A picture or two from my recent trip to Boston and NYC

I spent about 10 days between New York City and Boston a couple of weeks ago. Only now starting to edit the pix that I took on the trip. Here are a couple. The first is a view of the Empire State Building from High Line. The second is from a Halloween party thrown by 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. Click on either image for links to more. I’ll post more as I edit.

Try out Google Chrome OS

You can try out Google’s Chrome OS easily no matter if you use Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. The long version of the instructions are at TechCrunch. Here is a rundown at Ars Technica.

Basically, you need two things:

1. VirtualBox, which will let you create a virtual machine on which to run Chrome OS, and
2. a pre-built disk image of a Chrome OS machine.

Just create a new machine, and use the image you download (named ide.vmdk) as the system disk.

Use the login name mentioned on the torrent page, and create a new Google account to play with (don’t trust something you downloaded from an unknown source). Et voilà:

It is pretty much a basic operating system, that just runs the Chrome browser. All “applications” are the usual web-based ones by Google, and others.

Interview with Araki

FLY has an interview with Nobuyoshi Araki, one of my favorite photographers. (NSFW - nudity.) The video shows some of the first pictures of his career, ones he took of his wife. It’s an excerpt from Arakimentari, a documentary by Travis Klose.

Parsing (X)HTML with regular expressions considered harmful

From @dakami, a good reminder for not trying to parse (X)HTML with regular expressions. You have to read the whole thing because this excerpt doesn’t even give feel for the original.

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML.

Silent Matrix

via www.youtube.com

Made by the Russian actor's group "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница).

Google enticing more developers

A couple of recent developments with Google. Firstly, they have released their Javascript tools, collectively called Closure (not to be confused with Clojure). Secondly, they have released a Creative Commons-licensed compiled language called Go (watch the teaser video below).

I haven’t had time to play with either of these tools. It’s nice to see that Go can be compiled for Mac OS X (my platform of choice).

New Photography 2009 at MoMA

Just returned from a visit to NYC and Boston. While in NYC, I went to see the New Photography exhibit at MoMA. It featured six photographers: Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek. They all work very differently, though a couple had similar methods. The unifying feature, though, is that the photographic process is used as a medium itself, and sometimes recursively (photographs of photographs).

Walead Beshty is the most “painterly”: he takes a very large sheet of photographic paper, and exposes parts of it to various colored light, masking out areas by using the sheet itself.

Leslie Hewitt’s work departs the least from traditional photography, and I found it very evocative. He photographs other photographs which are placed within a setting of common objects, sometimes with some personal significance.

Anyway, will write more about my trip soon.

Savion Glover and Company

Rewind for Savion’s solo.

New cameras shoot at 102,400 ISO

So, this is pretty crazy. Nikon just came out with their D3S which shoots to 102,400 ISO and 720p HD video. Gizmodo has a brief hands-on review, and coverage of the announcement.

Canon immediately follows with announcement of their 1D Mark IV (Gizmodo coverage) which also shoots at 102,400 ISO, but trumps Nikon with full 1080p HD video. Check out the short video that Vincent Laforet shot at 6,400 ISO.

The best camera is the one that's with you

Chase Jarvis just came out with a book titled The Best Camera Is The One That's With You: iPhone Photography. While I have not read this book, I could not agree more with the sentiment. A camera is no good if it’s sitting in your gear bag at home. The images are not going to take themselves. I happen to be a big fan of taking pictures with my phone.

Why you would flash your phone with generic firmware

So, my phone died again: it stopped recognizing the battery. AT&T sent me a warranty replacement. Of course, it had the default AT&T-branded firmware. I had forgotten how obnoxious it was: everything is locked out, and you have to pay to use them. You can't use the GPS without paying $10/month, you can't play MP3s, you can't use your own MP3s as ringtones, you can't tether the phone to your laptop for Internet access.

The only added feature is that it supports IM: AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. The built-in email client, however, is pretty braindead and doesn't have GMail as an option, and there is no way to manually set the account info.

This is why I reflashed my phone with the generic Sony Ericsson firmware. My phone is actually useful, now. Not bad for $16.

On the other hand, I am not terribly impressed with Sony Ericsson's quality control. This is the second replacement. I've had other SE phones in the past which never had problems, and I tend to use my phones for 3 years or so.

Minor CueCat hacking

I bought a CueCat from LibraryThing to make it easier to scan my books. However, by default, it outputs some weird encoding. This is OK for use with LibraryThing, since they can decode the CueCat output. However, not so great with Delicious Library, which can’t.

Fortunately, they must have gotten enough questions about it and they posted a simple solution. Basically, disconnect pin 5 of one of the chips on the circuit board. Beats the more complex solutions for some of the older models. And it works like a charm.

Anyway, what’s a bit ironic is that I got one of these for free right when they first came out. It was a promo with Wired magazine. I think I threw it away. It used a PS/2 interface rather than USB, anyway.