Live from Austin!

Two awesome scientific research studies everyone should disseminate widely:

1. Study #1: “The results of this study indicate that individuals who score in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli.” The one-liner: 80% of homophobic males are turned on by gay porn, compared to 34% of non-homophobic males.

2. Study #2: “I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle”

I thought these were common knowledge, but a couple of people refused to believe without a link today, so I think the fact-based community needs to do a better job of spreading the news.

After a while, I forget how barking mad Eric S Raymond is. Then he does something to remind me, like proposing the abolition of the GPL, eating an endangered puffin, praising the Fascists who fought the Spanish Civil War, writing that black people commit violent crime because they have lower IQs, or sending out his blog postings as press releases.

This time, he’s drawing on the wisdom of the Roman Emperor Caligula and modeling his idea of good US foreign policy on the Roman Empire. Because, you know, the hardline policies of Caligula, Claudius and Nero were such a great success for Rome.

A UT professor took 50,000 nerve cells from a dog brain, and grew them in a petri dish.

Then he wired the micro-brain to an interface via 120 electrodes.

And then, of course, he taught it to play Quake 3.

1. It’s 10:30 at night. You’re watching TV, when someone knocks quietly on the front door. Do you:

1. Answer the door.
2. Ignore it.
3. Yell “Go away.”
4. Pretend you’re not in.
5. Call the police.
6. Fetch your gun.

2. Imagine you open the door. It’s dark, and a light rain has recently stopped. There’s a man at the door. He’s reasonably well dressed, but has torn the pocket of his trousers on something. He’s not obviously drunk or high. He starts to tell you a somewhat confused story involving a broken down car. Do you:

1. Listen politely.
2. Shut the door on him.
3. Tell him to go away.
4. Threaten to call the police.
5. Close the door and actually call the police.
6. Fetch your gun.

3. Imagine you have allowed him to finish his story of woe. He tells you that he was at a restaurant with friends, but that his car broke down, and that it seems the battery is cracked and he doesn’t have the cash to go to the nearest store and get a replacement. He begs you for some money, promising to give it back as soon as he can. He offers to leave his military ID with you as some kind of collateral.

Suppose for the sake of this exercise that the amount he’s asking for is of no consequence to you; that you could blow that much on CDs and not have to think about it. Suppose you also have a pretty good idea that his story doesn’t really hold up, and that you’re very unlikely to see the money again. Do you:

1. Give him the money anyway.
2. Give him the money, but insist on collateral.
3. Shut the door on him.
4. Tell him that you know he’s scamming you, and that he should go away.
5. Threaten to call the police.
6. Close the door and actually call the police.
7. Fetch your gun.
8. Dear god, please don’t tell me you actually gave him money, you idiot.

You don’t have to give your reasoning, and there are no prizes.

This one time, right, I printed something using CUPS on a Linux box, right…and it actually printed!

No, really!

I didn’t have to rsync the file across to the Mac and print it from there. Printing on Linux actually worked. I swear I’m not making this up.

(And yes, I’ve tested the printer URLs, and they’re correct.)

I’ve been happily running Debian on my ThinkPad for over a year, probably the longest time I’ve ever kept a single OS on the thing. Or rather, I had been until Saturday. Saturday is when I decided to update my X.org.

I’d had some problems with X.org before. Debian Testing upgraded to X.org 7.0, and it turned out the ATI FireGL T2 drivers in that were broken. So, no fancy new X.org 7 for me until 7.1, I thought, which was a shame because the new ATI drivers in 7.x provide full hardware acceleration, including 3D.

Still, updates were to be had, so I went ahead with what I expected to be a routine point release upgrade of 6.9. However, it turned out that the packaging of X.org has been rearranged, along with the system directories.

Result: no X.

I tried running the autoconfig, which has always worked in the past. It didn’t work, couldn’t find the perfectly ordinary USB mouse either. I upgraded everything else via apt-get upgrade and rebooted, and discovered a ton of errors now appeared during boot. I spent an hour or so dicking around before coming to the conclusion that the system was hosed in a way which would probably require some kind of reinstallation.

This isn’t my first moment of dissatisfaction with Debian. PAM was broken for months, I’m not sure if it has even been fixed yet. Sound stopped working a couple of months ago. It seems as if somehow along the way ‘testing’ has become ‘unstable’. Perhaps it’s because of the pressure to speed up the release cycle–but then, I don’t see any new stable releases on the horizon.

So, it was time to weigh options. Debian Testing had just burned me badly, so that was out. I could stick with Debian, reinstall Sarge, and live with no accelerated graphics until the next Debian release, which could be years away. I could try the IBM Linux image, which is based on a well-known commercial Linux distribution that I’m not a big fan of. Or, I could try something else.

The new distribution all the cool kids are running is Ubuntu, so I downloaded and burned a CD and booted it. All the ThinkPad hardware worked first time, including Bluetooth, ATI graphics with 3D acceleration, sound, and ACPI power control. So, it looked as though Ubuntu would give me the Debian base I liked, with the advantage of a release schedule measured in months rather than years, and accelerated graphics.

However, Ubuntu is based on GNOME, and I’ve been a KDE user in recent years. There’s a KDE-based Ubuntu variant (Kubuntu), and also one that runs the XFce windowing environment (Xubuntu). I tried all three.

GNOME is nice and simple in appearance, but it’s a terrible RAM hog. KDE has chronic optionitis, but has lots of handy programs; but I thought about the programs I run all the time, and realized that only one is actually built for KDE–the others are all GTK-based.

Then I tried XFce, which is GTK-based, and noted that I could run XFce and Firefox together and use less RAM than just the KDE desktop. So, XFce was ahead. When I noticed that XFce showed file sizes correctly but GNOME didn’t, the deal was sealed.

Next problem was to back up all my user data. I went on a cleaning out spree, burnt a DVD of old stuff I hope never to need again, and shrunk everything down to under 30GB. I used rsync to back it all up to our MP3 and e-mail server temporarily.

Then, I decided to be daring, and used resize_reiserfs and GNOME partition editor to make space for a new root partition, turning the old partition into /home. This allowed me to install Xubuntu without wiping my home directory.

I just finished confirming that I can get the VPN working, so I don’t have to go into the office in the morning. I’ll get Eclipse and all the other work stuff going again tomorrow.

OK, I think I now realize why I’m the only one surprised that digital photography has changed things so much.

Dan wrote:

In my experience, most people can’t count on getting more than 2-3 usable prints out of a roll of 27 shots.

Wow. If I only got 2-3 usable shots out of a roll, I’d have given up photography a long time ago.

Let’s consider our recent Extreme Squirrel Feeding outing. 21 shots. 6 were duplicates, i.e. basically the same shot as another one, and I picked the best. 8 were worth uploading. So that’s about a 50% hit rate.

For the Vegas 2003 photos, if I eliminate panorama pieces there were 91 shots initially. 7 duplicates leaves 84, and I uploaded 38. So again, about 50%, as there are a few that are perfectly good photos but just weren’t relevant to the narrative so didn’t get uploaded.

If I go back to film, the hit rate is higher, as I was more careful not to waste shots. I’m trying to shoot more with digital, but old habits are hard to break.

Partly, I think it’s that I put quite a bit of thought and planning into photos. I’ll often walk around and look at something from different angles and different positions, evaluating the light and so on, before picking the place I want to take the shot from. At that point there’s not much need for multiple exposures. Other people seem to take pictures from wherever they happen to be standing when they get the idea, and then they’ll move and realize there’s a better angle and take another photo, and another, and so on.

I don’t know which approach is better. Taking lots of shots might result in unexpected great images, and might be better for learning. On the other hand, you don’t always have the luxury of multiple takes, so sometimes you need to get ready and be in the right place ready for the photo. Plus, of course, there’s still a cost even to digital photos–time taken downloading, examining, and so on. I quickly learned that you can’t judge whether a photo is any good based on how it looks on the camera’s LCD. At best, you can eliminate a few that are so bad that the defects are visible even on the LCD.

The latest LiveJournal Abuse Team abuse is “nipplegate”. Someone on the Abuse team decided that female nipples were offensive. When this was challenged, the terms of service were promptly rewritten to retroactively justify the decision. (Which, if you’ll recall, is something I suggested as a resolution for my disagreement with the abuse team, and something they rejected out of hand and claimed wasn’t possible.)

If anyone had any hopes that the purchase by sixapart would lead to a little more maturity and professionalism from LJ Abuse, it seems like that day is a long way off. They claim that a total ban on female nipples is essential, but that pictures of a dead baby with congenital defects are OK.

A bunch of people have temporarily deleted their journals in protest. I’m sure that’ll achieve precisely nothing; save LJ money on bandwidth as a protest? Who thought that one up? If you want to protest, take your content elsewhere. But I’m doubtful anyone will do that, though it does seem as if the number of active accounts on the system has started to drop.

Anyhow, I mention this because coincidentally, I’ve just finished migrating my Vegas pictures and writeups. The pictures are now on Flickr, you can find the writeups via search or tags. In particular, back in 2004 I wrote:

Which brings me on to the subject of breasts. They seem to be a major source of fascination in Las Vegas. You take an otherwise tired concept like a bunch of women dancing on stage, add a sprinkling of tits, and magically you have compelling entertainment.

I notice that one of the shows has two versions. During the day you can see the clothed edition, which is billed as suitable for children of 5 and up. In the evening, there¿s the topless version of the exact same show, which you need to be 16 to see. From this I deduce that young American children will be traumatized if exposed to the sight of human breasts; presumably they are all bottle-fed, which would also explain their later fascination with watching Vegas showgirls.

Ah, those funny Americans and their bizarre puritanical ideas. I remember being amazed back in 1997 when I discovered that Victoria’s Secret airbrushed the nipples from the photos of women modeling their products. Then again, since breasts can shut down an airport and cost a TV station $550,000, maybe it’s best we try to protect children fromlearning about them.

Wait, what am I saying? They’re just breasts. Get over it, America.

Now that I’ve been participating in Flickr for a while, I’ve realized that digital technology has fundamentally changed the nature of photography. Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places, but I don’t recall seeing any discussion of this amidst the hype about Things Digital.

On the face of it, digital cameras shouldn’t have been that big of a disruptive factor. Film cameras were so cheap they were given away as promotional items, whereas digital cameras were hundreds of dollars. (Still are, if you want a decent one.) Minilabs had brought 1 hour processing to the world, and dropped costs to around 30¢ a picture. It’s not like there was anyone who needed to think about the expense involved in taking a particular shot.

Of course, there’s an immediacy to digital; you can print your photos in a minute or two, and you can print a single photo without waiting until you finish a roll. Yet film got there first, in the shape of Polaroid, and look what happened to them. Also, printing your own digital photos is expensive—you end up eating up any cost savings you made by shifting from film. Also, if you’re lazy or forgetful like me, you let images collect on your memory card and download them once a week.

Is it the Internet that has been the catalyst of change? Again, I’m not really convinced. People had flatbed scanners long before they had digital cameras, and plenty of people still dislike viewing photographs online, in spite of the superior image possible from a computer screen.

So it seems as though digital photography doesn’t really offer anything all that radical; just a combination of minor improvements. Yet somehow, digital photography has led to radical changes.

First off, it has changed the nature of the subjects people take photographs of. As a child, I was lucky enough to be given a camera and plenty of film. I started off taking pictures of objects that I found interesting—close up pictures of toys, the grass under my feet, and so on. It didn’t last, though. I don’t remember whether it was explicitly communicated to me, but I quickly learned that the primary purpose of photography was to record pictures of people grinning while standing in front of famous places.

Now, though, everyone seems to be reconnecting with the childish glee of being able to record any small piece of the world they see, and show it to other people. With a digital camera, people somehow feel free to photograph a discarded beer can, a rusting sign or the bruise on someone’s leg.

The second big change is commentary. Partly it’s the fact that you can access the photos immediately, but I think a lot of it is that you have a natural way to associate comments with the picture, without having to start a scrapbook. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

My mother used to write on the back of prints with a pen. This was less than ideal. With a ball-point pen the smooth front surface would often get visible markings, and the ink would generally rub off all too easily.

With digital photos online, the commentary can be more of a shared, social, collaborative experience. And you don’t need to turn the photo over to see the words.

The third change is that photography has been democratized. Yes, professionals can often do a better job, turning out photos of consistently high quality; but it seems as though with persistence and lots of experimentation, all kinds of ordinary untrained folk are capturing occasionally stunning images. Maybe they don’t know how, but that can come later.

The final change is the sheer mass of images available to everyone to look at. This is really a side effect of big change #1, that people take pictures of everything now, combined with the existence of handy Internet web sites. Want to see a picture of (say) a steam train, a glass of water, a capybara, or a sock? There are hundreds on Flickr, and if you run out there you can try any of half a dozen other photo sites, or Google image search.