My Personal Infocloud
So
Two of the strangest things I've seen this week:
A guy who can pop his eyes 95% out of their sockets.
And a incredible story of drinking and violence from New Zealand. I don't know what is more remarkable, the fact that one guy drank 72(!) beers then drove home or that the other guy that he stabbed had no idea that he was stabbed until he went home and looked in the mirror.
You can't make this stuff up.
So
DailyLit lets you spam yourself with an email containing five minutes worth of reading from a classic book of your choice.
Im not sure that this would work well for me as I am really not fond of reading large amounts of text off of a screen and, in any case, I prefer to do my reading away from my desk. Your milage may vary.
So
Mesmerizing time lapse video of over one hundred hot air balloons launching and soaring at the 2006 Reno Balloon Race (via youTube). It's fun to watch the eccentric paths that some of the balloons aloft take.
The way that it was produced is kind of interesting as well.
So
Im a bit surprised that I haven't heard more about this (perhaps the hysteria will whip up as we get closer to the date). The gist of it is that with the newly enacted Daylight Savings Time (DST) guidelines older Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) will not adjust for DST properly starting in 2007. The first event will happen on March 11, 2007.
If you have been looking for a reason to upgrade to JVM 1.5, this should do.
So
The thing that strikes me as odd about what is happening in Michigan with regard to requiring state ids to vote is that it is focused on the wrong thing. I believe that this is a thinly disguised attempt to make it more difficult (if not impossible) for citizens to exercise their right to vote.
Until this year, the township that I live in had a very simple and effective means of verifying voter identity: you sign a block on your voter registration form that is duplicated in a ledger that you again must sign at the time you vote. Simple, effective and costs the citizen nothing. Now, they too are requiring state issued photo ids in order to vote.
Instead of trying to concoct ways of making it more difficult to vote, why isn't there more focus on making sure that the votes are actually counted in an accurate verifiable way? It baffles me that the state of Nevada has a rigorous certification and inspection process for slot machines while there is no similar scrutiny for voting machines and processes.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at all as there is a clear line of thinking in this country of late that money (gambling) is more important that citizens rights (voting).
So
Ok, now there is a legal reason to re-evaluate all of the AJAX and Flash cruft that you may be tempted to gratuitously stick on your web site to be the flavor of the moment. And double that for all of the 'flash only' sites out there.
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that a lawsuit filed against Minneapolis-based Target Corp. by the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) regarding the accessibility of the retailer's Web site can move forward.
According to the NFB, the ruling sets a precedent establishing that retailers must make their Web sites accessible to the blind under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
So when you are out there fixing the (visual) accessibility issues with your site, how about enabling some of the semantic web technologies for your site at the same time. More 'machine readable' data on your site also translates into better (non-visual) accessibility.
technorati tags: ada, ajax, flash, accessibility, webdev
So
Lately, I have been asking myself the question when does digital photography cease to be photography in the classic, analog sense and when does it need a new name like digital imaging or even creative digital imaging? The tools to manipulate images and, indeed, the manipulated images themselves have become so commonplace that there should be some sort of rating or standard for how much manipulation has been done to an image. Some camera makers are even putting the alteration capabilities right into the cameras.
To construct a classification system for altered images, you might start by thinking of it in terms of the categories that are placed on what is nominally supposed to be fruit juice. The substance may, in fact, not be 100% juice; rather it is frequently diluted, mixed with other juices, or high fructose corn syrup or is totally not juice with only an artificial 'juice flavor' added to it. (I had a remarkably hard time finding the actual classification system for juice, so if anyone has a link, I would appreciate it.) So building on the juice analogy, perhaps the categorization/labeling goes something like this (with DP representing Digital Photography and DI were I believe it becomes something else Digital Imaging):
| 100% Juice | DP | Photo as it came straight from the camera with some cropping and rotation allowed |
| Juice | DP | Photo has had some contrast and other color channel adjustments |
| Juice Drink | DP/I | Photo has had significant adjustment made to it (filters, dodging, cloning, bw conversion) |
| Juice Beverage | DI | Photo original content has been altered by addition of visual elements not in the original; may actually be a composite image at this point |
| Beverage | DI | Image has been altered to the extent that it can no longer reasonably be called a photo; the image represented does not, has not, nor will likely ever exist in real life |
technorati tags: photography, imaging, photoshop, ideas
So
> The academics from University College London found there are now only a quarter as many Cocks in Britain as would be expected, a third as many Smellies, and half as many Dafts and Shufflebottoms. The numbers of Piggs, Nutters and Bottoms has declined by around one third.
Read the rest at the New Zealand Herald.
So
Today Flickr added the ability to geo-tag photos via the flash-based organizr tool. This is a great addition and one of the big features I really liked about zooomr.
Basically, within organizr you drag and drop photos onto an embedded Yahoo Maps screen. You then have the ability to further edit tags, tweak security and location information. The first time you use the map function you are asked to set a default view permission for photos that you geo-tag (this can be overridden on an individual picture or batch setting).
It's no surprise that Flickr is using Yahoo Maps for this function (instead of the vastly superior Google Maps), the huge downside of this is that there is little or no street level information available in Europe and Asia — even trying to switch to the satellite view doesn't help much as you frequently get a blank screen if you are at a low enough altitude. This made trying to geo-tag some of my recent vacation photos from Spain basically impossible.
You can use the Explore –> Photos on a map drop down to see what other photos have been added to a given map. You can search for a location by name or just by dragging around on the map. I was surprised to see that another photographer in my area had uploaded/tagged close to 50 photos already.
I have gotten one error in Organizr trying to use this function — it looked like the database was not available. The text of the error message was hard to make out as it was written over my photostream in a light gray font. Hitting the refresh button appeared to make everything right again.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.
technorati tags: yahoomaps, flickr, photography, geotag, maps
So
I am always trying to learn more about photography so when I came across the Cambridge In Color site, I was pleased to find some clearly written, detail discussion about photographic concepts and techniques. It was refreshing to have this information presented in a largely vendor neutral manner unlike many of the other 'tutorial' sites that are really just click-whoring advert sites.
There is a good range of material there covering fundamentals like bit depth, image noise, histograms; a tour through some of the image manipulation that can be accomplished with photoshop and advanced topics like HDR, panoramas and hight photography. Good stuff.
technorati tags: photography, tutorial, cameras