Tattle

This is an HDR of Seattle’s skyline, taken using a Canon 5D Mark II with 24-105 f/4L lens, then post processed with Photomatix Pro, Aperture, and Photoshop.

Photomatix Pro is used to combine three images taken by the camera, each with a different exposure. Photomatix Pro is then used to tone map the image, giving it distinctive look. The image is then imported into Photoshop where is is merged with one of the original images to correct Ghosting artifacts caused by moving objects - in this case people and cars. I also used Photoshop to correct for lens distortion, caused by shooting at 24mm (which on a camera with a full frame sensor, such as the 5D, is a wide angle).

Finally, the image is taken into Aperture to do some final tuning.

Overall I think this is one of my most successful HDR images.

Finally getting around to processing some photos I took earlier in the year. These two pictures show before and after post processing done with Aperture and Photoshop.

First I used Aperture to correct the exposure and levels. The original image was shot as RAW on a Canon 5D Mark II, so fortunately there was enough information to recover the details in the water and the geese. I then cropped the image to remove uninteresting areas of water, whilst still leaving room on the left for the geese to fly into. Finally, I used Photoshop’s clone and healing tools to clean up the grass in the foreground which was intruding into the picture.

Back in June I posted some thoughts on the possible reasons behind Adobe’s week long shutdown.

So, this week, Abobe likely pays most of its employees from the $160M pot of money labelled “Accrued compensation and benefits” in its Q2 accounts. Doing some rough calculations, if each employee has 5 weeks accrued vacation this will convert over $30M from a liability held on their balance sheet into cash.

Adobe’s Q3 accounts are now available. They show a reduction in “Accrued compensation and benefits” of $20M to $140M. My original estimate was a little out as I estimated each employee had 5 weeks accrued vacation; the actual value is probably greater.

However, the overall sentiment was correct; the fundamental reason behind the shutdown was cash flow.

itsmejaimee:

EVEN LEGO’S HAVE IN-N-OUT!@! HA :]

finermac:

Snow Leopard: Before a user changes their homepage to Google, Safari now lets them know that they can use the search bar instead to perform a Google search.

I wonder if this is anything to do with the revenue that Apple receives as a result of Google searches originating from the Safari search field. John Gruber mentioned this back when Safari was announced at WWDC 2007:

My somewhat-informed understanding is that Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.

britishisms:

“They can’t be that different, they’re called the same thing!”

For your convenience: waffles, muffins, and biscuits, in the US and England.

I did take a few liberties with this, in the interest of making an awesome graphic:

• The “England” header should probably say UK, but Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have their own delicacies, and I’m not sure how they conflict with these definitions. Playing it safe.
• The British waffle is potato, and is generally eaten with sausages or bacon or baked beans (or all three!). (Baked beans, by the way, are not supposed to have brown sugar in them, you awful people.) Waffle is actually interchangeable and can mean either a potato waffle or a sweet waffle in England, but if someone says “waffle” they usually mean the potato kind.
• The American muffin is technically called an English muffin, which is equal parts ironic, ridiculous, and confusing. Muffin is also interchangeable in the US, and possibly in England (I’m sure we have English muffins like you guys, but I’d never eaten one before now).
• The American biscuit looks awful, and I do not ever want to eat one. What I call a biscuit, Americans call a cookie or a cracker. American cookies are also fairly common in the UK.

Images stolen from Wikipedia, mostly.

There’s a good debate raging over the announcement from atebits, the developer of the excellent Tweetie for iPhone, that version 2 will be a new application, priced the same as the old version.

I fully support the right of a developer to charge whatever they want for an application, and agree that upgrades are a hugely important revenue stream for developers.  And in this case I’ll personally be very happy to pay $2.99 to upgrade.  Others disagree, and are upset that they would have to pay anything at all for an upgrade.

I think Jeff LaMarche just about nails it:

Right, and when Adobe releases a new version of Photoshop or Microsoft releases a new version of Word with “a slew of new features and functionality”, those are, of course, free, right? Of course not.

There is of course a small hole in this argument. While Adobe does charge for upgrades, they also have a pricing structure that reflects that existing customers have already paid for many of the features. Upgrade pricing has been around for years, and works well. For a $2.99 application I’m willing to overlook this, but for a $600 application I’d be a little upset if I had to pay $600 for the upgrade.

But are atebits doing the wrong thing here? Absolutely not! The Apple App Store doesn’t support any type of upgrade pricing, and until it does this is the only option available to developers. Given the option of charging full price to everyone or nothing to existing users I’d personally have made exactly the same decision.

Longer term, I think upgrade pricing in the App Store will become essential. The only way to pay developers bills is to give them a steady revenue stream. Upgrades will be an essential part of that.

I absolutely agree with Steve Frank on this:

stevenf:

Let me preface this by saying that I have much love for Pocketables and Jenn is one of the few people I think can legitimately claim to be an even greater gadget-hound than myself. So, I don’t mean any disrespect.

What caught my eye was an article called What is your ideal mobile internet device?

Blue-sky questions like this pop up frequently on gadget-related forums, and what I’ve never understood is why the answers are almost always bullet-point lists of hardware specs.

A certain size screen! An Atom CPU! 2 GB of memory!

What difference does any of that make? The Newton MessagePad 2100 is in my top 10 mobile devices of all time, and it ran on a 167 MHz ARM CPU and had about 1 MB of internal storage. There are aspects of it (particularly the Notepad) which remain unmatched in terms of usability.

Hardware is hardware. It’s cheap. It’s a commodity. It gets better every year, so calling a particular hardware configuration of all things “ideal” seems ridiculous, as it will all be obsolete within two years no matter how good it is.

What’s even weirder about these bulleted hardware wish-lists is they tend to be oddly pragmatic, often based on technology that is available now or very soon. Jenn throws out “5 hour battery life” — how is that ideal? Even if we’re trying to be down-to-earth, can’t we at least shoot for a full workday? Newtons could eke out a week or two on AA batteries with nominal use (in an era before the power demands of backlit color screens and internet connectivity, of course).

When I think about my “ideal” mobile device, it comes down to: what can I do with it? Will it let me have a full “desktop” internet experience, or close to it? Will it present that experience in a way that makes sense on a small form-factor, or is it bolted on top of a shoddy port of a desktop OS that’s totally inappropriate for the intended use? What forms of input will it handle and how? For input methods that are error-prone, what are the correction methods, and how easy are they to use?

Will I be able to install whatever software I like on it? Will I be able to access the internet from “anywhere”, or only in specific hotspots dictated by a particular technology that’s popular right now? Will it still be able to get on the internet if I go to another country?

Will I have to mess around with “syncing” my various forms of data, or has the manufacturer come up with a more elegant solution? Is the device meant to stand on its own, or be a counterpart to a desktop machine?

The one thing every “successful” (to my mind, if not the marketplace) mobile device has always had is custom software. I don’t mean a layer of gaudy icons, designed by the nephew of the head of the sub-department of the manufacturing plant that also oversees rubber gaskets and refrigeration who is pretty good with the Photoshop filters, sitting uneasily upon a substrate of Windows Mobile.

I’m talking about a software stack that considers, from day one of its existence: battery life, memory usage, bulk storage capacity, user interaction, responsiveness, real-world usage scenarios (not how well it demos), data accessibility. That sort of thing.

My “ideal” mobile device is designed from scratch for its form-factor, allows me to communicate wherever in the world I am, holds all my important data, allows me to search it, identify relationships between it, and interact with it in a consistent and human-friendly way, doesn’t “own” my data or lock it into a particular platform.

Beyond that, any CPU that is sufficiently responsive is fine.

Exactly one year ago I posted my Omnivore’s Hundred list, which was the current meme-de-jour. Since then I’ve been making some steady progress, so this is my update. I’ve only included foods that I’ve eaten for the first time since posting the original list (in bold), and foods I’ve still never eaten.

1. Nettle tea
2. Huevos rancheros
3. Steak tartare
4. Crocodile
5. Carp
6. Borscht
7. Baba ghanoush
8. Pho
9. Epoisses
10. Rice and beans
11. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
12. Dulce de leche
13. Oysters
14. Bagna cauda
15. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
16. Root beer float
17. Cognac with a fat cigar
18. Curried goat
19. Whole insects
20. Fugu
21. Sea urchin
22. Prickly pear
23. Umeboshi
24. Abalone
25. Spaetzle
26. Dirty gin martini
27. Poutine
28. Carob chips
29. S’mores
30. Sweetbreads
31. Kaolin
32. Durian
33. Chitterlings, or andouillette
34. Gazpacho
35. Caviar and blini (but not together at the same time)
36. Roadkill
37. Baijiu
38. Hostess Fruit Pie
39. Pocky
40. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (only two-star so far)
41. Kobe beef
42. Goulash
43. Horse
44. Criollo chocolate
45. Spam
46. Soft shell crab
47. Rose harissa
48. Mole poblano
49. Lobster Thermidor
50. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
51. Snake

I think that’s good progress.  The highlights are Kobe beef and Pocky.  I’ve added curried goat to my list of eaten foods as an Indian friend explained that “mutton” in India is probably goat, and not sheep as I would have expected.

My good friends Will and Becky have gone crazy, although crazy in a “wish I was crazy enough to do doing that” kind of way.  They’ve got themselves a VW Campervan called Jules, and are preparing for a 15,000 mile trip around Europe.

Cannot wait to follow their progress!