I’ve put up some photos of my recent trip to Denver to work on a Wetpixel project with friend and software developer Alex King.

While I was there, I met up for dinner withThe Other Eric, Rod and his friend, Candice, and Justin. I also went with Alex to the Denver Tech Meetup, which pretty much filled my annual quota of overt geekiness. Good stuff.

For the last few days, I’ve been in Denver hanging out with Alex King and working with him on the Wetpixel Photo of the Week (the code was mostly written by Alex, nearly two years ago).

Here’s what we did:

1. added public voting functionality to the existing POTW contest. the voting is constrained both by cookie and ip address to prevent fraud. if you go to the POTW site and vote, when you go back there using the same browser on the same computer, you will be able to change your vote.

2. created two POTW web widgets, one for the latest POTW and another that shows a specific user’s latest entry.

Good stuff. Give the embedding a try, if you have a site that might benefit from pretty underwater pictures!

Alex convinced me today to use full-text RSS feeds. I made the switch in the Wordpress options. Hope it works!

Jack was really happy after his first swim. After the swim, Livia ran from the other room to announce that Jack has just laughed for the first time, and we then tried to get him to do it again (he didn’t). I’m like a proud dad… who isn’t the dad. :) Video follows… (read more »)

Darioush Winery in near-infrared

Osvaldo Golijov has been in town for the past week to finish up a project with Francis Ford Coppola up at the Niebaum-Coppola Estate, which I guess is now called the Rubicon Estate. On Monday, Livia, Baby Jack, Corinne and I drove up to the estate to hang out for a couple of days. (read more »)

My communications needs are complicated because I am on the road so much; In a typical month, I use a combination of e-mail, instant messaging, land lines, Blackberry, Skype account, SkypeIn number, and Iridium satellite phone to stay connected to the world. I may have found a service that will simplify everything.

A few minutes ago, I signed up for a free GrandCentral account (beta), which gives me a single phone number that rings all my phones at once. In addition to offering simultaneous ringing, GrandCentral also offers customized greetings, call screening, call recording, phone transfer, SPAM/marketeer detection/elimination, ring sharing, voicemail sharing, and more — and all of the features can be selectively activated by call group (keyed off of incoming Caller ID), so I can allow friends to get through immediately while screening those calling from unknown numbers.

While I’m on the road, I should be able to add additional numbers to ring as well, although I will have to wait until international support is added.

When I signed up for Twitter, it gave me the option to import both my address book and Livejournal friends in order to invite them to use the service. I hate intrusive methods of friend discovery and see this option offered often. Personally, I don’t like having my e-mail address(es) shared by friends to random services, so I don’t do it to others.

However, I’d gladly share my address book if the service used the data (transiently) for discovery instead of for active solicitation. I want to upload my data and see a list of everyone in my address book who has an account with the service, with an option to be immediately linked to them. Instead, we are often forced to search exhaustively for our friends, one by one. I’m sick of it.

Alex just converted me to OpenDNS, and I’m totally sold on it already. Ironically, I was trying to do a Google search for “OpenDNS” (unsuccessfully, using local DNS) when I went in and entered OpenDNS’ DNS settings in the Network preferences pane. Immediately after I clicked on “Apply Now,” the search completed, and information about OpenDNS came up.

UPDATE I’ve been using random connections at hotels lately, and I’ve found that OpenDNS often fails, and I have to switch back to using whatever default DNS the provider gives me. It might better to not use OpenDNS when out on the road…

NewsGator has just released NewsGator Go! for Blackberry. I installed it (OTA install — very simple), and it rocks. It works the way you’d expect an RSS reader to work on a Blackberry, with the added benefit of synching my feeds and what I’ve read with NetNewsWire for Mac, FeedDemon for PC, and NewsGator’s web interface. I’ve been waiting for a mobile feed reader like this for a long time.

Hmm. Now that Alex has convinced me to give Twitter a try, I guess I’m supposed to go be a twit about this as well.

In late 2003, Steve Drogin suggested that I apply to give a seminar at the annual Boston Sea Rovers Clinic. Being completely new to the industry, I had no idea who the Sea Rovers were nor what their clinic was all about. A few months later, I arrived at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel in Boston to find the most amazing dive show I had ever seen.

Although the annual clinic has limited space for booths, its speaker line-up and Saturday evening film festival are typically the main draw for visitors. The show is run solely by volunteers, and all proceeds are used for scholarships, internships, and support of other non-profit organizations (the Sea Rovers themselves are a 501C3 not-for-profit organization). All of the daytime speakers pay for the expenses involved in getting to and staying in Boston, yet each year there are many more applications for speaking slots than can be accepted… [full @ wetpixel]

me, with sherry hsieh and one of her cats

Now an annual tradition, I spent the first weekend of March in Boston. In past years I stayed with abhi shelat (who has since moved to Switzerland), but for the last two years I’ve taken the opportunity to hang out with Sherry Hsieh, her husband, Jens, and her cats, Stella and Simba.

In what has seemingly become a tremendously popular trend among my network of friends, Sherry is pregnant. I’m becoming good with babies simply through osmosis. Continue for a couple photos of the kitties. (read more »)

Hey, guys. Alex convinced me to give Twitter a try [me, on twitter]. I’ll try not to be too inane. Please let me know if you’re on Twitter, too.

Twitterrific seems to be the ultimate twitter widget for Mac OS X, and Twitter’s SMS interface could be a nice way to send micro-updates when I’m in strange places around the world, especially once Alex releases his Twitter Tools plug-in for Wordpress. I couldn’t get the IM interface working, though. Sending the confirmation code repeatedly had no effect.

We migrated echeng.com to a new server (migration courtesy of Chris @ Austin Dev) last night. Please let me know if you see anything weird here!

I also have insomnia. I’m trying to sleep, but I can’t. :(

The practice of shark finning (where sharks have their fins cut off while still alive and are thrown back in the water to die) is brutal, wasteful, and often, illegal. A web search for shark finning will show you in mere minutes how terrible the practice is.

Please show your support for the world’s dwindling shark populations by signing this petition against Alibaba.com, one of largest online traders of shark fins. Signing the petition takes less than a minute and requires only your name, e-mail address, and geographic location. You can also protect your privacy by showing yourself as “anonymous,” if you wish.

Sigma announced two products today that I’m really excited about. The first is the Sigma DP1 compact digital camera, which uses an APS-sized Foveon sensor (the size used in most digital SLRs these days) to produce what they’re calling 14 megapixel images. The sensor is actually 2652 x 1768 x 3 layers, which should produce images that compete well with images produced by today’s 10 megapixel SLRs. Hopefully, this Sigma announcement will signal the first of many compact cameras that use large sensors. At the moment, the only other cameras like this that exist are the Epson RD-1 and Leica M8 digital rangefinders. Both are high-end, expensive cameras meant to satisfy the film rangefinder crowd.

Anyway, I’ve been waiting for such cameras for a long time. The idea that you can get a clean image out of a camera the size of the new DP1 has until now been a fantasy. One big drawback of the DP1 is that it has an f4 lens. Lame.

The other product is the Sigma APO 200-500mm F2.8 lens. Nikon has a 200-400mm f/4 lens already, but a 200-500/2.8 sounds incredible! With a 2x teleconverter, you’d have a working focal length of 400-1000mm at f5.6. I’m sure this thing is going to weigh a lot, and traveling with it might be nearly impossible.

The only long lens I own at the moment is a Canon 400mm/5.6L. It’s sharp and light, but won’t focus closer than around 10 feet. Luckily, a bunch of friends have other long lenses I can borrow. I’ll just have to convince one of them to get the Sigma 200-500/2.8 so I can give it a try. :)

Over the past few months, I’ve made a complete switch to using Aperture as my primary photo-organization and processing platform. On the road, I use a Macbook Pro (loaded with RAM), and Aperture runs at a manageable speed, allowing me to organize, compare, and process images with an efficiency I had been previously unable to achieve. When I’m traveling, I love Aperture.

But at home, Aperture just does not work. Here, I run the program on a fully-loaded Mac Pro with striped disks, — and still, Aperture runs so slowly that it is nearly impossible for me to get anything done. So what’s the difference between the two libraries? My Macbook Pro’s Aperture library doesn’t have many images in it. Typically, it only contains a few thousand at a time; I use it solely as a travel platform, populating and manipulating a few projects until I get home, at which time I export and import them into my main library, which lives on the (much) faster Mac Pro. My main image library (just for travel) has over 50,000 images in it, most of which are RAW files from assorted SLRs producing images ranging from 6 to 16.7 megapixels apiece.

With over 50,000 images in the library, I routinely have to wait 15 seconds to create a new folder, 45 seconds for a right-click menu to show up, 120 seconds when I try to remove some images, etc. I just “picked” an image in a 2-image stack, and it took 30 seconds. Performance is terrible. Most of the time, the processors are not being taxed when I do things like right-click or navigate around, which leads me to believe that the fault is in the SQL Lite database, which doesn’t support simultaneous writes. And don’t even think about trying to do anything simultaneously when Aperture is trying to build previews.

At the moment, I’m trying to find and select 6 high-resolution images for delivery to a book editor. It’s been 10 minutes, and I’m about ready to use file-name searches in the file system to do the job instead (my images are referenced, so I can still do this).

<– To commemorate my recent experiences with Aperture, I made this bastardized animated .gif that encapsulates the Aperture experience when dealing with large libraries. Apple, your Aperture design team needs to be simultaneously congratulated for innovation and smacked across the face for such poor decisions.

Out of desperation, I’m going to give rebuilding the index a try.

UPDATE I rebuilt the Aperture index, and life is much better. Aperture is responding fairly well to complex operations like right-clicking on an image. More later. For now, check out Apple’s new product. :)

courtesy of xkcd

I’ve never tried this on anyone, but it would sure be funny (proper company required). [via t.o.E]