Things You’ll Find Interesting April 24, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

perl, UTF-8, and photo EXIF data…

A comment on a previous post deserves a followup:

If you’re interested in writing it up, I would certainly be interested in reading about the details of the utf-8 data issues you experienced (and how you fixed it).

It’s a fair question, and easy to answer once you know what to look for, but not entirely obvious. The symptom I had was that my copyrights, which have the © symbol in them, were showing spurious characters in them; it was clearly a weird UTF-8 issue (I love the “I’ve dealt with this before, now I just have to remember how” problems).

My first thought was that I just needed to convert the character into an HTML entity. I loaded up “HTML::Entities” and ran the string through it encode_entities(); that’s the right thing to do in general, but, well, didn’t fix the problem.

The not quite so obvious answer: Perl’s internals predate UTF, so there’s been a lot of whacking it with a stick to make it work with international character sets. One side effect of that is that unless it knows you’re using UTF-8, or you tell it you are, it assumes everything is 8bit ascii. If you’re doing unicode type things within the code itself, Perl will figure it out and it’s (mostly) transparent to the programmer.

Not so with external data; typically, this is a problem when reading in from a database, but EXIF data loaded from an image is handled the same way. Unless you tell Perl that data may have UTF-8 data in it, it treats it as 8bit data.

There are a couple of ways of doing this. What I ended up doing was loading in the Encode library (“use Encode;”) and then running the string through decode_utf8(). That tells Perl to treat the string as unicode and does the necessary internal conversions. After that — it’ll handle things behind the scenes for you (mostly).

$s .= '<div class="piccopy">' . encode_entities(decode_utf8($$picinfo{'Copyright'})) . '</div>' . "\n";

You can also tell perl and any data coming from an incoming stream is unicode when using open() and etc. Google is your friend here.

So the answer is fairly simple, the causes somewhat baroque, and frankly, I’m probably being a bad person by not building unicode support into my scripts automatically (but I’ve been coding Perl a long, long time, and habits die hard). This is a place where I need to update my best practices, probably.

And I still need to clean up this script so that all of the incoming EXIF data is properly decoded. I solved this problem, but I haven’t yet updated the script to solve this issue generally for all of the data. And yes, that is in the TODO list…

Photo of the Day: Photographer Pondering Eternity (and Sea Otters)

Photographer Pondering Eternity (and sea otters) by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

While out at Pigeon Point one day, I noticed a sea otter had wrapped itself in kelp and decided to take a nap in the bay near the lighthouse (see him here). While looking for an interesting image to take of the otter, I noticed this photographer doing the same. I liked the way he was set off against the waves and shore behind him, and his shirt gave the image a nice shot of color. this shot works for me on a number of levels, including (perhaps especially because of) the photographer being just slightly out of focus where the scene behind him is sharp — to me, that emphasizes that he is there to frame the subject of the shot, not the subject of the shot himself. Which is what we as photographers are. 

Things You’ll Find Interesting April 23, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

The Ban Hammer descends on Raffie Torres

The Ban Hammer has descended on Raffi Torres, and the result is a 25 game suspension. 

That’s a lot. A lot more than I expected and I don’t know of a pundit that predicted that big a ban, but when you watch the league’s explanation, it makes sense. 

Note that “makes sense” is not the same as “is correct”. I have mixed feelings about this. I expected the league to over-react, but even my thought of what “over-react” might be didn’t reach 25 games. 

And yet the reality is that Torres is an unrepentant cement head who’s thrown elbows at heads for years, been yelled at for that for years, suspended for that more than once, and still does it and wonders why people get upset. 

So out comes the league equivalent of the “three strikes” rule. 

I don’t have a problem with that. Torres was a problem that needed to be taken off ice until the league is convinced he’s actually figured out why pulping people’s heads is a bad idea. If he can’t figure that out, he needs to be removed from the league permanently. 

I guess my mixed feelings aren’t so much about this decision (good riddance), but that it’s decision that won’t inhibit this behavior with other players. This is clearly a strategic strike at an individual that’s proven themselves to be harmful to the game. It won’t be a deterrent to anyone else.

So I guess my response to this is to look back at the larger issue; we still need ways to convince players to take the safety of opponents seriously — the “R”expect factor — and this doesn’t move that forward. My core  feeling on that is simple: current penalties aren’t severe enough, and if it were up to me, they’d all be doubled effective tomorrow. Taking care of this acute problem was necessary. The League hasn’t gone far enough in addressing the chronic problem that leads to players like Torres getting stupid enough to earn such a lengthy vacation… 

Will they? I think they will, over time. Too slowly for my taste, but the politics of this problem are severe and complex, because while the people of influence who belong to the Church of Don Cherry are not as influential as they once were, they still impact these decisions. And we can’t forget the core of it all: we can’t screw up the game of hockey in the name of improving it. 

I can’t build any sympathy for Torres here, as severe as the penalty is. He ultimately earned this. 

I just don’t think it solves the real problem. Just scratches the itch.

A common thought popped up in the comments when I posted about this a few days ago: should the NHL use how long an injured player is out as the basis for the length of a suspension? 

This one’s a bit of a tough call. I’m firmly in the camp that feels intent should be the primary piece of evidence, not the severity of the injury. The NHL has made it clear, however, that injury (or lack of it) and severity of the injury are factored into the suspension now. (let me make this clear: I feel this is a big mistake, and the NHL will regret it). Having taken that step, do you take the next and tie it to how long a player is out?

I hate that idea. There are so many factors out of the control of the player causing the injury — simple ones, like “does this player heal more quickly than that player?” to really complex ones like a player’s injury history; ignoring heads for a second, if I were a defenseman who low-bridges a player and tears his ACL, should I be suspended longer if that player had previously torn that ACL three times and was now facing major reconstructive surgery and seven months of rehab instead of a scope and six weeks?

That is, at its core, the argument why factoring in injury (instead of intent)? Should I, as a player, get a lighter suspension because the player I attacked was good at ducking and only hurt a little instead of as badly as I intended? but that’s what the NHL is doing. 

Let’s not even get started on the issue of team doctors fudging the data or a team quietly holding a player out longer because it impacts a key player on the opposition? (if you don’t think that would happen, you’re wonderfully naive). This opens up a can of worms nobody should want the league fighting with itself over. 

With concussions, the more a player gets concussed, the more severe future concussions tend to be and the longer they take to go away. Is that something a suspended player should be held accountable for?

My answer is no. But then, my answer is that the rules and suspensions need to be crafted so that we shouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place, that second and third concussions are incredibly rare in the league. we’re not there yet. 

I wrote my general philosophy on this topic about five years ago, and it hasn’t changed: 

At some point, we DO have to remember that hockey is a physical and violent sport. Injuries are part of the game, and they’re going to happen. You have to legislate and referee the game for the safety of the players. You also have to realize that if you legislate and referee the game to GUARANTEE no injuries, what you have isn’t the hockey game we know and love today (you have rec-league no-touch hockey, or ringette or curling). A player who’s had concussions has to understand the risks of going out and playing again, and take on responsibility for some of that risk. it’s the League’s responsibility to make sure that players play in a safe environment for the typical player; it’s an individual’s responsibility to know whether their personal situation is safe enough under those conditions. [….] The one person who has no responsibility there is the person doing the hitting. If it’s a clean hit by the rules of the league, he shouldn’t have to worry about what players he should hold back on. It’s up to the player to be able and willing to take that kind of hit (and/or risk the side effects of it happening…).

 It is critical that the league set rules that make sure legal hits are not dangerous hits. they’ve made progress here, but it’s still far from perfect (because it’s a complex, difficult set of tradeoffs, and in some cases, we don’t know — the amount of knowledge we’ve gained on concussions in the last ten years is both stunning and scary; what do we still don’t know?). It is also critical to remember that the things we’re dealing with — the big, physical plays and hits — are a core aspect of hockey, and we run the risk of screwing up or destroying the game if the rules aren’t thought through carefully and implemented well. Fans don’t stop to think about that aspect, but fortunately, the league does. That’s why I continue to cut them slack as they struggle to find the right set of compromises here.

Photo of the Day: American Bittern in Flight

American Bittern in Flight by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

I looked up and saw the bird in the air flying right at me. This was literally a point and pray shot where I had to depend on autofocus and autoeverything to get it. On top of that, I was seriously worried the bird was going to come through the open window of the car, so the camera was at least partly an attempt to protect my face. As if was, it cleared my car roof by maybe two feet. I will, of course, take full credit for my massive photographic skills in making this shot. Merced National Wildlife Refuge

Things You’ll Find Interesting April 22, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

And the Sharks go golfing….

 Trying to put this loss in context. It didn’t hit me as hard as some years, because I fully expected it, but still, this Sharks team shouldn’t be going out in the first round.

Dave Pollak at the Merc has an interesting perspective:

Aftermath of a record-early elimination: Sharks waiting till Tuesday to pack things up for the season | Working the Corners:

Five games. Every other first-round exit lasted six. Until Saturday night’s 3-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues, who won their first playoff series since 2002.

Think about that for a second. Since St. Louis last won a series, the Sharks — a franchise 25 years younger — have won nine.

That isn’t a defense of the team’s management in the wake of a very disappointing 2011-12 season. Just a statement of fact to put things in context.

The reality is, every year one team wins the Stanley Cup and twenty-nine do not. the Sharks are in their twenties, but if you stop and think about it, if the Cup were rotated to each team one per year (like the All-Star game is), the Sharks wouldn’t have had their time with it. Objectively, there’s still a few years to go before they are “late” to the Cup. 

Sports and sports fandom, however, are not objective things. That’s not how fans think. Nor should they. So when a team falls short, it hurts. When you look at a team and you wonder if it’s peaked and the window is closing, it hurts. But in sports, sometimes you do your best, and it’s not enough. 

Was this season this team’s best? Honestly, no. It struggled to get on a roll all year. But this first round against the Blues? I don’t have many complaints. I don’t think the Sharks lost this series, they were beaten. 

I also don’t think the Sharks “fell back” much, either. I think what we’re seeing is a league where many teams are making strong positive moves in their talent and execution. This is parity, and I like it. there are 25 teams capable of making the playoffs and not being embarrassed being there. 

Take a step back and think about it. Which team would you rather be a fan of: the Sharks, who haven’t won a Cup yet, but have been in the playoffs consistently and played deep into the playoffs a number of times — or the Florida Panthers, who ran to the Stanley Cup in 1996, and didn’t make the playoffs again for a decade? or the Blues, another team that’s been out of the playoffs for years that’s now back in the mix?

Would you really put up with a decade of cheering on the Islanders for one Cup? 

Not me. 

Of course, I want both. But honestly, if I can’t have both, the Sharks have done a good job of keeping me entertained. 

So for me, I’m disappointed, but life moves on. I know some fans and media types like to whine about parity) and those whines get louder and more insistent the closer you get to cities like New York or Detroit where there’s this sense of entitlement that of course they should win every year) — but it’s good for hockey, good for the league, and fun to watch. 

That doesn’t mean the Sharks can or should stand pat. I’m thinking through what changes I think are necessary, and a post mortem is coming. But I own’t be burning my jersey in protest. Instead, I think I’ll sit down and watch the Bruins game… 

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