The latest incarnation of deviantART, one of the largest online artist communities, is out but this release, like all the others throughout the years I’ve been there, is more focused on “sleekness” and having a cool interface than adding real features.
deviantART still is missing the point in a few important issues: crappy RSS support or no API or similar among other things.
There’s no way to embed deviantART elsewhere, I can’t put my messages or my contacts photos on my Netvibes, I can’t put deviantART News on my Google Reader, I can’t use data via a public interface to create things like a desktop uploader or a cool mashup. In other words: deviantART is closed, outdated and monolithic and is clearly missing how the Internet is evolving, and a fine example of that is their FAQ item #335:
Are RSS feeds available?
to be updated……….
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Heather, besides designing the cool theme used on my tumblog, does a pretty nice job in sewing photos together (a.k.a. panography). And fortunately she does it quite often.
The Eclipse Project is home to a quite reasonable amount of sub projects, the list keeps growing every year, so to help the end-user the Eclipse Foundation arranges a simultaneous yearly release of Eclipse and all sub projects. Ganymede is the 2008 release, following Europa in 2007 and Callisto in 2006, and it contains Eclipse’s latest version (3.4).
Eclipse Ganymede
Thomas Hawk, photographer and one of the minds behind Zooomr, posted an interesting post in his blog where he explains his process of handling the hundreds of photos taken each day. While not being exactly “rocket science” it’s interesting to check the workflow of a professional, whose archive nowadays is bigger than 5 TB, and compare it to our own because, as an amateur photographer, my organizational and handling problems are about the same, but in a much smaller scale.
My workflow nowadays is built around the fact that my everyday operating system of choice for some time has been Linux, which can be cut down to this:
- Using F-Spot (recently I preferred it over Picasa because it’s a Gnome native application) I import all the photos in my memory cards to a Incoming folder in my storage device, I rarely delete photos. F-Spot already organizes those photos into folders with “year\month\day” structure, something I use to do by hand, so this keeps the bulk data roughly organized per date. I’ll do some basic tagging here also.
- Quickly browse the imported photos and develop the ones “somehow interesting” with UFRaw, (I’ve been shooting exclusively in RAW for some time). I don’t have the huge amount of photos Thomas has so I don’t use the intermediate Maybe, I just rely on the different versions created by F-Spot.
- Basic processing in Gimp, 95% of the time is things like Levels, Curves, Noise Reduction, Saturation and Unsharp Mask.
- The output of previous step goes to a Processed folder, which contains lossless JPEG files (sometimes in a slightly smaller resolution). This is the starting point for the final touch, if any (most of the times is extra processing like a fake lomo look).
- Pick some of the photos Processed folder and publish them to my Flickr and Zooomr accounts, usually the tagging and geotagging is done here.
- And that’s it!
One of the differences I’ve found whe comparing both workflows, where I feel I could improve my own, is tagging and geotagging. I mostly do this in photos I’m about to publish, most probably because I’m lazy guy, but I’m facing the fact that doing it on an earlier stage highly improves the ability to browse and search larger collections, something I’m already in need as mine is reaching a point where is becoming hard to manage.
A photography workflow evolves throughout time, adjusting to someone’s needs and preferences, mine changed a lot in the last couple of years when I decided to shoot RAW and use Linux on my desktop, and this is the current iteration of mine, which will probably evolve in the future (having a decent Lightroom in Linux would be a fine reason to change it a little).
And that’s all!
My Photography Workflow [Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection]
PS - I guess this post also could be called “Photography workflow in Linux only using with Open Source tools”
I’ve been a long-time fan of Launchy, and most of the other application launchers out there, for some time. And now I found out another good use for this neat little tool:
Launchy Utility: Easily start, stop, and restart Windows services [labs.atellis.com]
Technorati Tags: keyboard launcher, launchy
Some time ago I wrote about GetHashCode method and now Paulo Morgado has also faced some “hash related” issues to deal with (also in Portuguese). Again, the reminder should be not rely heavily on GetHashCode.
Lately I’ve done most of my photo processing with Gimp, which meant no decent noise removal tool for some time (despite being a great app this is one of Gimp’s handicaps). Fortunately I stumbled upon GREYCstoration a free plugin, as in “free beer” and “free speech”, that brings top quality noise reduction to Gimp, probably the best around right after “camera profile oriented” tools like Neat Image.
Denoising with GREYCstoration [Linux Photography]
Managers and many other marketing or management people tend to use buzzwords a lot, more often than it should be, and web 2.0 probably is the most misused of them. Whenever that happens, and if the reference article is way took long to read, there’s a little simple way to explain what web 2.0 is about, with the added bonus that already paves the way to what’s web 3.0, which will probably include Mahalo-like search engines or “intelligent” FriendFeed services to filter and create a context to the huge amount of information things like Facebook or Twitter flood us everyday.
Explaining Web 1.0, Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 [Resourceful Idiot]
Technorati Tags: mahalo, friendfeed, twitter, web20, facebook
Recently I ran into some unexpected, and rather strange, issues on an application server using the Enterprise Library 2.0 Cache Application Block. Apparently there were occurring some strange collisions while retrieving the data from CacheData (the table where the cached data is stored) where the same cache key was having multiple entries, something the Dictionary container where the data is stored isn’t too happy about. The guys at Patterns and Practices, for performance issues, don’t use the cache key as a primary key for that table, but a much more efficient and more easily “indexable” integer, which, in this case, is being calculated using the GetHashCode of the cache key. Usually the GetHashCodeimplementation isn’t a fully blown hash algorithm (unlike the more robust MD5 or SHA) so I allways doubted of the uniqueness, particularly in this case where the application server was moved from a 32 bit to a 64 bit architecture, nothing a quick trip do the good old MSDN wouldn’t confirm:
Remarks
The behavior of GetHashCode is dependent on its implementation, which might change from one version of the common language runtime to another. A reason why this might happen is to improve the performance of GetHashCode.
This basically means you shouldn’t trust GetHashCode, because the result for a given string can, and surely will, be different depending where you are calculating it, namely between 32 and 64 bit architectures. The main lesson to be learnt here is GetHashCode, either for String or any other type, should only be used for disambiguation of entities in runtime.
All those Portuguese speaking interested in Scrum followers now have a place to share thoughts, experiences and everything else Scrum related, yet in a very early stage.
Scrum em Português
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