*scottstuff*

It looks like the Nokia N90 is shipping. This is Nokia’s high-end cameraphone, with a 2 MP camera, a real lens, and a HVGA-ish display.

I’m still waiting for the N91.

There are a couple rumors floating around this morning about a new Canon dSLR, the 5D. Canon’s model numbering is reversed from most manufacturers–lower numbers signify higher-end models, so this would be a model above the current Canon 20D but below the 1D series.

The spec sheet that I’ve seen suggests that it’s a full-frame camera that takes 12.8 MP images at 3 FPS. It looks like a cross between the 20D (same AF and metering system) and the original 1DS (same sensor size and similar resolution). The rumors put the price around EUR 3500, which usually ends up meaning that B&H will be selling it for between $3000 and $3500. That’s a fantastic price for a full-frame camera, but personally, I’d probably rather buy the 1D mk II–it’s basically the same price, it has a slightly smaller sensor and slightly lower resolution, but it has 2.5x the frame rate, an amazingly fast SD interface, and it’s built like a tank.

So is this a rumor or yet another leak on Canon’s part? Generally, new Canon cameras don’t leak until a day or two before the official announcement, so we should know what they’re up to by the end of the week.

Update: According to TechWhack, the 5D will be announced on August 26th. They say that it can buffer *60* JPEG frames or 17 RAW frames. At 3 FPS, that’s 20 seconds of shooting in JPEG. If I was in the market for a new camera (which I probably would be, if I wasn’t also in the market for a new PowerBook and new phone), I’d probably at least look at the 5D, especially if they manage to get the high-ISO noise even lower this time around. The frame rate is kind of slow, but the massive buffer makes me feel a lot better about the camera.

Update: Canon has announced it. See my newer Canon 5D page for details.

It’s OSCON season, and most of the open-source world has descended on Portland for the week. This includes most of the leaders of the Ruby community, so the Portland Ruby Group held their own “Free OSCON” night at FreeGeek. Four of the people giving Ruby talks at OSCON gave their talks for free at FOSCON, and most of the rest of the Ruby speakers were there lurking in the back of the room, including Dave Thomas and Matz.

I dragged my trusty D60 along and took a few pictures, along with a few notes.

DHH on Rails

The first speaker was David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and O’Reilly’s “Hacker of the Year” for 2005. He basically gave us his 15-minute OSCON keynote on Rails, which was both a brief introduction and a marketing talk for Rails. His big theme was “flexibility is overrated”–by reducing the number of ways that you can approach web development, Rails makes it enormously easier to actually get things done.

When David’s talk was complete, our host Phil (Tomson, I presume) presented him with a vintage copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Rich Kilmer on ActionStep

This was deeply cool. Rich Kilmer gave a brief presentation on his current project, ActionStep, a port of OS X’s Cocoa API to Flash. Right now, there are free tools that can create Flash .swf files, but Macromedia’s licensing keeps them from legally using any of Flash’s windowing tools. So Rich decided to write his own windowing toolkit, using NextStep/Cocoa API. They’re over halfway done, and expect to release the first complete version before the end of 2005.

I’m not particularly fond of flash, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention until Rich started showing off his ideas for Rails integration. He’s building a layer that will glue his Flash front end to a Rails back end, and the demo code that he presented made it look even easier then creating HTML forms for user interaction. I’m not sure that it’ll be something that I’ll ever end up using, but it looked deeply cool. Here are a couple screenshots:

Glenn Vanderburg on Metaprogramming

Next up, Glenn Vanderburg gave a talk on metaprogramming in Ruby. He showed how Ruby itself uses metaprogramming to implement things like attr_accessor, and then showed how people have used and extended Ruby over the years. One theme was the continuing development of metaprogramming idioms in Ruby; he showed how things have changed over the years, starting with an X protocol wrapper that someone wrote years ago, through Rich Kilmer’s Java debug protocol system, and up through Rails. Ruby’s metaprogramming ability is one of the things that makes Rails so successful–the ability to extend the language to let you say things like:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :categories
  has_many :comments
  belongs_to :user

  ...
end

This is one of the things that makes Rails so useful and so much fun to program.

Why

Finally, Why The Lucky Stiff came on stage. Why (or sometimes _why) is sort of the rock star of the Ruby world. His real identity is a closely guarded secret. He’s the author of why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby, which is easily the strangest programming book that I’ve ever seen.

His FOSCON talk was sort of a performance-art interpretation of his book.

We knew that interesting things were afoot when he showed up with a backup band, and we had to stop for a break while they set up on stage.

Once that bit was done, they launched into song. Why had a nice little piece that was essentially the Ruby lexer set to music. “A symbol starts with a colon and is followed by lowercase letters and numbers! A constant is composed of capital letters and underscores!”

This sort of thing went on for a while. He alternated between animated segments on the projector, demonstrations of distributed Ruby programming (with audience participation), singing about Ruby, and utter non-sequiturs.

Why’s presentation ended with the immortal words “stop her, she’s stealing our eigenclasses.”

Thanks to Phil and everyone else from the Portland Ruby group, and all of the presenters for giving us a very memorable and enlightening night. I have a few more pictures on Flickr, if anyone’s interested.

I’ve been dribbling pictures from my laptop to my Flickr account for days now, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve made a dent in the backlog. I just posted pictures from Sophie’s first birthday. She’s almost 2½ now; the pictures have been sitting on my laptop unsorted for almost 18 months. Every time I burn through another batch of ancient pictures I feel even better about Flickr.

I’m making progress on my PictureSync problems. Apparently the reason that it wouldn’t save my Flickr password as a conflict with a version of PictureSync that I tried out last October. There was some weird remnant from the old PictureSync still sitting in my keychain that I couldn’t figure out how to delete, so I renamed my Flickr account in PictureSync from ‘Flickr’ to ‘Flickr (Scott)’, and now everything works. There are still a couple weird AppleScript bugs that pop up from time to time, but it’s usable now. I’ll probably send the shareware payment off tomorrow and hope that the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.

I’ve also been playing with 1001, an OS X interface to Flickr from the author of ecto, my favorite blog editor. I set it up on my wife’s Mac mini so she can see the pictures that I put on Flickr automatically. I also installed 1001’s Flickr screensaver on her Mac–it’s kind of cool to see pictures that I posted a half-hour ago show up on her screen all on their own. Once I have a few more pictures up, I’ll start pushing Flickr on random family members; it seems like the perfect way to share family pictures in our increasingly widely distributed family.

In fact, the whole social-networking aspect of Flickr has taken me by surprise. I’ve already had a couple old friends pop up out of the blue. There’s a lot more interconnection in Flickr contacts then I would have expected. It’s not six degrees of separation: it’s two or three degrees at most.

Weird example–1001’s home page has a few example pictures, and the last one looked kind of familiar to me. I haven’t seen the picture before, but the guy on the left looks a lot like Boris Mann; Boris and I have been swapping comments on each other’s blogs for quite a while now. A bit of searching and I found the original picture of Boris and Roland Tanglao. Even though I’ve never actually met Boris, I’ve met at least three or four of the people on his Flickr contacts list and I read the blogs of several others. I picked a few other people on his contact list and looked at their contact lists, and I kept finding more people I knew. I’m not sure if this is all that useful, but it’s certainly interesting, and it’s given me a chance to see a lot of fascinating pictures.

It makes me want to go out and shoot something interesting. Over the past year, probably 95% of my photography has been pictures of family and friends; they’re important to have, but they aren’t very exciting. Unfortunately, they’ve been all that I’ve had time to take recently. Now that I’ve started clearing up the old backlog, maybe I’ll have time to take more pictures for the fun of it, not just because we need pictures from some random family gathering.

My poor laptop’s hard drive has been filling up with unprocessed photos again, so I took a couple hours this morning to organize things and offload them to my home fileserver. I’ve never been all that happy with my web-based photo gallery, but I haven’t been willing to spend the week or two that it’d take to write something better, and I haven’t found an open-source gallery program that works any better for me then what I have now.

So, I decided to give Flickr another try. Part of this was motivated by the Typo’s Flickr sidebar plugin–it’s the closest thing I can get to photo gallery/blog integration, and that’s something that’s been on my to-do list for around two years.

Since I use iView Media Pro for organizing my photos, I wanted to find something that could automate the process of getting pictures from iView into Flickr. A bit of searching found PictureSync, which isn’t perfect, but it works well enough for now. I can select a block of pictures in iView and drag them to PictureSync’s icon, and it will convert them to sRGB, scale them down, extract metadata from iView to stuff into Flickr tags, and then upload the whole batch. Unfortunately, it seems to have keychain issues that force me to re-create my Flickr upload settings every time I run it, and it’s not all that great at extracting metadata from iView’s “people” field. Still, it’s easier to use PictureSync and Flickr then it was to copy files to my server and re-run my make-album script, and that’s good enough for me.

So, I paid Flickr $25 to upgrade my account to “pro” status, which ups my upload limit from 20 MB to 2 GB and started uploading blocks of pictures. It’s going kind of slowly (550 MHz G4s aren’t all that great at resizing multi-megabyte images), but there’s no way around that for now. Eventually, I’ll probably write a Ruby upload script to work around the problems with PictureSync, and then I’ll be able to do uploads from a faster Linux box, but I’m pretty happy with what I have for now. It’s good enough.

In celebration of getting out of the photo hosting business, here are a few random pictures. First, Sophie looking cute, then my brother and his youngest son, my family watching a walrus at the zoo, and a mountain biker in Whistler.

I just received a message from Phase One about a new version of their Capture One RAW-image processing software. Hidden in the release notes is this little gem:

The batch queue limitation of 20 images have been removed from LE.

The last time I tried Capture One, I loved the output, but the 20-file limitation made it worthless for me, and the price jump to go from the $99 LE version to the $499 Pro version is just too big for me to justify. So, I didn’t buy it. I’m going to re-consider it now that the LE version is actually useful.

The Luminous Landscape has a feature up by Doug Brown of torontowide.com showing some of the less obvious things that you can do with multi-shot digital panoramas. I tend to read The Luminous Landscape once or so per week; the primary author has some interesting opinions on camera gear, but I’m not a big fan of most of his images.

The panorama article is an entirely different kettle of fish. I’m in awe of most of the shots. Somehow he’s managed to create panoramic action shots using an ancient Olympus E10. The framing and lighting are great, and the panoramic format gives everything a very different feel then most journalistic shots of similar topics. It just goes to show that the photographer matters a lot more then the tools he uses.

This leaves me itching to go shoot panoramas. I guess I need to go look for OS X panorama stitchers–the last time I looked, it was a lot easier to stitch photos in Windows then on the Mac.

By general consensus among photographers, B&H Photo and Video is one of the best places to order camera gear. They’re cheap, honest, and fast, and they carry everything. According to the EOS mailing list, they just suffered a big warehouse fire. A local station has details.

The Inquirer is reporting that the CompactFlash trade group released a newer CF spec at CES, bumping the top speed for CF cards from 16 MBps to 66 MBps. This should be great news for photographers–most DSLRs use CF cards, but they’ve been falling behind in the flash speed race. For example, on Canon’s newest 1D-series cameras, the camera’s SD slot runs rings around the CF slot. In fact, the SD slot on Canon’s new cameras seems to be faster then any CF slot on any camera, so it’s not just an issue for Canon’s CF implementation. CF has been falling behind; hopefully this speed boost will let the next generation of cards and devices double or triple their CF transfer speeds.

It’s not widely appreciated just how many different modes of operation modern CF cards have. They’re basically miniature PCMCIA cards, with their own ISA-style IDE controller built in. They’re also IDE devices–you can get an adapter to connect them directly to your motherboard’s IDE interfaces. In addition, modern CF+ cards have a USB interface onboard. I think there are a couple other modes of operation as well, like legacy PCMCIA flash stuff, but I’m a bit hazy on the details.

In spite of all of the complexity, they’re still the cheapest type of flash media on the market.

ProLab, Seattle’s second-largest pro film lab is closing their film processing and printing business. According to the Seattle P-I, the shift to digital has gutted not only their film processing, but also the demand for custom prints. Apparently people have noticed that a $2 8x10 from Costco with Dry Creek Photo’s profiles is pretty much the same as a $10 8x10 from a pro lab. With film, you’re pretty guaranteed that cheap places like Costco will scratch your film, screw up processing it, and leave it coated with gunk, but with digital that’s irrelevant.

So where does this leave the pro labs? For ProLab at least, they’re sticking with larger-format printing for advertising displays. Both ProLab and Ivey have been concentrating on this market for years, and it’ll probably serve them well for years to come, while traditional film printing fades into memory.