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Using shutter speed to change the look of moving water

27 Aug

I visited the Indianapolis downtown canal district a couple of weeks ago to take some pictures.  There is a waterfall at one end of the canal where an old set of locks used to be.  I used the opportunity to experiment with the looks you can create with flowing water using shutter speed.

If your shutter speed is really fast, say 1/250 of a second or less, you will see every stray drop of water caught in a moment of time.  I like to call this beaded water.  Here is an example:

Beaded Water

On the other end of the spectrum, using a slower shutter speed, say 1/30 of a second or more, will result is a smooth image where the flowing water blurs together.  I like to call this curtain water.  The example:

Curtain Water

For the rest of the canal pictures, visit the photos page.

 
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Posted in Photography

 

More on Microblogging

25 Aug

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned my belief that a big part of the problem that microblogging sites are having with scaling is the result of their design being primarily that of a content management website and not that of a messaging system which, I believe, is the more proper model.  I thought, after listening to last weeks FLOSS Weekly, that Laconica was taking a step toward this approach.  I’ve had some time to browse their website, and, they too are still primarily designed as a website.  I can understand their rational:  They want to scale through federation, so they want people to run individual sites for small communities.  To achieve this, they’ve come up with a design that will run on the lowliest of shared web hosting sites.  Finding a hosting service that allows you to run your own daemons and setting them up is much more complex than installing a PHP website.  It’s too bad.  A lot of what they are building in PHP is already in existing or drafted XMPP Specs.

As long as the sites size remains under, say, a few thousand simulataneous users per server, I think this approach will probably work okay if coded efficiently.  However, I still believe that to scale the true national service size companies like Twitter aspire to be, you need a tiered architecture with the subscriptions and routing handled in the messaging server. That server then feeds real-time track searching engines and the database which feeds the website.

 
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Posted in Software Development

 

What Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, et. al. are missing

24 Aug

Leo Laporte hosted a very interesting round table on TWiTLive after taping this week’s TWiT about the current state of microblogging and the direction it should take in the future.  Leo taped it, and I believe he plans to post it as a podcast.

It was an interesting conversation and one of the things that became evident quickly is that microblogs are different things to different people and that people’s views on what they are evolve overtime.  For many people, they are simply a sindication service of their friends posts.  For others, it’s really an IM system with a public datastream that can be mined in interesting ways.  The former crowd are happy with the current state of things; the latter found that Twitter lost all of its usefulness when the XMPP interface and its track command went away.  I fall in this latter camp, and I think that the current set of closed ecosystems will never be able to scale to google or yahoo size bacause they are designed as database driven websites first, possibly with a messaging system tacked on.

The other thing I found interesting was how much time they spent talking about federation between services.  This is part of the XMPP specification.  It is a problem that has already been solved if everyone will just talk XMPP.  In fact, because any XMPP server is essentially an XML router, it has the capability to support multiple message schemas simulaneously.  This would allow you to, say, route the text message from your Pownce feed to Twitter, as they are compatible, but not pictures, videos, or longer message that are not.

I’m encourage by the direction projects like Laconica are taking.  This are designed as messaging systems first.  Thus, providing that datastreams the can drive the websites, search engines, and special purpose clients that will eventually meet the needs of both camps.  In the end, I hope that somehow an open pipe can be created between these closed systems.  It will result in richer conversations and more complete data mining.

 
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Posted in Technology

 

I Loves some Audible

17 Aug

I’ve always loved audio books.  They give you the opportunity to read while doing some thing else:  driving, housework, exercise, etc.  As a teen, I had the entire 5 book trilogy of Douglas Adams “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series on tape, and I basically wore them out.  To this day, I can still quote entire chapters.

Fast forward to the Ipod age.  Now, I can have dozens of books on a tiny flash mp3 player that will run for dozens of hours on a single charge.  Audible.com was the first in the space of digital downloads for books.  They supply iTunes and they’re now owned by Amazon, so they are probably there to stay.  I recently signed up, and I must say I love it.  It is kind of expensive, and it breaks my rule agains buying DRMed material.  However, I haven’t been reading much  in the last couple of years, and this allows me to squeeze some reading in during my exercise time.  It’s nice to be reading regularly again.

Here’s to hoping Amazon can convince the publishers to shed the DRM.  Honestly, the book reading crowd isn’t a bunch of freeloaders.  We’ve always purchased our books, and human nature says those folks aren’t going to go giving the books away.  If Audible ever folds and I’m stuck with books I can’t listen to, you can tell me I told you so.  But for now, the benefits outway the possible drawbacks.

 
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Posted in Books, Fitness

 

Cycling Route for 8/9

09 Aug

Wow, what an awesome day for cycling!  Is was partly cloudy and cool…well, the mid seventies, which is cool for this time of year.  I rode up past the Fishers airport and up Eller Road to River Road.  I took that up to Noblesville.  There, I had to stop for water…I really need to get a Camelback, because I was already dehydrated by the time I stopped.  I continued up to Cicero, stopping for a rest at the Morse Lake park.  I continued out 234th from Cicero to SR 37.  I took that back down to Noblesville, and then Lantern Road back down to Fishers and Castleton.

morse-lake

 
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Posted in Cycling

 

Problems in Education: It isn’t about money

03 Aug

While catching up on last week’s news, I ran across this op-ed piece in the New York Times by David Brooks.  He laments our dwindling lead in competitivenes and fingers our inability to maintain the education gap we enjoyed for much of the last century as the culprit:

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

Since then, we’ve been trying to buy are way out of the problem, as inflation adjusted, per pupil spending has steadily marched up.  This, unfortunately, is doomed to fail:

In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

This is a societal problem which will require much more creative solutions than just raising my property taxes.  Although, in the end, that will probably happen too.

 
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Posted in Economics, Politics

 
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