Posts from — March 2007

The DEA is reporting the largest single drug cash seizure ever.  They along with Mexican law enforcement found $205mil US  in a bust of a chemical supplier to the Meth trade:

Forget stuffing that much under the mattress, put sheets on it and it is the mattress.  The LA Times as more coverage.

I’d heard about this before, but finally saw an explanation as two why you should not use two spaces after a period. I was taught typing in high school and two spaces after a period was the norm (as was two spaces after a colon that preceded a list - is that still ok?). Even though we had several computer labs full of new fangled Macintoshes at the time (this was the late-80’s), typing (or keyboarding as the class was called) was taught on typewriters.  Typewriters that were modern enough to have a proportionally spaced typeface.

Even as I wrote this post, I found it hard not to put the two spaces there. It is so engrained in me. Must. Resist. Spacebar. I fell myeself turning into one of those crusty old-timers ala Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character, ”Why in my day, we put not one, but two spaces after a period… and we liked it!” (which by that reference alone probably dates me.)

Having just purchased a new laptop from HP in the past few weeks, I’m aware of all the “crapware” they stuff onto new systems these days.  When I bought our new Dell Desktop last year, my first order of business was to re-format the hard drive and lay down a fresh install of Windows XP (mainly because I only sprung for XP Home when I bought it and had a Full Packaged Product copy of XP Pro to use on it).

Where it really blows is on utilities that enable key parts of the hardware.  The Dell came with a “lite” copy of the CD burning software (Sonic Record Now, IIRC).  That version wouldn’t burn ISO images.  There was a menu option in the program for it, but it only contained a link to purchase the full version of the product.

Then there is all the free online trials.  Sign up for AOL! or Earthlink! or some other service!  It is amazing how many icons are on the desktop when you finally log on.  Even the HP, which came pre-loaded with Vista Ultimate - they have software to help you pick one of their online partners.  Granted, it has a “I already have Internet service” option, but it will still nag you after a bit, “are your sure you don’t want to try one of these other online providers?”  Grrr.

Enter Lenovo.  I only got to use a ThinkPad once in the past - back when they were still made by IBM.  I was writing a custom wrapper for a customer’s VPN solution and they sent me one of their standard issue laptops with the corporate image on it.  Structurally, it was very utilitarian, but in a good way.  They keyboard had a nice feel to it.  Rumor from folks I’ve talked to that are still at Microsoft is that Lenovo is finally on ITG’s approved vendor list now (probably more to do with it now being not-IBM then anything else).  Even better, as Lenovo point out in their own blog, they offer their own utility for removing crapware. 

Why can’t everyone do this?  I’m scared to re-image the new HP our of fear of trying to track down drivers for everything.  I’ve gotten rid of most of the stuff I can, but I have this feeling there is more.  Omar Shahine points out another nice thing - all there utility apps are actually well written and look nice. (As a side note, Omar calls for them to ditch the S-Video port for an HDMI port - something my new HP Pavillion has - but then again it is billed as an “entertainment” computer and not a “business” laptop.)

As I’ve told several people who’ve asked, I learned to light most of the photos you see in my Flickr pool by following the techniques outlined by Baltimore Sun Photojournalist David Hobby’s excelent Strobist blog.  He is a champion of using small shoe mount flashes off camera. An older post of his on a recent assignment to photograph a rock climbing center really does a good job of outlining how to set exposure when working with a flash in this manner. 

The challenge with working with a flash off camera is most of the time you can’t rely on TTL to set your exposure (and David will tell you you shouldn’t anyway).  Generally you’re going to be working with the flash and the camera in full manual mode, and the only communication between the two is the camera telling the flash to fire - so you are on your own.

It isn’t that hard.  The thing to keep in mind is shutter speed doesn’t have that much impact on exposure when using a flash. This is because the duration of the flash is orders of magitude faster than the shutter speed.  The exposure is then set by balancing aperature and flash power.  What shutter speed will do is let you control how much ambient light comes into play.  As David suggests, test the shot at the max sync speed of your camera (my 20D will sync up to 1/250 sec), set your aperature and flash power to where they need to be, then slowly ease down on shutter speed if you want more ambient light.  I use the preview and histogram on the camera to make sure exposure is right.  Take a shot, check the exposure, rinse, repeat.  Classic “chimping.”

The claim is eventually you just start to know what the settings will be by looking, but I’m far from there now and it takes me a while to zero in on the right settings.  Elsewhere, David suggests using you hand as a stand-in for your final subject.  He does this to maximize his time since often his subjects have little time for the photoshoot.  In my case, the subject is a usally a kid who has limited patience.  Pre-adjusting the shot like this maximizes my time before the attention span timer goes off. In the shot below, I got the exposure wrong a bit -

The hands are blown out (parts are pure white and the detail is lost), but I’m still happy with it.  There is minimal PhotoShop going on in this image.  I processed the RAW image in Adobe Camera RAW, then did the desaturation and a bit of levels work, finally a touch of sharpening. 

Huge mare’s nests of cables have always drove me crazy.  Having recently had to re-locate our home PC to another room for a bit, when I put it back to its location in our living room, I just plugged everything back in so it would work, forgoing the nice cable management I took the time to install on the table it sits on.  It bugs me, but I haven’t had time to clean up the mess dangling from the table.

Then I read this post by Christine Kane this morning explaining the feng shui of how those huge cable messes sap energy (spiritual energy, that is).  I can’t say I accept or dismiss the principals of feng shui - I’m truly on the fence with this one, but one of them I learned a while ago, having your desk face the door, is one I’ve followed whenever I can.  Whether my chi is affected or not, most of the time the practices “feel right” and I feel better (which I suppose is the whole point.)  Either way I can at least justify my OCD tendencies toward wire ties.

Update:  I re-read the original post and felt it a little harsh on the whole feng shui thing.  I re-worded my statement a bit.

One of the strobist pool members posted a great instructable on moding one of the cheap ebay radio triggers to get more range on it.

One I get a second one of these (which will be short after getting a second flash) I’m trying this.

Though there are rumors we might be moving to Team Foundation Server soon, the cold reality is that my current project is Visual SourceSafe based.  Added to the mix is the fact I’m splitting my time to some bug fixing on an older version, and some new work on the current version.  The versions are branched under SourceSafe (which I have to admit, in v8 is a lot better than I remember it in back in the v6 days) and I’m stuck having to merge some bug fixes forward.  I was using the built-in merge tool in VSS, but managed to screw things up more than once.  A teammate forwarded a link to WinMerge to me, which is a god-send.  I know I’m only scratching the surface of it, but for merging across the two projects I’m on, my productivity has gone up.

One problem with VSS is comparing what files are out-of-sync in branches.  Basically I’d look at the history of a project, find the files that changed, try and print that history (and have to formatting render that report useless), then merge each one.  With WinMerge, I tell it to compare my two working directories, it tells me which files are different, I double click on the ones that are, use the super nice interface to move changes forward, and then when I save the merged file, since its read-only, it assumes it’s under source control and prompts me to check it out from VSS.  The integration could be better with VSS (I have to manually type the VSS project path), but I’m a whole lot more productive even with this little manual step.