Thursday, February 21, 2008

Holding fast don't slow 'em down.

I was in the doorway talking my usual gloom and doom
when Jimmy-the-girl wanted to inch by.

Inside people were chomping the whore-candy whole
smacking at their cheekbones like they forgot how to say.

Outside they're carpet-bagging the booze
and tough Johnny's boxing Jenny's ears off.

Well when pen hits paper, boy, you know what to do.
The King's Men are coming down hard.

If you let them, they'll get you.


Sunday, February 17, 2008

The internet is a series of tubes, and you need to realize that those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled...

Anyone who knows photography knows famous websites like dpreview.com (digital photography review) and photo.net (including boastfully "more than 3,000 [forum] posts added daily").

The photography website that I now hold in high esteem is imaging-resource.com.

This could be one of the best websites dedicated to digital photography on the internet.

I say could be because the user interface has some shortcomings.

I especially love the camera reviews for their technical professionalism, among many other things. When you go to one, look for the gray tab bar near the top. That's how you have to navigate, okay? When you get to the bottom they're kinda buried. Tabs, no 'next page' button. I think it lets them force you to drag your eyes over advertising.

There's, of course, much more to see. Like, for example, the ability to show you everything about all of the top current DSLR camera models at once.


Removed!


$ sudo mdadm --query --detail --scan --verbose /dev/md0 /dev/md1

/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Tue Jan 22 06:23:53 2008
Raid Level : raid6
Array Size : 796566528 (759.67 GiB 815.68 GB)
Used Dev Size : 199141632 (189.92 GiB 203.92 GB)
Raid Devices : 6
Total Devices : 6
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Sun Feb 17 05:54:22 2008
State : clean
Active Devices : 6
Working Devices : 6
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

Chunk Size : 64K

UUID : 4b2f184c:88e28e2c:cedde749:cf01a12c (local to host rackmount)
Events : 0.132552

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 17 0 active sync /dev/sdb1
1 8 161 1 active sync /dev/sdk1
2 8 81 2 active sync /dev/sdf1
3 8 145 3 active sync /dev/sdj1
4 8 33 4 active sync /dev/sdc1
5 8 177 5 active sync /dev/sdl1
/dev/md1:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Sun Jan 27 17:16:35 2008
Raid Level : raid6
Array Size : 156247808 (149.01 GiB 160.00 GB)
Used Dev Size : 39061952 (37.25 GiB 40.00 GB)
Raid Devices : 6
Total Devices : 5
Preferred Minor : 1
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Sun Feb 17 05:54:42 2008
State : clean, degraded
Active Devices : 5
Working Devices : 5
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

Chunk Size : 64K

UUID : 1e242aa6:b4f082ef:cedde749:cf01a12c (local to host rackmount)
Events : 0.239172

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 193 0 active sync /dev/sdm1
1 8 65 1 active sync /dev/sde1
2 8 97 2 active sync /dev/sdg1
3 8 113 3 active sync /dev/sdh1
4 8 129 4 active sync /dev/sdi1
5 0 0 5 removed


Saturday, February 16, 2008

Presidential candidates issues comparison grid.

I mean, I'm not really "that into" politics but, at this point you can't avoid it.

How is it that I am the only one to have posted this page to del.icio.us?

I guess you should vote for somebody, rather than not vote. Also here's where you can see Ron Paul on Letterman's Tonight Show.


Thursday, February 14, 2008

Partly sunny and a chance of Thursday.

When I was your age, facebook was just the words 'face' and 'book' put next to each other.


Sunday, February 10, 2008

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Nikon and Canon the crap out of your kids and pets this weekend.

I'm supposed to teach a workshop on the Pentax K10D in the morning, however if everything goes as planned, nobody will come to it. For a good reason. I think most of the photography world just feels sorry for Pentax, but I could be wrong. Anyway let me sleep in for an hour or two.


A city in terror on a thin blue line.

The more I look at careers in the job market in my field, the more I think (just think) about unions. What they are, and what they do.

19 men were tried and fired, August 26th through 29th.
For violation of rule 35,
The forbidden right to organize.
They suffered the loss of their livelihood that night.

A thousand-plus walked off the job to support their
brothers' cause (the anti-union prohibition clause).
They demanded loyalty at any price.


Friday, February 8, 2008

Work hard for your Ameros.

Oh from now I'll be saying "North America" to refer to the following things:

  • All of the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico
  • All United States, not including Puerto Rico
  • The 48 contiguous states
  • New England
  • The arbitrarily-bound 'Northern United States' which sometimes includes Washington, D.C.
  • Franco-American Canada
  • The US-Canada border-area
  • Mexico
  • The US-Mexico border-area
  • Canada, United States, and Mexico, together
  • Any other combination of these
I'm trying to push the fake-o North American Union conspiracy theory. At least this week. Plus, those 2 words replace all those others, so it's easy for me. But dauntingly confusing for my listeners.


Tuesday, February 5, 2008

The next big thing.

Lightfield cameras will probably be the most profound photographic evolution since digital. The ability to adjust focus after the exposure has been made!

Oh yeah and if you don't know about photography, don't start here, but get there quick.


Monday, February 4, 2008

WHO WILL SUPPORT YOU?

Embedded Windows is a hangman's noose and you know it.

Seriously, people.


Friday, February 1, 2008

This isn't anything special.

[cell phone starts ringing]
[you hear it]
[you open it, if appropriate]
[you look at the screen and indicators]
[you see who the call is from]
[you choose to answer it or not]
[you decide to answer it]
[you press a button]
[the call connects]

"Hello?"



---
I think, on average mostly any American person would be familiar with what a cell phone is and what it does.

Grandmothers get it. Its the new kind of their old rotary phone. Too many buttons. They don't actually use cell phones, but they get it. It's a telephone. Culture-starved midwest farmers get it. They've either got one or they've seen it on the tee-vee. Or at least they think it's some kind of walkie-talkie. Poor minority toddlers know Da-Da's calling on the daddy's-sound-comes-out-of-it-chew-toy. Top NYC professionals are on them constantly too. And everyone in between.

You've got a name, a mic., a speaker. You can trade voices with just about anyone. And just about everyone knows how to use them. Great.

That's how it should be for the successors of peer-to-peer sharing!

Sharing content with others should be as pervasive as making phone calls. It should be constant and instant and fall to hand with unmatched simplicity.

Keep the physical cell phone form factor for the time being. But get that solid state storage up there, boys! Should be rocking Azureus on the iPhone right now. Should learn some lessons from the one laptop per child program to see what can be learned about large-scale mesh networking.

Screw Azureus. Screw Treos. If you ask me every processing bit should always be running full tilt and never have wasted clock cycles. And every storage bit that we have should basically be full right now with incredible rich content to mash around. I'm talking about our near future: swapping HUGE amounts of data back and forth. Bandwidth is such a huge problem in the US.

All of your own digital voice, videos, photos, documents, 3D models--they're all available at your "phone number", your internet handle, whatever.

Where's it physically stored? Depends.

Probably some type of distributed filesystem. More on this later but basically, parts of your entire digital holdings can be stored on local physical memory in different places. You get something semi-central that keeps track of all your files'. It performs synchronizations, backups, balancing, caching, etc. to deal with constantly-changing device needs and content consumption. Some files on your 'cell phone,' some on your 'media center' at home, part on your husbands laptop, part on your work home folder, part on the fridge's built-in computer. That menu-maker on the refrigerator, by the way, acts as a digital picture frame too, and there's a couple photos on there too. You've got all kinds of media strewn about, people. We're looking at a messy future, but for now go with the distributed filesystem thing for 'you' or 'your family.' I'm not sure about how to "get at it all" in terms of a front end yet, I haven't thought about it.

But your cell phone should definitely blip if your friend calls you. It could show he's looking to download movie X. He saw it on your folder listing as movies being shared with friends.

If the movie's on your desktop at home, then maybe it'll automatically connect him through to do that, if the bandwidth makes sense. But this movie's stored only on your cell phone, because you downloaded it with your cell phone earlier, and you haven't been home, and your home system hasn't (up until this call decision) needed to manage bandwidth and storage. No need to try and get the home system involved. You've set it to not pull the movie off the phone during the day (via 3G or EDGE maybe) unless explicitly told to do so. It'll sync (maybe bluetooth) when you get home.

But now you've got the movie only on your cell phone, and your friend wants it. To get the file to him right now, it would need to use "conventional" wifi, the slow kind. In the future our wifi and 3G will be paltry, I hope, but this is the equivalent of bad reception. I expect there will be tradeoffs to future wireless technologies, like there are now.... So it would take "a while" for the movie to go from your phone to his, but it would go. It would just be slower. So you can tell him, or have the system automatically tell him why it predicts the call was not accepted.

Plus in theory the network fabric would be much more interesting. This example would work if it was a rarer file. Or everyone else had worse bandwidth than you. In a case like this the transfer will be permitted, but with very poor bandwidth. All the while it is attempting to optimize changing mesh network connections as the environment changes.

As in conventional peer to peer networks, all software bandwidth decisions are tradeoffs but there are probably plenty of people who already have movie X or parts of it. This call then equates to "I'm already downloading this movie from some slow peers but I wanted to to see if I could get it faster from your bandwidth, on account of you also being a contact." Your phone's reply is then either "Yeah I can seed, but it will not be any speed increase since I'm in a low-wifi zone." Or it will be "Can't contribute to seeding this file at all, in too-low bandwidth area." Maybe once you get back to the city the bandwidth will automatically boost it through. It can or can't all be done automatically by the filesystem and bandwidth managers.

Then you can grow these of course with a powerful set of permissions. A "call" shows you who's calling and what they want: if they want to talk, vidchat, get wedding pix you took, etc. Some things maybe you make public (CC) and people can browse your globally-shared files by looking at your online status (ID, phone number). To prevent everyone and machines from constantly hammering you for calls you obviously implement a system like current phone numbers. Not enough room here today to discuss filtering.

Anyways you can share/give/get/recommend/point-to any data with friends, family, and other types of contents. Obviously people in work group can only see your work files (some at the office mainframe, some from your laptop, and some on tablet you're updating now). I don't need to explain these things to you.

I dunno, I think I know more about bittorrent than the average person. But that really upsets me. I should know the same amount as most other people. Or in this case, they should all know, on average, about as much as I know.

I know how to connect and manage various types of downloads. I know how to port forward and how to change settings. I know how to get 4 people a I have used more than 14 different bittorrent clients but this isn't anything special. I would expect you have, too. I mean at least 8 or 10. I mean, you settled on one. You're using one. How did you get to it. I'm sure you're using one. I die by remembering most people have never heard bittorrent.

I challenge you, because I'm lazy.

To point me to a good bittorrent search site. One with lots of comments on every torrent, with tags, and features, and options. Lots of hits, friendly community, no BS. Clean layout, intuitive usage, no banner ads, no phishing, and really, no BS. If you know a good one let me know.

I don't care who you are, the current bittorrent is a piss-poor excuse, especially for the average person. Making a phone call and exchanging large-scale data should be equal in scope.


Some days I will give you a Word-Of-The-Day but most days I will give you a Knuckle-Sandwich.

We know who and where we are.


They can rock a nested coil.

There's a little pit that hits your stomach, hits the the part of your stomach that can hear sounds, the digestive-tract-eardrum tucked right between the jejunum and the duo-audio canal. And it starts right after you realize you're listening to things like Tegan and Sara and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs now.


Put your elbow in your ear.


Books I have in-hand by and about Andy Warhol.

  • Beloff, Halla. Camera Culture. New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1985.
  • Colacello, Bob. Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. Cooper Square Press, 1999.
  • Crone, Rainer. Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the Artist. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
  • Hickey, Dave and Steven Bluttal, Editor. Andy Warhol "Giant" Size. Phaidon Press, 2006.
  • Honnef, Klaus. Warhol 1928-1987: Commerce Into Art. London: Taschen, 2000.
  • Kaustenbaum, Wayne. I'll Be Your Mirror : The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962-1987. Carroll & Graf, 2004.
  • Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1966.
  • Makos, Christopher. Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1989.
  • McDarrah, Fred and Gloria McDarrah. Beat Generation: Glory Days of Greenwich Village. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996.
  • Miller, Bobby. Fabulous! A Photographic Diary of Studio 54. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1998.
  • Princeton University of Art Museum. Pop Art: Contemporary Perspectives. Princeton, New Jersey: Yale University Press, 2007.
  • Ratcliff, Carter. Andy Warhol. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.
  • Stanton, Melissa, Editor. LIFE Sixty Years: A 60th Anniversary Celebration 1936-1996. New York: Life Books, 1996.
  • Van Deren Coke. The Painter and the Photograph: from Delacroix to Warhol. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964.
  • Warhol, Andy. Andy Warhol Photography: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Hamburg Kunsthalle. Edition Stemmle, 1999.
  • Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Publishers, 1975.
  • Watson, Steven. Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
  • Yau, John. In The Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol. Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1993.
  • Warhol, Andy and Pat Hackett. The Andy Warhol Diaries. New York: Warner Books, 1989.


Movies I have in-hand by and about Andy Warhol.

In no particular order and in need of proper citation.

  • I Shot Andy Warhol.
  • Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film.
  • Warhol, Andy. Beauty #2.
  • Warhol, Andy. Bike Boy. 1967.
  • Warhol, Andy. Eat. 1964.
  • Warhol, Andy. Heat.
  • Warhol, Andy. Kiss. 1963.
  • Warhol, Andy. Lonesome Cowboys.
  • Warhol, Andy. Trash.
  • Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture.
  • Chelsea Girl.
  • Basquiat. 1996.
I haven't even gotten to the movies yet. Looking at about 14 days out to complete rough draft.