how this could be done in my current team. Actually I started to wonder if we were already doing it. It occurred to me that we have a fixed number of people, split into broad categories of analyst, developer and tester. If analysis is our constraint, then by the TOC I should reduce the flow of work to accomodate that. The problem is - what do I do with my developers and testers? If I just leave them idle then I'm realising no benefit, since I have to pay them the same amount anyway (fixed cost). I'm assuming that I don't have the capacity to loan them to other projects (partly 'cos I'd never get them back, and partly 'cos of the return ramp-up cost). Then it dawned on me that if I had developers who could act as analysts, or somehow shift some of the analysis work to the developers - then I'd be able to speed up and keep everyone busy.

Now this isn't really much of an insight - and in fact we already did this when we had a pinch in analysis for a few iterations. We're currently moving some of the work back to the analysts since our new constraint is developement . The insight (and this may be old news to you guys), was that this may be the underlying reason that teams of generalists seem to have better success rates than teams of specialists*. Simply put - you can manage your constraints better if you have people who are able to be moved around. I can't be stuffed doing the maths - but I'm pretty sure you could prove this mathematically. It might very easily end up that a team of average generalist people would massively outperform a team composed largely of skilled specialists - if for example the developers were skilled specialists and the analysts were unskilled specialists or vice verca. (This is amusingly affirming for me, since it's generally recognised by my peers that I'm no specialist - however I do seem to add value ;)

So, it may be that on page n+1, this is what Mr. Anderson is going to tell me - but I was so taken with the idea that I couldn't wait to read on - so someone else can tell me if this is the case.

(It seems to me that there may be some meat in the book with respect to tuning a software development organisation, not just at the project level)

Regards, David.

* I'm pretty sure I read a post about this recently, but I can't find it now - maybe someone could help me out.

A couple more black and white scans

2004-06-19T00:10:11Z

Both photographs of gates coincidentally. Both needed some retouching in photoshop, partly because I haven't always been kind to my negs - and these ones are 20 years old or thereabouts (not sure what that is in neg years). I'm going to have to figure out how to put nice borders around these jpegs to stop the white areas bleeding into the background.

another day, another scan

2004-06-12T09:41:15Z

]]> This is a pretty old shot, I think around 1989... I don't recall ever having printed it, so it's good to see it enlarged finally. I didn't have to do much to this one in photoshop apart from retouch out some dust and scratches.

what I did with my new film scanner (and photoshop)

2004-06-11T12:25:10Z

]]> Shot this at the European using Kodak TMZ at 1600, I think it was at around 1/15th or 1/8th with a 50 f2.

It's my first attempt at playing with photoshop. If you look closely, (at least I hope you have to look closely), you may detect that the labels and the bottles came from two different scans of the same image. This was because the labels blew out under the exposure I needed for nice definition in the bottles. So today I learned to use layers, the magnetic selection tool, the stamp and also some 75% eraser... lots of fun.

The scanner, in case you're interested, is a Minolta DiMage Scan Dual IV. I"m very happy with it, but then - it's the first scanner I've ever used - so I'm not exactly an authority ;)

...oh yeah - you can click on the image to get a larger version - just in case you didn't already know.