aperture 1.1 vs lightroom b4

finally i have the hardware to run aperture and lightroom side-by-side. my current preliminary view is that aperture really is a better thought-out working photographer's tool, with lightroom running hard to overcome a panic "beta" release [help me develop this now; you can pay me later!] with a surprisingly clunky and unimaginative interface/flow. [must be nice to have so many photo(shop)graphers on the side who are now writing and bubbling about lightroom. several books with boring images already in preparation...]

i would like to do a real review later, though not until i put several thousand images through both of these and bibble. [alas my usage of lightroom will only continue until the end of beta...]

[after i wrote this note, i discovered that apple upped the ante with the release of aperture 1.5... and i just thought of a way adobe can still win the day: just open-source lightroom...]

feature hole theory of design

interesting if not entirely edifying discussion of closures in java, from jag's blog entry titled black hole theory of design. i suppose closures in java would be useful in providing less clumsy functional dispatch mechanisms, but as in ruby and perl et al. the mechanism is just another mechanism, a plangbling, a fan-feature. it will not play a fundamental role, [as suggested by the theory] influencing the other core elements of the language, or its implementation. it is simply too late for that. is it worth its complexity budget? hmm, how else can java possibly compete with gruby?

big shrug...

[oblink: the lambda papers. i thought these would be coming out in a book form, but i have no idea what happened. rpg did not respond...]

r6rs, almost...

latest draft of r6rs released. [as a scheme implementor, i wish this fine language mattered more. instead, its imitators with clunky syntaxes and bad libraries get all the fanfare...]

charlie nails it.

found in charlie's diary entry spinning the hamster wheel:

One of the dirty little secrets of the computing industry is that staffing ratios are supported by Microsoft. It takes roughly one support person per forty desktops in Windows environments (one person-hour per working week wasted on coaxing balky software into doing its job, is a more accurate way of describing this), while large-scale UNIX desktop installations have staffing ratios between 1:200 and 1:1000. But bureaucratic politics is such that in any organization, an inefficient department with forty employees has far more clout, prestige, and (ultimately) money assigned to it than an efficient department of four ... because most managers are woefully inequipped to judge the relative merit of computing proposals and interpret human activity as productivity, rather than as evidence of inefficiency. We have therefore fallen into a situation where less efficient solutions competing in the marketplace are preferentially selected.

[charlie, not having had a career in system adminstration, somewhat over simplifies. endless updating/patching/upgrading of N different favorite variants of a common unix derivative does not exactly support the nice 1/10 efficiency ratio he suggests. solaris shops, on the other hand, may support the argument better.]

a big checkmark...

second episode of house, cane & able, ends with a moving ballad:

gravity
is working against me
and gravity
wants to bring me down

next morning, i see a new album in my neighbourhood starbucks:
continuum, by john mayer.

flipped it around. the fourth song is gravity.

ah. good stuff, i thought i may order it online. visited chapters-indigo, and found it under new and hot music.

i feel like a big demographic checkmark in someone's spreadsheet.

recently noted quotes

So, when the intelligent design folks announce with great fanfare that the bacterial flagellum is too complex to be explained by natural selection...well, it's hard for evolutionary biologists to suppress yawns. -- joan roughgarden

the truth is, most people like clicking - they just hate waiting. -- marty neumeier [the brand gap]

growing up means creating a civilization that does the best for the most. -- david brin [ad astra, 2004]

to install adium, drag the duck to your applications folder. -- adium installer

there are a few experiences that those of us who are filthy rich with it just don't repeat, and bathing a cat while drinking peppermint schnapps comes to mind for reasons i'd rather not discuss right now. -- daniel gilbert [stumbling on happiness]

although often a useful writing technique, passive verbs also advance effects without cause, an immaculate conception. to speak of ends without means, agency without agents, actions without actors is contrary to clear thinking. -- edward tufte [beautiful evidence]

if a person is poorly, receives treatment to make him better, and then gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health. -- peter medawar

real sysadmins ...

have a way with their passwd files...

# cat >> /etc/passwd
z1:x:999999:999999:xanadu-z1:/tmp:/opt/extras/zoneshell
^D

[found it somewhere on softpanaroma. reminiscent of the
way real programmers write C programs...]

one, one two, check, check...

blog check check, one two three... testing, testing...
[sun community blogs not picking up mine...]

[update: it picked up the test. will it pick the next one?]