Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

For some time now, titanium has been the material to convey technological edginess. In the hierarchy of credit cards, it apparently trumps silver, gold and even platinum. The metal is used to make fashion statements in products as varied as the original Apple PowerBook, fancy (but dull) knives, high-end watches or cameras like the $20,000 fiftieth anniversary commemorative Leica M7. As an eminently biocompatible material, titanium is also used in implants. I am not entirely immune to the lure of the material, as I recently purchased the iconic titanium spork for travel use.

Titanium has also become the material of choice for extravagant architectural projects, Frank Gehry’s abuse of the stuff in projects like the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao being only the most egregious example. Reportedly Gehry himself tires of the metal, but the tasteless committees that drive much of public architecture worldwide clamor for it, so he is trapped in the style just as surely as less famous architects are trapped in various forms of academism.

That said, there may be a backlash against titanium, and copper may be taking over as the new metal of choice in projects like the new De Young museum in San Francisco. I have also seen it used as a decorative element in a number of new residential buildings in my neighborhood in San Francisco (the picture to the left is from a building on California and Polk). Copper is of course the most beautiful of metals, with a rich hue reminiscent of sunset, and it gets even better with age as it gains its characteristic light green patina.

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I finally completed my CD ripping project and now have lossless copies of all my CDs (and the CD-audio layer of my SACDs) on my Mac.

As I mentioned before, the bulk of the work is tagging the music with correct metadata, locating cover art when the majority of my CD jewel cases and booklets are moldering in a cellar in France. (Amazon is helpful, specially now that it allows users to upload their own scans of cover art). Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes make short work of normalizing CDDB metadata like correcting the people who stuff the composer name in the title or vice versa.

I wrote my own scripts to tackle these common operations:

1. Strip numbers from titles. That’s the “Track #” field’s job. This script requires the Satimage AppleScript Regex OSAX plug-in to work.
2. Renumber a selection sequentially, so I can split a CD into its constituent parts and renumber them independently from each other or the original CD track order.
3. Strip prefix strings from titles.

This does not mean I am finished, however. About 3/4 of the way through, I realized iTunes is far from perfect at extracting CD audio. For various reasons related to how the Redbook CD audio format was designed without computers in mind, it is very hard to get a perfect, repeatable rip from one attempt to the other. iTunes has an “error-correction” option that seems not to have any effect. For reliable ripping, you have to use specialized programs like EAC on Windows and a cdparanoia-based program like Max on OS X. This complicates the workflow as Max is slightly buggy, and nowhere as good at managing metadata as iTunes is, so the one-step import in iTunes becomes a less streamlined affair:

1. Rip the CD to AIFF in Max
2. Import the AIFF into iTunes
3. Number the tracks (very important!) using my “Renumber tracks” script
4. Convert to Apple lossless
5. Copy the metadata from CDDB using Doug Adams’ Copy info tracks to tracks script.
6. Add album cover art and mention the track was ripped with Max
7. Backup to another hard drive!

The good thing is, now that I have collected the metadata and cover art, I can rerip trouble tracks with clicks or pops, and copy the metadata in one step using Doug’s action, so re-ripping won’t be as much of a hassle as the first time. The next step is to convert everything to FLAC so I have a non-proprietary library that works with SlimServer on my Solaris home server.

If you are not as obsessive about your music metadata as I am, the process will be much easier if you just use whatever CDDB supplies you. In any case, remember, just say No! to DRM-infested lossy-compressed tracks from the iTunes Music Store.

Bill Gates announced yesterday he is progressively going to disengage himself from day-to-day participation in Microsoft over the next two years, to concentrate exclusively on his foundation. However questionable Microsoft’s business practices may be, they are no worse than Standard Oil’s. The Rockefellers or Carnegie bought social respectability by endowing institutions for the already comfortable. No matter what the IRS may claim, donating to places like Harvard in exchange for naming rights does not qualify as charity in my book.

In contrast, Gates’ humanitarian work has been remarkable — his money is comforting the truly afflicted of this world, like sufferers of leprosy or malaria. His example is highly unlikely to be emulated by Silicon Valley’s skinflint tycoons (Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, I’m looking at you). The latter conveniently convinced themselves their wealth is due entirely to their own efforts, never to luck, or government funding in the case of the Internet moguls. This leads to the self-serving belief that they are absolved of any obligation to society or to those less fortunate (in both senses of the term).

This decision is not entirely unexpected. Microsoft has been floundering for the last several years, and has accrued severe managerial bloat, something the ruthless and paranoid Bill Gates circa 1995 would never have allowed to continue. There is remarkable dearth of insightful commentary on the announcement. My take is that the harrowing and humiliating process of the DoJ anti-trust trial proved cathartic and led him to review his priorities, even if the lawsuit itself ended up with an ineffective slap on the wrist.

Some equally interesting reading coming out of Redmond: Broken Windows Theory, an article by a Microsoft project manager on the back story behind the Windows Vista delay, with some really interesting metrics. Apparently Vista takes no less than 24 hours to compile on a fast dual-processor PC. It has 50 levels of dependencies, 50 million lines of code (one metric I personally find meaningless, as you can get more done in one line of Python than in a hundred lines of C/C++). His conclusion is that due to its scale, Vista could simply be structurally unmanageable. Certainly, the supporting infrastructure, as in automation tools, code and dependency analysis, project management et al. ought to be a project in itself of the same scope as, say, Microsoft Word.

When I worked at France Télécom in the late nineties, they were reeling from the near total failure of Frégate, a half-billion dollar billing system of the future project (another interesting metric: two-thirds of billing systems projects worldwide end in failure). The grapevine even devised a unit of measurement, the Potteau, after an eponymous Ingénieur Général (a typically French title with roots in the military engineering side of the civil service) involved in the project. One potteau equals one man-century. It is deemed the unit beyond which any software project is doomed to failure.

Vista involved 2000 developers over 5 years. That’s over 100 potteaux.

There are many ways to carry a camera. Most are supplied with a neck strap (and there is a non-slip shoulder equivalent, the UPstrap). Wearing a camera around the neck gets tiresome really quickly, makes you look like a goofy tourist, and potentially attracts the undesirable attention of thieves and would-be muggers.

I usually carry my camera discreetly inside a shoulder bag. A regular bag, mind you, not one of those obesely over-padded camera bags that are so bulky as to preclude walking around with them. You still need something to secure the camera, prevent it from slipping from your grasp and falling onto the hard pavement.

For pocket cameras, the wrist strap usually supplied will do just fine. You can get a tighter fit by attaching a cord lock (Google comes up with a bewildering variety of them) and reduce the risk of the lanyard slipping off your wrist. For some reason, only Contax had the sense to supply lanyards with a built-in cord lock.

For larger cameras, you need a hand strap. They are very common with camcorders, but unfortunately, very few camera manufacturers think of offering them as an option, or even provide bottom eyelets to make attaching them convenient. You have to hunt for third-party accessories and attach them using the tripod screw mount at the bottom of the camera.

For some time, I have mounted a cheap Sunpak hand strap on my Rebel XT. It does the job, but the plastic tripod mount is flimsy and unscrews all to easily, and the vinyl is not very pleasant to the touch. Another issue is that it precludes the use of an Arca-Swiss type quick-release plate. About a year ago, I wrote to Acratech, the people who make my ballhead and the QR plate on my Rebel XT, to suggest they drill an eyelet in the plate to allow mounting a strap, but never got a reply back.

I recently found out that Markins, a Korean maker of fine photographic ballheads, apparently took a patent on the idea and sells leather hand straps to go with some of their QR plates. Despite the princely price, I immediately ordered a set.

You have to unwind the strap to thread it through the eyelets on the camera and the QR plate, and back through the leather knuckle guard. This is fiendishly difficult to do if you don’t know the trick to it: wrap the tip of the strap in packing tape to produce a leader, and cut to a taper with scissors to ease insertion.

This strap works because the Rebel XT has a protruding hand grip. For a camera like the Leica MP, which does not have an ample grip (unless you attach an accessory grip), I use a sturdy strap liberated from my father’s old 8mm movie camera.

If you don’t have one of these lying around, you can always try one of Gordy Coale’s wrist straps, or if they lack snob appeal, Artisan & Artist makes ridiculously fancy (and expensive) ones for Japanese Leica fetishists.

Update (2022-11-24):

I use a Peak Design hand strap on my Nikon Z7. It attaches to a standard Peak Design anchor at the bottom (in this case, attached to a RRS QR plate) and has a gate clip strap at the top that goes through an slot-type eyelet (or in this case a triangular split ring).

I have noticed a trend lately of computers making an annoying whining sound when they are running at low utilization. This happens with my Dual G5 PowerMac, the Dells I ordered 18 months ago for my staff (before we ditched Dell for HP due to the former’s refusal to sell desktops powered with AMD64 chips instead of the inferior Intel parts), and I am starting to notice it with my MacBook Pro when in a really quiet room.

These machines emit an incredibly annoying high-pitched whine when idling, one that disappears when you increase the CPU load (I usually run openssl speed on the Macs). Probably the fan falls in some oscillating pattern because no hysteresis was put into the speed control firmware. It looks like these machines were tested under full load, but not under light load, which just happens to be the most common situation for computers. The short-term work-around is to generate artificial load by running openssl in an infinite loop, or to use a distributed computing program like Folding@Home.

Load-testing is a good thing, but idle-testing is a good idea as well…