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So! I've had my camera for a few days now, and I'm incredibly happy!
I've found it to be crazy sharp, and with really really low noise (crazily, if you use NR for long exposures), and it's just very impressive, overall! I'm still getting used to the controls, and I've made some mistakes because I don't pay enough attention to settings that I've changed previously, but I'm catching on (everything I need to know is on the little LCD on the top!). I'm also surprised that I quickly adjusted (and enjoy!) having to use the viewfinder for everything!
I managed to get some good shots:
- Sunset through the June 10th storm — JPEG RAW
- Water drops on a geranium, or something — JPEG RAW
- Grasses in the window — JPEG RAW
- Amy at the Falls — JPEG RAW
- The Mill by the Falls — JPEG RAW
- Airplane over Winooski — JPEG RAW
- Pepa eating ice cream — JPEG RAW
- Daisies on the deck — JPEG RAW
I've been shooting everything in continuous mode, as RAWs, so I've taken a lot of pictures already (almost a thousand, worth many gigabytes!), but I've only kept about a tenth of that. I should slow down, though, so I have stuff to do when I start up a variant of APAD (I'm thinking more like a summer-bounded year of pictures once a /week/, instead... more time for quality, less difficulty making a book, etc.). I'll get more details about that out there sometime in the not too-distant future — I'll probably start around July 1, but I really don't know! So my camera's been epic so far... there's only a few things I've noticed are a problem. One, I've completely lost the ability to do close-ups. I don't have a macro lens — it's on my list of things to get, but it's pretty far out there because it's so expensive (the very nice looking, manual focus, 55mm f/2.8 Nikon Micro lens is ~300$, which is crazy... well... apparently it's not crazy, but it feels crazy to me, so I'm going to wait for a while!). The other is that I have no time-lapse function, nor the ability to keep the shutter open for more than 30 seconds. These were both quite commonly used features of my last camera, for me... I made dozens of time-lapses and took a good number of star-trails pictures with the 8700 (which the incredibly noise-free D80 would be insanely much better at!). Luckily, the D80 comes with both infrared and wired shutter controls, which dad and I are going to have to rig up to work. I think wired would be better, if only because I don't know where I'd put a little IR box when outside doing night exposures (also because it's much more obvious how you're supposed to hold the shutter open with the wired control!). Problem is, I don't know what kind of connector the camera requires... I don't recognize it at all... The last thing I have to grab some time is a wide-aperture prime lens — I've been told (and have read, time and time again), that this is really the single most necessary lens (besides a standard happy zoom lens), because it's so much faster, and supposedly literally noticeably sharper than anything else... but someday! This was actually on my spreadsheet when I was initially deciding what to get, but I went with just the absolute minimal order when I went to make the purchase, for now! Anybody with other suggestions? I dunno :-)
Guesses? Hopes?
- OS 10.6: short babble, no PPC, yes 32-bit, yes Carbon.
- iPhone OS 2.0 (OS 10.6??): today.
- Cheap iPhone: <<< 300$.
Mostly probably things we aren't expecting. Hopefully everyone who's out there has fun :-)
2008.06.05 in code
These are here for Amy... drag them into your bookmark bar.
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Of note: the three title characters are not related in any way, except they were all a part of my day yesterday!
Firstly, and most-excitingly, thanks to Google, and mom, and dad, I purchased a Nikon D80 today! I simply cannot wait until it gets here... I've managed to read literally hundreds of pages of reviews and such and I'm very excited and happy and can't wait to see what it can do. Soooooooo excited — can'tcha tell?! The D80 replaces the Nikon Coolpix 8700 (don't immediately shrug it off because it's a Coolpix — for a point 'n shoot, that camera is astounding!) that Aunt Vivian graciously handed down to me a few years ago (first picture I still have appears to be from May 6, 2006, so pretty much exactly 2 years). That day was unbelievably important to me, because — before that, I'd never had a usable camera of my own (Kodak PalmPix for the IIIxe does not count!), and I'd just been handed something that would stay more or less attached to my hip for the next two years, recording countless memories (really, my memory is somewhat sketchy, so the pictures from this camera provide a great deal of my memory for me!) — almost 4000 pictures that I kept, in the end! (probably 10x that in total, because I use burst mode a lot!) So, while I most certainly have to thank Vivian for it, I'd say that it and I had an excellent run, especially through APAD'07 and all! This (outside a nursing home in Waterloo, ON, Canada) is probably the picture from this camera that gets the most 'wow's, but if I had to pick a favorite, I'd come back with about 150 pictures!
Second thing! I've got a much more stable, git-based workflow for working on Evas now, and I've even gotten the framework of the Evas-Quartz (without GL) engine sitting there! This is where the bulk of the summer's work goes, so I'm glad to have sat down and gotten that worked out. In addition, rectangles, polygons, and lines draw and animate properly! It was really awesome the first time I got the rectangles to draw, despite the fact that moments later they were animating over top of the window decorations... Text is working, to some extent, but I'm currently using an unacceptable text API (the built-in CoreGraphics one) which is so underpowered that it doesn't even support Unicode. I've got to move to ATSUI, but that involves reading lots of documentation and learning things I've never had to deal with before. I suppose that's sort-of the point of this, though, no? That might be tomorrow's job, since I know I'm not going to get much work done whichever day my new camera comes! EDIT: apparently there's a new CoreText API in Leopard. I think I'll use that instead!
The last bit — the Ma Bell bit — is that either AT&T recently added, or I recently noticed, the ability to download your call data in CSV (per-month). This meant I could clean up my call data grapher quite well (no more screen scraping means it actually works now — they broke it in January!)... so here y'all go. Figure it out on your own! My graph is below the jump!
I'm throwing this up here just for fun... it doesn't work entirely, but the general gist of things works. I feel much more comfortable with the Evas source code now than I did at the beginning of the week, but this is really just a start (considering this really isn't related at all to my final project).
Also, unless you, yourself, put the test app in an application bundle, moving and focusing the window won't work. I'll make that automatic sometime soon...
A patch!
2008.05.30 in code
Here's my (slow, naïve, resource hungry, stupid) implementation of Conway's Game of Life in a Mac OS X screensaver. Source here.
Don't use it on a laptop — it'll suck your battery dry. Don't use it on big displays (it works on my 1440x900 MacBook Pro on battery power just fine, but heats up one of the cores almost completely), it'll be slow. Basically, I'm just posting it here ... for fun. I know there's a billion better ways to do Life. Maybe someday, but not today!
I've gotten quite a bit further along with my first deliverable, the evas-gl-quartz port (using Carbon). Focus works now (though it needs to be wrapped in an application bundle — apparently this is a requirement). Keyboard input works, text drawing works (I'd accidentally commented out a bit too much!), the code is much cleaner. I haven't done mouse input yet. Things I've learned:
All this code (keyboard input, bundle making, mouse input, etc.) goes in Ecore. The test program (e17/libs/test/orig/evas/) doesn't use Ecore, because it's just an Evas test, so I've had to write all of that code directly into the test program. I've been doing that, because it will make writing Ecore_Carbon and/or Ecore_Cocoa (I still haven't exactly determined what's up here, nor talked to the people I need to talk to to get this working) much easier!
Performance is great! Just as smooth (which is, to say, perfect) as the OpenGL-X11 port, though the complete smoothness isn't apparent in the video.
2008.05.27 in code and music
I've recently been merging a few different music libraries together into my iTunes library on my laptop, so I was interested to see what sort of growth my library's had, over time. I whipped up a quick Perl script (which you can grab yourself, here — though you'll definitely have to modify it to work on Windows). I plotted the data from my library with Mathematica, and got this:
There's now a cleaner-but-less-succinct Objective-C version, and its source. The built version (first link) will run and then just disappear, having created 'music-chart.csv' in your home directory, which is a CSV of: (UNIX date, iTunes Library Count) pairs. You can chart it with anything that can chart pairs... Mathematica works (ListLinePlot[Import["/Users/hortont/music-chart.csv"], PlotStyle->Thick]); Numbers might, but I've seen it do nasty things (you have to manually set minimum and maximum X values, or something...); gnuplot will definitely work...
YAY! Here's EVAS drawing to OpenGL-on-Quartz!
I have some issues...
1) I can't drag/resize/focus the window. At all. I don't know why.
2) I'm currently using Carbon to create the window. That's kind of awkward because of the semi-deprecated state of Carbon in Leopard... that would prevent us from ever having a 64-bit Evas-on-OS-X application. I would like to use Cocoa, of course. For one, that would greatly reduce the amount of code required; secondly, it would probably fix #1 without any fuss; thirdly, it would fix the 64-bit problem, and be much more forward-compatible. However, I really can't fight with Autotools any more today, so I won't be getting Objective-C into the mix today, so... no Cocoa! Perhaps tomorrow. Or next week. Or something!
3) No input. This might be because I can't give it focus, but I think the fact that I don't handle input is also why I can't focus the window. Catch-22!
2008.05.21 in code
I mentioned yesterday that I made up some random math for Autolocate. The exact thoughts behind this escape me at this point — I had been awake for well over 24 hours when I found myself in Commons (our dining hall) with my computer and a bunch of printouts on Bayes' theorem (?!? I don't think this applied in the end, and might not have been related at all!)... and a preliminary version of the following equation:
^{2}}{.03}}}{\sum i} "p=\frac{\sum i\cdot e^{-\frac{(c-i)^{2}}{.03}}}{\sum i}")
Where i is the ideal network strength, c is the current network strength, and you sum over the set of networks. I think I came up with 0.03 (it's the factor that changes the width of the bell curve) by playing around with stuff in Mathematica until the curves looked right (who knows what that means!) I quickly implemented it, and created a small test application that I played around with for a few more days (this is the code I mentioned in the previous post)... here's a partial implementation, which seems to work:
+ (float)partialProbability:(float)c withOptimal:(float)i
{
return powf(M_E,-(powf(c-i,2)/.03));
}
+ (float)locationProbability:(NSDictionary *)testLocation
knownLocation:(NSDictionary *)knownLocation
{
float totalProbability = 0;
float count = 0;
for(NSString * key in testLocation)
{
if([knownLocation objectForKey:key] == nil)
continue;
totalProbability += [ALController partialProbability:
[[testLocation objectForKey:key] floatValue]
withOptimal:
[[knownLocation objectForKey:key] floatValue]] *
[[knownLocation objectForKey:key] floatValue];
count += [[knownLocation objectForKey:key] floatValue];
}
if(count == 0)
return 0;
else
return totalProbability/count;
}
Full source (but don't expect to be able to use it, it's a complete mess...)
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