Monthly Archives: March 2006

Economics of Digital Cameras

I was reading a backissue of Money magazine where Paul Clitheroe made a remarkably insightful analysis of film vs digital cameras (Money, June 2005, pg 20 am I better off With a digital or film camera?).

One thing he noted is that acquiring a digital camera turns you into a shutterbug; I would suggest spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a camera has that effect, but the zero-cost of each individual photo certainly does help. He notes that in bangs-per-buck, film beats digital – and he’s right. Not only are digital cameras more expensive to acquire for the features you get, but (at the time of the article) processing costs were higher too. Couple that with the poorer image resolution you get from digital images (super high-end digital cameras are only now approaching the image resolution of $20 compact cameras) and you would have to be nuts to go digital.

Unless you don’t actually process your images. As a general rule, I don’t. In the last eleven months I’ve taken… let’s see… 10,327 images (I was wondering what would happen to the camera when it rolled over 10K images, because the manual hints that you might have to re-format your media; turns out that’s not the case). Recently Cathy and I took advantage of a Harvey Norman promotion and trebbled the number of images we’d printed, to a total of 200. We might have spent $50 on printing all up. That would have bough 240 frames of analogue film in processing costs, but we only printed out the winners. If the full 10K images had been processed we may have spent $2000 on processing. That’s a bunch of money. I suspect I would have husbanded my shots more if I’d spent the same amount of money on a film camera. In fact, there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would have spent that much money on a film camera. Something about perceived value differences. Anyways, the camera has been fun, and I think given the thrashing it’s been getting, I’ve been getting value for money from it. Which I’m a little surprised by, because it was a lot of money.

For me, the big advantage of digital is that I can learn to be a better photographer at no marginal cost. And Paul says that at National Geographic, photographers average 350 rolls of film (almost 12600 frames) per story, with an average of 10 published. So, if I was a professional grade photographer using professional equipment, one in twenty of the photos I’ve printed would be magazine quality.

Matrix displays bite arse

Sure, CRT displays are bulky, consume piles of power and are heavy. But they can change resolution without a loss of … resolution.

See, High Definition TV runs at 1920 x 1080 – which, incidentally, a vanishingly small number of TV sets run at (ignore advertising about sets being HD-ready – all it means is the TV will understand a HD signal and happily convert it down to it’s native resolution). But converting a raster image from it’s native resolution down involves a loss of information; worse yet, if that resolution isn’t an integer multiple of source resolution, the downconversion algorithm has to make some judgement calls about which new pixel to push the old pixel’s information – so you can have some odd looking images, like horizonal or diagonal lines going… funny. Colour transitions can become forced too with a visible loss of colour depth. Converting up can also be a little strange, with some pixels odd colours (making the image look blurry) or straight lines becoming jagged. Given that signals might also appear in 704 × 480 (Standard Defintion) or 1280 × 720 (a high quality high definition signal not broadcast in Oztralia), aspect ratios on the pixels involved mean you need a native resolution not likely to be obtained for many years to get clean conversion between the resolutions.

CRTs don’t give a rat’s arse about conversion algorithms, and happily change the number of lines they throw on the screen in response to the number they’re given. The only difficulty you might encounter is the shadow mask or aperture grille.

LCD and Plasma display screens – generally TV monitors, and LCD projectors (and for that matter, any other matrix-based projection technology) have a failure mode that analogue CRT displays don’t exhibit:

Dead pixels.

Stuck on or stuck off, dead pixels are a one way street. You don’t see that kind of failure in CRTs. And I’m not aware of any TV manufacturers who guarantee their product against this particularly annoying failure. No-one is told about it at purchase time, but I’m predicting in three to five years time there’s going to be an uproar about it.

Anyone bought a new matrix TV lately? Happy about it?

AU govt pulls down satire site

Richard Neville says his spoof johnhowardpm.org web site has been shut down on the orders of the government, with Melbourne IT and Yahoo Hosting cowering to the demand.

Unfortunately it’s not in the Google or archive.org caches, but you can see it in a PDF. But on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like there was justification for shutting it down.

Update Monday 7am. Peter has found a comment from a John Dalton on Margo Kingston’s site showing a way of viewing the site — it’s only Melbourne IT that cowered; Yahoo still has it up, but you can’t see it without doing hacky things to your DNS. John suggested changing your proxies, which makes every other site not work. A better way is editing your Hosts file. On Windows, this is in somewhere like c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add a line:
216.39.58.74 www.johnhowardpm.org

And you’re set.

Friday quickies

What if Microsoft was marketing the iPod? (Article about the origins of the video here.)

In case you’ve been living in a virtual cave, VMWare’s basic VMServer product is now free.

Google is beta trialling GMail from your own domain, primarily aimed at organisations to start with. (via Patrick)

Found an old quote of mine:
To me, reading Perl is a little like trying to understand Norwegian. A minority of things – essentials like “Help!” or “Hello” – I can probably understand. The rest is just gobbledygook. (Quoted here, originally posted here.)

Migrating .Net 1.x to 2.x

Having got Visual Studio 2005 into my hot little hands, I’ve upgraded one of my projects from VS 2003 to 2005, and .Net Framework 1 to 2. Just loading it into VS2005 seemed to do most of the work for me.

I did find the new VS gives out a few very informative warnings in the code editor, such as unused variables. Good stuff (and shame on me for being so sloppy during repeated revisions of code).

The other thing I found was a few things had changed in the Web.Config file format. After much fiddling I found it easier to create a fresh one and copy my custom settings into it, than try and convert the old one over.

The only catch is that after copying it all over to the test server, it didn’t work. Turns out apart from installing the .Net 2.X Framework on your server, you’ll also need to get into the IIS setup and make sure it knows it’s now a 2.X application.

Other than that, pretty smooth. The one gotcha on my actual code was a custom button click routine that took the form QueryString and stripped out all the ASP.Net guff I didn’t want needed a bit of tweaking, as in .Net 2.0 there’s an extra __EVENTVALIDATION value. (My version is adapted from a 15seconds.com article, and is used to produce tidy QueryStrings that can be bookmarked.)

29th of February exists in WordPress (almost)

I discovered the other week that if you put an illegal post date into WordPress, such as 29-Feb-2006, it displays as the next day, 1-Mar-2006 on the page, but doesn’t allow commenting or going to the permalink, because in the database it’s still there as 29-Feb, so it doesn’t show up if you try to click through to it.

I suspect it’s just PHP’s date handlers being helpful, so it may show up in other PHP-based software.

Parenting magazines and Witchcraft

The difference between Science and Witchcraft is peer-reviewed double blind tests.

I have hearing loss as a result of an ear infection, so seeing this baloney annoys me on a deeply personal level – I don’t like the idea of kiddies ears going down the same path as mine because of faith-based approach to healing. I’ve discovered back issues of parenting magazines can be borrowed from our local library, and I stumbled across this issue of Practical Parenting.

Practical Parenting Magazine
July 2005, pg 74
Homeopathy for Ear Infections

The article started off with

“Editor’s Note: PP brings you this information in the interest of presenting a balanced view, but it should not take the place of medical advice: Make sure your GP knows the approach you are taking.”

Which shows they know they’re fooling around with fire. I want to know, why? The best answer I can come up with is that so many people are using homeopathy that the editors wanted to caution them against turning their backs on modern medicine and whatever benefits it may offer (peer reviewed double-blind tests not withstanding).
When are they going to run the article on the pros of paedophilia, in the interest of presenting a balanced view? Or, for the same reasons, something on balancing the humours? Can’t something just be plain old wrong? Can’t you slap your readers around like Stupid Lemon Eaters?

“Homeopathy works well together with the care offered by modern medical practice.”

Which can be restated as “drinking water will cure you, if you’re using antibiotics at the same time.” Or, summarily, “if you’re using antibiotics, drinking water won’t stop you getting better.” I say: if you want to experience the placebo effect, get your doctor to prescribe some Obecalp.

So Cathy and I looked at each other and decided this magazine was crap and that we’d only read the competitor in the future. After all, on their Editorial board, Woolworths Australian Parents Magazine have got an Obstertrician, a Midwife, a Paediatrician, a Dietitian, a Clinical Psychologist and a Breastfeeding counsellor; the magazine’s branded by Woolworths (the second largest retail company in Australia). They may as well call themselves Evidence-based ‘R Us. Then I see in the current issue:

Woolworths Australian Parents Magazine
Feb/Mar 2006, pg 62
Alternative treatments for glue ear.

Unlike Practical Parenting, Australian Parents saw no need to give a disclaimer that these alternative treatments at best don’t actually work and at worst will injure your child.

However, there are a range of alternative health approaches that are very effective either used on their own or in conjunction with traditional medicine.
(emphasis added)

I can smell a lawsuit. Medical advice without a disclaimer is one thing, but wrong medical advice and you’re up the creek without a paddle. And believe me, I looked for the disclaimer; plenty of information about the publisher of the magazine, nothing saying “don’t take our word for it, actually go to a doctor and get laughed at.”

Homeopathy is, says Patricia, a route that requires patience. Children will be prescribed oral drops which they may have to take for up to a year.

Given that these infections can last as long as six weeks, I’d hope that a year would “cure” the disease. Glue ear is a combination infection and mechanical failure; unless the homeopathic remedy is being shot up the Eustachian tubes, it’s not going to be any help. As double-blind tests have proven. And I can assure you from personal experience, a middle ear infection and the resultant injuries is no barrel of laughs.

The article goes on to recommend, amongst other quackery, ear candling as a remedy. I hate to tell you this, but setting your child on fire is not a safe way to deal with a middle ear infection; worse yet, it doesn’t work. Ear candling is dangerous.

Why not run an article on the healing effects of prayer, which is not only safe and cheap but proven to have some effect?

In the good old days, witches used to be burnt at the stake.

Science or Witchcraft – you choose.

The legend of Llamasoft

I’ve discovered that though Way Of The Rodent started publishing Jeff Minter’s auto-biographical history of Llamasoft, there’s actually more on the Llamasoft web site.

I’d thought I was good at Space Invaders until I met Chico. He was so good at Space Invaders that he could play it forever – it was no longer a challenge to him at all. So if he played the game at all he’d set himself some task that us mere mortals simply could not even begin to comprehend. Shooting all the Invaders was too simple. He’d time his shots so precisely that he could shoot individual Invaders out of the flock to eventually form his initials from the remaining attackers.

Vegan Lunch Box

Wow, blogging is an insane new media. One gal posts daily photos and descriptions of what she packs her in her kid’s Vegan Lunch Box. The public exposure of this has got to improve the food quality dramatically. If only my Mum was doing this, perhaps I would have opted for something more sophisticated than peanut butter and jam sandwitches every day.

Now, you’re not going to see a column in a newspaper on this, are you? You’d have to be a homemaker like the blogger, but she must be making mad coin given she’s getting 50-80 comments per entry; if I could see the ads it’d be peppered with them! Look at this place. We’re excited when we get one comment!