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July 1, 2010 by graham

A response to Oxford Archaeology

NB This post should never have showed up in the blog feed; I never published it because my comment actually did make it onto the OA blog. A bug made it appear in the feed. Sorry for the confusion.

Slight digression from the usual photography-related content of this blog. Anyone not interested in Launchpad or my work as a developer should look away nowish. We’ll resume our usual programming shortly.

For those interested, please take a look below the fold.

The Oxford Archaeology blog has a post today ranting (their words) about Launchpad’s lack of integration with Open Street Map. I’ve tried to reply in a comment on their blog, but since my response is quite long, it has been classified as spam and will need to be dug out of their moderation queue. In the interests of open discussion, I’m posting my response here, too:

Disclosure: I am a Canonical-employed Launchpad developer, working primarily on the bug tracker.

Disclosure the second: I’m aware that you’re ranting a bit here, but I’m going to say this anyway.

One thing that you don’t mention here is where you think the resources to tackle this change should come from. Now, I don’t know the ins-and-outs of Launchpad’s Google Maps integration. What I do know was that developing it was a complex process; at the time it was written Google Maps was the only provider of the requisite mapping data that provided the features we needed.

The paid Launchpad development team is very, very busy. The part of that team that works on the areas that mapping touches is small and very, very, very busy. As Curtis Hovey of the LP Registry Team points out in a comment on the aforementioned bug:

The Registry team had a list of prioritised work, something must be dropped to undertake this issue. The Google Maps code was handed to us under the assumption it would be simple to integrate. It was not. We dedicated a developer to this issue for 1.5 releases. The cost was that team and project pages were not updated to the Launchpad 2.0 layout, nor have they been, because more urgent work was undertaken. There are new features and broken features that are more urgent then this issue–one of changing the implementation without adding for fixing Launchpad behaviour.

If someone from the community provided a drop-in replacement, I will review the code on my own time and work to get it merged into the tree. The behaviour is largely on the page, some deft updates to launchpad.js to support OSM/OpenLayer and GMap is the principle effort. Note that Launchpad is switching to YUI, and the script must be compatible. I will have to provide the code that toggle between GMap and the alternate maps code.

Now, yes, that comment was written over a year ago, but the amount of work that the registry team has to do hasn’t diminished, and nor has the cost of switching from one mapping provider to another got cheaper.

On a final note, if you look at the bug you’ll notice that it isn’t closed and hasn’t been for over a year. It’s has a status of Triaged and a priority of Low, which accurately reflects where this bug ranks on the registry team’s list of things to do at the moment.

I appreciate that it’s vexing to see proprietary solutions being used in open source software, but I’d ask that you appreciate that the decision to use those solutions in the first place was motivated by pragmatic principles. If the cost of switching over to OSM were cheaper I’ve no doubt that we’d have either done it by now or would have reviewed a set of community-submitted branches that made the switch. Either way, the Launchpad team is not being nearly as stubborn on this as you make out in your post.

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April 26, 2010 by graham

Sunlight, clouds, skipping, oh my

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t looked at my blog for the last few days, you’ll know that I shot a sports fashion set on Friday for Jenna Wilson, a stylist who found me through ModelMayhem.

As shoots go it was pretty good. Everyone was quite relaxed, if a bit cold, and Jenna knew exactly what she wanted from the shoot, which left me free to get on with the business of composing the shots properly (though it’s obvious to me that I haven’t done a full shoot for a while because my composition was pretty rusty for the first half of the shoot).

The main problem that I had was the light. Friday in Preston was overcast but still very bright. Okay, it wasn’t bright sun at midday – small mercies and all that – but I spent most of the time bouncing on the ISO button to see if Nikon hadn’t built in some secret way to get to ISO 50. Exposure was a problem, and with only small strobes – and no added batteries to give them a boost – f/11 was a place I could live in only if I didn’t mind tapping my feet for 10 seconds whilst everything recharged. The SB-600 got particularly upset at one point and just stopped dead, though it came back to life after I ignored it for a while; maybe it was in a sulk.

The aim of the shoot was to get some sporty fashion shots; we even mixed in some skipping for good measure. Rachel, our model, was an absolute trooper, and she continued to pose well after most people would have given up and left.

So all in all, good fun. Looking forward to doing it again. Here’s a slideshow for you (yes, it’s flash; sorry). 

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April 25, 2010 by graham

Quickly

I did a sports fashion shoot on Friday for a student stylist who found me through Model Mayhem (this social networking palaver pays off, you know).

I like the way the shoot turned out; out of 500+ frames I’ve got ~375 picks (useable shots) and out of those I’ve got ~130 selects (frames that I think are worth delivering). That’s a lot more than you’d normally expect (usually I work to a 10% ratio of frames shot to selects). I’ll put a slideshow of the best of them up here once I’m done post processing. In the meantime, here are a couple of quick edits. Click to enlarge.

Another quick edit

Quick edit

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April 18, 2010 by graham

gphoto2 + F-Spot = win

Whilst I’m waiting for my MacBook to work its way from Shanghai to my house, depending of course on when Iceland stops its geological sneeze or the European aviation authorities decide that the danger has passed, I decided to see if I could find the best solution for tethered shooting under Linux.

The advantage to tethering, if you’re not aware of it already, is that because the images are displayed on the screen of your laptop it’s much easier to check that they’re up to your standards. It’s far easier to check focus, notice an over-busy background or to make sure that your lighting levels are correct on a full-sized screen than it is staring at a three-inch LCD on the back of your camera.

It turns out that every solution I could find on Google utilised two things: gphoto2 (a command-line utility for interacting with cameras that offer PTP interfaces) and some image viewer or other, usually Eye of Gnome or gThumb.

Now for me, neither EoG nor gThumb were what I needed. The problem is that I shoot almost entirely in RAW. gThumb takes ages to render RAW images and EoG only ever seems to present a 160x130px thumbnail of them. Obviously this isn’t conducive to a smooth workflow.

I tried several things, including extending my gphoto2 hook script (I took the scripts referenced in this post and modified them to suit my needs) to only display JPEGs in the viewer and then shooting in RAW+Basic, but I couldn’t get anything to work satisfactorily.

Then, finally, after a bit of digging around in the gphoto2 man pages and playing with different image viewers, I hit upon the following solution:

gphoto2 --capture-tethered --hook-script=/path/to/view/script

Where the hook script calls:

f-spot --view $FILENAME &

For reasons I haven’t yet been able to discern, F-Spot is orders of magnitude faster than gThumb at rendering Nikon .NEFs. So although it’s not Lightroom 3, this will serve my tethering needs, at least for the time being.

I’ve put my version of the tethering scripts up on Launchpad if anyone wants them. To grab them, just run:

bzr branch lp:~gmb/+junk/tethering

And Bob’s your uncle.

Archive

April 17, 2010 by graham

Yes, yes, okay

So I ordered a MacBook Pro and then Iceland decided to sneeze all over Europe. This is what the UPS tracking system is currently showing my shipment. I assume I’ll receive it some time this side of May…

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April 14, 2010 by graham

In which your loathing is cordially told to sod off

You’ll remember, no doubt, that I wrote a while back about having a sudden and hard-to-define hankering for a MacBook Pro. Well, dear reader, my laptop refresh benefit finally arrives this month (Canonical workers are expected to provide their own laptop upon joining the company but the company pays for a new laptop every three years) and I’ve decided that yes, MacBook Pro it is. In fact, the order is already working its way through the bowels of Apple as I type; I was just waiting for the models to be refreshed.

In the end, I went for a 13″ MacBook Pro, with:

  • Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz (shame it wasn’t an i5 but I’m not too concerned about it)
  • 8GB RAM
  • 500GB HDD

The point of the machine is to pretty much become my replacement-for-everything machine. I’ll still keep my desktop hanging around just in case, but I forsee myself working on the laptop pretty much all of the time.

And to be clear about this, I’m going to be running Ubuntu on it. Firstly, because I need it for my job but mostly because it’s an OS I love using; I’ve no need to use OSX except for two applications, Photoshop and Lightroom. And if they could run natively on Linux and colour management wasn’t such a pain in the arse I wouldn’t have been thinking so hard about buying this machine.

Now I’m all too well aware, judging by the comments on my last post about this, and on the replies I got on an internal mailing list thread about the pros and cons of a MacBook, that I’m going to come in for something of a kicking about having an Apple machine and working for a company that produces open source software, so here’s a summary of my response, with apologies to Stuart Langridge:

Spare me your moaning; my give-a-shit is broken.

For those people inclined to consider things a bit more before sticking the boot in, there are two main reasons why I went for the MacBook over the Windows-running equivalent – a Lenovo Thinkpad x201 (which was a slightly, but not to me significantly, better spec).

  1. Price: With the configuration I purchased – though as I said the Thinkpad has a faster processor – the MBP was ~£100 cheaper.
  2. Ergonomics: In the run-up to this decision I played with both an x200 and a MacBook Pro. For comfort, and for general feel-under-my-hands as I was using it, the MBP won. Also, I dislike trackpoints on laptops immensely (I’m aware that others feel the same about trackpads, but I’ve always preferred them to trackpoints, which I can never get to work well for me and which give me wrist-ache).

But there was another reason for buying a MacBook Pro, and I only really realised what it was this evening whilst thinking about how to manage storage once I move to using my new machine as my main machine. And the reason was this: I deserved it.

See, like a lot of people I know, especially a lot of people in Canonical, which has a lot of very smart employees, I suffer from Imposter Syndrome. By which I mean that I often feel like I don’t deserve to be where I am in life, like maybe today is the day that I get a tap on the shoulder and someone tells me “that’s it, we’ve figured it out, back to writing shoddy PHP code for you.”

And the funny thing is that whilst I was trying to work out what system to buy I ran into the same thought process. The logic went something like this:

  1. You want a Mac because you want to be able to use Photoshop and Lightroom
  2. But you could use those on Windows just as easily
  3. And think about it, you’re never really going to use those tools for anything proper, are you?
  4. Because you’re not really a photographer.
  5. So buy a Windows machine; you’ll only wipe it anyway.

Now, you’ll have figured out by now that this logic is clearly bollocks, but it took me until today to spot it for myself. Luckily, my wife has more sense than I do, which is why she told me to JFDI and buy the damn MacBook.

So I have. And to make it clear: first person who accuses me of violating my principles gets a poke in the eye.

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March 22, 2010 by graham

Ben Wallace Responds

I’ve received a response to my letter about the Digital Economy Bill from my MP, Ben Wallace.

Dear Mr Binns,

Thank you for contacting me about the Digital Economy Bill.

I understand that you are anxious that the Bill is being rushed through Parliament by the Government in advance of the General Election. The Bill had its First Reading in the House of Commons on 16 March. The Second Reading date has yet to be announced, but you can be sure that I will take into account your concerns when I have an opportunity to vote.

After the Second Reading the Bill will be considered on a line by line basis in Committee and I know that my colleagues in the Shadow Business, Innovation and Skills and the Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Teams on the Committee will scrutinise the Bill in great detail and will continue to hold the Government to account on this issue. My Party will take every opportunity to ensure that the legislation benefits our economy as much as possible.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

BEN WALLACE

This is actually a lot more promising than I was expecting, especially since his last response to me was pretty much a form letter.

I’m in the middle of a sprint now so I don’t have much time to think about this properly; feel free to add comments with your thoughts and I’ll come back to it later.

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March 20, 2010 by graham

Mumblemumblegrumblemumble

Bloody Northern weather.

We’d planned the woodland shoot for today; I’ve found a model with whom I want to work, we’ve agreed TFCD terms and outfits and I know what I want to shoot. And then it tips it down. The forecast for this morning was for lots of rain throughout the day, so we called things off and postponed until next weekend. Of course, the weather’s now cleared up a bit, but I’ve no doubt that the location will be a bit on the boggy side, so it’s better to leave things and get something that really rocks next week. Shame though; I’d have liked to have shot in the fog that’s forecast for tomorrow morning. Maybe my Awesome Wife and I will go out and get some shots together; you never know.

I’m on my bike for work again next week, off to Norwich for a Launchpad Bugs team sprint, which Gavin blogged about yesterday. I love Norwich. It’s a very pretty city and it offers a lot of photo opportunities, as I found out a couple of years ago when I was there for another sprint after just having bought my D300.

This time around I’d like to shoot a lot more human beings, in between making Launchpad’s remote bug syncing rock of course, so if you’re in Norwich and you’re up for having your portrait made by a slightly-crazed hairy developer then feel free to give me a shout (blog@grahambinns.com; @grahambinns on Twitter or @gmb on identi.ca).

Hopefully I’ll have some great shots to showcase next weekend, assuming the weather co-operates. Until then, be good.

Archive

March 16, 2010 by graham

Another letter to Ben Wallace

With the spectre of the Digital Economy Bill looming large for everyone, and the BPI and others lobbying to have it passed without proper parliamentary scrutiny, I decided it was time to write, once again, to my MP, Ben Wallace.

Dear Mr Wallace,

I’m writing to you, once again, to express my deep reservations about the Digital Economy Bill and to ask you to do all that you can to ensure that the Government doesn’t rush the bill through parliament and in doing so deny us our democratic right to have the bill scrutinised and debated by our elected representatives.

This bill, as I’m sure you’re well aware by now, is nothing if not controversial. In its original form it was deeply flawed, and the amendment that the Liberal Democrat peers proposed which would allow for the blocking of whole websites that hosted “significant amounts” of infringing material was even more ill-considered – so much so that the Lib Dems themselves tabled a change to their own amendment.

However, the government has said that it will enact the changes itself during the wash-up process in the Commons in order to ensure that the bill continues its speedy passage through parliament.

As I understand it, this essentially means that the amendment may be passed without sufficient parliamentary scrutiny. What makes this particularly horrifying is that it has been shown that the text of the Lib Dems’ original amendment was almost word for word from a draft written by the BPI[1], hardly the most neutral of parties in the context of this bill.

Furthermore, a leaked memo from the BPI shows that they expect Parliament to pass these plans without debate[2]:

“[MPs] will have minimum input …¦ from this point on. …¦ John Whittingdate MP [DCMS committee] …¦ has said this week it [the Bill] could be lost if enough MPs protest at not having the opportunity to scrutinise it. Whist true in constitutional terms, the hard politics of the situation makes it seem unlikely …¦ Come the week of 29th March the main political focus is likely to be on the …¦ Budget”

I cannot urge you strongly enough to do your utmost to make sure that this bill is debated properly and thoroughly in the Commons. Whilst I’m aware, speaking as both an IT professional and a musician and digital artist, that our laws need to be changed to combat the spectre of copyright infringement by digital means, this is not something that should be done at the end of a Parliament, to be rushed through before an election.

You have previously demonstrated your commitment to openness with the voters who elected you by being one of the only MPs to make details of all their expenses available long before the expenses scandal reared its ugly head. I hope that you will do the same here, and ensure that the people that elected you have their voices heard in Parliament.

Yours sincerely,

Graham Binns

  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/11/digital-economy-bill-amendment-lobbyists
  2. http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/label-bosses-warn-debate-could-cost-the-disconnection

You should write to your MP, too.

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