El Gringoqueño

I’ve been messing around with Qtpfsgui, a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo tool for Linux, Mac, and Windows. There are number of processes that on­e can invoke to increase the dynamic range of photos from RAW captures or multiple tripod exposures, but first, an example.

This was taken at dusk at a hotel pool in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico.  Very scary sky.

The basic concept is that your camera can’t really capture a bright sky with a dark landscape.  Set the exposure for your land, and the sky is washed out.  Lower your exposure for the sky, and the land comes out too dark.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could combine the two and fudge the photo to look more like your eye sees it?  The best way is with a tripod and multiple exposures with different settings, but I’m lazy and I want results NOW.

If you’re shooting RAW in your digital camera, you can capture a little bit more dynamic range than what you see when you export it to a jpg.  Try using an HDR tool to pull out a little more dynamic range or, in my case, heavily process it to give you that funky black velvet painting effect.  Meh, whatever floats your boat.  A lot of people seem to like these images.  ‘Course people seem to loathe them too.

The original photo looks like this:

It’s a nice photo, but the first one is quite dramatic, no?

Here’s another dramatic shot of the Mississippi and Missouri River confluence, shot on a cold day in December from the Missouri side.

I’ve been busy copy-editing and typesetting Laura’s doctoral dissertation. I’ve always been a fan of Donald Knuth and his obsessive work in typesetting with Tex. Since my beloved wife is a Stanford Student, I figured, cool, I’ll use TeTex (Latex) to publish the thing, kinda like an homage to the their text publishing tradition. Also to thumb my nose at the Computer Science graduate students who don’t think anyone outside of their department uses TeTex/Latex. They provide a Microsoft Word Template for the rest of the school. Screw that.

Latex is not for the faint of heart, though. The text markup language has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you won’t know how you lived without it.

First: Here is what you get with a Latex source document.

• Auto generated/indexed/enumerated list of tables and figures, complete with hyperlinks (in the PDF generated version) to their appropriate section
• All the enumeration happens regardless of where the table is. You cross reference based on a reference flag, not text. So for example, you don’t write out, "see table 2.1" you just create a label to your table like so, giving it a human readable name (although it could be anything):

  \caption{\label{tab:Articles-with-Language}
Articles with Language as Subject}

  and then you reference your table like this:

  The high percentage of articles on Language present
in this local news section in contrast to a
low percentage on Education (Table \ref{tab:Articles-with-Language})

  You never have to remember what table or figure number goes where with what table or chapter or whatever. You also don’t have to manually update your list of tables or figures. This lets the researcher get to the business of writing their paper rather than screwing around with formatting, which, let’s be honest, occupies a vastly disproportionate amount of the researcher’s time.
  

• Benevolent Stanford students have graciously provided a complete thesis Latex style to take care of formatting for print/ebook publication. Even/Odd margin stuff is taken care of for you. Smart beautiful justification and hyphenation, footnoting, contents, etc is formated and beautifully handled.
• Laura gets to write her stuff in OpenOffice, export it to Latex and I then format with Stanford’s thesis style sheet.

Here’s what it looks like:

Now that I’ve gotten into this a bit, I’m addicted. I’ve seen how other people have published ebooks and to tell you the truth, they get them pretty wrong. There is no cross referencing, no hyperlinks to the sections, no footnote links, table links etc. In addition, with Lyx (frontend editor to Latex) you get to separate out your chapters, sections etc and have multiple people work on or copy edit at the same time. Since each is but a text file, you can use a source code versioning system like Subversion or CVS to track changes. This allows you to publish tight updated versions and divide up the work.

I highly recommend Lyx, Latex for any sort of professional publishing. It’s makes maintaining long documents of any sort simply a breeze.

Well, they (my thoughts) are mostly unprintable, but I will strongly express my position on bottom posting.

It sucks.

But first, a bit of history:

The top posting, bottom posting debate has been mostly won by the bottom posting folks, that is, when replying to an email, your response should go after the quoted portion of the original email.

That’s caca - big stinky pungent steaming caca.

First, if the email was lengthy, you must scroll for ages to even get to your response. Second, the assertion that bottom posting "conserves" the flow of the conversation and is more "right" is also caca. The flow of the conversation is contained in your threaded mail reader. You do use a threaded mail reader, right? The threaded mail reader will preserve the flow of the conversation just fine, thank you, without all the fuss and muss of quoted portions above and below and all around.

My reasons for top posting (in email… doing so in Usenet will get you keel-hauled) is that my response is the most relevant portion of the email. My response is the reason I am sending said email. If the recipient is too lazy to look at his last email to discern to what I am replying, I have included a snippet of relevant text after my important response for reference’s sake. It is just a little reminder, not the important portion of the email. Bottom posters just don’t seem to get this, little bottom feeders that they are.

I get it, I really do. You are so humble, so meek, so respectful in your correspondence that your pathetic little response must be relegated to the tail end of the email. You suck. I don’t want to do business with you. I would rather do business with someone who has the balls to believe his words mean something and places them at the top of the email accordingly.

Got it?

I understand that this is a sensitive topic for many programmers and Open Source developers and furthermore that the convention of "bottom posting" or "bending over and taking up the rear" has won the day. I understand that top posting is frowned upon in public discussion forums. I disagree of course. Again, your Usenet reader is threaded, right? If you need to bottom post, I think you are an idiot, but I am outnumbered, so I acquiesce. You shall, however, not have the pleasure of enforcing upon me your flagrant disregard for common sense and decency by encroaching upon my personal email habits.

In my email I will top post. I will defend my top posting. I will throw down with anyone that wants to start a flame war on the subject.

I am prepared to defend myself.

P.J. and I discussing some of the confounding requests we get from windows admins as we try to protect them from themselves:

"Yeah, it’s like, ‘I want you to secure it, but I also want be able to do every stupid thing I can think of.’"

P.J Cabrera

 And there you have it in a nutshell the security problems with Microsoft users.
 

I just have to comment on this great little addition to my technology array. The personal music player, Cowon iAudio F1, rocks. I love it, even if the 22 hour advertised battery life only lives up to around 13. But, it plays ogg vorbis, mp3, wma, is super small, does voice recording, has 1 Gigabyte of flash memory, is an FM tuner, records FM radio, and "line in" too all for around $125.00. This little baby rules. I’ve had it for around 6 months now, and I think it’s fabulous, small, and powerful. Highly recommended. No iPods for me, unless I hack it with RockBox… which I might do, btw.