Notebook

ZDNet and Microsoft have these ads playing right now where a "Developer Evangelist" is standing at a whiteboard espousing how awesome visual studio is.

I actually watched one of these, and it was focused on the visual studio team system. The video is like watching a minor nightmare. The thrust of the entire presentation is that for each of the "roles" on a project, there is a tool to cut off the need for persons of that role to speak to or work directly with persons of a different role. The roles are familiar: developer, architect, tester, build manager and project manager. It is nice that MS is looking at ways to facilitate collaboration, but sharing responsibility and building up a cross functional team is a much better solution in the long run for everyone involved.

Granted, i am judging a tool and an entire corporate philosophy based on one goofy advertainment spot, but i think it is a good picture of the super tool heavy view of development that has infected so much of the software industry. Busines and development knowledge trumps tools knowledge any day.

Posted by at 2:50 PM | Permalink

I love to read. I read technical books, comic books, fiction, economic theories, etc. At the moment, i have a fair amount of stuff piled up to finish reading, though. I have one small, 3-high shelf unit in my office. This was chosen deliberately to limit the amount of stuff that i have out and in my queue. 2 weeks ago, though, i also had 3 knee high stacks of books lying around as well. I cleaned those out on a sunday afternoon and was left again with my 3 high shelf and no more. Those three shelves are a bit daunting though. Here are the books in my queue right now:

Bottom Shelf:

• Code Complete veresion 2, Steve McConnel
• Higher-Order Perl, Mark Jason Dominus
• V For Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd
• Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
• Winsor McKay, Early Works vols I && II
• Scary Godmother: Ghoul's Out For Summer, Jill Thompson
• Stray Toasters, Bill Sienkiewicz
• Hutch Owen: Unmarketable!!, Tom Hart
• Abe: Wrong for all the right reasons, Glenn Dakin
• Big Questions #s1-8, Anders Nilsen
• The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers, Scott Kelby
• Metropol #s 1 & 3, Ted McKeever
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
• Sandman: A Game of You, Neil Gaiman
• A Walking Tour of the Shambles, Gene Wolfe & Neil Gaiman
• Various issues of Software Development, Dr. Dobb's and Wired
• Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore
• How To Win in the Chess Endings, I.A.Horowitz
• UBIK, Philip K. Dick
• How To Solve Chess Problems, Kenneth S. Howard
• The Psychology of Children's Art, Rhoda Kellog with Scott O'Dell

Middle Shelf:

• No Books! Only printer media for the new epson, plus dvd-rs and cd-rs.

Top Shelf

• Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Herge
• Krazy & Ignatz: 1929-1930, George Herriman
• Canon GL2 Instruction Manual, Canon
• Open Source for the Enterprise, Dan Woods & Gautam Guiliani
• The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas
• Getting Things DONE, David Allen
• Java 2 Complete Java 2 Certification, Phillip Helller & Simon Roberts
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler
• Agile Project Management with Scrum, Ken Schwaber
• Refactoring, Martin Fowler
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Michael Feathers
• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, Peter Van Roy & Seif Haridi
• Walt and Skeezix: The complete Daily Comic Strips, Frank King
• The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952, Charles M. Schulz
• How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers
• Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots, Stephen Ducasse
• Practical Development Environments, Matthew B. Doar
• The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
• The Man in the Ceiling, Jules Feiffer
• Jaka's Story, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• Melmoth, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• Make Magazine, issues 1-5

whew. i am tired. now i need to go curl up with a good book. :)

Posted by at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tracey with Sleepy Ava
Originally uploaded by plural.

I have started a new photo set on flickr to hold my color corrections and retouchings. I find that as i make corrections, i don't keep the originals around (unless i shot them in RAW with the 20D), so i lose the knowledge of how i corrected the images.

Take a peek and let me know what you think!

Posted by at 11:50 AM | Permalink

BIll and i bought a new Epson r2400 printer. This is an 8 ink printer with swappable black inks optimized for matte or photo printing. We are using the machine with our macs via firewire and it is fast, quiet and gorgeous.

So far, we have worked with the Matte Paper Heavyweight, the Velvet Fine Art Paper and the Premium Luster Photo Paper. The Matte Paper Heavyweight is ok, with good tonal range, but a delicate surface and a lackluster low end. We have had to throw a more contrasty image at this paper to get good results. The Velvet Fine Art paper is gorgeous - when we print on the correct side. The instructions say to print on the "whiter" side of the paper. Neither of us (or most people on photo message boards!) can tell the difference! One poster suggested rubbing the paper gently to find the rougher side. We also found that the paper is printable side up in the envelope if you are looking at the instructions that come in the plastic wrapping for the paper. Once we found that out, we marked it with a sharpie so we don't put our oily fingerprints all over that beautiful paper.

The velvet paper has beautiful blacks and is a really rich paper. This was my favorite to print on.

I should say that the velvet was my favorite to print on, until we switched to photo black and ran a print through on the Premium Luster. When the print came out i felt like i was back in my college color darkroom pulling a matte print out of the processor. The paper has a weight to it that is really nice, thanks to its rc base, and a slightly pebbled surface that is not distracting at all. The tone was virtually idental on this paper to the same print on the Velvet Fine Art paper, but the blacks were much richer and it had a sheen to the surface.

My only complaint with working with the Luster paper is that the profile makes the prints much darker than they are on screen. While profiles are never perfect, the velvet and matte paper profiles required very minor adjustments to make accurate prints. For the Luster, i took the midpoint of the RGB curve and brought it up by 5-10%, which seems pretty drastic.

So far, it looks like i will be using the matte paper heavyweight for proofing and more throwaway stuff, with the final destination for some of my images will be the Velvet or the Luster. More detailed reports to come as we work more with this fabulous new printer!

Posted by at 10:28 AM | Permalink