Yesterday Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab on the planet to process Kodachrome, stops developing the iconic film forever. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, they gave him the last roll. When he finished shooting the final frames, he hand-delivered it to Parsons. Here are a few of those last 36 frames.
Friday, December 31, 2010
The End of an Era – 1935 to 2010 « Steve McCurry's Blog
The End of an Era – 1935 to 2010 « Steve McCurry's Blog
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Looking at Windows CE Sylvania Netbook
Oddly enough, I was just contacted to evaluate this puppy. By my daughter. If it doesn't cut the mustard she can take it back.
Sort of a coincidence in that it is contending for a somewhat similar space to the CR-48. (see last post )
Her boyfriend got it for her to use in her college classes. I have to admit it's kind of cute, it weighs about the same as an iPad. Clearly it was attractive in that it was very lightweight, very inexpensive (about $99), and looked like it might have minimum functionality, which I took to be accessing the web, editing documents, and hopefully, printing them out. Her finger tips are thinner than mine so the keyboard would work for her. (I my finger tips are about 1 1/2X the width of the virtual keyboard on an iPod Touch or iPhone, so little keys don't work for me very well.)
So I evaluated it by getting it set up to access our wireless, connecting to the internet, doing Google searches, playing a couple of flash videos, attempting to run two applications at the same time (like open a document while running a web browser) cutting and pasting text. Also checking for stability, and upgradability. "Dad, the Internet Explorer on this looks awful old." Hmm.
OK it was fairly painful to set up the home wireless connection. When I did get connected, and it locked up for any reason, and I had to reboot, often the wireless connection would fail, I'd press connect, and it would say connected but IE wouldn't get the message, so I'd have to reboot again. Since it locked up three or four or so times in the hour or two I spent with it (about the total for the last two weeks of pretty heavy use of the CR-48--which isn't even a released product) losing your internet connection was always a possibility.
I could edit a document and save it off in an older Office .doc format using the CE version of Wordpad. I did not try to test if I could directly connect a USB printer. You should close your browser; running two applications at the same time almost invariably pulls up a you are almost out of memory what now? dialog. I am not sure what value the task bar has if you don't have enough memory to run two applications at the same time.
By the way the documentation suggests that you not even attempt to use a printer, and instead e-mail your documents to another computer.
As an alternative, I thought it might be really cool to use Google Docs instead, Unfortunately, Google Docs nearly locked up, and informed me that my browser was inadequate to the task.
However, WinCE is not really designed to update, so you are stuck with a cell phone style version of IE 6.0. (Interestingly going to the Windows Update site locks up the little critter.) So there is no way to use Google docs. (A Chrome OS laptop, with Google web print and Google docs would probably actually meet her requirements).
I was able to run one out of two flash animations. I'd also have to admit that the CE user interface looks like it was designed by somebody who designs North Korean worker apartments, compared to a Mac, and iPad, or even Windows 7.
Well, I told her she could decide, so I gave her a report card for it and she could check for herself.
Weight A
Boot speed A
Stability F
Multitasking F
Write Document B-
Wireless D
Web C-
Upgradable/Up to Date F
She's going to return it.
Sort of a coincidence in that it is contending for a somewhat similar space to the CR-48. (see last post )
Her boyfriend got it for her to use in her college classes. I have to admit it's kind of cute, it weighs about the same as an iPad. Clearly it was attractive in that it was very lightweight, very inexpensive (about $99), and looked like it might have minimum functionality, which I took to be accessing the web, editing documents, and hopefully, printing them out. Her finger tips are thinner than mine so the keyboard would work for her. (I my finger tips are about 1 1/2X the width of the virtual keyboard on an iPod Touch or iPhone, so little keys don't work for me very well.)
So I evaluated it by getting it set up to access our wireless, connecting to the internet, doing Google searches, playing a couple of flash videos, attempting to run two applications at the same time (like open a document while running a web browser) cutting and pasting text. Also checking for stability, and upgradability. "Dad, the Internet Explorer on this looks awful old." Hmm.
OK it was fairly painful to set up the home wireless connection. When I did get connected, and it locked up for any reason, and I had to reboot, often the wireless connection would fail, I'd press connect, and it would say connected but IE wouldn't get the message, so I'd have to reboot again. Since it locked up three or four or so times in the hour or two I spent with it (about the total for the last two weeks of pretty heavy use of the CR-48--which isn't even a released product) losing your internet connection was always a possibility.
I could edit a document and save it off in an older Office .doc format using the CE version of Wordpad. I did not try to test if I could directly connect a USB printer. You should close your browser; running two applications at the same time almost invariably pulls up a you are almost out of memory what now? dialog. I am not sure what value the task bar has if you don't have enough memory to run two applications at the same time.
By the way the documentation suggests that you not even attempt to use a printer, and instead e-mail your documents to another computer.
As an alternative, I thought it might be really cool to use Google Docs instead, Unfortunately, Google Docs nearly locked up, and informed me that my browser was inadequate to the task.
However, WinCE is not really designed to update, so you are stuck with a cell phone style version of IE 6.0. (Interestingly going to the Windows Update site locks up the little critter.) So there is no way to use Google docs. (A Chrome OS laptop, with Google web print and Google docs would probably actually meet her requirements).
I was able to run one out of two flash animations. I'd also have to admit that the CE user interface looks like it was designed by somebody who designs North Korean worker apartments, compared to a Mac, and iPad, or even Windows 7.
Well, I told her she could decide, so I gave her a report card for it and she could check for herself.
Weight A
Boot speed A
Stability F
Multitasking F
Write Document B-
Wireless D
Web C-
Upgradable/Up to Date F
She's going to return it.
Monday, December 13, 2010
CR-48
Went to:
HTML5 Tech Talk
Monday, December 13, at 6:00pm PST.
Doors to be opened at 5:30pm and you needed to reserve a place.
It was curious, but after I registered, I kept getting requests to make sure I was really attending.
Google's Crittenden Campus, Olympus Mons Tech Talk
1400 Crittenden Lane
Mountain View, CA, 94043
Anyway, I got there, I was curious about HTML5, Mike West did a tech talk on IndexedDB a web based NOSQL, here are the slides. They did a quick update on Chrome, and then came the Oprah moment:
Google Chrome OS Notebook Cr-48s for everybody!
So I got into the invitation only beta!
And yes, I have posted this using the little guy, and moved some of my posts from my old blog to here. Only thing that was really painful was highlighting text with the track pad, really painful, I started using arrow keys to do it instead.
HTML5 Tech Talk
Monday, December 13, at 6:00pm PST.
Doors to be opened at 5:30pm and you needed to reserve a place.
It was curious, but after I registered, I kept getting requests to make sure I was really attending.
Google's Crittenden Campus, Olympus Mons Tech Talk
1400 Crittenden Lane
Mountain View, CA, 94043
Anyway, I got there, I was curious about HTML5, Mike West did a tech talk on IndexedDB a web based NOSQL, here are the slides. They did a quick update on Chrome, and then came the Oprah moment:
Google Chrome OS Notebook Cr-48s for everybody!
So I got into the invitation only beta!
And yes, I have posted this using the little guy, and moved some of my posts from my old blog to here. Only thing that was really painful was highlighting text with the track pad, really painful, I started using arrow keys to do it instead.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Working at ebrary
I'm working at ebrary now. Here's some information on them:
Reading PDFs Online with No Download
Integrating ebrary content
Reading PDFs Online with No Download
Integrating ebrary content
Friday, April 16, 2010
Review of A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel
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A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel And Einstein by Palle Yourgrau
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In the annals of twentieth century physical and mathematical thought there were a series of crises, and as a result of those crises, in many cases some kind of limitative result was derived.
Two of the figures involved in these results became deep friends in their late years at Princeton: the voluble Einstein and the strange reclusive Gödel, and this book dwells on the development of their philosophical views and the outcomes of some of that thought in the late work of Kurt Gödel.
Gödel, it is to be remembered, demonstrated a general approach that separated the concept of truth from the concept of provability from a set of axioms: every completely formal mathematical system possesses at least one true statement that cannot be demonstrated by it, regardless of what modifications you attempt. Gödel was extremely dubious of logical positivism, and essentially deriving his outlook from Plato, regarded formal methods as merely a rigorous way of arriving at fundamental, prexisting, intuitions of truth.
Einstein, more familiar to most readers, produced a geometrical interpretation of space and time not existing independently, but wholly determined by measurement, matter and energy.
Gödel became extremely interested in the aspect of time as psychological time, time that flows, and asked the question as to whether the intuition of time was something that should prove as reliable and fundamental as the notion of truth. Or was Plato's hint to be followed that time was not truly to be taken as real?
Gödel in exploring Einstein's general relativity came to the conclusion that time was an illusion, at least in the sense that we intuit it. Or perhaps one might say, it lacked the power and generality to become a fundamental intuition. It is odd, in that in his master work, his Incompleteness Theorem, he rigorously demonstrated the generality of the intuition of truth; yet in his work on relativity, he demonstrated deep flaws in the intuition of time.
Background: Unlike special relativity, general relativity allows the large scale distribution of matter to determine "average" or in some sense privileged observers at any region of space and time, in which it could be said time is to pass.
Gödel proceeded to
1. artificially imagine a universe in which the large scale distribution of matter is rotating about an axis
2. demonstrate that an observer could follow a path in which they would end up eventually in their own path
3. argue that in such a world time in the sense of a linear flow that we can intuit is an invalid concept
4. argue that if time cannot be validly applied to all possible worlds it has no true validity in any.
It may be noted that Gödel invented a totally new and completely valid solution of Einstein's field equations, but with very odd conditions clearly not followed by our actual universe. The argument from complete necessity in all possible worlds, may strike the reader as odd, or may seem to recall strange resemble to the Ontological Proof of the existence of God (Gödel played with formalizing the Ontological Proof, but never published it.)
I gave 3 stars to this book because (I have read the monograph on the Incompleteness Theorem, so trust me on this) I thought some of the explanations for the general reader, especially the Incompleteness Theorem were a little poor. It did give a very brilliant portrayal of Gödel's philosophical concerns. I also not that this is the non-technical companion to a much more rigorous exploration of Gödel's war on time, also by Yourgrau.
View all my reviews >>
A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel And Einstein by Palle YourgrauMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In the annals of twentieth century physical and mathematical thought there were a series of crises, and as a result of those crises, in many cases some kind of limitative result was derived.
Two of the figures involved in these results became deep friends in their late years at Princeton: the voluble Einstein and the strange reclusive Gödel, and this book dwells on the development of their philosophical views and the outcomes of some of that thought in the late work of Kurt Gödel.
Gödel, it is to be remembered, demonstrated a general approach that separated the concept of truth from the concept of provability from a set of axioms: every completely formal mathematical system possesses at least one true statement that cannot be demonstrated by it, regardless of what modifications you attempt. Gödel was extremely dubious of logical positivism, and essentially deriving his outlook from Plato, regarded formal methods as merely a rigorous way of arriving at fundamental, prexisting, intuitions of truth.
Einstein, more familiar to most readers, produced a geometrical interpretation of space and time not existing independently, but wholly determined by measurement, matter and energy.
Gödel became extremely interested in the aspect of time as psychological time, time that flows, and asked the question as to whether the intuition of time was something that should prove as reliable and fundamental as the notion of truth. Or was Plato's hint to be followed that time was not truly to be taken as real?
Gödel in exploring Einstein's general relativity came to the conclusion that time was an illusion, at least in the sense that we intuit it. Or perhaps one might say, it lacked the power and generality to become a fundamental intuition. It is odd, in that in his master work, his Incompleteness Theorem, he rigorously demonstrated the generality of the intuition of truth; yet in his work on relativity, he demonstrated deep flaws in the intuition of time.
Background: Unlike special relativity, general relativity allows the large scale distribution of matter to determine "average" or in some sense privileged observers at any region of space and time, in which it could be said time is to pass.
Gödel proceeded to
1. artificially imagine a universe in which the large scale distribution of matter is rotating about an axis
2. demonstrate that an observer could follow a path in which they would end up eventually in their own path
3. argue that in such a world time in the sense of a linear flow that we can intuit is an invalid concept
4. argue that if time cannot be validly applied to all possible worlds it has no true validity in any.
It may be noted that Gödel invented a totally new and completely valid solution of Einstein's field equations, but with very odd conditions clearly not followed by our actual universe. The argument from complete necessity in all possible worlds, may strike the reader as odd, or may seem to recall strange resemble to the Ontological Proof of the existence of God (Gödel played with formalizing the Ontological Proof, but never published it.)
I gave 3 stars to this book because (I have read the monograph on the Incompleteness Theorem, so trust me on this) I thought some of the explanations for the general reader, especially the Incompleteness Theorem were a little poor. It did give a very brilliant portrayal of Gödel's philosophical concerns. I also not that this is the non-technical companion to a much more rigorous exploration of Gödel's war on time, also by Yourgrau.
View all my reviews >>
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Hacking your cell phone (for techies)
Dude (or dudette) where's my pictures?
Some cell phones don't give you access to your pictures, videos etc., other than to run up data charges by sending them. If you want to get access to them, there are tricks you can use. This is for the fairly techie user, so it is just an example. My laptop is running Vista,and my cell phone is a cheap LG VX5500 but the principles should work on other systems.
Obviously if you have a smart phone, you probably don't need to do all this. But if you are smart and your phone is dumb, or if you are just a general mad scientist type, read on.
1. Assuming you have a mini-USB port on your phone, get a cable for it. If this doesn't work, it will at least let you charge your cell phone from your computer.
2. Plug the mini-USB cable into the computer and the cell phone and turn each on.
3. In Vista, it should auto detect and install a device driver for you. If that doesn't work, you can Google for the driver for your phone and install it yourself.
4. Ho hum. OK you are set? you should go into Device Manager (or equivalent) and confirm that it sees the device. You will not see it in the file system (e.g. Computer, My Computer etc.).
5. Go to www.bitpim.com and download BitPim. It supports:
Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
Linux RPM
MacOS X 10.3+ (Universal)
6. If you are the type that likes to ask for directions or use manuals, you may want to read the online help first. (Nah.)
7. Figure out what model of phone you have. Set up BitPim accordingly. You don't really need to know what port you are on, you can choose autodetect.
7. You can select an advanced option to access the cell phone's file system. You should be safe as long as you are only doing downloads and don't muck with the files on the phone itself. (If something bad happens, don't blame me, go back to the store and say "it just stopped working".)
8. On most of the Verizon LG phones, the user media files are in subfolders of the brew folder, you just have to explore around a bit and find them (buncha files ending in .JPG!).
9. Right button click and select the option to make a zip file backup. You can also find things like your calendar, text messages and address book and back them up as well. Here's what I see on BitPim on my phone:
Here is my cellphone's filesystem in BitPim!
The picture folder (directory) is highlighted.
Right button click on a directory and it offers to make a zip file on your local file system.
If you double click on any file it will bring it up in a HEX editor.
Here is my cellphone's filesystem in BitPim!
The picture folder (directory) is highlighted.
Right button click on a directory and it offers to make a zip file on your local file system.
If you double click on any file it will bring it up in a HEX editor.
Here's a guide that gives you some information about the common locations for many VERIZON cell phones. I can't vouch for it, as I don't own every damn phone listed. But if can give you some good ideas where the goodies are, even if you have a different model.
http://mark.cdmaforums.com/FileLocs.htm
10. Unzip the files and do what you want.
As I side note, I actually took, and downloaded a pixelated photograph from my cell phone, and blew it up and it was actually accepted in a juried photography show. (The image quality gave it a somewhat impressionist quality.
Note: this is for informational purposes only, and I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this information.
Some cell phones don't give you access to your pictures, videos etc., other than to run up data charges by sending them. If you want to get access to them, there are tricks you can use. This is for the fairly techie user, so it is just an example. My laptop is running Vista,and my cell phone is a cheap LG VX5500 but the principles should work on other systems.
Obviously if you have a smart phone, you probably don't need to do all this. But if you are smart and your phone is dumb, or if you are just a general mad scientist type, read on.
1. Assuming you have a mini-USB port on your phone, get a cable for it. If this doesn't work, it will at least let you charge your cell phone from your computer.
2. Plug the mini-USB cable into the computer and the cell phone and turn each on.
3. In Vista, it should auto detect and install a device driver for you. If that doesn't work, you can Google for the driver for your phone and install it yourself.
4. Ho hum. OK you are set? you should go into Device Manager (or equivalent) and confirm that it sees the device. You will not see it in the file system (e.g. Computer, My Computer etc.).
5. Go to www.bitpim.com and download BitPim. It supports:
Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
Linux RPM
MacOS X 10.3+ (Universal)
6. If you are the type that likes to ask for directions or use manuals, you may want to read the online help first. (Nah.)
7. Figure out what model of phone you have. Set up BitPim accordingly. You don't really need to know what port you are on, you can choose autodetect.
7. You can select an advanced option to access the cell phone's file system. You should be safe as long as you are only doing downloads and don't muck with the files on the phone itself. (If something bad happens, don't blame me, go back to the store and say "it just stopped working".)
8. On most of the Verizon LG phones, the user media files are in subfolders of the brew folder, you just have to explore around a bit and find them (buncha files ending in .JPG!).
9. Right button click and select the option to make a zip file backup. You can also find things like your calendar, text messages and address book and back them up as well. Here's what I see on BitPim on my phone:
Here is my cellphone's filesystem in BitPim!
The picture folder (directory) is highlighted.
Right button click on a directory and it offers to make a zip file on your local file system.
If you double click on any file it will bring it up in a HEX editor.
Here is my cellphone's filesystem in BitPim!
The picture folder (directory) is highlighted.
Right button click on a directory and it offers to make a zip file on your local file system.
If you double click on any file it will bring it up in a HEX editor.
Here's a guide that gives you some information about the common locations for many VERIZON cell phones. I can't vouch for it, as I don't own every damn phone listed. But if can give you some good ideas where the goodies are, even if you have a different model.
http://mark.cdmaforums.com/FileLocs.htm
10. Unzip the files and do what you want.
As I side note, I actually took, and downloaded a pixelated photograph from my cell phone, and blew it up and it was actually accepted in a juried photography show. (The image quality gave it a somewhat impressionist quality.
Note: this is for informational purposes only, and I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this information.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Java Kicks Ruby on Rails in the Butt | Ruby-On-Rails
Java Kicks Ruby on Rails in the Butt | Ruby-On-Rails.
A nice presentation, although the Englsih grammar is a little sketchy. I did think he handwaved a bit about migrations, in that the pseudo-sql in ruby is what is supposed to generate the actual SQL. Nice summary of model driven development, though.
A nice presentation, although the Englsih grammar is a little sketchy. I did think he handwaved a bit about migrations, in that the pseudo-sql in ruby is what is supposed to generate the actual SQL. Nice summary of model driven development, though.
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