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a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'

Oblomovka

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2002-07-16

raphael photographers of san jose, you provoke me to great wrath

Oh, what do you do? I came back from an argument at a photographers today. The Irish Times needed a headshot for a column I’m writing for them, so I just popped around the corner to a place called Raphael Photographers, run by a guy called Phil. The prints came back today. They are, to my unprofessional eye, really bad. Like, patently bad. There’s a water marking on the print. The background is dotted, as though it was poorly developed. There were reflections off my glasses that Phil’s tried to clumsily retouch, which leaves my right eye looking like I have a third pupil.

We got into a row. Phil there claims that reflections are “inevitable”. In a studio, with full control over lighting, and says that any professional photographer would agree with him. He refuses to reshoot the picture, or give me my money back. Quinn turns up. Quinn’s dad was a photographer, so we find ourselves trying to explain to Phil that you can avoid reflections, that you can fix these things if you pay attention at the time. He denies this vehemently. In the end, Quinn and I start getting the giggles. He seemed to be making such bizarre claims about the nature of photography. I really needed some pictures – and fast; but in the end both Quinn and I were both pulling our punches. Essentially, Phil had more to gain from this argument. If we lost, we lost $60 and some lousy photos. If we won, Phil would lose $60, have to redo the shoot, and we’d have to make him admit that he was a bad photographer.

If I was giving a review of Raphael – which I am, because I’m writing this to get spotted by Google (hey, Mr Googlebot: that’s Raphael Photographers of the Alameda, San Jose, California) – I’d say he was a bad photographer. But that’s easy for me to say. What’s it like for him? I’m not the world’s greatest writer. Often, I suck. But Phil doesn’t seem to be able to admit when he screws up. I don’t know what to do in that situation: am I supposed to convince him, grind him down, rub his nose in it? That doesn’t seem what one should do. He kept showing me other photographs, pointing out the reflections in those, and saying “Look! Here!”. And I kept biting my tongue from saying, yeah, Phil – but that’s because these completely suck too. You need to find a better job!

But what if there are no better jobs? What if he doesn’t know how to do anything else? What if he’s a bad photographer, but really good at selling his photos? And why don’t epinions ever end up this wishy-washy and existential?

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2002-07-15

all hail harry newton

One of the best bits about living with people is you get to read all their books. Gilbert is in my eternal gratitude list for showing me Harry Newton‘s Telecom Dictionary. Any dictionary that includes definitions for Caller-ID message format, Poisson distributions, meatware, Podiumware, RS233 and Harry himself (“According to Susan, his wife of over 21 years, he has become a sex symbol for women who no longer care.”), is a winner.

There’s no topical reason for writing this. I just thought people should know.

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2002-07-11

james and marybeth

Lisa’s song about the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel is so sad. I doubt the music industry gives a toss about the world it’s shutting down – but you’d think that the preservers of a country’s entire heritage would care. I hope so.

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2002-07-10

apple almost had me.

The iBook’s power adaptor went on the blink earlier today. And me with only ten minutes left to copy my work files over! No problem, I thought, with neophyte MacAddict glee – I’ll just pop over to the nearby swanky Apple Store and pick up a new one.

The G3 iBook AC adapter costs $68. Unless you want one from an Apple Store, the man at the “Genius Bar” said. In which case it costs $68 plus an $85 “service parts charge”.

To be fair, he did tell me I’d be better off ordering online, and offered to recharge my Mac there while I wandered around the Mall for a couple of hours. Disappointed by this level of genius, I declined, went home, ordered the part (two days delivery), and then hacked together a fix using a leatherman and gaffer-taped. I so wanted to be just a meek little consumer today, too.

Anyway, enough Jerry Pournelle-style whining. Here’s another Linux to MacOS X blog. Useful notes on identifying which OS version you have from the terminal, remotely mounting disk images, changing shells and the like. No permalinks though.

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2002-07-08

who’s your mac daddy?

Well, it’s day four of messing around with Loaner – Cory’s old 466 ibook he lent me on Independence Day. I was keen to poke around with the development side of MacOS X, so I bought me a copy of Garfinkel and Mahoney’s Building Cocoa Applications on Saturday, and got to work. Inconclusive conclusions so far:

Things I like

Things I’d do differently (given I’m such a darn free software wonk):

Things that, after all these years, remind me I’m back in Macland

And yes, you’re right. This is a displacement activity :).

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2002-07-06

oh yes, and:

Incoming!

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i should cocoa

I’ve been lent a MacOS X iBook! This is great news, because I’ve been curious about this new OS for months – ever since I saw how many hackers were playing with it at Emerging Tech. Even better, the unspoken condition of the loan is that I do some open source hacking on the platform.

I’ll be writing most of my experiences up on the Forwarding Address: OS X” blog, but I thought I’d dump these notes down here first, because they’re a bit less technical and very unformed.

Much of the actual OS is gently familiar from my everyday Debian life. It’s the social differences that are disorienting me most of all. I’ve been looking around for good Mac sites the past few days, and getting a lot of culture shock.

Rumour Sites
Despite what Slashdot might imply, I don’t think it’s possible to maintain rumours for very long in Free Software land. “A little birdy tells me that Alan Cox might be working on a new I2O implementation!”. Either the object of the rumour comes along and grumpily puts everyone straight, or (if it’s a more subjective piece of gossip), two gangs of fanatics come along and flamewar each other until no one cares what the truth is anymore. In MacOS land, the only person who appears to know what’s really going on except Steve Jobs. And he’s never on IRC. It’s exciting!
“User-contributed tips”
Mac Websites have this quality of “I’ve been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!”. Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.
Shareware
I’ll say it: paying for software seems eery, old-fashioned, and frankly, a bit spiv-like. You’ll share this with me, but won’t give me the source code, and cripple it until I give you money? What definition of “share” is this? Let alone having to pay to see what the top shareware items even are. It seems so stingy. Oh, and yet, so tempting…

Not saying that any of this is bad – just that it will get some getting used to. Thank goodness for the homely familiarity of fink, hey?

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seth’s analysis of palladium

Seth has done a great job at an objective explanation of what Palladium is (and congratulations to Microsoft for explaining it to the EFF without an NDA). It’s reassured me on a couple of points – for instance, it’s possible for a 386 Linux to take advantage of the Palladium’s features, and the Palladium doesn’t leak ID data about the machine.

I still think that it has strong monopolistic tendencies however. Given that anything in the Palladium can trash anything outside of it, but not vice-versa, there’s a strong market pressure to move into the Palladium context for most uses. And now we have a situation where not only are specific applications OS-specific, but specific application’s data files are OS-specific too. This is only as bad as, say, the Microsoft Word or SMB situation was a few years ago. But there’ll be no reverse-engineered OpenOffice or SAMBA projects. It still encourages homogenuity, even while being on the face of it platform-agnostic.

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2002-07-03

government to internet: be more like tv

The DTI has issued a report that says “compelling content will drive the next wave of broadband services according to the study” and recommends setting up a “Broadband Channel”, “a Channel 4 for the broadband age”.

This kind of out-and-out idiocy – that broadband adoption is being held up by a lack of movies to watch – seems to be widespread on both sides of the channel. So far, I’ve seen it mainly trotted out to back braindead bills like the CBDTPA, or to fleece gullible ISP’s (who are talked into desperately teaming up with low-grade, low-budge “content providers”). This was @Home’s business plan, and BT Interactive’s too. Both roaring successes.

Broadband’s not being held up by a lack of bloody content. Oh yeah, I get that all the time: “Oooh, I’d gladly fork out for a 2 meg connection, but you know, I just don’t think there’s enough on the Internet for me right now.” Broadband’s being held up by simple technical reasons, and the telcos reluctance to lose their monopoly on the last mile.

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2002-07-02

steve bowbrick has a weblog!

He was one of the original Class of ’94 UK net entrepreneurs, and now runs another.com. That boy thinks too much.

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