lifebsideben

Finally the SD300 is available, I’ve been waiting for its release the past 3 months. I’ve been wanting to replace my Olympus D40Z digital camera for a while now… it takes decent pictures most of the time but I still wasn’t satisfied. I’m a “little camera” fan, I’m willing to give up (some) features for smaller footprint, and so far I’m quite happy with the SD300.

Here’s the big differentiators from the Olympus, in my opinion:

• fast start up and shot-to-shot cycle time
• much smaller footprint. the sd300 I really can fit in any pocket!
• larger LCD display, and entirely more sensical operation. after a shot, if you want to keep the review onscreen, press one key. no mode switching, no rushing to show it to people before it disappears!
• it actually remembers the last mode you were in, complete with various manual overrides etc., between power-off and back on. this was immensely frustrating on the D40Z.
• SD cards go a lot bigger and faster (I picked up a 32x 512M) than SmartMedia!
• the movie mode is waaaaay nicer, including 640×480 @ 30 fps, saved as some variant of QuickTime (I think actually MJPEG)
• formatting a SD card takes less than 1 sec!
• “stitch assist” mode for panoramic photos, and half-decent software to stitch them
• generally the software is much much nicer than the olympus stuff, and has full OS X support too!

That’s the good stuff. The less impressive stuff about the new camera so far include:

• Uses proprietary batteries. All the smaller cameras do, but there is something nice about NiMH AAs, and the ability to “fall back” to alkalines when you’re out of the country, can’t get to a AC outlet, etc. (This happened to me in Romania; I didn’t have time to charge the batteries but could pick up some cheap AAs to tide me over until the end of the day…)
• Picture quality, in general, is not noticeably better than the Olympus. But I’ll take more outside shots and compare further. So, it’s a 2-year-later-model camera, same resolution, but about same quality pictures. I guess I expected some advances, even in a smaller camera.
• No case included, and the official Canon one is on backorder. When the camera has 40% of its back as the LCD, you really feel safer with a case to put it in! I finally just picked up a $10 Case Logic model from Fry’s in the meantime. I can’t find the specific case on their site, but it’s kind of cute–built like the black case that comes with the iPod 2nd gen… like two pieces of padded material with snug elastic on the sides.
• “long shutter” mode is up to 15 sec; the Olympus can do 45 sec. Granted, you don’t need this often, but I’ve gotten a few really cool nighttime shots of the sky with the long exposures.

That’s kind of the roundup at this point. I’ll see how I feel in a few more weeks after the holidays… really worried about the battery situation, until I can get a spare (for $40!)

Now the really sad part is that the D40Z, which cost me $550 at Amazon 2.5 years ago, only goes for about $100 on eBay. Sigh…

Tags: cameras, photography, review

I finally saw THX-1138, George Lucas’ first “real” movie, made in 1969-1970. I bought the new 2-DVD set sight- (and movie-) unseen at Costco about a month ago, and finally got around to watching it. There were several times through the “Director’s Cut” that I thought, “hmm, that’s a pretty sweet special effect for a relatively low-budget 1970 flick”… and then near the end I started thinking “uh oh, I bet George was hacking this up… that scene looks totally CGI and doesn’t quite match the rest of the movie…” And then it got worse, almost every scene near the end seemed to be obviously “enhanced”. So, I sat through the entire movie again listening to the director’s and co-writer’s commentary, expecting to learn about the scenes / tweaks that had been made for the DVD release. Not a word, nada! Apparently, if you aren’t familiar with the original, you’re supposed to think this version is the original. Incredible. I checked out a couple sites, and found what I was looking for… I found out he pretty much gave it the “Star Wars treatment”–significant cleanup (typically a good thing) and also significant changes/additions (typically not a good thing IMO). There’s even a scene were characters are radically changed, from (I presume) humans, to fully CG characters. Huh??

I just don’t understand some artists’ obsessions with “fixing” past (often, very old) works… there are basically a couple of arguments, one being “they are the artist and entitled to make any changes, any time” and the counter “once a work is published and is popular it becomes part of the culture/consciousness and should not be changed, especially surrepitiously.” I actually agree with both, but to varying degrees. From what I’ve gathered of the changes made in THX-1138, I think a few probably added to the experience and didn’t hurt the story (the mindlock eye-roll effect, cleaning up some of the audio, making the car crash more consistent, adding more bodies to the throng in the hallway), but others really seem like they do (cleaning up the video too much, adding CG to show “more” of the world (it’s supposed to be clausterphobic…), adding a silly-looking darting-car sequence in the beginning of the chase, making the asylum area too white such that the ‘thunder’ audio effect is nonsensical, showing the robot assembly details–totally unnecessary, etc.) And we’re talking a 35 year old movie here! The artist is no longer the same person–leave the original alone. At least give us the original and the “updated” version on the DVDs. Prince tends to do the exact same thing, changing old song lyrics to be more in lline with his new Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. Does he have the right to do this? Of course. Should he? No, if you ask me. Leave the songs as they were… don’t bother performing them if you don’t like their original content. Or make new songs (as he certainly does).
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We are hosted at ev1servers.net, and generally I’ve been a really happy customer these past few years. However, we added a 2nd box for mysql, and got their private network (10.) set up between them, and had nothing but problems. Slow connection (typically 6mbit/sec, kind of lame for private network!) and lately, lots of dropped connections/routing problems/loss of connectivity. Bad news. You hate to see mysql queries doing “writing to net” for 5 minutes…! We’ve finally ditched using the private network and are going direct to the external IP on the 2nd box, which is much much faster and more reliable (that’s sad). (Setting this up safely of course involved lots of firewall rules…!) Anyhow, it’s working, but the one thing I’m worried about is that in theory we’re limited to X amount (1T I think) of traffic a month on the frontend interfaces (on both boxes). I don’t want to pay for overages because they can’t manage to get their private networking stuff to work reliably. The nagios graphs of uptime aren’t pretty

Between prince.org and a couple of the other sites we host, we do a decent amount of traffic, and it seems like it’d be a ton easier to just get some rack space and throw some machines at the problem, especially as we’re considering buying (renting) yet another machine… which would really start making the buy vs. rent situation look less viable. One of my big issues is that ev1 is super expensive to get a high-end machine (for example, for a DB server), especially with a lot of RAM. I want a big box to support fulltext searching in mysql, which requires oodles of RAM (the dataset is over 1G), but that is a fortune to rent. I’m going to price (again) local SF hosting providers that are flexible and dig helping out semi-nonprofits like us. And maybe price out an Opteron with 8G of RAM for the database… mmmm that’d be tasty…!

If anyone’s got suggestions about providers (I’m talking about up to 8U and maybe .5T/month transfer, and I’d really like 24/7 access but that’s not a dealkiller if not), let me know!

I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam lately–so, it was time to turn on the “no comments go public until approved” switch. I’ll try to give timely approvals to new comments, sorry for the inconvenience.

There’s a nasty phpbb2 security hole, and one site on my server is running that (one I don’t control directly), and it’s been exploited by at least two different people (judging by IP address) already. You can do some pretty nasty stuff with this hole, to the point where if you have a buggy kernel (one for which there is a local unprivileged user->root exploit), you can get remote root. Blah. Fortunately the script kiddies weren’t that smart, never got past the inital stages. But… worrisome. I always trust my code over other peoples’, even though it’s got a lot fewer eyes on it. I’m just super paranoid about user input processing and handling…

In the meantime (until I figured out exactly what was happening, for sure) I also upgraded PHP to 4.3.9, and mod_ssl to 2.8.22, and Apache to the latest rev. Went pretty seamlessly, but I suspect when I want to do an openssl upgrade it’s going to break everything. Sigh. Too bad no support for RH7.3 anymore! Or, at least, too bad the dedicated box is 1,500 miles away and I can’t just sit at console and upgrade it to something newer…

I was looking for some old photoshop images I had made and stumbled across some pretty ancient stuff. Once upon a time I ran a BBS (or “bulletin board system” for those of you born post-1979) called “Tog Dog: the Evil Clown of Pork”. I apparently actually still have a DOS .com file advertising it (it would get zipped up into archives available for download.)
Here’s a “screenshot”:

Pretty funny: up to 28.8kbps, and a whopping 420 megs of storage (which if I recall correctly, was spread across 3 harddisks!)
The .com file is dated 4/1994, but I’m pretty sure that was just when it got copied onto the drive… I think the dialup site was pretty much dead by then.

Tags: nostalgia, software

I wanted to be able to vote and also get to work at a reasonable time, so when the baby woke up crying at 5am, it seemed like a good plan to stay up, and get to the polls as they opened at 7am here. I read a bunch of email, surfed the web a bit, and ended up at my polling place (a church in Burlingame) at 7:00 on the dot. There were already about 10 people for each of three districts in line, and I’d say the average age was 40. I was heartened to see someone younger than myself at the registration table, but then realized they weren’t voting, just tagging along with their mom After a quick 10-minute wait in line, I gave my name to the lady checking names; she was 75 if she was a day. The names are pretty small, and she actually crossed off the name underneath mine accidentially! I looked and saw “Ben Miller” crossed off, and said whoa–wait a minute–that guy is my neighbor and is going to be really pissed off if he can’t vote. She was apologetic and said “I’ll make a note here next to his name, that he hasn’t actually voted.” Hmm. I hope she’s still working when he shows up… Minor drama complete, I finally did vote, which was actually a bit more challenging than I had expected: while I had a sample ballot filled out with my choices in my pocket, there had been slight changes between that one and the actual one, including at least one category where extra candidate(s) had been slotted in. There weren’t really enough of those little collapsable-table-with-shield things, but my neighbors apparently weren’t too worried: several people were (voluntarily) voting with their ballots on a round table nearby, in plain view. When I scanned my ballot in the machine, it was #11 in my precinct. Cool. Not so cool is that I then sat in traffic for an hour to get to work (my typical commute is less than half that…) Blah.

By the way, my kid can’t vote for about 18 more years… but he’s already an activist:

Tags: burlingame, voting