Tag Archives: Computing

Opinion

iPhoto 5 Books

As many of you will already know, I recently came back from a trip to Vietnam. Some will even have seen the pictures. Others, however, do not like looking at pictures on a computer screen and always insist that I get prints. This time I decided to go one better and get a book.

Those still wallowing in the PC world may not be aware of a Macintosh application called iPhoto. It’s a bit like Adobe Photoshop Album if you’re familiar with that. It allows you to catalogue photos, categorise and label them and perform some minor edits such as red-eye removal, cropping and simple colour adjustment, although I normally use Photoshop for this kind of thing. I mention it here as one extra feature that I’ve never used before was its ability to make custom books. I normally use Photobox for my prints but this seemed like a much easier option.

I’m pleased to report that it was simple to do. I selected the book size and template and iPhoto automatically distributed the images in the book. I picked the “Travel” theme which is on the good side of slightly tacky. Then I added and subtracted a few, changed the order and altered the layouts, putting my favourite pictures on their own page and sequences of shots on a spread. I also wrote an introductory text for the first page. They allow the pictures in a variety of formats: a single shot taking the whole page, with borders and a number of different pictures per page. I think I used all of the various formats in the book at some point and they all work well.

It was all drag and drop (except for the typing!), just working as you’d expect with no need for a manual or even the on-line help. The first surprise was when I tried to order it. Firstly there were more pages than the default. It must have automatically created enough pages to show all the pictures, which is fair enough but I was a little shocked when I saw a higher price than I was expecting. And secondly I found that I had to enable One-Click ordering. I don’t like to have that switched on normally ? I like to be inconvenienced a little when there’s impulse buying ? to be done!

It took about a week to be delivered. First impressions are good, it is well packaged, appears to be nicely bound, and the cover has a hole in it revealing the title page. In my case this is a slightly Photoshopped sign I took (“Welcome to Vietnam”) and a small picture of myself. Opening up the book I find the introduction text. It’s clear and sharp, unlike my writing, but I note that they’ve not changed the quotes into “smart quotes,” which is a little un-Apple-like in the sense that it’s a small addition that would make it look that little bit more professional.

I confess that my most serious criticism is one that most people slowly nod their head and agree to in a patronising and not entirely convincing manner. Despite the gorgeous presentation, I feel that the image quality is not especially good. It’s not shockingly bad ? as we can see from the response of other people to my comment ? but it lacks adequate resolution and looks to be dithered. The colours also appear to be aiming for saturation at the expense of realism although this may, to some extent, be affected by the resolution.

In Apple’s defence I would say that they have a difficult balance to strike. Even at the resolution they used the book, which included just over forty images, was in excess of a 20Mb upload which takes some time even on my ADSL link. By contrast prints I get individually are normally between two and four megabytes each. Plus this is their consumer application. Maybe Aperture or iPhoto6 performs better in this regard?

But overall I am impressed. The book was quick and easy to create, the order was processed and delivered reasonably quickly and the quality is more than adequate for its intended audience. A definite thumbs up and I am very likely to do the same thing again next time I return from a holiday.

Links

The Perils of JavaSchools

I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man. (Those that know me should stop nodding their heads and agreeing now, please.) This is another “things were better in my day” post.

As I previously mentioned, both graduates and companies are complaining that university courses are not vocational enough. I personally dispute that. However I am generally in agreement with Joel Spolsky when he says that “Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers.”

Joel on Software: The Perils of JavaSchools

This all comes back to knowing “principles” rather than just implementation details. Java is a fine language for doing “real” things in, but since you don’t need to know much about pointers, recursion and some fairly standard algorithms, people tend not to learn the fundamentals. This is a great shame.

Links

IT grads damn university courses

We normally see employers complaining that recent graduates don’t have “relevant” skills. This article is an interesting twist on that, with the job-seekers themselves complaining about their courses.

The Register: IT grads damn university courses

I think both employers and job seekers are missing the point. There’s a difference between “education” and “training.” University degrees should not simply be vocational training, they should teach principles that can be applied throughout a career and not just specific technologies that might well have a shelf-life of only a few years.

Opinion

Random Changes

When it first happened I was irritated. A few days later I was irritated that I was still irritated. It didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t a big thing and it shouldn’t have bugged me at all, much less still a few days later.

After a while I realised that my irritation was more rational than I initially thought so I started to write them down as a way of structuring them. And here they are.

So what went wrong? Well, first we’ll need a little background, although I’m sure you will appreciate that I can’t go into all the details.

My day-job involves writing code, enhancing and fixing a sprawling, ten year old application and this day was no different. For the previous few weeks I had been developing a small improvement to one of the reports. I had satisfied the requirements by modifying an existing report, including the occasional conditional where appropriate. Not my best piece of work by any means but I had spent some time on it, had some of myself invested in it in some small way. I checked in the change to our source control system and moved on to other things. A short while later someone reported a bug against it. Not an unusual occurrence with the very vague requirements I was working to and the general standard of my code, however one thing did surprise me — I was sure that I’d tested for and added code for that particular scenario.

It turns out that I was right. The problem was that somebody had completely rewritten my code. The new implementation was very elegant, more aesthetically pleasing that my hack. Remember that I never believed it was the best code I’ve ever written, so if the code actually worked correctly I wouldn’t have cared. But it didn’t. It had fixed one small problem with my code but had introduced at least one new problem, one that was far more difficult to fix than the problem it was trying to solve.

There’s a technical, software engineering, side to this and there’s the effect is had on me. If I was being grand I suppose I’d call that the psychological side. I would like to talk about both of these aspects.

First, let’s discuss the technical side.

When modifying a large, established code base I have always believed that the correct approach is to make as few, targeted changes as possible to get the job done. The problem with a non-trivial code-base is that embedded inside it is dozens of small tweaks that you would never think of making but the software has accumulated in the School of Hard-Knocks. Real life has a tendency to throw up scenarios that, theoretically, are not possible. No matter how good you are at writing code these things happen.

This changed violated this principle. That alone annoyed me.

Of course the counter-argument is that we should be continually refactoring the code. This is the Extreme Programming approach and is one that I have talked about previously. I do have some sympathy for this argument, except that in this case it t really apply. While the new code was undoubtedly cleverer than the code it replaced, it’s difficult to say that it’s better. When you’re writing code that may well be around in a number of years time it needs to be understandable. Writing clever code can be a disadvantage. A few extra lines of code, if they’re simple and easily understood, are often a good thing. It’s easy to forget that it’s not just the computer that needs to read the code.

Naturally the reason that people do this is that it’s much easier than reading and understanding the code, and this is probably more true in the language that we use than most (it’s a proprietary one that you won’t have heard of). So the author of the new code will have saved himself a few hours of work but by creating a clever yet difficult to understand alternative he has generated more work and confusion for legions of support analysts in the future. This costs the company time and money, although the author of the new code appears to be a super-hero as he checked in hundreds of lines of new code compared with my much smaller number.

The psychological aspects are less easy to define but in many ways are more important. Unfortunately I would concede that I am less capable of discussing them in anything like scientific manner. It’s not going to stop me trying, however!

The question at the centre of is all is: why do certain kinds of people like writing software? It’s a painstaking and fiddly task which requires unheard-of precision and attention to detail. Why would anyone want to do that?

I’m sure there are as many answers as there are programmers, but a common root cause would be the simple challenge of solving a complicated problem. There’s a certain satisfaction in completing something tricky and, even if you recognise that there are other ways of doing something, there’s usually a certain pride in the way you did it. It may not be the best, but it’s your way.

So really it’s one of those seven deadly sins: pride.

Also there is a large motivational aspect to it. At this point in the project I was already lacking my usual level of enthusiasm for a number of reasons that I won’t get into here. What kind of effect is someone unnecessarily rewriting my code going to have on me at this low ebb? Why would I want to write more code and make more fixes now? Surely it’s just going to get rewritten.

Note that I didn’t say “criticised.” I think an important aspect to get across here is that I am not above criticism. If the code had been improved, if the new author had discussed the options with me first and we’d agreed a way forward, I doubt that I would be writing this piece here and now.

Now there may well be some degree of bitterness here, however I think ll agree that there are both technical and human factors reasons why things should have been different.

Opinion

Nostalgia

I though I’d start the new year with an unusual, for me at least, positive message. The message: we’ve never had it so good technology-wise and often we forget that.

I started thinking about this when I realised what I was doing with my computer. Right now, for example, I am typing this into Emacs. In the back-ground I am scanning in some film and burning the previous scans onto CD. Only a few years ago any one of these activities would have been more than enough for a simple home computer. A joke at the time was that Emacs stood for “eight megabytes and continually swapping,” and now my iPod has thirty-two megs of memory as a convenience, basically to avoid letting the battery run down too quickly.

Even better, for the sake of clarity I’ve missed out the programs that I’m not actively using. Mail and Adium are happily keeping a look-out for new messages, iTunes is bashing out some good music. iCal is ready to tell me that I was supposed to be meeting a friend an hour ago, I left the Address Book open last time I looked up a phone number, I can’t even remember what I was editing in Word but that’s open too and Safari is primed, just in case.

But even that is a simplification. The disc image that’s being burned is on a different computer, they’re connected wirelessly and using a protocol that’s native to neither (Mac to Linux using SMB).

I don’t mention any of this to brag, or suggest that I’m doing anything odd or unusual here, quite the contrary. I just mean to point out that these are complex but every day activities that we expect not only to work, but to work seamlessly at the same time as lots of other stuff. And that, frankly, is absolutely amazing.