Puppet warp in CS5

Interesting to see how this works with high resolution files. Content Aware Scale introduces way to much artifacting so I have no faith in Content Aware Fill. This might be useful though.

On a side note, how long till we have a icon which denotes a picture as a Illustration versus and real Optical Photograph?

Print is dead, long live Print.

Popular Science+ – Blog – BERG

Working with the Popular Science team and their editorial has been wonderful, and we’ve been working together to re-imagine the form of magazines. Art direction for print is so much about composition. There are a 1,000 tiny tweaks to tune a page to get it to really sing. But what does layout mean when readers can make the text disappear, when the images move across one another, and the page itself changes shape as the iPad rotates?

We discovered safe areas. We found little games to play with the reader, having them assemble infographics in the act of scrolling, and making pages that span multiple panes, only revealing themselves when the reader does a double-finger swipe to zoom across them.

Bad content will not work in this context. I think we may be able to merge what was great about old media, great art, design and well written content with the instant always on internet culture.Very interesting to see how this plays out.

Soon to be.

The iPad Launch: Can Steve Jobs Do It Again? - TIME

It is possible that the public will not fall on the iPad, as I did, like lions on an antelope. Perhaps they will find the apps and the iBooks too expensive. Maybe they will wait for more fully featured later models. But for me, my iPad is like a gun lobbyist's rifle: the only way you will take it from me is to prise it from my cold, dead hands. One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker's Guide that humankind has yet devised.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1976935-4,00.html#ixzz0jsoyT6fS

As soon as you stop thinking of it as a computer, you kinda realize that this thing is gonna be awesome.

St. Francis Dam

Three minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam catastrophically failed. There were no eyewitnesses to the dam's collapse, but a motorcyclist named Ace Hopewell rode past the dam and reported feeling a rumbling and the sound of "crashing, falling blocks," after riding about a half-mile (800 m) upstream. He assumed this was either an earthquake or another one of the landslides common to the area, not realizing he was the last person to have seen the St. Francis Dam intact, and survive.

Dam keeper Harnischfeger and his family were, most likely, the first casualties caught in the floodwave, which was at least 125 ft (38 m) high when it hit their cottage in San Francisquito Canyon, approximately 1/4 mile (400 m) downstream from the dam. Forty-five minutes before the collapse, Hopewell, the motorcyclist, also reported seeing a light in the canyon below the dam—the dam itself did not have lights—suggesting Harnischfeger may have been inspecting the dam immediately prior to its failure. The body of Harnischfeger's wife was found fully clothed and wedged between two blocks of concrete near the broken base of the dam; their six-year-old son's body was found farther downstream, but Tony Harnischfeger's body was never found.

As the dam collapsed, twelve billion U.S. gallons (45 billion liters) of water surged down San Francisquito Canyon in a floodwave, demolishing the heavy concrete walls of Power Station Number Two (a hydroelectric power plant), and destroying everything else in its path. The flood traveled south down San Francisquito Canyon, flooding parts of present-day Valencia and Newhall. The deluge then turned west into the Santa Clara River bed, flooding the towns of Castaic Junction, Fillmore, and Bardsdale. The flood continued west through Santa Paula in Ventura County, emptying its victims and debris into the Pacific Ocean at Montalvo, 54 miles (87 km) from the reservoir and dam site. When it reached the ocean at 5:30 a.m., the flood was almost two miles (3 km) wide, traveling at a speed of 5 miles (8 km) per hour. Bodies of victims were recovered from the Pacific Ocean, some as far south as the Mexican border.

Was talking with the Chimney repair guy up here about this the other day. Pretty interesting story. Here is a NPR story about it The St. Francis Dam Disaster on NPR as well.

Adobe on Mac Gripes

kung fu grippe

Yes, I do hate to bag on software developers, but, Jesus. If I were one of Adobe’s Mac guys (and, obviously, if I had the resources and mandate to do so) I’d do any of four-ish things (And yes, I realize trying to do all of them at once is paradoxical and impossible. Pick one.):

1. Start over. Not really exactly start over. But stop acting like these iterations around shuffling product lines and bolting on new bits of functionality is getting you anyplace good. Act like you’re inventing new apps for what people need today. For the OS people use today. Learn from the indies. To use a word that I’m allowed to invoke exactly quarterly: innovate. (See also: Lightroom) 2. Strip the shit out of everything. Cut down on cruft, chrome, gold plating, menu diarrhea, and all the other things that make Adobe apps feel like a carnival ride you’d NEVER put your kid on. Yes, be an auteur, but also be a mensch. Apply your own version of 80/20 rules to everywhere it applies. Viz: Does anyone use “Plastic Wrap” as much as “Unsharp Mask?” Okay. Then why are they on equivalent menu levels? Make it clear what’s really important but then (ala Quicksilver) also learn to bubble up what we each use the most.1 3. Stabilize. You know. The slow launches? The long saves? The crappy performance? The crashing? Yeah. Stop that. 4. Be nicer to us. Man, if you make software, you never want to be on my “Groan Pile.” That’s the apps that make me Groan as soon as I realize I have to launch them. MS Word is not only the President of Groan; it’s the 4-term FDR of Groan. But, Adobe makes some promising dark horse candidates for the next election cycle. Because, with Adobe apps, everything from installation through activation through re-activation through software updates through more re-re-reactivations through (HEY! more updates!) is like a giant rectal exam. That I paid for. Or maybe more like a weekly trip to the DMV where I’m confronted by a manic-depressive clerk who always thinks I’m lying about my age and eyesight. Swear to God, guys; I bought the fucking apps. See? And the updates? Wow. You should check out this new thing called “Sparkle.” It’s a Mac thing. Really catching on. Apps update and you don’t even have to go to the DMV every week to do it. Cherry. One (sometimes one of the extremely few) of the benefits of the annoyingly rabid Mac community is that we do talk to each other a lot, and we do absolutely have equivalents of pro wrestling’s faces and heels. Right now, Adobe is not regarded as a hero. No. Right now you’re the heavy guy from some country we don’t like who’s always with the folding chairs. Maybe you don’t want or need to be a hero to a bunch of portly men in Daring Fireball t-shirts. That’s understandable. And, in which case, yes, this is all beyond irrelevant. But, I’m assuming you want to do the right thing and that you want to reclaim your rightful place of honor within the community that, frankly, helped make you (yeah, I know you’re big competitors now, rah rah).

Holy crap, if you only knew how much Photoshop crashes on me everyday, you would weep. Everything I want to say is summed up in this link.

Snow Leopard, The Ars Review.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review - Ars Technica

This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a "time out?" I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.

Many of these same developers applauded the "150+ new features" in Tiger and the "300 new features" in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?

It probably helps to know that the "0 New Features" slide came at the end of an hour-long presentation detailing the major new APIs and technologies in Snow Leopard. It was also quickly followed by a back-pedaling ("well, there is one new feature...") slide describing the addition of Microsoft Exchange support. In isolation, "no new features" may seem to imply stagnation. In context, however, it served as a developer-friendly affirmation.

If you have the time this will sum up a lot of what is going on with the new OS X update, Snow Leopard. It's all about the back end and making things more stable. My take on the new upgrade?

Don't.

As always, wait till the first patch a month or two down the road before installing this on any workplace based machine. So far I have seem reports of it not working well with Xrite color monitors (Eye One Match), Wacom preferences, Quicken and others. Any Pref Pane app that is 32 bit will cause some problems as well.

Sadly, the pissing match with Adobe continues as Apple blames Adobe and Adobe blames Apple for the problems. People are reporting CS4 is unusable with Snow Leopard which I find amusing as CS4 is unusable in 10.5.8 anyways. The Open GL GPU bugs really rear their heads in Snow Leopard and I imagine the old Carbon Photoshop just hates everything about 64 bit and Cocoa (Yes, I just simplified the hell out of this fight. Not dipping my toes into that flame war thankyouverymuch.)

So this update is all about the back end and unseen revisions to how the OS actually works. It makes the programming for the Mac all the easier and programs work faster, provided they are programmed to take advantage of these new changes. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is the key to this if you want to read up. So the real benefits to Snow Leopard will start to show when programs start updating to take advantage of the changes (Possibly with "Snow Leopard Only" programs coming down the pipe feeding into the Mac "upgrade every two years or die" product cycle they are so fond of now a days).

Snide aside, could be a interesting update down the road especially if Adobe plays nice for once. But as I said before, wait on any updates to your work stations.

Maybe if I get some free time later in the week I'll do a post on how Adobe is the new Quark itching for some company to make a functioning Photoshop clone and clean their clock with it. Does anyone under 25 even know what Quark is? Under 30?

Twitter versus Blogging.

Who ever thought that blogging would now be thought of as "long form" writing? Thanks for making us bloggers feel all grown up Twitter, we all owe you a big thanks. Plus, you have siphoned off the diary bloggers who can now Tweet about their breakfast without the need for a web browser. Not that I have anything against Twitter or blogging about breakfast for that matter. I have been the "single link" poster boy here for awhile now as well, so there ya go. But the difference between these two are what is interesting to me. Twitter is a mobile app in that it is made to be written and read on cell phones and the like. Blogging to me is like being in the Library. I want to roam and find new stuff and generally wander. As a young lad I spent many a afternoon in the Public Library wandering the aisles looking for poetry and art books. The nature of the internet constantly reminds me of this and the good blogs being a signpost to more interesting stuff.

Twitter on the other hand is direct personal updates often with no connection to anything else. Often of a very personal twist. A blog can link to other articles to numerate on a point and all sorts of other goodness. The nature of a Tweet is just that, "TWEET!" and gone. Which is great, not my thing mind you, but I think it's great.

Of course the pink elephant about this discussion is Iran and what has happened there. The very mobile nature of Twitter and the tie into phone communications makes it impossible to just shut off. This has proven it as a great documentary medium for current events that would otherwise be lost. It has also been key in organizing protests and the like. This has proven Twitter transformative without a doubt and defines it as something "New That No One Expected".

See this Onion piece for example (and lulz):

"SAN FRANCISCO—Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran."

Which is all amazing and insane and people much smarter then me need to parse this information and tell us what it all means. But getting back to the Twitter versus Blogging point here, I think it could possibly be the application that makes using the internet "Old Fashioned".

"And then, oh mah gawd, he like, sat down at a desk and opened a browser?! I mean who does that?!"

Is the computer desk / laptop the nostalgic "Dad at the table with breakfast and a newspaper" for the early internet folk?

Of course, 95 percent of blogs are essentially abandoned and 10 percent of the Twitters users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. So this is all hot air anyways and I am going to make a egg sandwich.

I'll post pics on my Photolog after I get done updating my Facebook profile.

Pocket Wizards at 1/8000th of a sec!

So I received my Mini TTi and Flex TT5 yesterday and have been testing and testing and testing. Here are some pretty exciting results all shot at 1/8000th of a second! I am using Profoto ComPact-R 300r's with the Flex TT5 plugged into one of those with the Mini on top of a Canon 5d Mark 2 to trigger it all. Then just for kicks I put up my old Vivitar 283's with some old 1970's era Wein slaves in the mix as well. As you can see from the behind the fan shot, all are being captured at 1/8000th of a sec. Feel free to check out the files and see for yourself if you don't trust my screen shots. They are also on the Pixelrust Photostream as well if you want more data. There does seem to be a touch of fall off on the camera right side of the frame but nothing that is a deal breaker.

I was chatting with the esteemed and accomplished photographer Mike Powell (they won't know I'm lying Mike!) and his thoughts on it are that the gear I am using is crappy (thanks Mike you jerk!) which means the flash duration is way longer then with good gear. So the actual strobes themselves are probably at around 1/500-1/800th of a second in duration which makes it easier for the Pocket Wizards to be in the sweet spot during the shutter release at 1/8000th. Go go crappy gear!

Also, this fan is called "Finga Choppa!" for good reason. This little guy moves at a good clip.

Also, these are test pics man, cut me some slack on the crappy lighting!

Click on the pics to see them bigger.

[gallery link="file"]

Photomatrix HDR studies

I have been doing HDR work for some time now, but after this weekends studies I thought I post some of my thoughts on it. Here are some screen grabs of a side by side comparison between a 'conservative' use of Photomatrix and one done with hand masking. Photomatrix is on the left.

[gallery link="file"]

Notice how on the overall view you may be fooled into thinking this actually looks good? Notice all the artifacting in the views at 100%? To me, that is ugly as hell and not something I am into. Plus, the HDR appears smeary because of the slight breeze at the time. The plants move and the software can not cope with that. But this also brings up why I think HDR is such a blight upon Flickr. No one prints their HDR shots. They process the shit out of them in Photoshop and then post them with no intention of printing.

Of course, I could be dating myself by saying I print my work. For all I know, that is a very old timey concept.

Hmmm...

Is it just me or is fffound, reddit and digg suddenly filled with the same crap over and over again instead of new content? What is afoot? Are the Corps moving in and rehashing themselves with scripts instead of user generated NEW content?

I think I found a fix!

Macintosh Performance Guide: Configuring Photoshop

Bigger Tiles is critical

The Bigger Tiles plugin in particular is absolutely critical to performance. Using Photoshop CS4 11.0.1, I measured these bizarre results with and without Bigger Tiles on both a 2.8GHz 2008 Mac Pro and a 2.93GHz 2009 Mac Pro Nehalem. I confirmed with Rob-Art at barefeats.com that same behavior; the culprit seems to be the Smart Sharpen function, which runs far more slowly without Bigger Tiles.

I ran into this page yesterday and since installing these plug ins CS4 has stopped it's constant crashing. Oh man, I spent hours on the phone with Adobe tech support and never got a good answer. I rebuilt this system from the ground up to try and resolve the crashing. So if you have problems with Photoshop CS4 crashing constantly, try installing these little guys.

On a side note, some other things I have recently learned:

Itunes Genius function will crash your itunes on launch if you are not connected to the internet. My ISP went down on Saturday and that meant no music for me since it would not launch. Turn that crap off. Good luck on turning Genius off if you have no internet by the way.

If you highlight a word on the New York Times web site you will get a little question mark that will open a definition of that word. Pretty slick.

Not Paradise by the dashboard lights

Disable Dashboard | Utilities | Mac OS X Hints | Macworld

There may be other reasons you’d rather not have Dashboard available. For instance, if you run a lab of Macs in a school, you may not want the students wasting all their work time on the Asteroids video game widget or watching the (I am not making this up) Goblet of Fire movie release date countdown Widget. If you’d like to disable Dashboard, for either RAM usage or other reasons, here’s how to do it. It requires a trip to the Terminal, in /Applications/Utilities, but it’s not too hard to do.

How to kill the Dashboard once and for all!

In praise of booooze.

' I drink, therefore I can', Prospect Magazine issue 158 May 2009 - Printer Friendly Article

The Colorado study tested the DNA of moderate-to-heavy drinking students to determine whether they had the G-variant gene. They were divided into two groups accordingly, before having alcohol injected directly into the bloodstream (to eliminate differences in absorption rate). Those with the G-variant produced a slightly different version of what is known as the mu-opioid protein, which elicits a stronger response in the brain. As a result they reported stronger feelings of happiness and elation after their shot of alcohol. This initial euphoria is usually followed by a longer state of relaxation, lasting several hours. For those with the G-variant, this period aids the creative process. Perhaps the odd additional tipple might be needed to keep the fire burning, although too much further consumption douses the flames prematurely, inducing lethargy.

The effect of alcohol on this group is not the same as an opiate. The euphoria is much less pronounced than, say, heroin, while alcohol still exerts depressive effects. A drink too many and the soporific effect predominates, overwhelming the endorphins and sending even the G-variant drinker to sleep. This may be why Francis Bacon, by his own admission, worked well after a few drinks, but not when drunk.

The creative effect of alcohol, then, seems to involve a delicate counterpoint between stimulation and relaxation. Unlike some side-effects of drink, such as its tendency to make some people morose or violent, this endorphin release is positive and pleasant to behold. People with this gene variant also seem more prone to alcoholism, perhaps engaging in an increasingly vain pursuit of the highs they used to experience after the first drink or two.

There once was a saying uttered among my friends in younger days, "There ain't nothing I do I can't do better drunk."

Now the saying is more along the lines of, "I need a nap."

The moral? Don't get old. Great link though....

Drobo, uh oh.

Are you familiar with Drobo? That link gos right to the support page because you are going to need it if you own one. Google "Drobo won't mount, but shows up in Dashboard". Basically, it disconnects and then won't remount but I can see it in the Dashboard app. I can even get it to blink it's lights at me and see it in Disk Utility app. But it won't mount come hell or high water. To fix it I shut down the computer, unplug the firewire cable from the Drobo, wait for it to go to standby mode (one light), then unplug the Drobo power cord. Wait 20 seconds or so and plug the cord back in to power it up. Meanwhile I boot up the compter and launch Dashboard. Once the Drobo is done booting I plug the Firewire cable back in and have 60% chance it will show up. Repeat if it does not. Not exactly fun.

This time after doing this I get some Dashboard red lights saying it's going to take 100 hours to rebuild and data protection is in progress. The tech support person blames the new WD Caviar Green drives. Saying any of them could be bad. So by their logic you are adding more possibilities for failure by having more hard drives in a RAID? Really? Is that not the opposite reason for running a RAID?

I also found out that Drobo uses a proprietary RAID system. So if it does crash, you can't get your data back witout another Drobo bay to plug them into. Not cool. Time to go back to a bank of mirrored hard drives as a back up. One fails I can pull it and still have data. I have been using eSATA Drive Enclosures by Mac Gurus for about 5 years now and have never had a hiccup. Been using Drobo since Sept 08 and have had to call tech support 3-4 times and now I have a serious system crash on my hands that I can't do anything about for 100 hours till it gets done with it's rebuild.

This Drobo does not inspire confidence. If a car keeps breaking down you are not gonna take it cross country on a road trip. The Drobo keeps breaking down, I don't trust it with long term storage needs.

And to people who say RAID is not backup, yeah I know, but it's part of my redundancy here and I use it as my library in Lightroom and iView Media. So shush. The idea of having to rebuild those libraries over the weekend while finding another back up solution to phase out the Drobo is not fun.

A life well wasted

A Life Well Wasted

Robert Ashley wonders why he spends his free time playing videogames, asks random people on the street about it, talks to a researcher whose work attempts to harness the brain power wasted on gaming, gets to know an eccentric, forward-thinking game designer who lives sustainably with his family of four on $14,000 a year, and gets a first-hand account of what it’s like to work on terrible games (and what it’s like to get terrible reviews) from an anonymous game developer.

ScribeFire goes to the dark side

ScribeFire, Zemanta, and a hidden tracking image at Simon Scullion

A comment on Brent’s blog explained how to deselect this “option” in the ScribeFire settings, under the ‘Publishing’ tab, look for ‘Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel for statistics gathering’.

So I noticed scribefire adding this shit to my posts recently and a little googling came up with this nice gents site explaining it and how to kill it. The offending gif it loads is "zemanta-pixie-img". Thats just not cool to me. If it plugs this code into all my posts there is nothing stopping them from changing that into a banner ad.

Bad Scribefire, very bad. Now go to your room.

The rise of smart drugs

A Reporter at Large: Brain Gain: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

And yet when enthusiasts share their vision of our neuroenhanced future it can sound dystopian. Zack Lynch, of NeuroInsights, gave me a rationale for smart pills that I found particularly grim. “If you’re a fifty-five-year-old in Boston, you have to compete with a twenty-six-year-old from Mumbai now, and those kinds of pressures are only going to grow,” he began. Countries other than the U.S. might tend to be a little looser with their regulations, and offer approval of new cognitive enhancers first. “And if you’re a company that’s got forty-seven offices worldwide, and all of a sudden your Singapore office is using cognitive enablers, and you’re saying to Congress, ‘I’m moving all my financial operations to Singapore and Taiwan, because it’s legal to use those there,’ you bet that Congress is going to say, ‘Well, O.K.’ It will be a moot question then. It would be like saying, ‘No, you can’t use a cell phone. It might increase productivity!’ ”

From Metafilter.

And I do not know where I stand on this. One side of me wants to throw the towel in and just say the Rat Race is officially past me by and fuck it. Now you have to take drugs to get ahed in the job market? BAH! Then another says, wouldn't it be great to get my brain fired up like it was when I was 16? There is a scary and a fun side to it but knowing human nature I'll go with the scary side prevailing.