building a new web gallery

So, a few weeks ago, I started doing some serious thinking about revamping my web sites (again). For the last few iterations, I’ve always done the “some day, I need to do this all RIGHT, but for now…” and pull some stuff together that works. Well, mostly works, okay, and kinda the way I want, and sort of looks good.

Actually, that last isn’t fair; the wordpress themes you can get from a site like Themeforest are quite good, and with some care in choice and some thoughtful tweaking, it’s hard to argue against spending $40 for the theme and 20 hours of customization when building it all from scratch might take you 100-150 hours (or more). Since time is a valuable commodity to me, I am willing to make those kind of buy/build decisions (and I have found a new wordpress theme I really like, but it’s going to take me a chunk of time and energy to do other things around it. But that’s for another blog post, later).

One of the things that’s been on my “figure it out already” list for a while is what to do with my online images. When I dropped my flickr account, I lost the ability to keep my “portfolio” images in one place and my larger set of published images in another, and that bothers me on a number of levels. I’ve also never taken the time to fully customize Smugmug, which is another of those things on my “when I have time, I need to…” list.

So the end result is that it all looks rather uncoordinated and, well, amateur. Which it is, but it doesn’t have to look that way.

I finally decided it was time to get serious about fixing some of these things, and for the last couple of weeks I’ve been exploring bringing my photos in and publishing them myself, taking full control (and blame) for this instead of offshoring it to another site.

That means building out my own galleries and publishing them myself. Which means “hello, Amazon S3″. Amazon S3 implies a static site, not something with PHP or some other language behind it, which implies building the thing in advance. I also wanted it built around HTML and CSS, not flash, and mobile friendly. And I want it as turnkey as possible, as close to fully automated as possible.

Adobe Lightroom has the Web Module, which can generate web galleries. The default HTML templates Adobe ships are — decent. But not what I want. In doing a lot of research into third party add-ons and plug-ins, I found a couple that I thought were pretty good (specifically Photographer’s Toolbox Elegance and the plug-ins from The Turning Gate), but ultimately nothing I found did what I wanted (of course).

So I decided to start hacking.

Creating the S3 setup was straightforward. My hosting service handled setting up the DNS. And thus was born photos.chuqui.com.

I stated with Jeffery Friedl’s workflow for exporting images to the iPad, which works awesome (and which I use to dump images onto my iPad for loading into my Portfolio app). His collection publisher plug-in allows you to create a nested set of directories to export images to. Using smart collections, you can, if you want, automatically choose which images are candidates for each folder; tie this into a publish service, and you can dynamically add or delete images to these folders by adding or deleting them from the services without having to muck with the files on disk at all. If, for instance, you set up the smart collections to be tied to a set of keywords — you can do all of this purely by adding and removing keywords to images and then running the update to the publish service. Set up the images to output to the size you want them to be displayed in their large format, and you can even have lightroom watermark them on the way out.

if this all sounds like greek, don’t worry. When I’m further along in the process and this graduates out of “plaidworks labs”, I’ll give more detailed instructions. But if you look at Jeffrey’s discussion of his iPad workflow it’ll take you well down this path; if publish services are new to you in Lightroom, check out my piece on a geek’s guide to publishing to smugmug where I go into detail on this.

So now I have the images on disk, in a set of folders. Now all I need to do is create a gallery to display them. I spent some time today hacking on this. It ain’t pretty, but it works.  I wrote a perl script that walks the folders. For every image, it creates a thumbnail and extracts key EXIF info. It then creates the directory’s index.html on the fly. Right now, if you bring up that link, you’ll see the thumbnail and the EXIF shoved onto the page without any real formatting (as I said, “proof of concept”).

So it’s now a working web gallery. I added links that allow you to walk through the nested directories and back up to the root. The thumbnail that shows up when you load the page is auto-generated. The large image that you see when you click on a thumbnail is exported from Lightroom.

If I run the script again, it deletes all of the thumbnails and all of the html files and regenerates them. That way, if I delete an image, I don’t leave broken links behind. If I add images, they’ll show up when I regenerate.

That all took 150 lines of Perl, plus the addition of two sets of libraries (ImageMagick and ExifTools), which should be portable to any computer that runs perl. It took me about 2 hours of coding to get to this point, plus about 90 minutes of fighting to get ImageMagick installed and running right — something that’s been a problem since the days when I worked at Apple, and it’s a bit disappointing to see it’s still a problem today. If I were more motivated, I’d build a full Perl setup (like I did when I was at Apple) but I wanted to stay as generic as possible.

Getting all of this onto S3 is easy; I use Panic’s Transmit. This means that this tool chain can be nicely automated; when the perl script is done, I can set it up to run via Cron, and also set up Panic to fire up and mirror any changes up to S3 without me needing to touch it. I can do that in the middle of the night when I’m asleep, meaning 99% of the work can be done in Lightroom (image selection and keyword additions to hook them into the publishing services, then firing off the publishing service to write them to disk). If I delete an image, when I regenerate and sync the updated html files out, it’ll disappear — no hanging links anywhere.

Still a lot of work todo, of course. Next step is to create a way to add descriptions and information about each gallery. Probably create a parent page that links to all of the galleries, have some way to bring forward thumbnails as the link images for each, that sort of thing. I’ll probably do that via a file that lives in each directory and gets integrated into the HTML when I generate it.  Then make the HTML semantic, do a design to make it pretty and “HTML-y” (most of the EXIF probably will live in a pop-up, and I’ll pop up the image into a lightbox instead of making it a separate page). The look and feel will all go into the CSS, and I’ll hook this up to Google Analytics.

All of that in the perl script generating it; by the time it goes to S3, it’ll be pure, static HTML. If I don’t add/delete a big picture, they won’t change, so this is browser cache friendly. Oh, and since I fully control the HTML being generated, I can make it SEO friendly; and if I decide I want to change that around, I just update the script and regenerate. I’m not tied to hoping the web galleries

I do plan on making the script available when it’s further along. I’m considering whether this should ultimately be in Python or node instead of Perl, but, well, I’m deep down still a Perl geek. The nice thing is that these galleries don’t require Lightroom (you can create the images from anything), don’t require any specific service (you can host them on any web server) or back end processing, and I can do all of this on my laptop, meaning wherever I go, I can update this stuff as long as I have access to the internet, so it doesn’t require a server somewhere to generate them — just access to the hosting spot. And Amazon S3 is incredibly inexpensive.

What it doesn’t do is things like e-commerce or print sales, since there’s no back end processing capability. I’ll still use Smugmug for that. What that allows me to do is slim the Smugmug site back to just the “best” images and make it more of a “serious” portfolio site again. And one of the things I’ll want to do (of course) is make sure the galleries link to images on smugmug when they exist there…

So this is a good start. Right now, generating everything for about 60 images takes under 2 minutes, and the sync process for an update about 2 minutes as well. Sometimes I think we get so focussed on “interactive” that we forget that it doesn’t always require a big web back end full of PHP and MySQL to do these things. A bit of thought and some scripting will create a nice efficient site that looks to be quite maintainable and flexible moving forward without a lot of manual hacking and babysitting. Seems like a nice deal to me.

Of course, now I have to finish it. Back to work…

How about those Sharks?

Day 16.5 — Engine issues keep Sharks grounded in St. Paul, no new info on Couture, those darn deflections | Working the Corners:

No, not the angst that comes with a 2-6-1 roadie. And not even the literal pain that Todd McLellan is dealing with after getting smacked with a stick early in the second period.

 

Because of on top of all that, on top of the fact they’ve been on the road since before Valentine’s Day, the Sharks are not flying home as planned tonight.

Mechanical trouble grounded their charter plane and they’ve all been brought back to their usual hotel in St. Paul, which luckily had not filled the necessary 40 or 50 rooms.

How about those Sharks?

Two losses to end the nasty 9 game road trip; they had a chance to turn this trip into a mediocre one, and ended up turning it into a disaster. You now have to look at this team and seriously think “given how the western conference is playing out, they could miss the playoffs”.

I can’t figure out why. the word being used by the team and players is “fragile”, and that’s true — when a mistake happens or a bad bounce, this team freaks out a bit, and suddenly they’re down a couple of goals. Niemi is off, can’t find his game; at least Griess seems to be stopping the stoppable goals.

I don’t know why this team is like this. The core players haven’t been like this in the past. They haven’t tuned out the coaches, they aren’t pissed at the GM, they are playing hard — just not playing smart. They seem (mostly) to play late parts of the game hard and intense, it’s starts that are killing them. Or in Minnesota, a good start, but they had about 3 minutes in the third where they gave up a couple of goals. They don’t play 60 minutes of good hockey, and playing 45 minutes kills in this league.

I said earlier in the week I expected Wilson to make a trade to shake up the chemistry. I’m more convinced now something needs to be done. The scary thing is that I’m not sure the coach or GM knows why things are off, or how to fix it. The players definitely don’t — they seem mystified as to why they’re this way. It’s not lack of interest or effort. It’s lack of sharp focus and execution. And that’s not necessarily easy to fix.

Maybe a shinto priest for an exorcism. If things weren’t bad enough, tonight the coach gets brained by a stick and knocked out (thank god is wasn’t WORSE than that, but there were five minutes there when I was wondering if this team had stressed him into a heart attack), and now, the plane breaks, and they can’t even get home until tomorrow. So even the hockey gods seem pissed at the Sharks right now.

Laurie turned to me tonight and said “I am so glad we don’t have season tickets this year, because if we were paying $100 a seat to watch this hockey, I’d be really pissed”. And she’s right. I miss the folks we used to sit around; I don’t miss dragging my butt to the arena 35 times a year and all of the disruptions that imply — and I don’t miss being in the arena for the games. I do still love the team and the game, but I’m really enjoying being able to not worry about it until game time, turning on the TV, and if they mess it up, pulling out a book or the iPad and multitasking around it… And the way they’re playing hockey this year makes that decision seem even smarter….

In any event, the road trip is done. Well, the last road game is done for this trip. hopefully the team can get home. Unfortunately, they haven’t shown that “home” is a fix of this, either…

And now, to the trade deadline. I wonder who won’t be in teal on Tuesday…

 

Today’s fun bit of reading

go have a chuckle as John Scalzi writes a review of a book he hasn’t read, by deconstructing how the book came to be. Via a book review.

(and he’s right. what a cluster. and why?)

The Lifespan of a Silly Argument – Whatever:

I have not read the book yet, but from the review and other pieces I have read about it online, the problem here appears to be that in regards to the essay, Fingal was under the impression that the piece was non-fiction (probably because The Believer apparently does not accept fiction), and therefore the facts within it had to be, you know, non-fictitious. Whereas D’Agata appears to have argued, essentially, that facts were stupid things, that that their individual truth value was not as important as an overall “Truth” that he was aiming for, and the the essay form in itself was being deprived of resonance due to a slavish insistence on factual correctness.

 

can we agree to do this more generally now?

Flickr disables Pinterest pins on all copyrighted images (exclusive) | VentureBeat:

The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has just added Pinterest’s newly introduced do-not-pin code to all Flickr pages with copyrighted or protected images.

Good for flickr for doing this early, and actually seeming to take a leadership position (sort of) on something. Kudos to them.

But now, can we now come up with a general solution that works across sharing sites in general? or should we suggest all sites that allow for image sharing adopt this as a “do not share/copy” flag?

I’m someone who’s decided to put a creative commons on most of my online images and don’t mind them being shared. But I fully understand why some might feel otherwise. How can we create some defacto standard they can use that sites can adopt to acknowledge that preference? Should they just do it via this flag? Or should there be a more generalized solution put in place?

Someone should bell this cat. I would, but who’d listen to me? (grin)

 

 

Today’s OMG quote….

(Duncan talking about the setup at TED. Just freaking unreal that we’re dealing with storage headed towards the petabyte stage. Us old farts can remember a time when the entire united states computing universe would fit on those drives…)

Thunderbolt at TED2012 – Duncan Davidson: “In the lower right photograph, there are twelve 12TB Pegasus R6 arrays. That’s 144TB total. It’s a tenth of a freaking petabyte of usable space.”

 

Red-Tailed Hawks building a nest

From my Panoche Valley trip. This pair nested here last year, so I wasn’t surprised to find them rebuilding the nest and settling in this year. The male was bringing in sticks and headed back out again, the female was doing the construction and keeping an eye on things in between visits.

Asking for some feedback…

 

I’ve been ramping up my work on the next generation of my site, blog and online photos. I’m now making decisions, setting priorities and trying to decide on what to focus on and what to let fade into the dust.

It seems to me you all need a voice in this process, so here I am, asking your advice. Here are a few (hopefully quick) questions I’d like everyone who reads this to answer:

1) What one thing about what I do/post online do you want me to do more of (and why)?

2) What one thing about what I do/post online do you want me to do less of (and why)?

3) What are the reasons/things for reading this site? Why are you here?

4) What, as a reader of this site, do you want to tell me?

Be as short or as long as you like. Please send your notes to me at chuqvr@gmail.com, or you can post them here as replies if you prefer.

Everything will be read and pondered. your name and email will be kept private. It will help me better understand what your likes and dislikes are, so I can adjust what I do here.

Silence, of course, will be considered to mean everything is perfect, or that I suck and you don’t care enough to even send an email, depending on whether I read this stuff when I’m in a good or bad mood…

Thanks!

 

Dealing with Crap apps in the catalog…

There’s a kerfluffle going on with the Apple App Catalog over “crap app”, which is a bit of a misnomer because the primary anger is being aimed at developers who build apps aimed at grabbing money with poorly designed copycats of more famous apps. Sort of like what Zynga now does for a living, but not on Facebook.

What caught my eye were phrases being thrown about like “Apple’s missed opportunities to prevent disaster were such simple and quick fixes”, which, once I stopped laughing, made me want to cry in sympathy.

It’s not simple. It’s not quick. If it was, Apple would be doing it.

In my previous life, I was involved in these issues on a regular basis. Before we hired our App Review gods and goddesses, I didn’t duck fast enough and got do do that as well. I was in on the discussions with the lawyers setting up the rules early on; I was consulted (as the voice of the developers and official tie breaking vote when needed) on apps we weren’t sure passed the smell test on whether they should be published.

So I can pull out and play the “been there, done that, no T-shirt” card here.

And the reality is, it ain’t easy. And what Apple probably would LIKE to do it probably can’t, and would open itself up to various legal challenges and a whole can of really foul tasting worms.

Your first problem: one of the underlying concepts of the DMCA process that gives companies a safe harbor is that they take a hands off approach to the content. There are some broad areas where exceptions to this are carved out, especially around adult content, and there are some areas where companies have decided to do some broad fireaxe enforcement like the “make me rich, do nothing” apps. But the reality is, once you start policing content, you start opening yourself up to liabilities on all of the content you do not police. It can even cost them the safe harbor, and then the entire app store infrastructure could be at risk.

So you have to be really careful how and where you do your enforcement and bans, and you have to do these things such that you minimize opening yourself up to legal or PR fights over “you did that, why aren’t you doing this?” as well. These quickly turn into scenarios that make lawyers wake up screaming. And situations that boil down to “he’s ripping off this other person” become entirely subjective, and as a reviewer, you can make jokes about the app (privately), but you can’t reject it for that — until someone files the complaint of infringement. There’s a legal protocol defined here, and if you cross that line and start pro-actively rejecting apps, you are buying yourself and your company a whole lot of legal indigestion.

There’s just a wide swath of things that a company like Apple really can’t (and shouldn’t) do, and if they DO, they’ll end up getting yelled at. Think back over the last couple of years over every time an App doesn’t get through the review process into the catalog, and the developer complains, and everyone gets up in arms over “big brother Apple” and yells for a while. And here we are, calling for Apple to do MORE big brother stuff.

Apple is in a no-win situation here. Because you know if they did start being more pro-active here, it’d just feed the “apple is big brother” screamfests instead.

The Curious Case Of The (Cr)apps That Make Money | PandoDaily:

 

 

Apple has a serious problem on their hands, and it is one they need to fix it as soon as possible. No, this isn’t a diatribe about the lack of Flash on the iPad. And, no, this isn’t about the need for an SD Card slot for iOS devices. Instead this is an issue that Apple’s biggest ally – iOS developers – are complaining about, one that hurts the user, and one that could end up damaging the iOS ecosystem more than any set of labor issues ever could.

The issue we are facing, is the proliferation of scamming apps.

 

 

First, Apple needs to cut off the funds. Taking the approach of going to the root of the problem, Haddad noted that if Apple “makes it clear that if you try to defraud customers, then you aren’t going to get any money. If there’s not any financial incentive to scamming then it’s very likely that most of the problem will just go away on its own.” This would likely cut out most of the scam apps from the App Store.

 

As soon as you start touching money, it gets even nastier. So, if Apple cuts them off and doesn’t give them the money, then what? Apple keeps it? refunds it? If you refund it, what do you do with everyone who wants refunds for apps THEY feel are scams, but Apple doesn’t agree? What do you do about all of the people demanding refunds, and because the only way to get a refund is to have it declared a scam app, starts complaining that everything they decide they don’t want is a scam app?

This is a a PR and customer support nightmare. trust me on that. Even in a “no refunds for whatever reason” policy app catalog, refunds are a horror. This just makes it even more of a horror, because now a chunk of users will try to wedge what they want into this policy to get what they want.

Only real solution? How about a “refunds for seven days” for any app users don’t want? Developers, do you really want to go down that path? Apple would have to hold funds another 30 days or so before sending them to you to avoid having to claw them back. Users could pay for an app, use it a while, then get their money back; free seven day rentals of your full function app, effectively. if I were a game developer and Apple proposed this, I’d be headed to cupertino with torches and pitchforks. Be careful that the “fix” doesn’t create an even nastier problem.

 

However, in between the time that scammers hit the Top 100 and the time Apple is issued a takedown notice, many users can get irritated by the lack of quality apps in the store. To mitigate this problem, Haddad recommends that Apple start to curate the Top 100 list beyond automating it based on sales.

 

And whatever policy Apple implemented on this, it’d create a firestorm, because “the fix is in!” because it is.

The core problem here: Crap apps are like porn. everyone has their own definition (which overlaps in many, but not all, places), and everyone sees what needs to be stopped as obvious. And however you define these rules, it’ll piss off enough people that the firestorm will probably be continuous.

 

The real question is what happens if Apple does nothing and continues to use their flawed policies. It hurts the user, who loses their money. It hurts the overall App Store ecosystem, as people stop trusting the look of applications, decreasing sales. Finally and most importantly, it hurts the developers, who have to fight harder for users, as user trust will continue to decline. There are any number of end-game results, and none of them are good. Apple needs to nip this in the bud now, before it gets any worse.

 

All of which are to some degree true. But be aware of fixes that actually create different, bigger problems.

2012: The Year Scam Apps Killed the App Store | Impending:

 

A Beefed Up Fraud Team: I can only speculate at the size and competency of the App Store fraud team,

 

Is this fraud? If an app developer’s intellectual property is infringed, the DMCA process already exists to mediate that conflict and take it to a resolution. This isn’t Apple’s responsibility to deal with pro-actively, it’s the developer. If the developer initiates a complaint, there’s a (long, complex and ultimately off to the courts to decide) process to follow. It works, and it actually takes into consideration the issues of BOTH sides of the complaint a lot better than ACTA or SOPA ever did… Apple’s IP isn’t impacted here, so it has to stay out of it. As a developer, you need to work the system to protect your IP. Apple won’t (can’t, and shouldn’t) babysit for you.

 

Automated Returns: What I can’t fathom is Apple’s refusal to automatically refund all customers who were defrauded of their money. There have been hundreds of open and shut cases, and to this day Apple requires customers to jump through hoops and phone calls (in 2014!) to receive refunds. This is insanity.

 

Discussed above. Ask a high end department store about women “renting” dresses for parties to see how much fun a relaxed refunding system would be for developers. Especially game developers. Be wary of what you ask for.

 

Video Previews in the App Store: Requiring a short video demo of the app in action would have prevented the common scam of providing one or two misleading screenshots to fool browsing customers.

 

Hah! we did that. It works great! Apple should. seriously. Or you can post them to Youtube or Vimeo now, and link to them in your marketing material. Seriously, this is a great idea. It works. If you aren’t doing free trials or screen videos of your stuff (especially games) you’re missing a great marketing opportunity. Ways to enable this by Apple would be a nice addition.

 

Better Education of App Store Customers: Much like the fashion industry, the App Store’s plague of knockoffs created a problem of uneducated customers unable to recognize the real thing vs. the counterfeit until after the sale.

 

“educating the customers” is something people have been advocating forever. And it always fails, because there’s always a subset of them who can’t or won’t be educated. Which doesn’t mean you don’t do it, because to the degree you can do it, it reduces your problems. But — it won’t solve your problem. Just reduce it.

 

The App Store could have done a better job profiling quality studios and developers, beyond highlighting individual apps, and rewarded those who built an ongoing track record and reputation. Not just developers, but App Store customers as well, to weight their reviews and ratings.

 

In my previous life, I designed a neat social system to do just that, and couldn’t get the people who should have been interested to care. Heck, I sat in meetings with product managers where I had to explain why pulling an app from the catalog if ONE PERSON flagged it as offensive was a bad, bad idea. And I had to argue about that multiple times.

But heck, I still have the design, and I do think a self-regulating community could moderate a lot of these problems if properly implemented. It’s too bad we never got past “I think we should have a LIKE button” in my previous life. And I’m open to discussing this with the “right people” if they want my advice. You know how to find me (or send me a linkedin).

Automated self-policing policies are the right answer here, if done well. If done badly, don’t bother.

The big problem in all of this? Discovery in an app catalog ecosystem still sucks. We didn’t solve that problem. Apple has made some progress, but it’s still very much not a solved problem. And it won’t be any time soon. Because it’s hard. And that’s why when I see phrases like “simple and quick”, I laugh, to hide the tears. buy me a couple of beers, I’ll show you the scars… As a developer, frankly, you should know better than play the “how hard can it be?” game, because isn’t that what your non-developers friends say about that new feature they want you to add to your app?

If it was easy, Apple’d have done it by now. Seriously.

(hat tip: Daring Fireball for the links to these)

Don’t think about this one too hard…

Attorney generals fear Google’s new privacy policy is an “invasion of privacy” | VentureBeat:

The new policy, Google has insisted, is meant to simplify things, but users, Congress, and now state attorney generals are attacking the policy for granting Google unfettered access to user data across its products.

 

“Google’s new privacy policy is troubling for a number of reasons,” the letter reads. “On a fundamental level, the policy appears to invade consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information consumers input into one Google product with all Google products.”

 

I’ve been pondering this since Google announced the simplified and consolidated privacy policy.

Was Google really unaware of the implications of this simplification and what it meant for consolidating a user’s information into one big lump, and how users were going to react to that consolidation? Were they really that naive?

Or…

Was Google fully aware of this implication, and thought they could pull this off without people noticing and getting up in arms by calling it a simplification and declaring it to be good for everyone? Were they really that naive?

Which version of Google bothers you more? The Google that was incredibly naive about the implications of such a significant action and only saw what it thought was a good thing t do? Or the malicious Google that naively thought nobody would see through their plan to consolidate this data and thought they could pull this off with some smoke, a few mirrors and handwaving?

To be honest, I lean towards the “well meaning but incredibly naive” Google of the first choice, rather than the overtly evil and malicious Google. I’ve seen enough Google missteps to believe they’re mostly well meaning but naive, and incredibly tone deaf about the implications about things they do that impact their users. But at the same time, in a company like Google, that tone deaf, naive worldview doesn’t make me feel much better about things.

I’ve tried to come up with a third scenario that didn’t involve Google being naive or evil, and I can’t. And I can’t see a scenario where a change this significant wouldn’t create a kerfluffle over the implications of the changes — and yet, it looks like Google didn’t see a scenario where it did. If you’re that unaware of how your users think and view you, that’s a problem. Especially for a company that’s made a strong commitment to “go social”.

No matter how you look at this one, it creates a worry point about depending on Google. Not because of what they’re doing (although it’s not harmless, either), but because of the implications of how they think and how they understand their users and customers that they could do this and not see the tidal wave of criticism coming… And as far as I can tell, they didn’t, and they still aren’t working to manage the issues this is causing…

 

 

 

Next for the Sharks: a trade….

Dreger: Sharks a strong contender for Blue Jackets’ Nash:

The San Jose Sharks are emerging as a strong contender for Rick Nash. Sources say Columbus initially targeted Logan Couture, but was quickly told that was a non-starter. But, make no mistake, San Jose will stay in the mix until Monday’s deadline.

 

Nash and Sharks veteran Joe Thornton are good friends and have shown an impressive chemistry when playing together internationally that isn’t being overlooked. The Sharks would prefer an off-season deal to avoid the in-season disruption, but San Jose is keen.

Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson won’t discuss specifics on any of the deals he’s working on, but tells TSN there has been a lot of creativity suggested with a variety of his players. You can’t blame Howson for working outside the short list Rick Nash provided at the beginning of this saga.

Having watched the Sharks stumble through this road trip, and especially last night’s loss to Columbus, one thing is clear: there’s something off about the team. It’s not tuning out the coach, or not caring, or not working hard, or lack of commitment, or any of those things. But still, this team’s just not right.

And while bringing in Dominick Moore is a nice deal, that’s not going to fix it. This team, as much as anything, needs a kick in the butt and a shake of the neck, and when this has happened in the past, Doug Wilson hasn’t been afraid to do the kicking.

I smell a trade brewing. Not a spear carrier, 7th rounder going back trade, something fairly significant.

But I can’t convince myself it’s Rick Nash. I’m sure they’re talking; Wilson talks a lot, and sometimes, you talk and end up with Joe Thornton. But I’m not convinced a Nash trade would make the Sharks better. Different, definitely. Better? Not so sure. On the other hand, I don’t think this team necessarily needs to get better. I am convinced it needs to be different or they’re unlikely to shake this funk.

The problem is that a Nash deal would require some significant assets going back. I would assume, with Couture not an option, that it’d be a significant forward and a defenseman. Would you really want to give up both Pavelski and Doug Murray? Because it might take that, and a draft pick, and maybe a prospect, to do the deal. I’m not convinced.

So I tend to think Wilson will go in a  different direction, and look for a top six forward. To get it, he’ll need to give up something good, and my thought is that’s going to be defensive depth. So my nominee for trade bait is…

Doug “crankshaft” murray. Not because I want him gone (not a bit), but because he’s the kind of player that will bring back a significant talent — and I see no chance the Sharks would trade Vlasic, who is the other defenseman they’re probably fielding lots of calls over. oh, they’re probably hearing about Demers, also, but I don’t think he’s going to bring back a top six forward.

Now, the short term problem is that Murray when and had his throat caved in, and it’s hard to trade someone who’s injured. But I find it interesting they sent him home, but still haven’t put him on IR. I wonder why…

So we’re close to the trade deadline. And as usual, my greatest hope is that trade deadline day hits, and nothing of importance happens, just to let us enjoy watching the crew on TSN sweat it out and read their favorite poutine recipes on the air. But it won’t happen.  And this year, San Jose is in the mix, and needs to be. It’ll be interesting to see what Wilson does. I can’t see him doing nothing.

(and since I know Doug reads my blog, another piece of advice. Start Greiss for a couple of games, let Niemi take a break, and see what happens. It might be disaster, but Niemi’s a bit of a disaster right now anyway…)

 

 

 

Day Tripping Panoche Valley

With Monday being a holiday, I took advantage of it to do an extended day trip, spending a chunk of it out in Panoche Valley and ended out at Merced Wildlife Refuge in search of a pretty sunset. The day started about 6:30AM, ended about 7:30PM, and covered about 320 miles.

The primary goal of the trip: get out, get alone, do some thinking, make some decisions. Oh, and Panoche Valley is a very interesting birding area in the winter, and full of interesting geological details and other things of interest worthy of pointing a camera at. The morning started out cool and damp — raining, actually — but the weather prognosis was clearing, so I decided not to go back to bed (tempting, though). I got on site about 8:30 at Paicines Reservoir, which was surprisingly quiet, other the the adult bald eagle (always a kick) sitting in a tree watching the area.

A big part of the trip was to give the new lenses a series workout and start understanding how best to use them, and to integrate the T3i into the mix and get a good feel for the picture quality and what it can do (and, compared to the 7d, what it can’t). I love being back in a two body photo gear configuration; for a trip like this, I put the 300+1.4x on the 7d, and the 24-105 on the T3i, and swapped in the 70-200 as appropriate. That seemed to work quite well through the day.

Every time I bird Panoche, I come back thinking I should spend time exploring it as a photo location. This time, I did, and I really came away wishing I’d done so before. the landscape is — the best description I can think of is “starkly beautiful”, ranging from wide open ranch lands to lots of convoluted hillsides to areas that look straight out of a desert. There’s a lot of oak, and that’s a tree I find fascinating and I’ve started exploring how to show that beauty.

It wasn’t a great day for photography; it started out early very damp and grey with weak light. I hoped it’d clear to partial cloudy, but by mid-day, it was in some areas fully cleared, leaving me with glary light and bad shadows, and the birding dried up as well (not complaining; while working on the shot below, I was serenaded at length by a singing california thrasher, and visited by a greater roadrunner. Both nice additions to this year’s list). That made some of the day more of a scouting trip, but I still found places where I could get some nice shots.

I ended up driving fairly far up New Idria, mostly to see what was there, and then backtracking and going out through Little Panoche. Once I popped out the other side, it was off to Santa Nella for a late lunch (the in-n-out is open!). And once I was there, I convinced myself to head off to Merced to look around and try for a nice sunset. Merced was really quiet, though, the Geese had headed to an evening roost nearby but off the refuge, and the Cranes were in small numbers and not particularly close to the tour route. The sunset I’d had hopes for turned into more or less a dud, enough so that I cleared out early.

Still, though, a nice and productive trip, although this is likely my last visit to Merced until fall. Some decent birding, some nice intense work with the cameras, and a nice day out where even the cell phone can’t interrupt. I’m just starting to work through the images, but some of them seem pretty nice. I’m really liking these new lenses and the quality of the images they generate, and the T3i is living up to my expectations and beyond as a second body. It looks to be a nice combo with the 24-105 for general shooting. More on that when I have a chance to do some more experimentation…

This shot is of a barn on a ranch on the early part the drive through Panoche. I loved its look, and how it was well-lit while framed in shadows. I ended up deciding to use two different shots of it, and then realized it would make a nice black and white as well, so I went and did conversions. I like all of these (but I think the first image in monochrome is my favorite). What’s your thought?

In the first, the sky was a bit too blown out, so I ended up cropping it out, but I like how I ended up with that composition.  These are all processed with dFine and Viveza 2, and the monochromes through silver efex pro (which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to upgrade…). That’s a much more complex workflow than “just” Lightroom, and that’s part of the set of decisions I’ve been chewing on the last few weeks (or longer) as well. More on that in a future blog post…

There’s a lot of interesting subject matter in Panoche Valley, and I’m just scratching the surface, but now that I’ve taken some extended time there with an eye to the environment and not just the birds, I’m starting to see places to shoot and seeing the times and weather where it can make them sing. It’s an area that’s going to be a long term project, though, that’s for sure…

Not that I’m complaining..

 

 

Fix The Sandbox

When I first saw what Apple was doing with the sandbox and the restrictions it causes, my guess was that they’re setting these restrictions up for something else — and it seems to me the most likely thing is there’s some new product line coming (next gen apple TV box, perhaps?) and if your app is compliant with the sandbox restrictions, it’ll work on this new device, day one.

So what they’re really doing is getting app developers writing for this new product line, without telling them that’s what’s going on. IF you fit within this box, you’ll fit on this new thing, whatever it is.

Just thinking out loud. But that seems very much like Apple.

 

Red Sweater Blog – Fix The Sandbox:

At its best sandboxing is a means for app developers to faithfully state their intentions in a manner that can be evaluated by users, and also be reliably enforced by the operating system. So if your new “Fun on Facebook” app declares its intention is to connect to the web, you might judiciously allow it. If it says it needs to write files to the root of the filesystem, you’d be wise to search for another app.

 

Sandboxing on the Mac works by providing developers with a standardized list of “entitlements” which are clear descriptions of things it would like to do on your Mac. Examples include: access the internet, read files from your Pictures folder, print things on your printer.

The number one broken thing about sandboxing as it stands today, is the list of entitlements is simply too limited. Many apps on the App Store, including my own, will need to have their functionality considerably diminished, or in some cases made outright useless, in order to accommodate the available list of entitlements that sandboxing offers.

 

 

Your Address Book Isn’t Yours

Your Address Book Isn’t Yours | PandoDaily:

When you agree to upload an address book en masse, you ignore this mish-mosh collection of agreements and are treating that data as if it’s yours, when it absolutely isn’t.

So, what do we do? We’re not going to come up with some magical replacement for good ol’ contact cards — it’s been tried before, and always falls to simplicity.

 

And if you stop to think about it, the company that understood this was Facebook, and it got roundly criticized by many in the tech elite for trying to limit people’s ability to slog this data around from service to service.

This was also something we tried to manage in Synergy in webOS, and we got roundly criticized for it, as well, because the mental model most people has is “my address book”, and it was a point of — discussion — I had with users and developers on a regular basis, because our decision to tie records to the service they came from made sense in some ways, but made it difficult to build the kind of PIM services people wanted. And part of the reason they wanted them was because those services existed long ago on Treos running webOS, and they couldn’t understand why they didn’t exist on webOS.

I’m not pretending that we got it 100% right (I don’t think we did, not close), but this is a problem that didn’t exist in the days of the Treo, where data didn’t live on 30 different services with 30 different terms and conditions.

This is a cat that needs to be belled, but I haven’t seen a mouse able to get close yet. Plaxo dealt with some of the micro issues, but not the macro challenges. The fact is, this is all brand new, and the rules of engagement (and disengagement) in a world where data is hyper distributed and not easily controlled by the owner.

And that’s my view of this — it doesn’t matter that the data lives in your address book, or on google, or iCloud or yahoo or wherever. It’s still MY data, even if I gave you permission to store a copy for your use. I should have the right to say how that’s to be used, and how it can be shared. Or whether.

Which means there needs to be some way to infinitely distribute that data while still having that data check with some authoritative point for both updates and access authorization.

You really want to be the service that controls (and monetizes) someone’s online identity? Solve that problem, and we’ll all use your service to manage how people access our personal information.

And until that happens, these fights and challenges will continue…

 

 

iPhone Address Book Fiasco Should Be Apple’s Cue to Build Its Own Social Network

iPhone Address Book Fiasco Should Be Apple’s Cue to Build Its Own Social Network:

Apple can take all that address book data and make a real social platform out of it, adding features like two-way friend confirmation, blocking users, public profiles, photo sharing, activity streams, whatever. Then, one click could let you import all that stuff, especially all those existing friend relationships, into apps. Eventually, this could even become a standalone social network service, like Facebook. Maybe call it “Friend Center”.

Why bother?

It’s hard to overstate the importance of social apps for Apple’s iOS platform. Many of its most popular apps are owned by social networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And many of its top games are social, too, ranging from “Words With Friends” to multi-player card games.

 

I think this is a great idea. I don’t see it happening.

There’s a problem here. You can’t build social networking systems if you don’t understand social networking. If you try, you get — Ping. You get Google Wave. You get Google Buzz.

Google finally figured that out, and put work into changing the corporate DNA and getting people in who saw these things as social systems and not engineering systems, and I think Google+ is a good system that’s getting better (it’s interesting to live in two worlds and hear both sides of the Google+ story — the geeky elite seem to put it down a lot, and the photographers caught on to it early and love it (I lean towards the Photographer opinion, for what it’s worth).

Google, though, is further down the social path than Apple. They at least grok the need to converse with users and be part of the social space, and they have done a fair amount of blogging (corporate and personal) and while Google Groups needs a massive makeover, well, Apple Groups are, um… And where is Apple’s presence in their own support forums?

Steve was simple not interested or supportive of the core of the social phenomenon, which was talking to customers. You can’t control a conversation, and Apple was about control. You can join into a conversation, you can influence it, you can do a lot of things, but you can’t control it. And so, Apple was never IN the conversation.

I expect this will change under Tim Cook, but the DNA to be successful in this is missing from Apple even more than it was missing from Google when they thought Buzz was the answer. There are people at Apple who would love to do these things, but I think it’s going to require big attitude shifts within the company, and an influx of people who can both understand the Apple way of things and mindset AND social systems before you have a hope of something like this happening. Which to me means it’s easily a few years off. And people who can translate social systems into something that won’t give Apple hives (and work to transform Apple into a mindset that will work in a social universe, too). I think this shift is necessary; this “snow blind” issue of Apple and social systems is a place where I think Apple’s success is at risk; it’s a way for a competitor to shift the market away from Apple in a way that Apple can’t compete with, similar to the way Apple used the iMac and design esthetics to do that to Microsoft in a way Microsoft couldn’t understand how to react to. Not an easy task, but it’s where I see a big vulnerability to a market disruption that Apple can’t fight.

This isn’t new. It was one of the things I was pushing to people who would listen, way back before I left Apple.

Jobs I wish I could have taken at Apple (Apple Post-mortem, part 2 of some number….) @ Chuqui 3.0:

 

2) Community architect for iTunes. This is one I actually had some discussions about. Maybe you’re familiar with Pandora or last.fm? One of the questions I’ve had since the start of iTunes (and the Clear-Channel-ification of broadcast radio) was how people found out about new and interesting music. It’s sure not on broadcast radio any more, especially here in Silicon Valley. Pandora and last.fm are heading in that area — but what if you could turn the iTunes community into a real recommendation service? And how would you do it? there are some very simplistic tools in iTunes today that are “very Amazon” and not “very community” — and they’re nice, as far as they go. I felt that there was a lot of opportunity to build something really sharp and best of show. There was definitely interest among some folks inside iTunes, too. It may well happen — it just won’t be something I did. ohwell. Here’s hoping, though. There’s such opportunity here.

3) Community architect for .Mac. Although honestly, .Mac needs a lot more than community building. Allow me to defer detailed discussion of .Mac for later (remind me if I forget….), but while I think it’s good for many things, there are lots of things Apple really ought to do with .Mac (they should have bought Flickr, dammit, to name just one), and Mac Groups are barely adequate for organizing a church picnic. But there are some decent bones here to build from, if they’d just commit to doing so. Unfortunately, I just never got the feeling they would.

 

And now, six years later, we have — Ping — and iCloud, and Apple’s emergence into the social fabric of the net is still, well, completely missing. Well, Phil Schiller now tweets once or twice a month…

Apple should be going in this direction. I see no indication they are. Apple needs to bring people in who can help them, people who both understand these technologies and understand Apple and its culture. Good luck finding them. And it’s going to take Tim Cook and Eddy and Phil and the top execs committing to not just integrating twitter into IOS in some superficial way, but bringing this stuff into Apple and the Apple mindset and corporate DNA.

The one thing I do know is that Tim Cook understands how Steve made Apple successful, but he’s not Steve, and he has his own ideas and vision. He’s started shifting Apple down different paths already; he’s much more likely to have his own blog than steve ever would have, for instance, and he’s a lot less controlling, but not less demanding. So I think the possibilities are there in ways not possible as long as Steve was in charge.

But still, I’m not holding my breath.

 

 

turning off the twitter feed posts…

 

I’ve just disabled the daily twitter feed posts. Since Google dropped the sharing option out of Google Reader I’ve been experimenting with that as an alternative, and honesty, I just don’t like it. Lots of noise, little information, less amplification of that information. This is especially true with twitter putting the links through their shortener, since I don’t even get a benefit of using bit.ly to figure out which ones (if any) you click on; the analytics are pretty opaque, and the links point at twitter’s shortener, not the original site, so they don’t get any direct google help. The analytics show that almost nobody is clicking in to read those articles (not surprising), and it’s effectively impossible to see if anyone is using them out of the RSS feed.

Add in that all of the twitter chatter gets in the way, and the more I look at it, the more I see a useless blob of stuff with little to really call useful to someone. So why bother? Don’t be surprised if I go back in and nuke all of those postings, now that I’ve decided they’re pretty worthless…

So for now, if that stuff interested you, your best bet is to monitor my google+ page. If and when google gets its act together and makes that available as an RSS feed the nightly digest might return (or maybe not), but until then, I see no reason to post that stuff in the current form. It’s just not that useful or interesting.

(and yes, I’ve submarined out of the blog again. Right now, all my energy is being pushed at work stuff — I’m living in Omnigraffle as we try to push the site design off to various groups for review and implementation, and so in the evenings, I’ve been mostly just — gasp — kicking back. As soon as this really busy phase shifts, I’ll be back more reliably. This is a good pause, and lots is happening really fast, but I just haven’t been feeling like writing in the evenings because of it. But we’re going to, we hope, launch in about half the time sites like this typically launch, once we get there, or so it looks right now…

 

 

RIM avoided an outside CEO because they’re all children or morons, says director | VentureBeat

Oh, good lord…

RIM avoided an outside CEO because they’re all children or morons, says director | VentureBeat:

 

“So we’re supposed to hand it over to children, or morons from the outside who will destroy the company?” RIM director Roger Martin told the Globe and Mail in an interview. “Or should we try to build our way to having succession?”

 

no, no. stick to the current plan and destroy it from within. That’s much more effective.

 

 

 

I got a rock.

HP proxy: Ray Lane’s $10 million plus comp and other fun facts — Tech News and Analysis:

Lane, who became executive chairman of HP on September 22, 2011 (he had been non-executive chairman since November 1, 2010, the start of HP’s FY 2011)  logged more than $10 million in total compensation — the bulk of it in stock and options — for the fiscal year, according to the HP proxy.

Other highlights from the proxy:

 

 

 

Meg Whitman who famously took the HP CEO position in September for $1 in salary, gets $16 million in stock and options. Former CEO Leo Apotheker walked away with $30.4 million when he was fired by HP last September.

 

Except for my first year tenure, when they couldn’t even afford that. (but don’t feel bad for me, according to them, I was very well compensated).

 

 

WOULD 4-ON-4 BE BETTER?

Dallas Stars Blog:: WOULD 4-ON-4 BE BETTER?:

No sport seems more at war with its playing surface than hockey.

The players get bigger and faster. Coaching keeps getting smarter, deeper and tech-enhanced. Yet the rink remains 200’x 85’. And because of this scoring, offense, and creativity is suffering.

So what should be the strategy to counter this? Make the rink bigger? Not gonna happen, those seats with fannies in them are the lifeblood of the individual teams. OK, what if they eliminated a player per side and played four on four?

Noted stick and puck sorcerer, Mike Ribeiro is in my camp on this and I’m-a go ahead and say many of his ilk would concur.

If this radical change were to be implemented me thinks the impact on the game would be both positive and profound.

At first thought, I can see the attraction of shifting the NHL to a 4 on 4 league full time. I’ve wondered at times whether the league should expand 4-4, or go to it full time myself.

Well, unless you’re a player or the player’s union. It’d likely mean losing 3-4 roster spots per team, or 100 player jobs. I can’t see the union buying into that any time soon.

But I think back to the wonderful days of Roller Hockey International, which for a few fun years was a summer distraction in NHL arenas (“Let’s Go Rhinos!”). It was summer fare populated with a few IHL/AHL caliber players, but mostly European and ECHL caliber athletes.

And it was four on four full time. And the more I think back to the style of play we saw watching the RHI for a few years, the more I remember thinking that it was hockey, but it definitely wasn’t what I’d call “real hockey”. And that there was a reason the NBA outlawed the zone for those many years….

I think the four on four discussion is a lot like the international rink discussion. It seems logical and like a good idea, but in both cases, the answers to what’s going on with the NHL is a lot more complicated, and you might solve some problems shifting the league to four on four, but you’d definitely create new and different problems, and it’s not at all clear to me it’d make the league better, just different.

Having watched RHI hockey and full time 4-4 for a few seasons, I don’t think that’s the kind of hockey I’d want to watch every night in the NHL. I don’t think it’d be better. Just different.

 

A quick look at January….

1/12th of the year is gone already. How time flies when you’re having fun…

I apologize for the quiet on the blog the last week. Blame it on a rhino-virus, which took just enough out of me to make sitting on the couch a lot more attractive than other options. Tonight I’m back off sedated, off the Aftrin, energy levels almost back to normal, so I thought I’d check in and remind folks I’m alive.

I’m into my sixth week at the new gig, and things seem to be progressing well. It’s been this whirlwind of meeting folks, listening to them, offering them our views, and trying to figure out what exactly we need to do (as opposed to what we were hired to do). We’ve made lots of progress, we’ve gotten the contract with the developers approved, I’ve gotten the first round of wireframes making the rounds and the various teams looking at them haven’t laughed or cried yet. But we’re just scratching the surface; I’m already mentally planning a year out, and trying to make sure when we get there, we have what we need. Good stuff so far. My new cohort in crime and I seem to sync up well in complementary ways, and it’s nice being in an environment of yes.

January was a positive month for my online stuff and a good start to the year, despite my being pretty quiet the last week or so. Overall visits were up 60% over December with page views up 50% — and up 110% over January 2011. Traffic to my photos on smugmug rocketed to almost double my previous highest page view month. I got my first video experiment up, and it got 125+ views and good feedback and some very useful critiques. I only got out with the camera twice, but both were very intensive trips and both generated some really nice images — but I also got the trees pruned before the apricot budded and I’m making good progress on some neglected work in the yard and the house — much as I wish I could spend all my spare time out with the camera, there are other things I like doing as well. I also filed 13 reports with eBird for a good start to the year — one lifer and 114 species to the year list, my best january since 2009, which beat it by about 8 species, and if I hadn’t caught this stupid cold, I’d probably have gotten out one more sunday and caught it.

And I’ve started the redesign of this site and my online stuff, although you probably won’t see it for a while. it’s not just swapping in a new theme, from the looks of it. But that’s where my evening focus is right now (that, and skyrim and the sharks). I am working to shift to a more active creation attitude from a content consumption mentality, and so far, I think things are headed in the right direction.

Most popular pieces in the month?

• Changing of the Guard (about HP and webOS, not surprisingly)
• How not to be a doofus with a camera
• Some Thoughts on Lightroom Keywords (which keeps chugging along)
• My Favorite Images of 2011
• We’re having the comment fight again
• Everyone’s best photos of 2011 lists
• Why I walked Away from my Fiction (and why I’m back)

Although I have decided, for the short term, to focus on blog writing and the blog redesign as the primary tasks, and photography as the third wheel. Other stuff will wait to later in the year, just so I can keep focus on things I want finished sooner.

So I’m hoping to carry this forward into February, and see what happens. It’s both nice and scary to be through January, because I feel like i’ve accomplished a lot and set things up to accomplish even more — but I’m not sure where the month went. Been good, and busy. Better than the alternatives, I guess.