Title: Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking
Author: Julieanne Kost
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: O'Reilly
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0596100833
Pages: 148
Keywords: photography, photoshop, creativity
Reading period: 30 December, 2006

Julieanne Kost, a Photoshop evangelist for Adobe, flies 200 days a year. For the last five years, she's been taking photos out of airplane windows.

This book is part pretty pictures, part a meditation on creativity, and part a Photoshop tutorial.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That must be why the word count is so low. In the first 120 pages, there are eight pages of text on creativity, and one page of text for each of the following seven chapters. The book concludes with twelve pages of text in an appendix on Imaging Techniques, a high-speed introduction to photo manipulation in Photoshop.

The rest of the book is pictures. Pictures of clouds, pictures of fields, of mountains, of the sea, pictures of sunrises and sunsets. Great photos, even if the subject matter is a little repetitive.

The appendix shows several examples of before-and-after shots, and she's worked some wonders, though you'd expect no less from a Photoshop Evangelist.

Ultimately, the book is unsatisfying. Both the creativity and the Photoshop sections are too cursory to be of much value. It is more successful as a book of photographs, but I would have appreciated more commentary on the photos themselves. Why choose this one? What caught her eye in the first place? The choices of composition and cropping. What worked, what didn't.

Too bad.

Title: Matriarch
Author: Karen Traviss
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Eos
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 006088231X
Pages: 387
Keywords: SF
Reading period: 20-30 December, 2006

The fourth installment in Traviss's series about the wess'har, which began with City of Pearl. The plot is too complex to summarize here, and would make little sense if you haven't read the preceding books.

This is intelligent, character-driven SF, written for adults. A small cast of humans interact with four very different alien races, far from home. These aliens are not Americans with green skin; they live by different rules. The humans are flawed people who struggle with complex issues.

Traviss's themes include ecology, ethics, and responsibility. She also throws in some action and enough plot twists to keep things unpredictable.

The books take a little getting used to, but pull me along. I look forward to the projected remaining two books in the series.

Title: Rilke on Black
Author: Ken Bruen
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Five Star
Copyright: 1996
ISBN: 1852427817
Pages: 160
Keywords: crime, fiction
Reading period: 26-28 December, 2006

Three very screwed-up Londoners kidnap a Rilke-spouting businessman and hold him for hostage. There's a horrified fascination as it inevitably goes pear shaped. Written in a spare, first-person style, it's short, but certainly not sweet.

Inspired by Keith Martin's Reading Notes, I've decided to try writing a short review of every book that I read, starting today. I expect that most reviews will be 100 to 250 words.

Why? Like my Picture of the Day project, it should help me think a little harder about what I'm reading, if I know that I'm going to have to say something pithy about it. I'm a better photographer than I am a reviewer, so the exercise should be good for me.

Now you know why I put together a way of Rating with Stars for dasBlog yesterday.

The first two reviews have already been written and will follow shortly.

Technical Notes:

• Abusing Amazon images showed me how to grab the book covers.

• I'm using my Amazon Associates ID to link to the books, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ISBN/georgvreill-20 Unless my readership grows signficantly larger, I'll be lucky if I haul in as much as $10 per year.

• Right now, I'm filling out a little template in a text file and generating HTML. In time, I hope to add some plumbing behind the scenes to generate automatic indexes of authors, keywords, etc. But first, some content.

I want to be able to write some reviews and graphically rate them with stars. I put together some transparent stars in Gimp and added a macro to dasBlog.

I'm going to rate this effort:

4.5 stars out of 5

To get this effect, I simply wrote $stars(4.5).

(And I had to carefully construct the previous sentence so that dasBlog wouldn't invoke the stars macro.)

I'm hardnosed. I rarely give 5/5 to anything. I don't really expect to need the half stars, but I may want that fine control at some point.

To use this in your own blog, download the zipfile of star images.

Copy 5star*.gif to your blog's images directory. The *.xcf files are Gimp source files.

Add the following line to the <ContentFilters> section of your blog's site.config:

<ContentFilter
      find="\$stars\((?&lt;expr&gt;[\d.]+)\)"
      replace="&lt;div&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;images/5star${expr}.gif&quot; /&gt; ${expr} stars out of 5&lt;/div&gt;"
      isregex="true" />

Enjoy!

I've been getting into Python lately. One problem that I've encountered under Windows, is that input redirection doesn't work if you use the .py file association to run the script; e.g.:

 C:\> foo.py < input.txt

There's a well-known input redirection bug. The fix is to explicitly use python.exe to run the script.

A related problem for me was that stdin was opened as a text file, not a binary file, so \r bytes were being discarded from binary input files. The fix is to run python.exe -u (unbuffered binary input and output).

I didn't want to hardcode the path to python.exe in a batch file, so I came up with the following wrapper, which parses the output from assoc .py and ftype Python.File.

Just place this batch file in the same directory as foo.py and call it foo.bat.

 @setlocal
 @if (%_echo%)==()  set _echo=off
 @echo %_echo%

 :: You must explicitly invoke python.exe, rather than rely on the
 :: file association for .py, if you want stdin redirection to work.
 :: See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2004-August/024920.html
 :: The -u flag to python.exe specifies unbuffered, binary stdin,
 :: so '\r\n' is not remapped to '\n'.
 call :FindPythonExe

 if "%PythonExe%"=="" (
     echo Can't find python.exe
     exit /B 1
 )

 :: Replace the extension of this batch file with .py: s/.bat$/.py/
 set PythonFile=%~dpn0.py

 "%PythonExe%" -u %PythonFile% %*
 goto :EOF

 ::
 :: Find python.exe in the path or via the .py association
 ::
 :FindPythonExe
 set PythonExe=
 :: Search for python.{cmd,bat,exe} in %PATH%
 for %%i in (cmd bat exe) do (
     if "%PythonExe%"=="" (
         for %%j in (python.%%i) do set PythonExe=%%~$PATH:j
     )
 )
 :: Extract path to python.exe from .py association
 if "%PythonExe%"=="" call :AssocPy2Exe
 goto :EOF

 ::
 :: Return the executable associated with .py in %PythonExe%
 ::
 :AssocPy2Exe
 call :AssocExtn2Exe .py
 set PythonExe=%_exe%
 goto :EOF

 ::
 :: Return the executable associated with file extension %1 in %_exe%
 ::
 :AssocExtn2Exe
 :: assoc .py -> .py=Python.File
 for /f "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i in (`assoc %1`) do set _ftype=%%i

 :: ftype Python.File -> Python.File="C:\Python24\python.exe" "%1" %*
 :: Grab everything after the '='
 for /f "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i in (`ftype %_ftype%`) do set _rhs=%%i

 :: Get the first token of the space-separated list
 for /f "tokens=1" %%i in ("%_rhs%") do set _exe=%%i
 goto :EOF

Now you can run foo.bat < bar.jpg with the expected results.

Enjoy!

Update 2007/01/03: The batchfile now searches %PATH% before looking up the .py association.

Update 2007/01/12: See here for a significantly improved batchfile and for py2cmd.

I've dualbooted my laptop between Linux and Windows since June, spending nearly all of my time in Linux. I started out with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), but soon switched to Kubuntu (the KDE variant), later upgrading to Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).

To make this useful, certain key applications have to be available in both Windows and Linux. Firefox for browsing; Thunderbird for email; Rainlendar for calendar; KeePass and KeePassX for password management; among others.

My laptop has four partitions:

• Primary 1, NTFS - Windows, aka /windows or /dev/hda1. 8GB

• Primary 2, Ext3 - Linux system partition, aka / or /dev/hda2. 12GB

• Extended 1. Linux swap partition. 2GB.

• Extended 2, Ext3. Shared partition, aka /shared. 15GB.

I'm using NTFS-3G under Kubuntu to read and write the NTFS partition. Linux has long had support for reading NTFS partitions, but only recently has good support for writing NTFS partitions been added. It's a user-mode only filesystem, so it's not possible to run Linux from an NTFS partition.

I've installed Ext2 IFS (Installable File System) on Windows, which allows me to read and write Ext3 (and Ext2) partitions. I keep cross-platform data, such as my Thunderbird mail folders, on the Ext3 partition, /shared. My home directory is also on the /shared partition, so there's very little data that I mind losing on the / partition. I haven't had any problems with Ext2 IFS, except that I've had no luck with external USB hard drives formatted as Ext3. I'm not about to convert my Windows partition to Ext3, however.

Rainlendar is a fairly recent addition to the above list of cross-platform apps. I was using Mozilla Sunbird, but I never liked it very much. It's very much the poor cousin of Firefox and Thunderbird. Sunbird is slow, clunky, and ugly, with very few developers, who have taken years just to get it to version 0.3. It supports iCal as an export format, but publishing calendars to the web is a bear.

I discovered Rainlendar a couple of months ago. It's far slicker, with a large set of skins, and more functionality. iCal is the native format. Rainlendar is based on wxWidgets, so it's cross-platform. Installation on Linux consists of extracting everything from a compressed tar file. There's no deb or rpm packages to install it into your system menu, alas. I've been running it by using Alt+F2 (Run Command) to launch /shared/georger/rainlendar2/rainlendar (yuck!)

Earlier today, I ran across the very useful ArsGeek site, which has an enormous set of useful tips for Ubuntu users. One post on installing Songbird inspired me to figure out how to add Rainlendar to the KDE Menu.

First, open up a terminal, then:

 cd /opt
 sudo mkdir rainlendar2
 sudo chown georger:georger rainlendar2
 tar jxvf /shared/Downloads/Rainlendar-Lite-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Substituting your username twice in the chown line.

You should now be able to run Rainlendar from the command line:

 ./rainlendar2/rainlendar2 &

At this point, you may want to install a different skin, as the default look is overwhelming in my opinion. I use the Vista skin. The older skins (.zip files) need to be unzipped into rainlendar2/skins; newer skins (.r2skin files) merely need to be copied into that directory.

Now to get the Rainlendar icon into /usr/share/pixmaps. (Finding the damn icon was the trickiest part of this whole exercise.):

 cd rainlendar2/resources
 unzip -j resources.zrc res/logo-large.png
 sudo mv logo-large.png /usr/share/pixmaps/rainlendar.png

Finally, let's add Rainlendar to the Office menu. ArsGeek gives the instructions for using Alacarte under Gnome. For KDE, click the K Menu button, right-click on Office, and choose Edit Menu, which brings up the KDE Menu Editor. Click New Item, then set:

• Name: Rainlendar

• Description: Calendar

• Comment: Manage calendar and todos

• Command: '/opt/rainlendar2/rainlendar2'

Click the blank icon button, then Other icons. Choose the rainlendar icon and click OK. Save the new menu entry.

You should now be able to launch Rainlendar from the Office menu. Enjoy!

At work, we're having a Christmas party every day this week at 4pm. Each day, a different team is responsible for providing food and drink. Yesterday, my team provided Caipirinhas and some Brazilian food. Today, we had Scotch and savory cheesecakes!

I'm so used to cheesecakes being sweet that it's never occurred to me that they could come any other way, but I have to say that mushroom, pepper & pesto, and brie &hazelnut cheesecakes are all quite tasty.

10/29. In mid-October, I shaved off the goatee that I had sported since March, leaving me clean-shaven for the first time in a decade. I quickly got over that urge and let the beard start growing back.

This is me at the two-week stage: a self-portrait taken while experimenting with the new camera. It looks a little odd to me. I'm using this as the startup photo on the camera.

10/30. I go back and forth between Atlas's offices at Pioneer Square and the International District, and Smith Tower is a major landmark.

10/31. Once again, we got dozens and dozens of young callers at Halloween. I have a set of Halloween photos at Flickr.

11/01. This is taken from the roof of Atlas's office Occidental Square, looking at the building on the other side of the street.

11/02. Tres works in the group that I'm loaned out to, Atlas Publisher. He has a certain sartorial flair. He also turns out to be a friend of Sparky.

11/03. Occidental Square at dusk.

About six weeks ago, I read about Sparky's A Picture a Day project on his blog. He in turn had been inspired by Photojojo's Project 365.

Here's how it works, for me. I take at least one photo a day, every single day for a year. Every so often, I upload the photos to my Flickr site. If I get more than one worthwhile photo in a day, great, but one and only gets tagged potd (picture of the day).

Why? Apart from the reasons enumerated by Photojojo, here's what I get out of it.

First of all, fun. It adds a little spark to my day, to be always looking for photo ops.

Second, the constant practice makes me a better photographer.

Third, more photo editing and photo organization. Historically, I have been much better about taking photos than I have about organizing them and editing them. This should get me off my duff about going through the thousands of photos I've taken since I went digital in 2001, and posting the best of them.

Before I was inspired to start this project, I had been thinking about getting a small point-and-shoot, like the Casio Exilim. When my parents stayed with us and went to Hawaii with us a month before, I had played with my mother's Exilim and liked it. My father had also had me order another Exilim as a present for Michelle, and I had carried that around for a week.

I bought myself a Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 at CostCo. It's 10 megapixels, which I think is overkill, but even so, I can get more than 700 photos on to a 2GB card. It came with a leather carrying case, now a fulltime resident on my belt. I'm fairly happy with it, and I think I've got some good results from it. But judge for yourself.

I love my other camera, a Nikon D70 digital SLR, but it's far too bulky and heavy to carry with me all the time.

I finally uploaded the first 36 pictures to Flickr last night, after working on them for most of the weekend. It would have been sooner, but we spent 2.5 weeks in Ireland with wholly inadequate Internet access, and I was quite busy before then.

From now on, I hope to post new POTD pictures two or three times a week.

The next few posts will talk about those first 36 photos in more detail. I also intend to write up the workflow that I'm developing.

I noted at the beginning of July that my sister Michelle was to be married to David Bowles in Dublin in early November.

The wedding took place on Friday, November 10th. Emma and I arrived the afternoon before, half stumbling with tiredness. My brother, Mark, and his wife, Lizzy, had arrived from New York only hours earlier.

The ceremony took place at 1pm at St. Brigid's, a small, old Anglican church, on the outskirts of Stillorgan village, long since absorbed into the Dublin metropolitan area. It was very Ascendancy, with 19th century plaques about Fellow of the Royal College this and Brevet Colonel (Boer War) that.

The bride looked lovely, and I have the photos to prove it.

After the wedding, we all repaired to Barberstown Castle for the reception. There were, I think, 160 guests who partied late into the night. Emma and I gave up around 1:30, exhausted from the jet lag. My mother didn't get to bed until after 4am. Philip Bowles, David's father, who had been undergoing chemotherapy, was in fine form and stayed up nearly as late.

Emma and I had arranged to stay a second night at Barberstown Castle, and I ended up sleeping until 4pm on the Saturday, trying to sleep off the drink and the jetlag.

The following week, my mother and I went through the nearly 400 photos that she, Emma, David Reilly, and I had taken, and whittled it down to 74 representative ones. She badly wanted to send the photos to her friends around the world, so I set up a Picasa web album for her and uploaded them.

Mark set up a site for Michelle and David before the wedding, but it doesn't yet link to the photos.

SysInternals has always been a source of great tools for troubleshooting your system. FileMon, RegMon, Process Explorer, Handle, ListDlls, PsTools, DebugView: all of these have earned a permanent place on my Windows installations. Mark Russinovich, the co-founder, is a world-class hacker. He co-wrote Microsoft Windows Internals without access to the Windows source. It was he who discovered the Sony Rootkit and publicized it on his widely read blog.

Many people were somewhat disturbed to learn that Microsoft bought SysInternals a few months ago, that it would compromise the tools.

It seems not to be a problem. The tools have just been re-released on the TechNet SysInternals site. There's one new tool, ProcMon, which aggregates together FileMon, RegMon, and a process monitor. And they've made the whole suite available as one zipfile, instead of having to download each tool separately.

This video says it all.

Go vote tomorrow!

I've seen a number of references to a Microsoft demo of speech recognition that went famously wrong, but it wasn't until this evening that I finally watched the CNBC Video that started the meme.

A TV reporter makes a snarky introduction then cuts to video of a Microsoft PM demoing the new speech recognition technology in Windows Vista. Dear Mom comma, he says. Dear aunt, appears in Word. It gets worse from there. Funny stuff. Go watch the original video.

But it's not the whole story. There's another video which sets the demo in context. Overall, the demo was reasonably successful and the speech commands worked fairly well.

If you think people talking into their cellphones is annoying now, wait until you hear them talking at their computers!

"This isn't an election anymore, it's an intervention."

— Andrew Sullivan on CNN.

I don't have much time for either Andrew Sullivan or Christopher Hitchens. Both of them bear a lot of blame for getting us into Iraq in the first place.

But here they are on CNN yesterday, ripping into Bush for saying that Rumsfeld is doing a fabulous job and that he and Cheney must stay until the end of his presidency.

(Via AmericaBlog)

For the last few months, every blog post that I've made has been accompanied by at least one image. Sometimes I already have an appropriate image. The rest of the time, I use whatever I could find after searching Google Images.

Earlier today, I came across 10 Tips for Google Image Search. I particularly like the Greasemonkey script which allows you to view the original image by clicking on the thumbnail.

Email is addictive because of "operant conditioning":

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. ... The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because 'next time' might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there's never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.

... Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless.

So what to do about it?

If a behaviour isn't rewarded then it will gradually disappear. The problem is that we don't want to remove the reward (email), so we need, instead, to weaken the strength of the link between the action and the reward. A simple delay would do this - imagine a five minute delay between hitting the check email button and getting new email. A delay is doubly-effective because the longer the delay the more likely you are to have email and so the more consistent the reward will be.

I didn't find any suggestions that were particularly effective, however.

I'm not addicted to email, per se. I can however surf the web endlessly. There's always one more fascinating link to follow.

I've up loaded my Halloween pictures to Flickr.

Windows deservedly gets a lot of bad press about the unending stream of security updates. But Linux, despite all of the propaganda about it being more secure than Windows, has its own security problems.

Take this post from LWN.net yesterday:

No security updates today
[Posted October 25, 2006 by corbet]

It is sad that this is worthy of note, but it is: on this day, Wednesday, October 25, we have not received a single security update for any Linux distribution.

(This post was composed on a laptop running Kubuntu 6.06.)

I found a series of amusing cat pictures, via Ned Batchelder's blog.

Update 2007/10/04: That site is gone, but fairly similar photos can be found at LOLCats.

My operatic education continues. Tonight we saw the Seattle Opera's production of The Italian Girl in Algiers, aka L'italiana in Algeri .

The plots in opera, especially comedic opera, are always wildly improbable. This one revolves around Mustafà, the buffoonish Bey of Algiers, who wants to pass off his wife Elvira to Lindoro, an Italian slave, and take instead the newly arrived Italian girl, Isabella. Isabella has come in search of her lost love -- Lindoro, of course -- and has brought another lover, Taddeo, also a buffoon, who poses as her uncle. Isabella is more than a match for every man who crosses her path, twisting them around her little finger.

The performances are delightful and the music is a treat. Mustafà, the petulant Bey, as played by Simone Alberghini, is particularly funny. Recommended.

In my wanderings, I recently came across two sites where you can ask all kinds of strange questions, with a reasonable expectation of getting an answer.

Little Details: "writers have questions, other writers have answers". A LiveJournal community for writers seeking all kinds of background information for their plots. Some samples:

• 1920's cold remedies

• Danish drinking songs

• Control parents have over their children testifying.

Ask MetaFilter is more general purpose. It's a good place to go when your question can't be reduced to a keyword search on Google. Sample questions:

• What's the fastest and cheapest way to paint a red room white?

• Is there a program for the Mac that will scroll a window to capture a screenshot of its entire contents?

• I want to be my own YouTube/Google video. Is there an easy way to show videos on my own server embedded in a page?

• What's the best vegan substitute for lard?