Thursday, March 29, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Old beaters
I have two great obsessions in life – books and cameras. When I was doing my taxes for last year and adding up all the receipts, I realized that in 2006 I spent about $400 on books and close to $9000 (that nine thousand) on camera equipment, printing and processing. The cost of camera equipment did not surprise me much – cameras and especially good lenses come with pretty hefty price tags. What did surprise me is the amount I spent on books. Considering that I mostly buy used books that cost, on average, between 2 and 5 dollars, $400 is a lot of money.
However, I am getting off the subject. One of the things I love about photography is going to yard sales and thrift stores and finding old junky cameras, fixing them and actually using them to take pictures. When I went to
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Monday, March 12, 2007
Light and Easy
I love walking. For years, before my photography business took off to a point where I had a wedding or a bar mitzvah almost every weekend, my leisurely Saturday routine involved waking up around 9 AM, walking to Panera Bread, having a leisurely breakfast, walking from Squirrel Hill to downtown Pittsburgh, from there walking to the South Side, having a cup of coffee and reading a book at either the Beehive coffee shop or at the Tuscuny Café, stopping by at a couple of used books stores and taking tons of photographs along the way. Taking pictures was the main part of the whole trip – from week to week I would alternate my routes slightly, just to have the opportunity to photography new places and new people.
The only thing that I did not like about those trips was lugging a huge digital SLR. I’ve always been very anal about quality, and using a point-and-shoot digital camera just wouldn’t cut the cheese. Point-and-shoots are slow, limited and for the most part produce fairly crappy pictures.
A few weeks ago I finally decided to give in to my bad back’s demands and bought a Canon Powershot 610 digicam. At first I was very skeptical – I took hundreds of photos and bitched about how bad they are compared to my 5D. And then it dawned on me – I take the photos on my walks for myself, just because I enjoy it so much. These photos do not have to be perfect – they just need to document what I see. Chances are I’ll never need to make a 16x20 print from any of those files – and even if I do the content of what I photograph would be more important than the quality. That revelation settled it for me and last Friday, for the first time in years, I walked for more than 10 miles without the painful weight around my neck.
It was great. It was liberating. I loved it. Now I have that little beautiful digicam in my bag all the time. As far as I’m concerned it was the best $200 I ever spent.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
The Rebirth of Russian Literature
Many people consider Russian literature on the of greatest in the world. Every advanced literature class you’ve ever taken at either high school or college at least mentioned great Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. I’ve never been a huge fan of Russian classics – maybe it was the way they were taught to us in Soviet schools, maybe I simply cannot appreciate the subtlety of Tolstoy’s description of a Russian peasant’s soul. In any case, as a print junkie, at least I’ve always been proud that that Russia had literature.
In the mid 1980’s, with the birth of Gorbachev’s perestroika came the death of Russian literature. Actually, it was the death of Russian culture altogether. Very few movies were made and there were virtually no original literature being produced. Bookstore shelves were filled with fairly crappy translations of Western mystery/murder novels or, even worst, Daniel Steel. When I immigrated to the United States in 1994, I could not wait to learn how to read English books so I could actually enjoy books once more.
In the last few years this grim situation finally began to change. New writers began to emerge – Boris Akunin with his wonderful detective novels that take place in the 19th century Russia, Sergei Lukiyanenko with excellent sci-fi and Maria Semenova with “Russian fantasy” that’s actually not a Tolkien knock-off.
This morning I made my weekly pilgrimage to the Barnes & Noble, and I saw both Akunin and Lukiyanenko books translated into English. And, oddly enough I felt proud and elated. Even though I have all of Akunin and Lukiyanenko books in Russian, I bought their books just to support the new emerging Russian literature.
In the mid 1980’s, with the birth of Gorbachev’s perestroika came the death of Russian literature. Actually, it was the death of Russian culture altogether. Very few movies were made and there were virtually no original literature being produced. Bookstore shelves were filled with fairly crappy translations of Western mystery/murder novels or, even worst, Daniel Steel. When I immigrated to the United States in 1994, I could not wait to learn how to read English books so I could actually enjoy books once more.
In the last few years this grim situation finally began to change. New writers began to emerge – Boris Akunin with his wonderful detective novels that take place in the 19th century Russia, Sergei Lukiyanenko with excellent sci-fi and Maria Semenova with “Russian fantasy” that’s actually not a Tolkien knock-off.
This morning I made my weekly pilgrimage to the Barnes & Noble, and I saw both Akunin and Lukiyanenko books translated into English. And, oddly enough I felt proud and elated. Even though I have all of Akunin and Lukiyanenko books in Russian, I bought their books just to support the new emerging Russian literature.
Assholes in Photography
I’ve been a photographer for a long time, and I can attest to the well-known fact that looking at the world through a camera’s viewfinder changes one’s perspectives and points of view. I’ve been looking at the world through that little window since I was eight years old and sometimes I catch myself thinking about everything that goes on around me in terms of frames. What’s even worse is that, for example, when I see a car accident, my first thought is “Where the hell is my camera” instead of “I hope those people are OK.”
There’s another trend that I have noticed recently – a much more disturbing trend. You take a perfectly nice person, give him or her a camera and let them read a few books on photography. In most cases, as if by magic, that person turns into an absolute and complete asshole. Over the years I have belonged to a number of photography clubs and participated in a multitude of photography-related forums. I’ve seen this happen hundreds of times – people who consider themselves professional photographers or at least advanced amateurs tend to treat other photographers with disrespect and scorn. If you don’t believe me, look on photo.net. Read almost any question posted by a beginner, and then read the responses by “seasoned” photographers. Instead of simply answering the question, they punish the person who posted the question in the first place for trying to learn.
Another brand of “photography assholes” have this notion in their heads that photographs should be taken in a certain way, following certain rules. A few months ago I posted a photograph from a photo essay that I did years ago on what goes on at college parties (underage drinking, drug use, etc…). That photograph was published in several magazines, a fact that attests to the picture’s merits. When I posted it online I got an overwhelming number of responses that berated me for bad lighting, lack of sharpness and graininess instead of commenting on the photograph’s content. I wanted to scream! Cannot people understand that journalism is not the same way as studio photography!
There’s another trend that I have noticed recently – a much more disturbing trend. You take a perfectly nice person, give him or her a camera and let them read a few books on photography. In most cases, as if by magic, that person turns into an absolute and complete asshole. Over the years I have belonged to a number of photography clubs and participated in a multitude of photography-related forums. I’ve seen this happen hundreds of times – people who consider themselves professional photographers or at least advanced amateurs tend to treat other photographers with disrespect and scorn. If you don’t believe me, look on photo.net. Read almost any question posted by a beginner, and then read the responses by “seasoned” photographers. Instead of simply answering the question, they punish the person who posted the question in the first place for trying to learn.
Another brand of “photography assholes” have this notion in their heads that photographs should be taken in a certain way, following certain rules. A few months ago I posted a photograph from a photo essay that I did years ago on what goes on at college parties (underage drinking, drug use, etc…). That photograph was published in several magazines, a fact that attests to the picture’s merits. When I posted it online I got an overwhelming number of responses that berated me for bad lighting, lack of sharpness and graininess instead of commenting on the photograph’s content. I wanted to scream! Cannot people understand that journalism is not the same way as studio photography!
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
The Open Source Problem
I recently posted an essay on my website titled “An Ode To Mac”. The essay simply reflected my awe for Apple, it’s attention to detail and the wonderful user interface design. I simply wanted to share my satisfaction with a particular product; what I did not expect was a number of emails sent to me by people who took my article as a personal insult to their love for Open Source software. One person berated me for buying into Apple’s “corporate bullshit advertising” and helping development of “heartless capitalism” by spending my money on something that I could get for free.
Now, let me say this – while I like not having to pay money for software (who wouldn’t), and I make a lot of my own source code available online to other developers I am very much against what a lot of today’s Open Source software amounts to. Let me clarify – I am all for code sharing and, for example, would love to see the source code for Windows and Mac OS just so I could play with them. However, I deeply dislike the idea of software being given away for free. Why? Because it is killing programming as a profession. Because it is turning software development into an after-work hobby for people who have other sources of income. Because it has the potential of eliminating thousands of jobs – after all, who’d want to pay for software if you can get it for free?
To better explain my point, let me give you a brief overview of the history of the Open Source movement.
The free/open source software movement began in the 1960's. The small "hacker" communities from universities such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT passed their code back and forth between their members – if someone made an improvement he or she were expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To withhold code was considered impolite at the very least - if you benefited from the work of your friends, you should return the favor.
It was in this environment that Richard Stallman began his computer science career in 1971 at the MIT AI lab. Stallman worked primarily on a proprietary operating system designed to run on the DEC PDP-10. Once DEC systems were discontinued and many of Stallman’s colleagues ended up leaving academia for the private sector Stallman began his work to resurrect the community in which developers could freely exchange code. He came up with the following specifications of what truly free software should be.
1. Run the program, for any purpose.
2. Modify the program to suit their needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, they must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.) They must have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.
3. Redistribute copies, either gratis or free.
4. Distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.
To ensure that his code would always be freely modifiable and distributable Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL); this license specified that users of the source code could view, change, or add to the code, provided that they made their changes available under the same license as the original code.
Another big name in Open Source is Linus Torvalds. During his second year of graduate studies at the University of Helsinki he wrote a UNIX-like kernel called Linux (the name is a derivative of Linus + UNIX). Over the years, a number other programmers began to modify and tweak the code, sending their improvements back to Torvalds for inclusion in the next release of the kernel. Eventually, Linux became THE kernel for the GNU operating system.
Today Linux has a huge share of the operating system market, especially when it comes to server OS. While not as user-friendly as Windows or Mac OS Linux is very stable and free. Just to give you something to compare – it cost my company $8,000 to set up a Microsoft Exchange Server; setting up Postfix or SendMail would have been free. On the downside, I’d have no one to call for support to troubleshoot server problems, I would not be able to integrate mail with Active Directory and I wouldn’t have as many third-party add-ons available. Is that worth a 8000-dollar price tag? For a small used it obviously doesn’t, but for a large company it is definitely a viable solution.
Open Source is NOT the same thing as free. All it means is that whether you purchase a software package or get it for free, you will have access to the source code and the ability to modify/tweak it to suit your needs. Many people, however, confuse Open Source with free. When you buy a car, you have access to its engine and can make modifications at your heart’s content. You don’t expect to get a car for free, do you?
The problem with “free” is that it goes against the grain of free market economy. What drives any healthy economy is competition and you cannot compete with free. Ford’s Model-T was produced unchanged from 1908 to 1927, and we’d still be driving something similar today if it weren’t for the competition from Chrysler and GM.
Same concept works for software. For years I have been using Borland J-Builder (among other Borland products). Last year (2004) IBM came out with Eclipse and made it available for free. Let’s be honest now – who the hell is going to pay for a product when a similar package is available for free. Another problem is that because a product is free it doesn’t have to compete with other similar products on feature-to-feature bases. Who cares if GIMP is more cumbersome to use than Adobe Photoshop – why bother improving the user interface if no one will pay for it?
Many programmers who develop open-source applications just do it as a proof-of-concept type thing – they just want to see for themselves if they can get a piece of code to work. There is no incentive for them to make it better, and I’m speaking from personal experience. About 6 years ago I wrote a piece of software that traced DLL dependencies under Microsoft Windows. It wasn’t a great product, the user interface pretty much sucked and it had a few bugs that had to do with file system permissions. I wrote the program, posted it online and forgot about it. A year ago I went back to the website that hosted that program and to my surprise realized that people still used it, even though you can download a similar program from CNet for $15.00. People were willing to use my crappy proof-of-concept program rather than paying $15.00 for a much better product!
I could go on for pages and pages making a case against free software, but I do not want to bore my occasional readers and most of all, I do not want to bore myself. Instead, I’ll allude to an old axiom – if something is too good to be true, it probably is. The concept of free software might sound really good today, but I’d like to hear all the Open Source zealots’ opinions if, for example, cars were free and they were forced to drive a 1908 Model-T Ford.
Now, let me say this – while I like not having to pay money for software (who wouldn’t), and I make a lot of my own source code available online to other developers I am very much against what a lot of today’s Open Source software amounts to. Let me clarify – I am all for code sharing and, for example, would love to see the source code for Windows and Mac OS just so I could play with them. However, I deeply dislike the idea of software being given away for free. Why? Because it is killing programming as a profession. Because it is turning software development into an after-work hobby for people who have other sources of income. Because it has the potential of eliminating thousands of jobs – after all, who’d want to pay for software if you can get it for free?
To better explain my point, let me give you a brief overview of the history of the Open Source movement.
The free/open source software movement began in the 1960's. The small "hacker" communities from universities such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT passed their code back and forth between their members – if someone made an improvement he or she were expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To withhold code was considered impolite at the very least - if you benefited from the work of your friends, you should return the favor.
It was in this environment that Richard Stallman began his computer science career in 1971 at the MIT AI lab. Stallman worked primarily on a proprietary operating system designed to run on the DEC PDP-10. Once DEC systems were discontinued and many of Stallman’s colleagues ended up leaving academia for the private sector Stallman began his work to resurrect the community in which developers could freely exchange code. He came up with the following specifications of what truly free software should be.
1. Run the program, for any purpose.
2. Modify the program to suit their needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, they must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.) They must have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.
3. Redistribute copies, either gratis or free.
4. Distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.
To ensure that his code would always be freely modifiable and distributable Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL); this license specified that users of the source code could view, change, or add to the code, provided that they made their changes available under the same license as the original code.
Another big name in Open Source is Linus Torvalds. During his second year of graduate studies at the University of Helsinki he wrote a UNIX-like kernel called Linux (the name is a derivative of Linus + UNIX). Over the years, a number other programmers began to modify and tweak the code, sending their improvements back to Torvalds for inclusion in the next release of the kernel. Eventually, Linux became THE kernel for the GNU operating system.
Today Linux has a huge share of the operating system market, especially when it comes to server OS. While not as user-friendly as Windows or Mac OS Linux is very stable and free. Just to give you something to compare – it cost my company $8,000 to set up a Microsoft Exchange Server; setting up Postfix or SendMail would have been free. On the downside, I’d have no one to call for support to troubleshoot server problems, I would not be able to integrate mail with Active Directory and I wouldn’t have as many third-party add-ons available. Is that worth a 8000-dollar price tag? For a small used it obviously doesn’t, but for a large company it is definitely a viable solution.
Open Source is NOT the same thing as free. All it means is that whether you purchase a software package or get it for free, you will have access to the source code and the ability to modify/tweak it to suit your needs. Many people, however, confuse Open Source with free. When you buy a car, you have access to its engine and can make modifications at your heart’s content. You don’t expect to get a car for free, do you?
The problem with “free” is that it goes against the grain of free market economy. What drives any healthy economy is competition and you cannot compete with free. Ford’s Model-T was produced unchanged from 1908 to 1927, and we’d still be driving something similar today if it weren’t for the competition from Chrysler and GM.
Same concept works for software. For years I have been using Borland J-Builder (among other Borland products). Last year (2004) IBM came out with Eclipse and made it available for free. Let’s be honest now – who the hell is going to pay for a product when a similar package is available for free. Another problem is that because a product is free it doesn’t have to compete with other similar products on feature-to-feature bases. Who cares if GIMP is more cumbersome to use than Adobe Photoshop – why bother improving the user interface if no one will pay for it?
Many programmers who develop open-source applications just do it as a proof-of-concept type thing – they just want to see for themselves if they can get a piece of code to work. There is no incentive for them to make it better, and I’m speaking from personal experience. About 6 years ago I wrote a piece of software that traced DLL dependencies under Microsoft Windows. It wasn’t a great product, the user interface pretty much sucked and it had a few bugs that had to do with file system permissions. I wrote the program, posted it online and forgot about it. A year ago I went back to the website that hosted that program and to my surprise realized that people still used it, even though you can download a similar program from CNet for $15.00. People were willing to use my crappy proof-of-concept program rather than paying $15.00 for a much better product!
I could go on for pages and pages making a case against free software, but I do not want to bore my occasional readers and most of all, I do not want to bore myself. Instead, I’ll allude to an old axiom – if something is too good to be true, it probably is. The concept of free software might sound really good today, but I’d like to hear all the Open Source zealots’ opinions if, for example, cars were free and they were forced to drive a 1908 Model-T Ford.
An Ode to Mac
About 5 months ago I finally bought my first Mac. I desperately needed to replace my 3-year-old comatose Dell laptop; since I had no good reason to chose an Apple laptop over one made by HP or Sony I decided to go for the coolness factor and simply walked into an Apple store and walked out with a beautiful white 1600-dollar MacBook.
At first I questioned my decision – $1600 is a significant chunk of change. Moreover, since most of the programming I do is somewhat platform-independent I kept trying to convince myself that I wouldn’t have been happy with a cheaper HP laptop running Linux.
The more I used my MacBook the more I fell in love with it. Day after day all of my reservations evaporated and were replaced with awe and respect for Apple’s engineers. I cannot say that it is easier to program under Mac OS than it is on Fedora Linux, or that my productivity increased enough to justify the exuberant price tag. It is all the little things that make Mac OS what it is – the best damn operating system I have ever used.
One of the things that I discovered for myself is Namely. It is a little application that runs in the background. You hit CTRL + SPACEBAR and a tiny search box pops up at the top of the screen. You type in the name of the application that you want to run, hit enter and voila – the application of your choice launches without a single mouse click. When I showed this to my girlfriend her response was, “What’s the big deal?” Well, having been raised on UNIX I learned programming using simple editors such as EMACS and VI, and to this day I really hate moving my fingers from the keyboard to go to the start menu to launch an application. For years I worked around this problem by always running a command window or a terminal window in the background on Windows and Linux systems respectively. When I needed to launch another application I would simply ALT+TAB to the terminal window and type a command to launch a program.
And don’t get me started on the function keys! As a programmer I usually have a ton of windows open simultaneously – so many that they don’t all fit on the taskbar. I cannot even begin to tell you how annoying it is to ALT-TAB through all of those to find the right one. On my MacBook all I have to do is hit F9 and all the windows are displayed as large thumbnails. All I have to do is click the right one.
Dashboard is another favorite of mine. I’ve always hated having to download a ton of widgets for weather, stocks and dictionaries and have them all running in the icon tray. With Apple’s Dashboard all I have to do is hit F12 and all of my widgets slowly swim into view.
About two weeks ago I was trying to set up Apple’s mail to work with the Exchange Server at work and I noticed that when you resize the Date Received field the date format changes from long (April 5, 2006) to short (04/05/2006) to even shorted (4/5/06) depending on the column width (yeah, I know that Leander Kehney wrote about this in Wired, but so what? – I saw this first☺). It is a very subtle feature, and almost everyone I told about it replied with an indifferent “So what?” However, it’s tiny things like the changing date format, that ever-present attention to detail that made Apple what they are today – the best damn personal computer manufacturer in the world.
I love my MacBook. Every time I find a new feature I feel like I just received a birthday present. I feel amazed every time I use the “hot corners” of my Mac’s screen to stop my laptop from going to sleep that someone actually came up with something so simple and yet so elegant. Now I feel justified to look down on all the poor PC users and express my sadness by telling them, “Dude, you are getting a Dell!”
At first I questioned my decision – $1600 is a significant chunk of change. Moreover, since most of the programming I do is somewhat platform-independent I kept trying to convince myself that I wouldn’t have been happy with a cheaper HP laptop running Linux.
The more I used my MacBook the more I fell in love with it. Day after day all of my reservations evaporated and were replaced with awe and respect for Apple’s engineers. I cannot say that it is easier to program under Mac OS than it is on Fedora Linux, or that my productivity increased enough to justify the exuberant price tag. It is all the little things that make Mac OS what it is – the best damn operating system I have ever used.
One of the things that I discovered for myself is Namely. It is a little application that runs in the background. You hit CTRL + SPACEBAR and a tiny search box pops up at the top of the screen. You type in the name of the application that you want to run, hit enter and voila – the application of your choice launches without a single mouse click. When I showed this to my girlfriend her response was, “What’s the big deal?” Well, having been raised on UNIX I learned programming using simple editors such as EMACS and VI, and to this day I really hate moving my fingers from the keyboard to go to the start menu to launch an application. For years I worked around this problem by always running a command window or a terminal window in the background on Windows and Linux systems respectively. When I needed to launch another application I would simply ALT+TAB to the terminal window and type a command to launch a program.
And don’t get me started on the function keys! As a programmer I usually have a ton of windows open simultaneously – so many that they don’t all fit on the taskbar. I cannot even begin to tell you how annoying it is to ALT-TAB through all of those to find the right one. On my MacBook all I have to do is hit F9 and all the windows are displayed as large thumbnails. All I have to do is click the right one.
Dashboard is another favorite of mine. I’ve always hated having to download a ton of widgets for weather, stocks and dictionaries and have them all running in the icon tray. With Apple’s Dashboard all I have to do is hit F12 and all of my widgets slowly swim into view.
About two weeks ago I was trying to set up Apple’s mail to work with the Exchange Server at work and I noticed that when you resize the Date Received field the date format changes from long (April 5, 2006) to short (04/05/2006) to even shorted (4/5/06) depending on the column width (yeah, I know that Leander Kehney wrote about this in Wired, but so what? – I saw this first☺). It is a very subtle feature, and almost everyone I told about it replied with an indifferent “So what?” However, it’s tiny things like the changing date format, that ever-present attention to detail that made Apple what they are today – the best damn personal computer manufacturer in the world.
I love my MacBook. Every time I find a new feature I feel like I just received a birthday present. I feel amazed every time I use the “hot corners” of my Mac’s screen to stop my laptop from going to sleep that someone actually came up with something so simple and yet so elegant. Now I feel justified to look down on all the poor PC users and express my sadness by telling them, “Dude, you are getting a Dell!”
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