Archive for July, 2009
Gmail: Please Bold the Hidden Labels Button when there are Unread Messages
I love Gmail. It does everything I could possibly want an email client (web or desktop) to do. All of my non-junk email accounts are Gmail or are forwarded to Gmail accounts. That said, occasionally something occurs to me that would make my Gmail experience a little bit better. Sometimes these crop up as Labs features, which I think is great, and is part of why I enjoy using Gmail so much.
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Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 13
The City and Experiments with HDR
I was in San Diego to watch Harry Potter last night (terrible, by the way) and I took the opportunity to check out downtown and Coronado. I’ve included a couple of pictures I took from Harbor Island.
Then today I spent more time taking pictures on the beach. I’ve been trying out some HDR techniques; you can see the results below.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 12
Beach, Surfing, and a New Camera
For the past couple days I’ve been heading down to the beach to take pictures of the sunset with my new Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I’ve really been having fun with this camera, and I’m learning a lot (especially how to estimate settings—I’ve been trying to force myself to use full manual controls for most of my pictures, and my eyeballing skills have much improved). I also got the chance to try surfing this evening, but I didn’t get any pictures of that.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 11
Baldy, Part II
I intended to climb San Gorgonio this past weekend, but couldn’t because my intended trail was closed due to “bear issues” (direct quote from the ranger). I ended up hiking Baldy again, this time with my friend Kevin from work. We went up the same way as I went last time, but we were both pretty tired and ended up going down via the ski area (and one helpful lift ride) to hitch a ride back to our car. The weather was unpleasantly hot, and is making me rethink my plans to do more hiking this summer. It was also crowded; Baldy’s proximity to millions of people makes it a very popular mountain. I’ve only included a few pictures because they were kind of uninspiring after Mount Rainier.
First Thoughts on Scala
Over the past week or so I’ve been looking into the Scala programming language. If you aren’t familiar with it, Scala is one of a group of new-ish languages including Groovy, Clojure, and Nice (as well as new implementations of preexisting languages like Jython, JRuby, and Rhino) that run on the JVM (either interpreted or compiled to Java bytecode). Over perhaps the past decade the JVM has been increasingly seen as an attractive target platform for language development for several reasons:
- Implementation in Java instead of C
- Features like garbage collection, portability, and a huge standard library come for free
- Languages benefit from advances and optimizations in the JVM
(This is part of a trend pointed out as Prediction #4 in a list of 10 predictions about software Steve Yegge made about 5 years ago.) In fact, targeting a virtual machine has almost become the only way to implement new, fancy languages with reasonable performance, portability, and implementation time.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 10
Burroughs Mountain, Mount Rainier National Park
For my second (and last) whole day in Seattle, I went hiking with four other friends. We went to Mount Rainier National Park, and hiked the three peaks of Burroughs Mountain, directly adjacent to Mount Rainier itself. It was a fun hike, with lots of snow left from the winter and unbelievable views of Rainier. The weather was also wonderful; it was warm the whole day, but with lots of very interesting clouds that made for great photography opportunities. I also got to introduce my friends to the joys of glissading; the trail to the third peak of Burroughs Mountain was entirely on snowpack, so coming down was fast and fun.
I took more than 400 pictures during the 8-mile hike, the majority of which were profiles of Mount Rainier itself. I’ve tried to pick out the best ones, but I had a hard time limiting myself.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 9
Fireworks at Gas Works Park
This weekend I traveled to Seattle to visit some Rice friends who are interning/working there. We went to Gas Works Park to watch the fireworks show over Lake Union. It was extremely crowded, with thousands of people carpeting the grass for acres. We managed to get right to the water, and I set up my tripod directly in front of the fireworks barge (although there were some unfortunate bushes right in front of me). A lot of these pictures were taken with my friend Kevin’s Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3.
Playing around with CHDK
I own a Canon Powershot A540, and I’ve been putting it through its paces this summer. There are a few ways in which I’ve sort of hit the limits of its capabilities; for example, I can’t do the typical slow-shutter-speed waterfall photographs because the aperture only goes down to f/8 (although I could probably hack it with a makeshift ND filter or something). Interestingly, the capabilities of these cameras are in part set by the firmware, and so there is an open-source firmware enhancement project called CHDK which aims to both unlock the full featureset of the hardware and augment it with more featureful software.
