A New Kind of Science. I’m 200 pages in or so and I have to agree with this reviewer’s views – Amazon.com: Books: A New Kind of Science

His writing is hugely, vastly self-important as well as highly affected. (He claims that’s necessary for clarity! A joke, presumably.)

As a wise friend once observed to me, “most nonfiction books should really be pamphlets”, and that seems to be the case here in spades. The first 200 pages have about 5 interesting points – a powerpoint slide or two would have sufficed.

My Picture Hardware. Someone reading my blog recently asked me what kind of photo hardware I use.

i am not a photo enthusiast. i am just a dad who wants a modest number of pictures. i don’t want to learn about f-stops, shutter speeds, exposures, etc. my ideal camera has one button. so given that…

i currently use 3 cameras – 2 still, 1 video. (i don’t count the panasonic gd87 phone as one of these). For everyday stills, I use the casio exilim – 2megapixel. very small, long long battery life. i use it alot because it is easy to slip in a pocket. it has crappy optics, digital zoom – a real photo geek would sneer at it. but it is useful. I also have a kodak dx4900. better optics than the casio, 4 megapixel, really easy download to pc, and easy to recharge. battery life kind of sucky tho. and too big to carry around all the time. But C likes the pictures better.

for printing drafts, i use an hp color laserjet. for final prints i use shutterfly. i tried all kinds of printers, and a) C was never happy with the prints, b) the printers were very finicky and slow, and c) the consumables were so expensive. once i moved to a service, C was happy, and it was less hassle for me.

For video i use a canon gl1. kind of expensive but takes great movies and corrects for a lot of my flaws. I don’t understand what even 10% of the buttons on this camera do.

Copying documents from home to work. I copied all my photos from home to work today. Both PCs are always on, on broadband connections. Creating a connection between them tho is so hard, regular humans could never do this. I ended up using the remote terminal goo in Windows XP but what a mindblower this is. Opening up a window on the remote pc, seeing your local drives mapped in crazy new places within this window with funny names – i can’t imagine explaining this to a regular human being. It seems like such an easy task – copying files from home to work. Why is it so hard?

Digitial Image Recovery. This looks like a vital tool – Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery – if you haven’t corrupted a memory card yet, well, you will.

The Tyranny of Email. Good read here – Critical Section - The Tyranny of Email. Another good reason to turn off the blackberry on weekends, and maybe during the week sometime too. The blackberry makes the tyranny pervasive, and that is not a good thing.

PCMag review of picture packages. Pictures, Pictures, Everywhere

My Blog is becoming my PIM. I used Info Select years ago and I keep thinking I should try it again. But I realized today that what I really want are the features of Info Select on my blog. IE I want to be able to really quickly sort and search the blog based on any string I enter. Because increasingly my blog is my PIM, i am dumping all my notes up here for my own future reference. I don’t have Favorites or Bookmarks in my browser anymore, they all go in the blog with annotations. All the little notes I used to keep – up on the blog. If I had a reasonable security model, I’d move my todo list and a bunch more notes up here. And all my contacts – tho for that I need better security and better DB functionality. I’d love to see a blogging package that implemented a lot more of the PIM feature list, I’d move to that.

PMA 2003 Software announcements. A quick review of these – Minolta Messenger lets you add hotspots to photos, an idea we were kicking around yesterday. Not sure it is worth a whole separate app! Adobe Album gets lots of press – I hear it blows chunks on large data sets. Preclick gets some nice press, I am downloading now. It is pretty fast at importing my pictures (about 2000). And it is very fast navigating thru photos – this may win the speed war! but it has very limited org tools, it is just a reflection of what folders you have created in the filesystem, and then you can add ratings to photos. it has a fast search feature but i think it only searches on titles. and has an “autofix” feature as its only real editting tool – i kind of like the simplicity here. Qimage is supposed to be a killer printing program for photos – looks kind of geeky. Ulead announced its latest -- I’ve never been overwhelmed with Ulead product quality but worth looking at I guess.

Marc doesn’t have a blog. Via Scripting News, marca doesn’t have the “time or ego need” for a blog. My paltry traffic level certainly doesn’t result in an ego boost! And I get great payback on time spent. Maybe marc is worried that his postings can’t stand up to the full light of day (obviously that hasn’t stopped me).

PMA 2003. Need to check out the awards for digitial photography at PMA – Tong Family Blog: PMA 2003

My new camera phone. I am using a panasonic gd87 on the att gprs network now. Very cool, a nice form factor, an integral camera, small size – lots of wows from folks at Ignition today. But it was a herculean buying and provisioning effort requiring the aid of literally world experts.

I wanted a cool small form factor phone with an integral camera, not some clunky addon camera that I would lose or never use or end up breaking the fragile connector. And it had to be gsm for travel. All of which pointed me towards phones available in Europe, not in the US. Besides the panasonic I also looked at the Nokia 3650 and a siemens model. I went with the panasonic because it has the most active ebay presence at the time but the nokia may have passed it now.

Ebay is definitely the place to find these phones – ACS has an ebay store with a lot of camera phones as does wireless express. I bought from ACS. Wherever you buy, make sure the phone comes in an english language version – some foreign phones don’t, particularly if originally intended for the asian market. And make sure the phone is unlocked and can be used on a US network.

The phone shipped promptly, and on initial receipt I was a little scared. It was originally intended for the Vodaphone network and the box was all in german, the instructions were in german. Taped to the side was a converter for the charger plug (german of course) and a photocopied set of english instructions. Did not inspire confidence!

I bravely moved my ATTWS SIM over and no problem, gsm voice service was available immediately! But no data services worked – I dug into settings and the WAP browser and email service were all pointing to vodaphone private IP addresses, clearly this was never going to work. So I moved the SIM back to the ATTWS phone and dug through all the screens to find the IP, WAP, and MMS settings – a very painful process going thru all the menus. And this is where I needed the world experts – Adrian and his buddies among the att alums and current employees helped find all the right settings. Once I had all the settings, I moved the SIM back to the panasonic, set all the settings, added the settings for my work SMTP server, and amazingly it mostly worked. MMS doesn’t seem to work but I can do email, browse the web, etc.

Was it worth it? Well the phone looks cool. The UI is very hard to use tho. And the pictures are izone-like in terms of quality. But a great learning experience.

Migrating to a new PC. Installed a new PC last night and migrated all my apps, settings, and docs off the old using Alohabob. Pretty much without a hitch, this is a real timesaver. The only hurdle I hit was Office, which complained that machine configuration had changed substantially, and that I needed to insert my CD and reactivate. So I had to find the freakin’ CD and screw around with activation. The new PC came with corel’s wordperfect and quattro pro, I kind of wonder why I even need to screw around with office anymore. Certainly I won’t be buying new Office licenses or upgrades for my home pc’s in the future, it is just too expensive to use on a home network. Openoffice or corel or something else will have to do.

OK problem 2 with the migration. Printers didn’t move over at all. I have to re-setup my printers on the new machine. bummer.

Firewall went toes up last night. Our Sonicwall at work went toes up last night, a hardware failure. Hence my blog was dead for a while. We are back limping with a temporary firewall solution, will have a new firewall in place by tomorrow am. A morning without net access is painful, I felt like I was missing an arm or something.

Intermixing MIDI and DMX. I may need a box like this to intermix MIDI and DMX in my control system for halloween.

Harvard Joke. From Dave. Ha.