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All my pet peeves against Linux rolled into one. From Google and Adobe engineers, no less. And of course, most of the replies are “yes but we’re free, we have choice, etc…”. *sigh*.

Two weeks ago I did my first concert with my new 5D markII (Lenny Kravitz, no less). I’m quite happy with the results. In fact I’ve never, ever brought so many good shots from a concert. By “good” I mean “exploitable” : low noise, correct exposition and focus. A quick statistical check on a few of my previous concerts yields an average ratio of 30% of keepers/taken. In this concert, the ratio was 54%.

I’ll spare the praise on its high-ISO performance. Everything you’ve already read is true, yes you can shoot at 3200 and get something exploitable. Noise becomes noticeable at 800, under that it’s irrelevant. But the other huge improvement compared to the 40D is a working auto-ISO mode. This allowed me to take shots at 100 ISO. In concert. I’d never have thought that possible, but I have a bunch of perfectly sharp shots taken at well below 800, which is usually the lowest setting I use in concert (sometimes 400 when there’s really a lot of light). The other good part of this mode is that, well, it varies ISO. Which means I have both noiseless, clear shots and fairly grainy ones when it kicked into 3200, and this lets me vary the mood at post processing. From

to

In conclusion : can’t wait for the next concert

It’s already a tweet but worthy of a blog post : a few minutes ago, edenx, my “proof of concept” OSX version of Rosegarden, has just made its first noise. Played its first 3 audible notes (for posterity, those are in chromatic progression starting at middle C).

Some quick facts : the UI is a bare bones “Tracker” : a track list and an event list, with a ‘Play’ button (will post screenshots and possibly a screencast later). It can save and load documents, and has undo/redo. In total, about 900 lines of code, out of which you can remove about 100 lines for a scrollview synchronizer which I’ve copied from an Apple dev document. It’s hard to estimate how long I’ve spent time on this so far. Initial setup of the svn repository was done in mid-may last year. I resumed work on this in late february I think, with a first commit on march 1st. I estimate I’ve spent an average of 10 hours a week on this since then. That’s including browsing the Apple dev docs to look for info on stuff not covered by Aaron Hillegass’ excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X posting on the cocoa-devel mailing list and bugging my friend Florent for help.

These facts are all very pointless by themselves, you need to compare them to how long it took Chris, Rich and me to get RG to make its first sound back then (although we also had a notation editor at this stage too – a pretty hefty piece of work).

About 1.5 years ago, I posted about how the iphone/ipod touch was the logical successor of the universal remote. This post is just to report that The New York Times sees the same trend developing.

For a while now I’ve been regularly recieving emails on my gmail address which are mistakenly sent to me. Not spam, actual email (and sometimes pretty important too), just sent to the wrong address. I generally make the effort to reply to the sender so that he would know about his mistake, because otherwise there’s no way he’d guess.

And it also seems that many people think ‘g.laurent@gmail.com’ belongs to them. Nope, gmail ignores any dots in the username.

The point of this post is trivial : beyond the obvious online/offline debate (I dislike webapps though I agree they have their use in some cases), here’s another thing you should consider about moving all your email to a gmail/hotmail/ address : it will make you lose an important distinctive part of your email address, that is its domain name. Within a large email host, you run a much greater chance to have a name clash than within your own ISP. There already are a few ‘glaurent’ on Orange or free.fr (two of the largest french ISP providers), but on gmail there’s a whole lot, and each is bound to get private email that doesn’t belong to him if he didn’t make his address distinctive enough (I’m pretty sure there’s a ‘glaurent.gmail@gmail.com’ – that one probably gets the cake).

That’s another reason to get your own domain name, too .

Almost a decade ago now, back in a time where vanity pages on geocities where hip and Facebook or flickr weren’t even a neuron firing in their designer’s minds, I put up a bunch of “silly” pictures on my homepage as a mockery of this trend to put useless personal stuff on homepages (some trend, uh ?). These pics are digitized X rays. The irony is that, what was meant as a joke ridiculing the uselessness of most homepages turned out to be actually useful to some. Over the years, I received quite a few usage request on these X rays, mostly on the skull one. Most were for educational uses, a couple where even for art. And judging by my site logs, many are referencing the images from their own pages.

And just today, I received an email from Michael Berkowitz, a retired teacher who had asked me for permission to use the skull image in his science transparencies back in May 2006. Today he’s asking me the same thing but for CD ROMs. For one thing, I really appreciate that he would make the effort to reach me again about it, even more given the use he makes of it. But also I’m very glad that this joke ended up being one of those cool things about the Net, that you have no idea how useful whatever you make available will really be.

Back in 2006 my friend Claude Chastagner and I wrote a short piece on file sharing, which was a short version of an article which we wrote for the Revue Française d’études américaines. In this short version we equated the music market to the water one, mp3 and downloading being the equivalent of tap water (i.e. essentially free) and CDs being bottled water (i.e. what you’re buying is less the product itself – music – than added service – a long lasting medium, immune to viruses and other computer-related mishaps).

I’ve been browsing around Gerd Leonhard’s previous writings (warning, the man’s a Net-junkie and has an account for every social site in existence), and I’m proud to see he had the same idea (though he developed it much more). His Water Like Music Manifesto is a must-read.
(edit: Gerd Leonhard came up with this back in 2005, Claude and me in 2006 – given I’ve been maintaining a close watch on the subject, I think it’s safe to say I came across it somehow )

On another note, this quote from Feargal Sharkey, who attended the debate “The Big issue – how can music and ISP work together” at the MIDEM seems to show that there’s still work to do : “It seems we are surrounded by an ever-growing chorus of pseudo-intellectual cyber professors who will have us believe that their vision of reality is nothing short of the high altar of intellectual thinking. And to challenge those viewpoints and assumptions is nothing short of heresy and treason.”

Then again I can see how hard it is for non-tech people to understand that their business has suddenly turned into a computer engineering problem.

This year I have to luck to be accredited for the MIDEM as a photographer, which allowed me to attend a talk on how ISPs and Music distributors can work together. Very interesting, it seems the music companies are finally getting a clue. Check out Gerd Leonhard’s Pirates Prison Project.

A sign of the times : the “official bag” handed to the press (with docs and stuff in it), is Fair Trade (with a Max Havelaar label) and made of certified organic cotton.

Lots of iphones. Lots. And netbooks.

Finally, first time shooting from the Red Carpet. A tricky exercise. It’s probably nicer when the temperature is above 10ºC.

I’ve just read this very well written post on all you need to know about concert photography by Alan Hess. Nothing much to add, except he says not to carry too much gear yet carries probably twice as much as I do  (though having two bodies is hardly unusual and makes a lot of sense). He’s got my respect for on-the-fly adjusting of parameters (ISO, aperture and shutter speed). I prefer to simply redo light metering (spot mode of course) while keeping the aperture at f2.8.

This morning I noticed that some comments from my blog had disappeared. Checking the DB table, they’re gone for good (my host currently has no automated DB backup facility for my kind of account). I only have a precious few to start with, so I made the effort to dig them up (thank you Google for your ‘cache:’ operator) and re-create them. I wish I knew what happened, I suspect akismet since I think it happened after a round of spam moderation. Anyway, that’s one more reason to look into an alternative hosting solution. DB backup through phpMyAdmin is no fun.

(Edit : turns out that my host does make automated, daily DB backups, lucky for me I came across them when looking for my website logs – so I was finally able to properly restore de comments table)