Italy
Quick update:
Today is our 7th day in Italy. We started in Riomaggiore, one of the five towns of Cinque Terre. On Monday, we hiked through the towns to Monterosso, where we cooled off after the hot hike with a swim.
Tuesday was another hike, this time south to Porto Venere at the tip of the peninsula.
Wednesday morning we left Riomaggiore for Gallicano, Tuscany. On the way, we stopped in Lucca to ride bikes atop the city's large defensive walls.
Thursday we climbed the Apuan Alps up to a small peak called Monte Forrato. The peak had full 360 degree views, to the coast, to the surrounding peaks, and back to Gallicano.
Yesterday was another travel day; we left Gallicano, back through Lucca, to Siena. We got a short tour and spent some time wandering around the city.
Today we biked through Tuscany. Very hilly, very sunny, but beautiful all around. I was stopping every few minutes to capture yet another hilltop villa.
Tomorrow we meet Iris in Florence, and spend a couple more nights in Siena. Then we'll hit Naples, Pompei, Capri, and Rome before flying back home.
Trip 50% complete. So far: awesome!
Posted August 2, 2008 - One Comment
Lightroom Rocks
I've started using Adobe Lightroom more and more lately. It's a change in my usual workflow. For a long time, I was using Adobe Bridge, a very competent photo organizer, for arranging and previewing all of my photos. Then, after reviewing and culling, I would edit the best in Photoshop.
I changed over to using the Lightroom 2.0 beta (which is free right now) after shooting a wedding and realizing there was no way I was going to process 800 images in Photoshop before the end of the decade. Lightroom sits right between Bridge and Photoshop, a very competent organizer, with flags, tags, and ratings, mixed with a comprehensive digital darkroom. Lightroom covers all global changes you might want to make to an image: white balance, exposure, color, contrast, noise, sharpening, and lens correction, just to name the major ones. It also comes with a number of presets with different styles. The 2.0 beta has also added local changes as well: spot removal and a retouching brush that enables dodging and burning, local saturation, and tinting.
This all leads to a workflow built around rapid prototyping. I can play with white balance, boost the exposure, bump the saturation, increase the contrast, and add a slight vignette in less than five minutes, taking the image from the camera's low contrast, slightly underexposed defaults to a nice, rich photo. Along the way, I can try out different options, building on a preset or looking at what presets other people have used. My Photoshop workflow focused on getting everything just right, my Lightroom workflow still helps me get everything right, but with added creativity because I can try things out quickly and see if I like them.
An example:
This is one of my favorite images, which I wrote about back in September. But I've always felt this image was missing something. Really, it's just a little muddy; there's not enough separation between the foreground and background. I've tried using Photoshop to give it a little punch, but I could never find anything I liked.
So tonight I decided to give it a go in Lightroom. Fortunately, I'd kept the RAW file around, so I still had the color information. Since I'd been doing a lot of color correction in the wedding photos I have been processing, my first idea was to try and get the color balanced properly. Before when I'd worked with the color version of this file, everything had been too warm, mainly because the two main lights are flames, with a very orange light. I used the white shirt in back as a reference to get a good color. This turned the background slightly green, from the street lamps, while keeping the skin tones on the performer nice and warm. I then added a style that I am fast becoming fond of: high contrast, slight vignette, strong colors. With 3 settings changed and a little touch up to tone down the background, I got this:
Something about this pops so much more than the first version, the performer is separated from her surroundings by color and tone. It almost has a cross-processed feel. I've worked on this image a number of times, but without the rapid prototyping that Lightroom offers, I'm not sure I ever would have found a post processing that I could be completely happy with. Now, I'm so happy with it, I'm trying to sell it!
Posted June 30, 2008 - One Comment
Firefox Download Day
Happy Firefox Download Day everyone!
Huh?
Yeah, ok, you're right, it's not a real holiday.
Ummm....
You don't know what it is do you? Fine, I'll explain. The folks over at Mozilla are trying to set the world record for most downloads in 24 hours.
So what is being downloaded?
You didn't click on the link, did you? Firefox 3.0, the new, speedy, less-memory-hogging, more-user-friendly version of the world's most popular open source browser.
What are you on?
I'm a little over excited about it, so sue me. But seriously, you should try it out.
Posted June 17, 2008 - Comments
Aardvark FTW!
I should probably let someone else announce this so it's not shameless tooting of my own horn, but whatever:
http://www.djangodash.com/results/
First Place - Aardvarkia (out of 52 entrants)
- Benjamin Pollack
- Tyler Hicks-Wright
A code review tool with Mercurial integration.
(Aardvark reference for those who didn't get it.)
Some background: DjangoDash is a code sprint/competition to make more apps for the Django Python Web Framework.
Ben and I have been talking about code review tools, and have tried to use a couple, including ReviewBoard from VMWare and Rietveld Code Review by Python inventor Guido van Rossum, both of which use Subversion. We found their workflows to be too tedious to use frequently; you have to manually create a unified diff of all your changes and upload it to the server, while making sure not to accidentally check any of those changes in.
So, we decided to enter the dash with a code review tool based on Mercurial that uses its distributed nature to make the workflow easier. Now you just make your changes, start a new review at the website (which creates a new repo on the server for you), push your changes to your review repository, and assign the review to the reviewer. They can then accept it, in which case it gets pushed into the main repo, or reject, in which case it comes back to you and you have a chance to fix the problems. That way, all of your changes are versioned and periodic merges are done with the main repository so the branch history is always up to date. Moreover, a review history can be added to the check-ins after the review is approved, so the entire history is kept intact.
Right now we're planning it only for internal use, but I will definitely post if we decide to go open source with it.
Posted June 16, 2008 - Two Comments
Love the 1 You're With
Keacher and teammates from one of his d.school classes have put together a touching video on helping the environment by upgrading your computers instead of replacing them. It's a part of their environmental campaign called Love the 1 you're with. They've compiled a series of tips and pointers on re-energizing your computer and making it feel a little more loved. Check it out!
Posted May 27, 2008 - Comments
Meatless Like Me
Slate has a great piece called Meatless Like Me. Now, before all you omnivores run away, I want you to know it isn't the typical smug, holier-than-thou, tree-hugging vegetarian diatribe that we've all heard too many times before. It is simply trying to explain that the vast majority of us vegetarians are really not that weird:
To demonstrate what a vegetarian really is, let's begin with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a completely normal person with completely normal food cravings, someone who has a broad range of friends, enjoys a good time, is carbon-based, and so on. Now remove from this person's diet anything that once had eyes, and, wham!, you have yourself a vegetarian. Normal person, no previously ocular food, end of story. Some people call themselves vegetarians and still eat chicken or fish, but unless we're talking about the kind of salmon that comes freshly plucked from the vine, this makes you an omnivore.
Fortunately, at Stanford and here in New York it's not as much of an issue, but I can tell you that in Indiana, and a little in New Mexico, I got some strange looks and reactions from people when they found out I was one of those.
Posted May 8, 2008 - One Comment
Why Acid 3 Doesn't Matter
Mark Pilgrim recently posted an article bemoaning Mozilla's lack of attention to the Acid3 test. While I agree that it would be nice if Firefox passed Acid3 with flying colors, his article bothered me because it failed to take one thing into account: Acid3 doesn't matter. The proof is in the numbers. Over 75% of Web users are still using Internet Explorer, despite its dinosaur of a rendering engine. Meanwhile, the browsers that have passed Acid3 (at least in development builds) can't even break 7% of market share.
When all the hubbub about Mozilla not putting enough effort into Acid3 came out, Mike Shaver wrote a response that, while possibly coming off a little whiny, explained Mozilla's reasoning. And they got it right. As Rob Sayre points out, Firefox's failed Acid3 tests are corner cases that everyday users will not see, like SVG rendering (who uses SVG?), or won't care about, like dynamic title updating, and therefore deserve to have lower priorities. What they have been spending time on is getting Firefox 3 out the door. Firefox 3 is significantly faster, has an improved user interface, and uses less system resources, all things that very clearly impact the user. In fact, it's so good that it's making Mac users leave Safari, for a beta no less.
Commenting on Mark's post, Thor Larholm snidely remarks that Mozilla is no longer a leader in web standards due to its maturity. In part he's right: Mozilla has matured. But this isn't, as he tries to suggest, a negative. Mozilla is doing what any good software organization must do: it is prioritizing. There are bugs that need to be fixed now, and there are bugs that can be fixed later, and according to their Acid3 bug spreadsheet, I can see no bugs left that are worth holding Firefox 3 back for. On the other hand, Opera and WebKit are hastily fixing bugs in an attempt to be the first to fully pass Acid3. The problem is that in the process they changed the priority of the bugs away from the users and towards themselves. I find it troubling that these projects would do that just to chase an arbitrary target for bragging rights, because in a world of limited resources, that translates into less time spent on useful features.
Software development is all about prioritizing, and the sad fact is you can't always be working on the interesting bugs or the bugs that will win you acclaim with your fellow developers. You have to be working on what the user needs and what the user needs first. Mozilla has made a good compromise. As a user, I am thrilled about Firefox 3. I can't wait for the final release; I never knew the Web could be so fast. As a developer, I have no problems with Firefox; my code renders the way I think it should and I've never had to spend time debugging a Firefox-only bug.
So while I appreciate Mark so unselfishly feeling embarrassed on Mozilla's behalf, I, personally, am proud of them. They are still making inroads into one of the most entrenched markets in software today, and they are doing it by writing software that focuses on their users, by making the Web an inviting place for everyone.
Posted May 7, 2008 - Comments
Middle East Envy
There have been few times in my life when I've thought "wow, I'd really love to be in right now." Even fewer of those times has the blank been replaced with "Dubai". Sure, I'd like to go there someday, but I've never had a driving urge. Until now. Man, do I wish I was in Dubai right now...
Why?
Because right now I am missing what can only be the greatest meeting of the biggest photographers on the internet today, Gulf Photo Plus. David Hobby of Strobist, which I eagerly await reading each day, is taking pictures of David Nightingale of Chromasia, who shoots some of the most beautiful landscapes and portraits I have ever seen.
One of my most recent heroes, Joe McNally, is also there. Joe has shot for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, and was the first staff photographer at Life in over 20 years. He recently published the fantastic book The Moment it Clicks, and he writes on his blog about who lighting up all of Ellis Island and shutting down New York TV stations numerous times to [get a shot from the top of New York City]. He is joined by superstar Chase Jarvis, who is probably most famous for his ninjas.
They are all there, the guys I read and learn from every day, and they are teaching people how they do it. Yeah, I'm a fanboy. And I am so jelous...
