Urara

WF2: Midsummer Update (ongoing)

CL II: Water-Displacement Forty — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

[This is part of the Wide Finder 2 series.] We?re a few weeks in now, so I should provide an update. Those who are really interested might want to join the Wide Finder group.

I?m still getting email almost every day asking for access to the test data. As of June 21st, 42 people had downloaded the 100K-line test data, I?d given out 20 WF-related accounts on the test server, and nine people had reported results on the Wiki.

That results page is real interesting already, with lots more data to come. A few obvious results leap to the eye:

The best results are now approaching I/O speed.

Fan is a very interesting new language.

Check out wifii.groovy; I?m not going to prejudice the audience by leading with conclusions, but it?s very damn thought-provoking.

There?s a discussion of possible next steps here.

There are still lots of results to come. It?s not too late to get involved.

RotD: Yellow Rugosa (ongoing)

Database Pricing — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

Today?s rose is awfully pretty, and is accompanied by amusing erudition-soaked dialogue. Rugosa is a rose species and ?yellow? is self-explanatory. But the combination is rare.

I ran another yellow-Rugosa picture in May of 2007. Shortly thereafter I received an email from Alex Waterhouse-Hayward:

That yellow rugosa. Are you sure that?s what it is? In Canada, generally the only yellow rugosa is Rosa ?Agnes? which happens to be not only a Canadian rose but also the world?s first yellow rugosa.

Lauren wrote back:

That yellow rugosa is the Yellow Frau Dagmar Hastrup. We got it at the Old Rose Nursery on Hornby Island. http://www.oldrosenursery.com/hardy/rugosa.htm

There's another picture at http://www.hortico.com/roses/view.asp?action=show&productid=2599 which is reasonably close.

Alex had the last word:

Statistically since Rosa ?Fru Dagmar Hastrup? (Frau is incorrect) was hybridized (a found seedling of Rosa rugosa) by a Mr. Hastrup in 1914 (Since Hastrup was Danish it would have to be Fru and not Frau) it never occurred to me that your rose would be the one it is. I simply did not think of it.

When Dr. W. Saunders (in Ottawa) crossed Rosa rugosa with Rosa foetida ?Persiana? (a very yellow rose) in 1922 Rosa ?Agnes? became the first yellow rugosa.

Your specimen appeared in 1987 when an American called Moore crossed Rosa ?Golden Angel? with a rugosa hybrid called Rosa ?Belle Poitevine?. What is interesting about this deep pink rugosa is that it was introduced in 1894 (before our Fru). While its name is similar to Fru it is in fact a yellow rugosa that has no relationship with Fru except that both are hybrid rugosas.

My recapitulation of the above would be condensed to: Both of you are now honorary plant snobs. Not too many people have yellow rugosas, and to call the one in your garden just a yellow rugosa (without being precise to exactly what it is), ah! so nonchalantly as if all of us had this and other yellow rugosas...

Actually, I?m only snobbish about audio equipment, draught beer, typography, and Web technology.

RotD: Wild! (ongoing)

OOXML: Everything?s Just Fine — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

I think today?s roses are Wild, but it turns out that label can apply to a bunch of different things, including the official flower of the next province over, where I sometimes think I?m from.

Wikipedia thinks Alberta?s official flower is Rosa acicularis, and I suspect these are Rosa arkansana.

Sometimes I?m asked ?Where are you from, actually?? and the answer isn?t simple. I was born in Alberta and have lived there briefly once or twice. My youth was spent in Oregon and Lebanon.

You could ask the same question about these pretty pink citizens. The name ?arkansana? suggests something Americanly twangy, but the only evidence I really have is the picture: these blossoms, like me, come from Vancouver.

RotD: UltraPink (ongoing)

RotD: Sombreuil — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

This rose-of-the-day grows in our front yard, but we inherited it and I don?t know what it is. Plus, Nikon is making waves in the camera world.

You might want to check out Alex Waterhouse-Hayward?s wise remarks on the difficulty of photographing this colour range; my experience would suggest he understates it. But in this particular case, I walk by this particular plant several times every day and I think the rose?camera?Lightroom?browser bucket brigade does a surprisingly good job of showing you what I think I saw.

Cameras

Nikon launched the D700. This is the camera that might have pulled me off the Pentax bandwagon, but it arrives too late. Still, I don?t know. Most of these rose pictures are Pentax?s ?Limited? 40mm prime pancake, except for the last one which I?m saving up to end with a bang, shot with the Limited 21mm prime. I?m pretty sure that those two lenses don?t have any serious competition smaller than any camera body you might want to attach them to. I?m happy for now.

RotD: Sombreuil (ongoing)

RotD: Morning Mist — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

Today?s rose has a lovely French name and, like many others, lots of associated lore.

I don?t have time to be a rose geek, I just prune ?em and photograph ?em.

RotD: Single Petal, on Violet (ongoing)

New TLD Fun — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

I thought I?d shot my Flower-of-the-Day wad last month, but I have two problems: First, there are a lot of pleasing photos of roses on my computer, and second, I?m a bit bored. Thus, a Rose-of-the-Day series.

Bored!?!?!?

Well, there?s a little problem and a big problem. The little problem is an aggregate: things are kind of slow in summer, and I?m buckling down to serious work on mod_atom which I persist in thinking will be real useful but is deadly dull inside, and we?ve had some re-orgs that are delaying biting down on what I think is important to do next.

In the bigger picture, I?m feeling irritatingly un-itchy. I came into Sun four years ago ranting that blogs were hot and the SOAP stack was bad and REST was good and the Java language was boring and dynamic languages were interesting and syndication was underestimated. Well, all those arguments are verging on over.

I need a windmill to tilt at. I?m sure I?ll find one. In the interim, consider this:

That petal has fallen off an an instance of ?Parkdirektor Riggers?, which is a climbing rose (and an excellent one), and the little violet blossoms are our new front-garden ground-cover, recommended by a professional gardener, forsooth, but whose name I forget.

RotD: Morning Mist (ongoing)

The Shambling WS-Undead — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

We planted today?s rose in an awkward corner of the garden and thus had to move it; this summer it?s recovering and only produced one blossom. Pretty pictures are a relief, I hope, in a week that feels like summer?s Horse latitudes.

Tomorrow?s RotD will be the last, and it?s a honey.

Horse Latitudes

Yeah, I seem to be busy enough; talking to product and research groups internally, Wide Finder moving right along, making progress on mod_atom albeit slow, but it all seems an effort of will, not something that?s pulling me toward the keyboard at all times. Right now the only thing that?s exciting is a couple of big Fortune top-whatever Sun customers I?m talking to about modern Web stuff; the cognitive dissonance between the vigor of the high-tech Twittersphere and what?s actually in BigCo production is invigorating.

Whatever, time?s on my side; I never stay bored long.

RotD: More Rugosas (ongoing)

On Megapixels — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

Yesterday?s yellow rose is just one of three Rugosas, lovely plants growing in the wrong place.

Our back yard is walled off from the lane with a high cedar fence; outside it there?s a nice little carport that we only sometimes use. Along its side is the flowerbed with these three bushes, whose flowers we thus rarely see.

The picture of the ?red? blossom is accurate but not really representative of that plant, most of whose blooms are the most shocking bordello pink/violet blend imaginable. Of course, like most of my generation I?ve never seen the inside of a bordello, but it?s the colour I imagine you?d find there.

On Megapixels (ongoing)

CL III: Semantic Gaps — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

Suppose you?re interested in buying a camera. If you look at the ads and reviews, the first thing you see right beside every single one is its megapixel count. The camera makers want you to think that more is always better, which is wrong. But the community buzz is starting to be ?more is worse?, which isn?t really right, either.

Why More Used To Be Better

I was an early adopter of digicams, buying a 640x480 Fuji in 1998. I still have what I then considered the keepers, right here on this laptop; and most of ?em look like complete dogshit. Lack of talent and application are major contributors, but lack of pixels was a real issue too. Here are two of the best-looking ones, more or less (I think) as they came out of the camera.

Ten years later, I still have the same excellent wife and excellent cat and they still look about the same. The house, barely-moved-into here, looks immensely better.

I got my first ?serious? digicam in 2003, a Canon S50. The jump to a big five megapixels was huge, life-changing. I remember shortly after I met and photographed Dave Shea, I sent him one of the shots and he wrote back ?Ooh, I have serious megapixel envy?.

So from there on in, it was pretty easy: Cameras had a number attached, and bigger was better, so all the world?s camera companies? marketing departments got into lockstep and kowtowed before the mighty megapixel count. It?s still happening... pull some flyers out of your weekend paper and check the camera ads.

Why More Can Be Worse

Well, but once you get past six or so megapixels, the trade-offs start to get ugly and unsatisfying. Basically, almost all pocket cameras have about the same size sensor (SLRs have a bigger one which is why they take better pix), and the engineers can sure enough squeeze more pixels into that space, but there?s no free lunch; those pixels are squeezed and light-starved and undernourished and so you get noise problems and sensitivity problems and so on.

Here?s Micah Marty?s great little essay Digicam Appreciation, about how one camera company (Fuji), which had a lead in making high-sensitivity cameras that took better pictures indoors, pissed it away because they had to have that big megapixels number.

Indeed, it has come to be almost a consensus, among photographers who care, that big megapixel numbers are bad not good. It?s indicative that the Nikon D3, which right at this moment in 2008 is probably the best camera in the world (but damn it?s big), has ?only? 12 megapixels.

Here?s another anecdote. Recently, Ricoh announced the GX200, an update of the GX100 that lives in my pocket. It fixes the GX100?s #1 problem: slow write speed on RAW files. But, it also increases the megapixel count from 10 to 12. The reaction over at the DPReview Ricoh forum began with:

More Megapixels :-( But faster buffer for RAW :-)

And many more joined in about the ?megapixel chasing?�?�follow that ?reaction? link above for some instructive moaning.

What About Printing?

If you step outside the world of marketing brochures and hang around the online community of twitchy photography obsessives, whenever megapixels come up the context is usually printing, and the narrative reads like this: ?Well, X megapixels is fine up a print size of Y.? The highest-quality prints in the professional-photographers? space are those required by glossy magazines, which leads to some surprising values for X.

Me, I don?t give a flying fuck about printing. I look at pictures almost exclusively on the screen of my computer and if they look good I?m happy. I use larger-than-average screens, but still, the number of pixels I can squeeze into an ongoing page is immensely smaller than the number of pixels a modern digicam captures. So why should I care in the slightest about printing, or, consequently, about megapixels?

At this year?s Northern Voice, I ran into Matt Mullenweg and his brand new D3. Obviously we started talking about cameras, and when told me that he shot JPEG not RAW, and not even the highest quality JPEG ?Because it?s for the Web?, I was shocked. On the one hand, this is egregious mis-use of a great camera, but on the other, Matt has a point.

More Is Better

Well, these days, I shoot with the 10-megapixel Ricoh out-of-the-pocket, and the 14.6-megapixel Pentax K20D when I really care. Both of those cameras arguably squeeze in more megapixels than is reasonable for their sensor sizes, but both have managed the engineering to get pretty decent image quality. And you know, I?ve started to adopt the (heretical) opinion that more really is better.

Here?s why: composition isn?t something you do in real-time with the camera, any more. It?s what you do with Lightroom (or equivalent) later on, and the important thing is that the camera capture everything important with good enough fidelity that, after you cut out what?s not important, what you have still looks good. As evidence, I offer some Lightroom screen grabs of pretty extreme cropping in action on my recent rose pix.

I?ll freely admit that digital cameras have made me sloppy. When I?ve been working through my inventory of film scans, I?ve noticed that with a film camera I put a lot more work into composition and leveling and so on; most of those scans I?ve published are (modulo dust and noise removal) about what came out of the camera.

Who cares? These days when I shoot, the over-riding priority is not to miss anything; I know I can fix the composition later. But only if I have enough high-quality pixels to work with.

OOXML: Everything?s Just Fine (ongoing)

RotD: UltraPink — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

Or at least that?s what ISO?s Secretary General says. [I had hoped to stop writing about this subject, sigh]. There are multiple appeals against OOXML; let?s try to read the tea-leaves without too many guttural snickers.

The Story Thus Far

When Microsoft decided to ram OOXML through the ISO ?fast-track? process, a number of voices spoke up saying that would be inappropriate given the scale of the spec, and that doing this would be bad for the ISO and for the industry.

ISO thought it over (well, one assumes they must have) and decided that no, fast-track would be OK and they?d proceed, making up ad-hoc process as necessary. Predictably, and as predicted, the process was rife with corruption and bullying; at the end of the day, the pretence of carefully evaluating standards-ware had mostly worn away and it became a straightforwardly-nasty political dogfight between Microsoft and its allies on one side, and anti-Microsoft partisans on the other.

After Microsoft won, there were appeals from four countries saying, mostly, that the process was inappropriate given the scale of the spec, and had damaged ISO?s image.

Next?

ISO will examine the appeals. Let?s bear in mind that a favorable outcome for the appeals would mean, in effect, ISO acknowledging that they?d made a big high-level mistake. And then let?s not hold our breath waiting for transparency or neutrality.

Especially when ISO?s head honcho Alan Bryden goes on the record to say (quoting from Reuters) that ?criticisms that a fast-track process was abused to rush through the Microsoft standard were unfounded? (note Reuters doesn?t use quotation marks, so presumably they?re summarizing Bryden).

Um, excuse me, doesn?t it seem wildly inappropriate for the chief executive of an allegedly-neutral international agency to comment dismissively on an in-progress appeal? If I were on ISO?s Board of Directors or equivalent, I?d be hauling Mr. Bryden in right now for a short unpleasant interview.

Whatever; the damage is done. I really hope my personal impression, based on the OOXML experience, that ISO alternates between bumbling and whorishness, is wrong. The world needs a reasonably competent and transparent standards organization whose integrity is not a standing joke.

Good Morning (ongoing)

(Last) RotD: Lucky Sunset — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

I like mornings. Especially bright ones on foot in the city. People are up and about for a reason; it?s easy to believe the world is on the whole is a well-organized purposeful kind of place.

I smile particularly when I walk past a restaurant or other storefront and they?re outside washing the big windows. Glass in a city gets cruddy fast, and the window-washers are a daily battalion of shock troops in our doomed but admirable struggle against entropy generally. People who ten hours later pause hungrily by the windowgleam to consider the menu, they never think about the minion in the morning light with the bucket and rubber blade on a pole.

And if they?re washing the windows in front, in the back you know they?re chopping and peeling and mixing and baking.

Driving can be good too (well, unless you?re going east) but it could be better. I like all kinds of music but when it?s morning and I?m behind the wheel of a car, all I want to hear is rock�&�roll, hard fast and loud. I could put a CD in but it?d be nice to be surprised. Sadly, the rock stations don?t play much music in the commute window, that?s their prime slot for ads and then they seem to think the people in cars want airhead DJ banter, mostly.

Hmph, this is a big-government country with an intrusive broadcast regulator that oversees radio formats. Clearly they?re doing something wrong. I?m a taxpayer and I want some damn enforcement; compulsory morning rock�&�roll please.

CL III: Semantic Gaps (ongoing)

RotD: Wild! — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

I do intend a Cottage Life post soon that?s not about maintenance, but this isn?t it. I thought I was trying to fix the water heater, but in fact it became a four-way semantic mapping conundrum.

Well, if I?m going to take your time with sordid basement maintenance tale, I should at least salute nature visually first. When a big tree falls in the forest and eventually becomes fertile ground for other shrubs and trees as it rots, they call it a ?nurse log?. I wonder if that term still applies if it ?s been through a spell as driftwood?

Back to the basement. The symptom was simple: no hot water. The technology was simple: there?s not much to an electric water heater. I bought a basic multimeter for the cottage and broke out the trusty Readers? Digest Do-It-Yourself Guide.

First, figure out the multimeter. Unfortunately, its documentation had no pictures, and the text referred to the controls using terms other than those painted on them. Fortunately, the Readers? Digest had a discussion about multimeters. Unfortunately the terms it used corresponded neither to the device nor its documentation.

I spent literally half an hour sticking the leads in an electrical socket and twiddling the dial before I figured out that you put it here for ohms, there for AC volts, and so on.

OK then, I stripped down the hot water tank. Fortunately, its insides looked just like the picture in the book. Unfortunately, the instructions referred to multimeter measurements in terms that did not correspond to those painted on the device, nor to those in its documentation, nor (especially pleasing) to those in its own how-to-use-a-multimeter instructions.

At this point I had to go outside to walk and breathe a bit. Ah, cottage life.

Eventually it became obvious that they were trying to say that there should be no resistance through either the thermostat or the override, and something less than infinity through the heating element. At which point it became obvious what to do and then, what to replace.

Next week, a relatively cheerful piece about snake bite.

CL II: Water-Displacement Forty (ongoing)

RotD: Single Petal, on Violet — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

Cottage Life, unless yours is a mansion with full-time staff, is mostly maintenance, with a few intervening breaks for nature or beer. I?m neither deft nor mechanically gifted, but the right industrial chemicals can make up for that.

I include the view shot to illustrate the story, but you have to enlarge it first, and when you do there are other points of interest. The pale-brown line on the water, more or less in the middle of the picture, is a log boom; trees that have been cut somewhere near the ocean and are being hauled off to the mill by a tugboat, which you can actually see towards the left side of the picture, a black-and-white dot on the water among the pine needles.

You can also see our dock partly behind the bushes at the bottom. We get 15 feet or more of tide, so there?s a high walkway on pilings, a floating platform, and a connecting ramp, hinged at the top, rolling at the bottom. The dock bobs in the waves and the ramp squeaks irritatingly.

I asked around and wondered what to do and the guy two lots over said ?That bastard?s bin? squealin? like a stuck pig for years?. Well, apparently they?d never heard of WD-40. Now, I had to dangle a dozen feet over the rocks to get at the top end of the ramp, and lie on my belly in among the wood-chips and bird crud for the bottom, but it doesn?t squeak any more, just the silence and the waves now. Aaaaah. It is has been suggested that I used more WD-40 than strictly necessary.

WD-40

It has a Web Site (Flashturbation, sigh) where there?s an Official Fan Club, and of course a Wikipedia entry, and a handy page at Snopes about WD-40 legend: ?Lubricates prosthetic limbs?. I love WD-40.

(Last) RotD: Lucky Sunset (ongoing)

ongoing — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

The last rose of the day is a ?Royal Sunset? in the sunset, A lucky shot, another small instance of good fortune in what?s been (so far) an unreasonably lucky life.

Well perhaps not sunset exactly, but after supper last Sunday, a narrow shaft of slanting sun illuminated the blossom and not much around it. I had the 21mm wide-angle on but there wasn?t time to fiddle with lenses, I just threw the camera on all-auto and pointed and shot. Lucky, I said.

Lucky, You Say?

In spades. My family is mostly free of both insanity and cancer and we mostly like each other, all of which puts us in a small minority of families. I drifted through life without working very hard at anything until I stumbled into work that I loved and have been well-paid for it. My kids are tractable and healthy. I live in a nice part of a nice city. I get to travel to interesting places and meet interesting people. I get along well with my wife of twelve years. I get to tell stories to the world, and some people like them.

And sometimes a sunbeam catches a rose when there?s a camera handy.

There isn?t a day that goes by that I don?t shake my head in amazement at how well things have worked out so far. If I were a character in a play by Sophocles the outlook would be grim.

The Shambling WS-Undead (ongoing)

Good Morning — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

I?ll try to play this straight. It seems that a posse of industry titans (IBM, Oracle, CA, and EMC) want a W3C working group to standardize WS-Transfer, WS-ResourceTransfer, WS-Enumeration and WS-MetadataExchange. Because, as they say, ?There is still some work to be done?, and ?Accessing data about a resource through Web services is an area of the Web services architecture that has yet to be fully realized.? I guess that if you really do want to implement HTTP on top of the SOAP stack on top of HTTP, these are clearly the Right Vendors For The Job. There is, however, real danger in this move, as outlined by Mark Nottingham in The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly.

New TLD Fun (ongoing)

Mike vs. Dave — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

I?m not sure whether this free-TLD idea is a good or bad thing in the big picture, but you can have some idle fun thinking ?em up; it?s almost poetic:

.geek, .nerd, .aspergers

.vancouver, .condo, .rain

.dot, .sun, .web

.pr, .fanboy, .whore

.plane, .train, .auto

.good, .bad, .fail

.pwns, .sucks., .rocks

.rock, .jazz, .blues

.mojo, .mofo, .homo

.school, .college, .job

.nba, .epl, .afl

.bondage, .discipline, .spanking

.fast, .slow, .stop

.beginning, .middle, .end

Mike vs. Dave (ongoing)

RotD: Yellow Rugosa — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

This is gripping stuff. Today, Sun?s chief counsel Mike Dillon blogged a blow-by-blow report on our in-progress litigation with NetApp. The story of the case is pretty interesting, but the fact that a major corporation?s Chief Counsel is blogging it in real-time is ground-breaking, I think. Just as interesting is the only-slightly-redacted declaration by NetApp?s Dave Hitz (PDF), filed in the case, that Mike linked to. It?s a remarkably unvarnished take on the issues facing closed-source vendors with a portfolio of software patents in the era of Open Source. Wow.

John Hopkinson (ongoing)

RotD: More Rugosas — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

This friend of mine is looking for a job, and since he?s got a fairly special skillset I thought it?d be worth highlighting him here. He?s a long-time veteran of security technology (starting in the British military) and more recently a really accomplished standards warrior. I got to watch John work in the context of the recent OOXML process, including the BRM in Geneva, where he was one of the most effective operators. He knows ISO process and politics comprehensively. Seems to me that at this point in history the combination of security and standards expertise ought to be real interesting to someone out there. If that might be you, contact me by email and I?ll put you in touch.

Database Pricing (ongoing)

John Hopkinson — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:29:06+0100

This marketing move is why the Sun/MySQL deal made sense; it?s all about marketing and selling. Frankly, in most respects, a technology comparison of MySQL and any old commercial database package is kind of boring; which makes pricing and delivery really important. John Clingan highlights this nicely in Save big bucks with GlassFish & MySQL Unlimited. He includes an obvious link to the Oracle pricing news, but I think Bryan Cantrill?s four-year-old The Economics of Software is relevant, too.