My mother used to say that ‘laughter is the best medicine’. This picture of a good friend in jovial mood confirms that. It was taken with my trusty old Leica M4. It’s astonishing how unobtrusive this ancient machine is: people genuinely don’t seem to notice it.
From Matt Williams’s review of the Bic Crystal ballpoint pen that he purchased from Amazon.co.uk…
Since taking delivery of my pen I have been very happy with the quality of ink deposition on the various types of paper that I have used. On the first day when I excitedly unwrapped my pen (thanks for the high quality packaging Amazon!) I just couldn’t contain my excitement and went around finding things to write on, like the shopping list on the notice board in our kitchen, the Post-it notes next to the phone, and on my favourite lined A4 pad at the side of my desk.
My pen is the transparent type with a blue lid. I selected this one in preference to the orange type because I like to be able to see how much ink I have left so that I can put in another order before I finally run out.
When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.
I have a helpful tip for you that you might not know about – if you let the ink dry for a few seconds you can avoid the smudging that sometimes happens if you rub the ink immediately after writing. Fortunately the ink used in this particular Bic pen seems to dry very quickly.
On the third day of ownership I went on a trip to London and took my pen carefully packed away in my brief case, but I needn’t have worried, this isn’t some temperamental ink pen that leaks when you store it at the wrong angle. I sat at my meeting and confidently removed the cap from my pen and it wrote flawlessly, almost immediately…
Interestingly, “1,408 of 1,417 people” found his review “helpful”. Who said irony was dead?
Google is taking aim at Wikipedia…
Google Knol is designed to allow anyone to create a page on any topic, which others can comment on, rate, and contribute to if the primary author allows. The service is in a private test beta. You can’t apply to be part of it, nor can the pubic [sic] see the pages that have been made. Google also stressed to me that what’s shown in the screenshots it provided might change and that the service might not launch at all…
If they do launch it, then the emerging comparisons with Wikipedia will be intriguing. GMSV has a thoughtful take on it.
Now you may be thinking, “Don’t we already have a collaborative, grass-roots, online encyclopedia … Wiki-something?” Indeed we do, as the Google guys are well aware, since Wikipedia entries tend to show up in that coveted area near the top of many, many pages of Google search results. But Google’s plan is based on a model that highlights individual expertise rather than collective knowledge. Unlike Wikipedia, where the contributors and editors remain in the background, each knol represents the view of a single author, who is featured prominently on the page. Readers can add comments, reviews, rankings, and alternative knols on the subject, but cannot directly edit the work of others, as in Wikipedia. And Google is offering another incentive — knol authors can choose to include ads with their offering and collect a cut of the revenue.
Some see this as a dagger in Wikipedia’s heart, but from a user perspective, I think they look more complementary than competitive, both with their weak and strong points. Search a topic on Wikipedia and you’ll get a single page of information, the contents of which could be the result of a lot of backroom back-and-forth, but which, when approached with a reasonable degree of skepticism, offers some quick answers and a good jumping off point to additional research. Search a topic in Google’s book of knowledge and it sounds like you’ll get your choice of competing knols all annotated with the comments of other users, and if there are disagreements or differing interpretations, they’ll be argued out in the open. So it’s the wisdom of crowds as created by readers vs. the wisdom of experts (or whoever is interested enough in glory and revenue to stake that claim) as ranked by readers. I can see the usefulness and drawbacks of both.
Where this does represent a threat to Wikipedia is in traffic, if Google knols start rising to the top of the search results and Wikipedia’s are pushed down. Google says it won’t be giving the knols any special rankings juice to make that happen, but the more Google puts its own hosted content in competition with what it indexes, the more people are going to be suspicious.
All kinds of interesting scenarios present themselves. It’s not just the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of ‘experts’. It’s also the Jerffersonian ‘marketplace in ideas’ on steroids. Just imagine, for example, competing Knols on the Holocaust written by David Irving (and I’m sure he will submit one) vs. one written by Richard Evans or Deborah Lipstadt.
Shot with a 200mm lens in an idle moment.
I went to a couple of very good lectures the other day — by Etienne Wenger and Yrjo Engestrom. Before the show started, however, this mysterious message was flashed onto the screen. What could it mean? That it was disgraceful to be seen in such company? It’s a truly idiotic notice.
Spotted on the desk of the colleague who is currently editing my stuff. Surely it can’t be that bad? According to Wikipedia, strychnine is a very toxic, colorless crystalline alkaloid used as a pesticide, particularly for killing small vertebrates such as rodents.
Richard Williams is not impressed by the decision to appoint a new England manager with such indecent haste.
Capello is one of the great club coaches and his brusque intelligence may just be what this generation of England players need. If England are going to employ another foreigner, he is as good as they come. But did the FA really need to seize the time quite so urgently?
Here was the opportunity to recognise the failure to reach next summer’s Euro 2008 finals as a real blessing, albeit in very heavy disguise. A period without competitive fixtures could have been used for rigorous consideration of the factors that have led the England team to such a pass, in particular the terrible paucity of plausible English candidates for McClaren’s job. This is the major fault-line running through the foundations of the English game, and the FA would have done well to acknowledge it by avoiding the temptation to make an instant high-profile appointment, announcing instead its intention to search for a radical solution…
I am chronically uninterested in sport, but I love intelligent writing. Which is why I read Richard Williams.
Vivid account by Bridget O’Donnell, a mother who happened to be on holiday in Portugal in the same group as the McCann family when their daughter was abducted.
We lay by the members-only pool staring at the sky. Round and round, the helicopters clacked and roared. Their cameras pointed down at us, mocking the walled and gated enclave. Circles rippled out across the pool. It was the morning after Madeleine went.
Six days earlier we had landed at Faro airport. The coach was full of people like us, parents lugging multiple toddler/baby combinations. All of us had risen at dawn, rushed along motorways and hurtled across the sky in search of the modern solution to our exhaustion – the Mark Warner kiddie club. I travelled with my partner Jes, our three-year-old daughter, and our nine-month-old baby son. Praia da Luz was the nearest Mark Warner beach resort and this was the cheapest week of the year – a bargain bucket trip, for a brief lie-down…
It’s a very good piece, which makes no attempt to exploit the experience. And she donated her fee to the Find Madeleine fund.
Interesting comment by Feli Di Giorgio in a Lightstalkers discussion.
Digital has lower noise (grain) and better color accuracy, especially in mixed light.
Digital ‘sees’ deeper into the shadows and film handles highlights better,
Film negative has greater exposure range, 10-18 stops depending on whom you believe.
Digital has more dynamic range than slide film , but less than negative. With the exception of the Finpix S5 Pro, pretty much every DSLR on the market delivers about 8 stops of usable dynamic range. Usable being the keyword here. The Finepix S5 PRO gets 10 stops, because of it’s high dynamic range SuperCCD, but it’s only 6MP.
Film also tends to have greater color resolution, but that is changing as manufacturers up the resolution of their A/D circuitry, which will also increase the useable dynamic range. There is a noticeable difference between the results you get with a 12bit and 16bit A/D converter.
One reason why the M8 may deliver more film-like images is due to it’s use of a CCD, rather than a CMOS chip. CCD’s tend to deliver images that have a more film like quality.
I’ve seen tests where the 16MP Canon 1Ds MkII runs neck to neck with a 6×7 negative and delivers less grain over 400asa. The film negative will have better tonality and greater dynamic range.
But in the end they are different media, like oil paint and acrylics. I prefer the look of Tri-X, so that’s what I shoot. Sometimes digtal is the better choice. I just use the tool that offers the best solution for the job.
Fascinating glimpse by SecureWorks of the inner workings of a spamming botnet.
With the help of Spamhaus, we were able to not only shut down the command and control server, we were able to obtain the running software from the server, written in the Python language. Examining these showed that the Srizbi botnet is actually a working component of a piece of spamware known as “Reactor Mailer”. Reactor Mailer has been around at least since 2004, and is in its third major version. Versions 1 and 2 likely used proxy servers to relay the spam; however, since this is not as efficient as template-based spambots, version 3 was created along with Srizbi, the bot that actually does the mailing.
Reactor Mailer is the brainchild of a spammer who goes by the pseudonym “spm”. He calls his company “Elphisoft”, and has even been interviewed about his operation by the Russian hacker website xakep.ru. He claims to hire some of the best coders in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, the post-Soviet confederation) to write the software. This claim is probably true – by examining details in the source code, we were able to identify at least one of the principal coders of Reactor 3/Srizbi, a Ukrainian who goes by the nickname “vlaman.” Various postings by vlaman indicate he is proficient in C and assembler, and would certainly be capable of writing the Srizbi trojan.
Reactor Mailer operates with a software-as-a-service model. Spammers are given accounts on a Reactor server, and use a web-based interface to manage their spam tasks. In the case of the Ron Paul spam, there was only one account on the server in addition to spm, which was named “nenastnyj”.
We loaded the Reactor Mailer software onto a test machine in order to recreate the interface as seen by the spammer…
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.