On the way home from work one night, I was listening to NPR. And they had an interview with some founder/CEO of a company that is in the business of hauling away computers from big companies. Retrobox.

I.e., the companies pay Retrobox to take the old computers, wipe the drives and dispose of the nasty stuff in a good manner. In part, this is driven by ecological concerns, but more by legal concerns such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPPA, which sorta forces companies to NOT divulge data.

OK, the other trick to this Retrobox company is that it takes the computers and – before disposing of them – tries to refurbish (sorta) the machines and – if successful – sells them on the site. Some revenue split happens between souce company and Retrobox.

I was intrigued – I’ve checked local ads and all that (and I’m in the burbs of Chicago; there is a lotta stuff out there), but I could not find what seemed good for me at a good price.

I wanted to upgrade (uh, replace) my current linux box (Pentium Pro, 200Mhz, 128M) with a better box. All the ads I’ve read are too expensive, because they give you MS Office etc.

So I did a Retrobox seach. Got a nice P3, 1Ghz, 1 GIG RAM for about $200.

Took about two weeks to get here; so what?

Put Fedora Core 4 on it; transferred some files, and I’m good to go!

Highly recommeded (I’m looking at blade servers now…)

Old:

New:

After about a half-dozen or so years, we finally got a new stove for the kitchen. Goodbye 1950s, hello 21st Century.

Looks good; works well. Whatever.

The old one was a Caloric (sounds like a dietary supplement, doesn’t it?); the new one is a KitchenAid, of dishwasher fame.

Again, whatever. If goodness or badness ensues, you know I’ll report on whatever.

Two very similar subjects;
two very different
visual effects.

My first post-college job was as a commercial photographer, a career that spanned a decade and led to some pretty interesting situations and stories. The vast majority of my commercial work was in color, from 35mm though 8×10 film.

My personal work, however, remained all black and white. Oh, sure, I shot a lot of color slide film on trips and color print film for family events, but my personal work – for fun, for art or whatever – remained almost exclusively black and white.

I’d go into the woods with a heavy 4×5 view camera, a huge wooden tripod and a bag with a couple lenses, filters and a couple of dozen sheets of film.

Yep, two dozen sheets tops.

And – on most days – that was more than enough, for many reasons:

• Knowledge that only a handful of shots could be taken made one choose subjects carefully and compose with deliberation
• The primitive nature of the view camera slowed down the entire shooting process. You had to set up the camera on the tripod, focus under a focusing hood, manually meter (or guesstimate) the exposure and then stick a film holder into the back and manually fire the lens.
• Just lugging the equipment around slowed everything and took its toll physically. We’re not talking point-and-shoot photography here. The exact opposite.

But I loved it then; I’d still like to do it, but I won’t – I’ve gone digital.

After pretty much being out of the game for over a decade – and doing little to no photography in the interim – I got a digital camera and have been having a blast with it.

But that’s not what I want to write about today.

I want to talk about how digital photography – with is basically the overwhelming choice today and will be the de-facto standard tomorrow – is killing black & white photography.

I don’t mean this in an old fuddy-duddy “Blasted cars! I liked walking 12 miles though the snow to work” way. Just a lament that acknowledges how the reality of today is causing the death of something I care about: black & white (BW) photography.

How is digital killing BW photography?

• Digital cameras are color cameras. The is no film choice, just a sensor (CCD – charge-coupled-device) that has RGB (red/green/blue) receptors.
• While most (many?) digital cameras have the option to take pictures in gray-scale mode, why would anyone – even me – bother? Shoot in color and then – later – convert to grayscale in just about any image-editing software (Photoshop et al) if desired.
• Even with the grayscale mode, the picture quality is the same BW or color in digital. It’s all the pixels, my friend… In film, BW kicks color film’s butt all over the place. I remember the first time I printed shots taken with a high quality BW film of a model I shot in a studio. WOW! Every eyelash, flecks of darkness in her iris all there. To get the same quality in color you’d need to move up from 35mm (which I was then shooting) to either 2 1/4 or 4×5 formats.
• I loved the weird BW films – especially the infrared and recording film stocks. The former rendered skies and water nearly black, any sunlit foliage glowing white; the latter had a very grainy result which was a great effect for some subjects. While you can approximate these effects with imaging software, one of the pleasures of these oddball films was the surprise factor. Even if you were really good with the films (this is especially true of IR film), it was often impossible to really tell what the end result was going to look like. Shots you think would be brilliant would be flat; the shot of a glass of water, for example, could turn out complex and beautiful. Digital with color is more WYSIWYG.
• When shooting BW, there is a certain mindset – you look at things differently. Because that red rock won’t be red – it’ll be a dark gray. You (should ideally) look at things more abstractly because, without the color, a subject is only gradients of gray and the composition. A bright red rose in color is easy; much like sunsets. To make either interesting in BW takes some effort.
• In the same vein as the preceding point, there are subjects that just work better in BW than color precisely because they are reduced to gradients of gray the composition. Weathered wood – a side of a barn, driftwood, fallen tree … – works better in BW (to me) because all you see are the subtle shadows and grain; you’re not distracted by the color. Take the pic to the right – I took this about 25 years ago, I remember a lot of details about the location and so on, but I can’t remember the colors. But what if the brick behind the chairs was vivid red? The siding color blue? It would detract from the what the BW photo currently is – two chairs. In BW, that’s where your eye goes: Right to those chairs. I call this pic my Laurel (fat) and Hardy (skinny) chairs pic. Some pictures can really only be in BW to have the desired impact. The same is true for color photos, I agree. It’s just that we’re losing BW…
• Part of my sorrow with the loss of BW is the death of the darkroom, as well. While I’ve developed and printed color, this is really something that I always left to the labs. It’s hard and temperatures have to be precise, chemicals fresh (chemicals are more toxic, as well). But part of the beauty of BW was taking that negative into the darkroom – that unassuming negative – and coming out with magic thanks to one’s darkroom skills and the arsenal of darkroom tricks. The dodging and burning, using straight Dektol or going soft with Selectol, posterizing, the vastly different interpretation of a negative two Agfa BW papers – Portriga-Rapid vs. Brovira – could bring to a print. And the smell of fix and glacial acidic acid…

What does all this mean? I don’t really know, but I do think we’ll see less and less BW photography.

Which is a shame because a good BW photograph – from Ansel Adams through Diane Arbus to Robert Mapplethorpe – is something we need more of. They – and a cast of a thousand others – have provided beauty that is of this world but just one step removed.

Removed of color.

There really isn’t all that much that I can add to the discussion of today’s terrorists’ bombings in London, except to say that it does appear to be the work of madmen.

Or those, at least, lacking the baseline rationality that I assume (yeah, I’m not two [sic] bright…) exists throughout the world.

Yet at the same time, it was no surprise. We are so wired on the War on Terror and taking off shoes/pants at airports, surrendering our nail clippers at same and watching the rainbow turn into a nationwide terror alert system (currently at Orange, for “I’m scared shitless, but I still have a change of underwear”) that we expect the other shoe to drop.

I just don’t know. *sigh*

To me, Billmon put it all in context:

You knew it was coming even if you didn’t know where it would hit. And while the shock isn’t as great as 9/11 (how could it be?) the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare that just won’t end is even stronger now. Because you knew.

[snip]

The same old nightmare, in other words, this time with an English address. And the same sinking feeling as before. Because you know it will happen again, even if you don’t know where.

— London Calling, Billmon.org

Yeah, it’s not even 10am and it’s almost 80 degrees out there.

We are in the midst of one of the hottest summers in recent memory, and one of the driest since the Dust Bowl years. Hope the rain promised for today materializes – the plants we put in this year (and other years) would certainly appreciate it.

Taken today

I remember buying my first computer and having the wrenching decision of whether to get it with base 10M hard drive, or dropping some serious cash (for me, at the time) for the 20M version.

No, those are not typos. Megabytes, not Gigabytes.

Today, I have 250G raid on my main box (two 250G disks, one of which is solely a mirror of the other).

This increased storage space has changed things. You don’t purge/defrag as often – just don’t need to. Enormous file attachments don’t matter and so on.

Faster processors and increased RAM work in a similar manner. I currently have six SSH sessions open, two Firefox browsers with a total of about 20 tabs open, Outlook, an IE session (testing code), a music player and other misc programs.

And that does not count the services I have running on the box: Multiple DBMS, Web server, application servers and so on.

This RAM/CPU bump has allowed me – over the years – to change my work habits. I don’t have to close one pig of a program before opening another pig. Just open them both. No biggie.

I’m certain the shift to almost unlimited bandwidth for almost everyone will have similar effects, changing the behavior of individuals and anyone/anything that touches or is affected by unlimited bandwidth.

By unlimited bandwidth, I mean when bandwidth for (almost) everyone is an always-on connection almost everywhere (maybe faster at home/office over Ethernet, but damn fast in the subway via WiMax or whatever) that is robust enough to support stuff we can only dream of today.

So what happens when pipes get really fat? And trust me, they will.

Some prognostications:

• Always On as the killer app– I’ve long posited that the primary benefit of broadband is not the broad, it’s the always-on effect. This is huge. You can just surf the web without the dial-up/log-in delay. This impacts a lot of other things. No need to turn on the news at 5:20 to catch the sports to see if the Cubs lost again – just surf over to this or that page and find out. TV news in general will be hurt, as will be newspapers. We’re already seeing this; imagine when unlimited bandwidth comes along with video clips and so on (CNN.com finally got this, and now offers at least a handful of videos for free).
• Goodbye Desktop apps/storage– I’ve always maintained that Google is betting its future not on ad revenue, but on being an application company. Sure, I could be wrong about this, but considering the tremendous success of Gmail and all that it portends, it makes you think. If Google could offer, for example, a network word processor (possibly with an off-line component), why would we need to pay for MS Word? Keep expanding on this theme, and it’s no wonder Redmond is getting a little nervous about the Google guys.
• Personal computers will need to change– An always-on connection is really only worthwhile if you can keep your computer running indefinitely. Right now, only Linux (or any *nix) works well this way, with Windoze boxes – while vastly improved with Win2000 and XP – still needing a reboot now and then. I really don’t know where Macs fall in the capability, but with BSD underpinnings, I’d guess you could keep it running a long time. This is vital, so the virus/OS patches can run at night, e-mail can keep downloading while you sleep so those big honkin’ attachments come in one at a time, instead of when you first fire up the computer. In addition, computers are going to need more RAM, to hold the network apps in memory, and better synchronization software to make network backups idiot-proof. Right now, this is still a job for serious geeks, for the most part.
• Internet consolidation will increase– With more and more action – apps, storage, shopping, information gathering and so on – moving to the Web, consolidation is inevitable. While niche sites/companies will flourish, some big guns will have to join forces to make a mighty gun to survive.
• Government will intervene– This is inevitable because consumers will push for it. Doubt it? How about the recent decision to finally approve a XXX top-level domain? The public clamored for it, who is going to oppose it and it’ll do little if any good. There will be more acts like this, such as taxes and privacy requirements and so on. But it’s almost too late – you can’t reverse engineer a decade-long explosion quickly. And – more to the point – the web is a world-wide-web. And how does it work? I live in Portugal, my servers live in Belize, my company is owned by a dummy company in Aruba and I sell Chinese-made stuff to both European countries and the US. What regulations do I have to follow? This is almost a UN issue. Uber-government. And the UN is soooo effective, especially in nuanced areas such as this. How can any country make rules for something like the web that is owned by both no one and everyone? It’s like China insisting Taiwan is part of the mainland country. OK, they can say that all they want, but Taiwan is not following China’s wishes, that’s for sure.
• Rise of non-computer appliances– The much bally-hooed (sp?) internet home may inch closer to reality with unlimited bandwidth. What this all will mean I really don’t much care (I really don’t need to start a roast cooking before I leave work via TCP/IP), but it’ll be interesting.
• Security woes– Always on means always vulnerable to attack, unlimited bandwidth means black hats can hit more folks more quickly and cover tracks more easily. I foresee some all HTTPS sites, home computers with built-in firewalls, more live patching of systems as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed, instead of weekly updates.

Will any/some/all of this happen?

I dunno. The thoughts just occured to me, and I’m sharing..

For the most part, I view computers as I do cars: They are tools to help you get to your [computational/geographic] destination. A little luxury is always a good thing, but I don’t get religious about it – “Must have radial tires!” “Must be a Mac” or whatever.

I have my biases, but – overall – I don’t care. I just want the thing (car/computer) to work, to do what it is meant to do, in whatever fashion.

The issue for me is when the car/computer fails: Auuggghhh!

Yesterday, Microsoft released a series of patches that were good things – security and all that. I installed same late at night, after full night of coding, as I knew it would (probably) take a restart to make them take effect.

Did so, and my damn mouse died. (Logitech MX700) It was too late to rummage around to find the driver disk for the mouse (others sleeping…), so I Googled it and found only a driver for an older (500 MX) model. Given the Net, I probably could have found the correct driver, but it was late…

Installed, restarted and the mouse awoke, except for the page forward/page back buttons – that I’ve grown to love.

[bleep]!

This evening, I dug out the driver disk and installed, and all is good.

Except it wiped out my MusicMatch (MP3 player).

[bleep X 2!!]

Reinstalled MusicMatch from the Dell recovery discs, slew of weird errors; did various updates and several reboots…and now all is good.

It’s good that all is good, but…

I’m fairly savvy with computers; if it took me this long, what about others. Hey, I just installed MS upgrades and now the mouse doesn’t work? Would an average user even know what the hell to do? Or what had happened?

Cars good.

Computers good.

Unless they be busted…and then it’s evil…

Yes, it’s Bloomsday.

Wish I had more time to write about such, but I’m in the midst of a code crunch.

Joyce rulz.

…and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geramiums and catuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountian yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

— Ulysses, last words

I was going to blog about the recent Disturbance in the Force, the Apple->Intel shift, but I didn’t, for a a number of reasons:

• Whatta I know? I mean, what kind of light could I possibly shine on this controversial event?
• There are plenty of other opinions on the event, from blogs through magazine articles to threads on sites such as Slashdot. As you can imagine, this event filled up hard drives on servers all over the Net.

But the most over-the-top (to me) view of the event was by long-time Silicon Valley insider (and one-time Apple pseudo-employee) Robert Cringley.

His analysis? This is the first step that will culminate in Intel merging with Apple to help both companies crush Microsoft.

What?! Can I have whatever he’s smoking?

While the argument he puts forth has some merit – and he does have a much better persective on the industry than me, he misses (to me) the most obvious flaw in his report: Steve Jobs, controller of the Reality Distortion Field, he of the brilliant marketing smarts that is always overshadowed by his massive ego, will never let go of Apple.

Hell, he got pushed out once.

And came back to lead Apple back to glory (small installed base, sure, but iPod, iTunes…).

(Or maybe Steve will convince Intel to change its name to iNtel.)

‘Tain’t gunna happen.

But I’m the same loser who dismissed the WSJ story about Intel/Apple talks about a week before the announcement that made it a reality, saying it was a recurring rumor that had no legs.

Oops. My bad.

But still. Steve losing control of Apple? I just don’t see it.

I noticed – earlier this week – that it was the 10th Anniversary of the first release of PHP. OK! On to the second decade of this, my current favorite language.

Version 5 looks interesting, but I really haven’t gotten into it that much. No writing v5 code, just reviewing code and reading articles. Some day…