This is the last blog entry here on WordPress. The archives have been moved back to my main site and my new blog entries will be moving there, too.

I’m going to leave a copy of the archives here because they’re well-indexed by search engines, but if you want to keep up on the latest, go here.

WebGUI looked good, but I couldn’t seem to get it working correctly. I tried a couple of other things, but none of those panned out, either. So I’ve decided to convert my main site back to Moin.

I used Moin on my main site back in the early 1.5-ish days and it worked rather well. I can’t remember why I changed, though it could well have been one of the many service provider moves I made. At any rate, Moin gives me the flexibility that I want, and I’m not terribly scared of Python if I want to get into some of the code that runs it.

I’ll eventually get my blog moved back there. While WordPress does blogs well I would rather keep everything together on one site. For some reason it gives me warm fuzzies.

On a whim I decided to have a peek about for a content management system that suits my needs. After a little poking about Freshmeat I came across WebGUI, which looks pretty interesting.

A couple of the obvious features I like are that it’s written in Perl and has a good security policy. Of course, TWiki is written in Perl and has a security alerts page, so that doesn’t guarantee much. WebGUI is shipped ready-to-go in binary form, and is ostensibly pre-configured, which I figure should save me from making too many foolish mistakes. Time will tell.

I’m going to give it a go on my main site soon. Photos don’t put themselves on-line!

I’ve started reading two new books today. The first is Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. The second is The New School of Information Security by Adam Shostack and Andrew Stewart.

I’m not much past the first chapter in either, but both seem pretty good so far. I’ll post my take on each when I have one.

Got a few good search terms to respond to again, so here goes:

twiki install centos 5.1: Don’t do it unless you know what you’re getting into. I had a bad security experience likely caused by Twiki, and I’ve seen a lot of people reporting similar experiences that they are convinced was Twiki’s fault. At the very least, google “twiki security” before you do it. The codebase is much too large for a single person to audit it in a reasonable amount of time. If you need a good Wiki in general, give Moin a try. Consider using a Wiki hosting service, where someone else has to worry about the security of the underlying machine. Or just don’t use a Wiki at all — unless you truly want what a Wiki in specific has to offer.

iphone unofficial toolchain easiest way: There is no easy way. There is drudge’s way that I point to in another entry, but aside from that I didn’t find any way that was at all easy. binutils can be convinced to generate (possibly-working) tools for arm-apple-darwin fairly easily, but I think GCC is a bit trickier. Don’t try to do it on your own unless you want to spend a lot of time making the tools work rather than using them.

do peanuts have gluten?: Nope, peanuts don’t have gluten in them. They may have gluten on them, though — it depends on how they’ve been processed or flavoured. When in doubt, read the label and assume that “spices” includes something gluten-based. I’ve seen some with and some without gluten, so have a look around.

Blogs written by programs suck. I’ve had a (relative) flood of incoming links from “blogs” that are nothing more than bottom-feeders wrapping excerpts from my blog with a machine-generated sentence or two around them. One was even a nonsensical machine-generated article (probably with a Markov chain, but with a lower-quality corpus of text than I’m used to seeing). They didn’t even choose any interesting entries to quote from (not that there are many of those here, anyway).

Maybe I’m just grumpy, but I’m thinking that FOAF needs an evil twin, maybe called DIAF, which would allow one to express their contempt for such a scheme.

According to the iPhone SDK ReadMe, the beta version of the SDK isn’t exactly ready to go on 64-bit systems. Given that I’m using a 64-bit system this may explain Error 34 and some of the other strangeness I encountered.

I’m also running into walls left, right, and centre in my plan to get GCC running on the iPod Touch. I had also forgotten about Perl’s perverse configuration process, which doesn’t lend itself easily to cross-compiling.

At this point I think I’m going to punt on building Perl for the iPod until the official SDK is released and I can get on the developer program. The fact that this will almost certainly take several months (until Apple is ready to accept non-Americans) is annoying to me, but there’s naught that can be done about it — I simply don’t have the knowledge to port GCC to the iPod, and that seems to be the most sane way to get these things going.

I managed to get a few more packages put together, and they’re available at https://www.kjwcode.com/project/idev/ with the first few. I’m at the point now where I can likely get start looking at gcc’s specific dependencies.

I’m trying to build bison for arm-apple-darwin and I’m running into a bit of trouble that looks like it originates in autoconf and/or friends. As configure runs, it checks for strndup to be declared and for it to be usable, and it claims it’s not declared but it is usable. The build fails with an unresolved symbol _strndup. The even odder part is that there is an implementation of strndup in the lib library, and it seems to get linked into libbison.a, but nm shows the symbol as being unresolved. This is probably due to some preprocessor magic going on in the implementation file.

Is there anyone out there who knows a bit about autoconf or how bison (or similar projects) fit together who can give me some clue as to what’s going on? I’m a total autotools newbie.

I’ll see what other deps I can pull together in the meantime.

I’ve started to build a few packages that will help me build Perl building on the iPod Touch. Rather than try to cross-compile Perl, I’ve decided to cross-compile what I need to get a development environment going on the iPod itself. It means much longer builds but much quicker total development time — or at least that’s what I’m hoping for.

So far I’ve got flex 2.5.35, libiconv 1.12, libtool 2.2, and m4 1.4.10. They’ve all been pretty easy, with the only hiccup coming when the flex build #defined malloc to rpl_malloc, apparently because the autoconf macros AC_FUNC_MALLOC and AC_FUNC_REALLOC set that up if they detect functions that aren’t GNU-compatible. Unfortunately, there’s no implementation of rpl_malloc or rpl_realloc available, so the build died when the symbols couldn’t be found in the libraries.

For the moment I’m just keeping shell scripts that patch files (where necessary) and run configure with the appropriate arguments. I’ll throw them up on my website tomorrow when I get a chance. I’ll update this entry with the link. If anyone has any advice moving forward I’d love to hear it — especially if I’m going about things the wrong way. I just have no clue when it comes to autoconf and friends.

Update: The first packages are up at https://www.kjwcode.com/project/idev/. More will be on the way.

After realising that the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK isn’t going to do what I want it to do yet, I am experimenting with various ways of doing what I actually want to do — run programs on my iPod Touch, not a simulator.

My first try is drudge’s HOWTO build the toolchain on Leopard, and it looks good so far, which is to say that I’ve got “hello world” running on my iPod. It seems to include everything you’d need.

The next big question is how to package things up for installation onto the device. For now I’m going to assume that people can scp things to their device and ssh into it (or use a terminal) to do the installation. I will likely get the Installer packages built eventually, though.

Using xcodebuild I figured out the command line to build a simple “hello world” in C for the ARMv6 in my iPod Touch. After scping it into place it faulted on me with a bus error. I don’t know off-hand if the ARMv6 can actually raise a bus error, or whether that particular error is overridden to actually mean something else entirely.

I also have no way of figuring out if the executable is able to find its shared libraries, as otool is conspicuously absent on the iPod, and I don’t know how to check out ARM binaries on my Macbook. My guess at this point is that the Aspen 1.2 SDK will only generate executables for OS 1.2 and higher, so 1.1.3 won’t work.

It occurred to me as I was reading through some iPhone/iPod Touch SDK information today that the whole SDK is geared towards iPhone OS 2.0 — Error 34 may be the Organizer’s way of complaining that the device isn’t running the expected OS.

If this is true, it’s something of a kick in the teeth. I’m sure I’m not the only person who was expecting to be given an SDK that was immediately usable on my device. I trust that a lot of experimentation by a lot of people will turn up some goodies, but for now I’m guessing that I’ll have to wait to use the official SDK. There is the off chance that code that doesn’t touch the UI or specific features of the device will still work — perhaps well enough to port Perl or similar. I’ll be experimenting with that this weekend.

So I got the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK downloaded and installed. Getting a sample app to run in the iPhone emulator is easy enough, but I can’t get it to run on my iPod Touch. There are two things I see getting in my way.

The first is that when I try to add an application to the iPod in the Organizer I get a message to the effect of “your mobile device has encountered an error” and the dialog specifies error code 34. I have no idea what this means yet, but I have a sinking feeling that it will only work with an iPhone, and not an iPod.

The second is that when I try to build the project for Aspen (as opposed to Aspen simulator) I get an error at the last minute about not having a code signing key. This I somewhat expected, but I also thought I should at least be able to put applications on my own device without having one. Typically, Apple is only allowing Americans to have code signing keys at this point, though they say that other countries’ developers will be included “in coming months”.

I’m feeling somewhat foolish for un-jailbreaking my iPod at this point. My only comfort at this point is that I’m not the only person struggling with it.

Update: The likely reason for this error is that the SDK builds code for OS 2.0.

Update: This seems even more likely, since programs built with the Apple SDK give bus errors when run on a device.

Update: If you want to get started building code that runs on a real device instead of the Aspen simulator, build a toolchain that will do the trick.

I managed to download the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK before the big rush, it seems. It’s en route between my workstation and my Macbook as I write. It’s a little over 2GB, so that process is taking some time over the wireless network.

I also scrubbed my iPod Touch, effectively de-jailbreaking it, now that I can install applications on it through the SDK. I would imagine most people aren’t going to go through the hassle of jailbreaking their iPods (though it’s pretty much mandatory for iPhones in Canada) and most of what I will do will target iPods simply because I don’t have an iPhone to play with.

I’ll post more as I find it out, but my first goal is to build Perl 5.10 for the iPod.

Since Perl 5.10 was released I’ve quite enjoyed the new CPAN experience through the cpan shell tool. I was enjoying it so much that I actually thought it was CPANPLUS. It wasn’t until I re-reread perl5100delta that I figured out it wasn’t.

I decided to do a new Perl 5.10 installation and take it from that point to my normal set of modules with CPANPLUS (conveniently packaged as the cpanp command). So far I’m completely won over. There are a couple of things to watch out for if you’re used to the usual CPAN shell:

• only the first letter of the command is checked, so if you try to “upgrade” you’ll wind up uninstalling
• upgrading happens using good old “install”, instead
• search results are numbered and you can operate on search results by the numbers (”i 4″ and so on)
• you can look at READMEs and so on without installing the package (yay!)
• as you might expect, it’s a dream to use with a local CPAN mirror

A few days ago I discovered a silly little bug in Terminal on OS X 10.5. It’s pretty easy to trigger:

• Open Terminal.
• Press Command-T to open a new tab.
• Press Command-W to close the new tab.
• Lather, rinse, repeat, and watch your window get smaller and smaller.

Each time you open a new tab Terminal steals a line for screen real-estate for the tab bar, and each time you close the tab the tab bar disappears and shortens the window by a line. It would be much better if it returned the line to the terminal session or did just about anything other than what it does. Fortunately, iTerm has no such issue.

Stevan Little recently dropped by my blog to comment on a couple of past entries. In addition to being a nice thing to do, it also brought a project I was working on back to mind. Though I’ve got some big plans for when the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK is released, there is still one project (code-named Pigeon) that I think Moose is a really good fit for.

Stevan pointed out that I hadn’t made any attempt to get help from the community before giving up on Moose. If you read yesterday’s post, you may not be terribly surprised. The point is a good one, though, and one I’m taking to heart.

I’ll point to Pigeon source drops when there’s something to drop.

Now that I’m done reading Geekonomics and have given it time to digest, I’ve got a couple of take-aways. One of them isn’t too much on topic with the rest of the book. In the chapter Doffing the Wizard Hats, the author suggests that:

As Steven Weber observed in The Success of Open Source, the Open Source movement has become a kind of Internet era Rorschach test.
People tend to see in the open source software movement the politics that they would like to see—a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian gift culture that celebrates an economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a virtual or electronic existence proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete nineteenth-century capitalist structures with new “relations of production” more suited to the Information Age.

While I nodded vigorously the first time I read the quote it hasn’t survived my thought on the topic unscathed. I’ve been a big fan of Open Source and Free Software (the last time in this article I will capitalise the terms) since before I could lay hands on it, I don’t see it as a political expression. Open source has always been a practical issue to me.

From the time I booted Linux 0.95a on my 386/SX-20 I have been ever-thankful that free and open source software is available, and like many people (especially younger ones), I did try to turn it into a political expression. Hating Microsoft was as much about political posturing as it was a protest of the shoddy treatment I had received as a user of their software. I had been ticked off when they took away the ability to switch the option character (from ‘/’ to ‘-’, which let us Unix-types use ‘/’ in pathnames), and I certainly wasn’t any more impressed when future DOS versions and Windows began to eat away at my (then-) copious free time, forcing me to spend more time kicking the OS and less time doing what I really wanted to do. As with any mistake in life, be it tight acid-wash jeans in the 1980s, strange musical tastes, or a penchant for too much beer, it’s something I look back on with a mixture of relief that I know better now and foolishness for having fallen into that habit.

Apparently not content to let Microsoft-bashing be the highlight of my political life, I also got somewhat into the free software vs. open source debate. The debate is far from over for a lot of people, but it’s not something I’ve paid attention to in a number of years. Other silly free software debates I was wise enough to be (mostly) quiet about were gcc vs. egcs, Perl vs. Python, Gnome vs. KDE, and quite a few more grassroots attempts to make mountains out of molehills.

Various other political scenes have come and gone in the past several years. “Forking is what open source is all about” vs. “forking is evil” battle, the “everyone should work on MyFaveProject and make it better” vs. “choice is good” feud, “$PROJECT is dead” chants, “if you don’t GPL $FOO I’ll call RMS on you” (as was the case with O’Caml when they decided on a new license), “ESR does not speak for me”, “Linus is $ADJECTIVE”, and the list goes on.

Where I first jumped in with both feet I quickly learned that I had to pick my battles. Before long I had realised that the best battle to pick was none at all, unless it was one that threatened me specifically. I also learned not to be too paranoid when assessing that threat.

The open source and free software community has been divided from the start. I think we got it from the Unix side of things. I remember being pretty young and my mom gave my brother a “Unix wars” poster for his bedroom wall. Now that which Unix you use is no longer politically interesting (you either use it or you don’t) the community has had to search for other divisions in itself to fight about.

I once lived in a housing co-op. The promise of such a thing is that everyone works together and makes the co-op a better place for all. Everyone joins committees that interest them and in doing so serves the community in the best way they can. Elders teach the younger folks the tried and true ways forward and… Well… It doesn’t quite work that way in real life, at least not in the co-op I lived in. Most people joined whatever committee they thought would be the least work. The elders and the younger folks may as well have formally declared war. Rather than work together, many people seemed to try to stab everyone else in the back so no one would try to take the title of “S/he who saved the co-op” from them. Dirty laundry was aired, rather than clean. People got so desperate for attention that they even started bringing their lawyer to co-op meetings. I’m not kidding. I left the co-op not long after.

In a lot of ways I think the nasty side of the FS/OSS community is the same as the co-op. While there are certainly political lessons I can tease out of the co-op aftermath I don’t feel a great need to do so. The same goes for the open source battles fought over the last several years. To be honest, if I’m talking about open source and someone starts up with those I either change the subject or leave.

So after all this rambling, finally my point — I don’t see any sort of political ideal in the FS/OSS community or in the act of releasing software under such a license. I strictly see a practical benefit, both for myself and others. No saluting Chairman Mao, no invoking Ché Guevara, no need to worship Linus, ESR, RMS, or any other set of initials. If you want to contribute, then go ahead. If not, then don’t. If you want to use the software, have at ‘er — and if not, then there’s a stack of commercial alternatives you can look at. The more that opinion and dogma are allowed to play a role in open source the more time is wasted.

These days the “in thing” is to dream up ways that open source is under attack. From websites that don’t support Firefox to perceived threats from Microsoft (who actually has a near-OSD-compliant license now) or Sun (who just bought MySQL and hired two big-time Pythonistas) or SCO (whose antics have not yet made any measurable impact on open source), everyone wants to rally the troops and storm the castle. If you doubt this, simply follow Slashdot or Digg for a little while. Once the troops are rallied, everyone writes an e-mail or floods a webserver or does whatever they’re told to do, and at the end of the day they claim victory, no matter the outcome.

With antics like these it is hard to take any sort of Rorschach test too seriously. A Rorschach has always looked a bit like goat barf to me, anyway.

What do I want to see in the FS/OSS community? Less opinion, less dogma, a lot more live-and-let-live. Tolerate others, even the ones who really seriously piss you off. Try to find the right times to watch something and the right times to turn your back. Keep a sense of humour — nothing pisses off someone who’s trying to get under your skin like being laughed at.

That’s as close to a call to action that you’ll get from me. I’ll just be over here, doing my thing.

As of tomorrow, Robynne and I will have been together for a year. It’s one of those things that seems like a few months sometimes and several years other times. It’s been a great year, so here’s to another!

Since Apple wasn’t giving me any iPhone/iPod Touch SDK loving, I decided to check out Aperture, their photo management software. The web page promises a huge number of new features, but there were a few things that caught my eye.

The first is the new look. The UI seems to be lighter than before and uses a lot of translucent items, which seems to be all the rage amongst Apple’s HCI folks these days. It’s a good change, I think — I don’t have a copy of Aperture 1.5 to compare it with, but it is certainly easy on the eyes.

Something else I noticed were the speed improvements. Previews generate a lot faster, the UI seems a lot more snappy, and I didn’t feel like I was waiting for much. For general browsing about and checking out photos the speed seems to be on par with Adobe Lightroom. I think it may be a little quicker at start-up and browsing through all of my photos (5′500) in one go. That being said I don’t normally torture myself like that. I think it may get the speed gains through all of the files being stored in the Aperture Library, but I haven’t looked at the format of that file (or whether it is even a single file or one of Apple’s famous directories-masquerading-as-files).

I haven’t checked out its memory usage, but I am sure it’s on par with Lightroom’s. The hardware requirements say a minimum of 2GB of RAM, and I’m quite sure that’s the case.

The only annoyance I have had so far is that the loupe seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to the initial zoom percentage the first time you bring it up after selecting a new image in the viewer. Sometimes it’s 100%, sometimes 1600%, and sometimes just about anything in between — I was getting 165%, 473%, and quite a few other weird numbers.

I’ve got 30 days left on the trial and I’m going to try to use it alongside Lightroom and see which I prefer. Now that Aperture is available for a decent price I’m willing to consider switching. I know Lightroom well enough to teach it to Robynne, so I’m sure it wouldn’t go to waste — I’m sure she’d love to shoot in raw and get creative with it.

Unfortunately, it looks like the rumor mill was right. It’s almost as late in February as you can get (the 29th, no less) and there is no sign of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK. Hot News has no details, and the ADC has no downloads listed.

Though I’m sure we’ll have it in our hands in good time I can’t help but think that Apple should have managed our expectations a little better, and perhaps told people it would be late. Keeping us guessing isn’t going to win them any friends and will do little to deter the hordes of people jailbreaking their devices.

Today was my endocrinologist appointment and things went rather well. He feels I’m on the right track by going from the pump to pen, as it isn’t causing the damage the pump was. I caught him up to date on everything I changed on my own and with a small exception it’s become the new official way forward.

I’m now quite sure he’s an endocrinologist I can work with. He knows when to be hands-on and when to keep his hands off, and I think I understand how he thinks about some things. Taking numbers and charts in today made all the difference, I think — his annotations tell a lot and give me ideas how to improve my record keeping.

My data is currently stored in a spreadsheet. When I get it nailed down I’ll post an empty sheet here for any other Numbers users who would find it handy.

I think I’ve found the killer features of Safari Books Online, and they’re two of the most obvious, for once. They are the bookmarks and notes features. Bookmarks are great for keeping your place in the book or tracking a very few places of interest in a book. They are not terribly fine-grained, though — they mark specific chapters, rather than pages. Notes have the same resolution but give the ability to store a note with a title and about a quarter of a KB of text. So far I’ve used this functionality to make longer-term, more specific bookmarks and to note where I see blog fodder.

It’s funny how two tiny features with only the bare minimum of integration can push the relative worth of the subscription from “worth it” to “addicted”.

Now that I’m done reading Geekonomics, I’m on to reading a few books in parallel. One of them is Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen. I’ve never read much on design patterns before. Sure, I can name a few and even implement a few of the basic ones, but that doesn’t win you much if you want to use them effectively.

Am I sure that design patterns are the way to go? Heck no, but it doesn’t hurt to learn something new. It can be hard to tell the difference between fashion and function these days, so the best way to go forward is to read it and see what sticks.

So far (a couple of sections into chapter three) what’s stuck with me the most is the reminder that composition beats inheritance for many uses. I’d been (naively) constructing a class hierarchy for an application that was inheritance-based and it was the right reminder at the right time.

I’m reading Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software by David Rice. It’s a great read, and not just one for technical people — David has a real gift for explaining things well enough that just about anyone can get a grip on what he’s trying to say. I certainly don’t agree with all of his assertions in this book and I find his use of statistics misleading at times, but so far he has made sure to back things up with a thorough treatment of the subject and a good deal of transparency in his goals.

On page 225 I notice that he mentions:

A glidescope beam provides vertical guidance that directs the aircraft to follow the typical 3-degree decent path to the runway for a smooth, “glide-in” landing.

While three degrees may be a pretty decent path, I’m pretty sure he meant to be talking about a descent path in the sentence above. This echoes something I pointed out to Lorenzo last night — you can usually count on a spell-checker to tell you if you’ve spelled a word correctly, but you can’t count on it to tell you whether you’ve used the right word.

I wonder who David would deem responsible for the error above?

According to RFC2822, messages should have a Message-ID header that uniquely identifies the message. The general format of the value for this header is xxxxxxxxx@mailhost.domain.com by convention. The right-hand side is easy to figure out, but what about what’s on the left-hand side of the at-sign? There are lots of ways to generate a unique value for the left-hand side, but it’s hard to choose between them.

The first couple that come to mind are MD5 and SHA-1. MD5 is largely being replaced by SHA-1 due to concerns about some attacks on the hash, so it’s easy to choose between those two. UUIDs are also a possibility. Modern mail transfer agents (MTAs) like Postfix seem to use a much more compact value, so I should probably see what they do as well.

It’s also tempting to use time-based values, like the number if milliseconds since the epoch. One would only have to cache values used in the last second to make sure you didn’t reuse any IDs, and that would be a fair amount more compact than a UUID or a 160-bit hash in hexadecimal.

It seems that Postfix uses something based on the message queue ID it assigns to each message (src/global/mail_queue.c), and also uses millisecond-resolution time to ensure every ID is unique. I can’t find Sendmail’s Message-ID code after a quick look, so I’m guessing it’s something that can be defined in sendmail.cf.

I’ll need to do a bit more reading to figure out whether a SHA-1 hash of the current time with milliseconds combined with the sender, recipient, and subject or something similar will do the trick in a portable manner.

Tonight I remembered a piece of software from a while back that I hadn’t looked at in a long time. OmniWeb has definitely come into its own since I’ve last looked. It’s a lot faster (though that could be the difference between a 600MHz G3 and a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo), and it seems to render pages looking a bit more like Safari or Firefox than before.

Another thing that’s changed is the price — just USD15 now. I remember it being a lot more expensive in the past. The 30-day trial will tell me if it’ll do the things I need it to do.

Something I enjoy doing every now and then is looking through the search terms that bring people to my site or my blog. Many are rather mundane, but there are always a few that are interesting. Here are my responses to a couple of them.

hiveminder windows mobile 6: I just got a new mobile with Windows Mobile 6 Professional on it, so I was actually able to try this out. I haven’t tried anything too fancy, but it seems to work just fine, so long as you are using the Hiveminder mobile interface. I haven’t tried the desktop interface on my mobile yet, and probably won’t.

opera 8.65 is too expensive: No, it’s not. It’s a very well-designed browser, and USD25 is a pretty good deal for software on most mobile platforms. I tested the software for over a week before I bought it and made sure it did all of the things that I wanted it to do. I ran into very few problems, which is another thing that sets it apart from much other mobile software — I seem to have a knack for killing pieces of software others have no problem with. I’ve been using Opera for months on my mobile with very few hiccups.

If you’re really dead-set on the opinion that Opera isn’t worth the money, simply use the browser that came with your device for a while longer. It won’t take that long to convince yourself. The only stock mobile browser that I have found to be worth its weight in gold is Safari as shipped on the iPod Touch (and presumably the iPhone), but even that has the price of the mobile device attached to it.

Finally, if you’re absolutely sure that a USD25 browser is a travesty, write your own. That’ll show ‘em.

Today was great. We managed to get out of the house and go to Piper Spit in Burnaby Lake. The weather was beautiful, which has the unfortunate effect of bringing everyone out of the woodwork. In most places this isn’t a huge deal, but the reality of small spaces with lots of people isn’t much fun when everyone has a camera.

There were a couple of photographers down there today who had Canon 1Ds and huge lenses set up down on the mud, off the pedestrian area. I find this behaviour annoying, not only because it makes other people think the behaviour is okay, but because you can tell a lot about a photographer by how they interact with the environment where they’re shooting.

A lot of people have heard me say that I love photography, but hate photographers. This isn’t to say that I am annoyed by every other person who picks up a camera. Rather, I can’t stand photographers who are entirely money-driven and don’t care about the environment they shoot in or those things that live in it.

Sure, the occasional photographer trampling the mud when the water is low won’t hurt much. The problem is that if people see one person doing it, they tend to think it’s okay for them to do it, too. I made mention of this to the photographers and pointed out a kid who had decided to go down there, and got a couple of lame excuses. They said it was the only kid they’d seen do that in four hours, but that isn’t really the point — one kid feeding the birds does little damage, but three kids running about trying to pick up goslings is dangerous for both goslings and the kids.

In the end I engaged one of the photographers in conversation, made my point, let him say his thing, and left. I was unconvinced by his argument, as I’m sure he was unconvinced by mine. I think that following a set of ethical field practices is a must, but I can certainly understand that it gets in the way of shooting for money. Oh well — it certainly wasn’t the first time I’d encountered parasitic photographers (street photographers are among the worst offenders, and I live in a city with lots of them), and it definitely won’t be the last.

The Knowledge Network showed a documentary about photographers tonight. I watched it with some interest, as I was familiar with some of the photographers (such as Araki). A common theme among the featured photographers was their connection with photography or what photography enables for them. It got me thinking about my connection with photography and what it enables for me.

Like anything I’ve only started to ponder, I don’t have any good answers. The subjects of my photography aren’t necessarily near and dear to me. I love birds, but they aren’t exactly my family. Industrial equipment, architecture, and industrial landscape don’t play large roles in my life. Indeed, I don’t spend any time around these things unless I’m photographing them. While several of the photographers featured were laying some aspect of themselves bare, there’s not much that can be told about me by looking at my pictures. My photography doesn’t necessarily show anything unique about my subject, either — there are thousands of photographers who can tell a story with a picture that I can’t even put in words.

So why do I do it? I think it’s a way of exploring a subject I’m curious about. Araki touched on the link between photography and memories, and mentioned that he doesn’t photograph the things he doesn’t want to remember. Perhaps it’s a way I obtain, organise, and keep information. That certainly seems like it fits well with the non-photography parts of me.

On a completely unrelated note, I just saw an ad for a nature show that used the song I Disappear by the Faint. Just when I thought I’d seen it all.

I’ve given up on trying to make CentOS 5 work with VMware Fusion. It was simply sucking too much time up with no real gains. I can’t figure out why it behaves so differently on the iMac and my Macbook.

Instead, I’ve installed Fedora 8 and mach, which is probably for the best — it gives me the freedom to build for quite a few different distributions on different platforms. The default install on FC8-64 includes a target for CentOS 5 x86_64. So far it’s building cpanspec just fine. More useful packages will come soon.

Every now and then it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on in your mouth. It’s hard to see exactly what’s going on, and it’s not hard to fear the worst.

Today was my first trip to a dentist since a 2006 root canal, and I was expecting to have a laundry list of “must-fix” issues to deal with. Instead, I have only one, and it’s one I’ve known about for a long time. I think this is my first cavity-free check-up since I was a child.

I’m relieved, to say the least. I’ll be resting easier this weekend.

At work I have an iMac, and at home I have a Macbook. Both have 2GB or more of RAM, both have Core 2 Duo CPUs, and both have a metric heap of available hard disk space. I have to build some RPMs for 64-bit CentOS 5, so I fired up VMware Fusion on my work machine and started to install it. No problem — it was happily installing as I left. Unfor