lucis

In case you hadnt noticed, slashdot’s new look for April Fool’s is a classic! Of course, the look would change back to the default tomorrow, so check out this screenshot if you missed it.

Today is officially the last day that Konica Minolta is in the camera (selling) business. Tomorrow (April 1st) it all goes over to Sony. I started using Minolta just over three months ago. In the last three months I have acquired three Minolta camera bodies and about a dozen lenses ranging from plastic toys (28-100mm) to perhaps what is the best lens ever produced by any lens manufacturer (the 200mm G lens). Today I feel as much a part of the Minolta-family as people who have been die-hard fans for over thirty years.
As I keep saying, the most popular (Canon or Nikon in this case) is rarely the best. Minolta consistently had better cameras (the design of the Maxxum 7 puts cameras in higher segments by other manufacturers to shame), newer technology (Autofocus, Anti-shake), better glass, and was perhaps the only camera company that wasnt afraid to innovate radically. What they lacked was good marketing strategy and advertising revenues. It is really sad when true innovators like Minolta go down like this.

The various forums devoted to Minolta have been quite emotional the last few months. Ranging from wild rumors of how Sony is going to ruin everything to truly sincere “thank-you’s” to the various people working at Minolta who are going to be without a job tomorrow. I just saw this post by an ex-Minolta employee on dpreview:

If you don’t know who Mr Kusumoto is well he’s the man who came from Japan many years ago with two suitcases full of Minolta cameras and started it all for Minolta. He was talking with the manager about something. When he was done about four of us techs who have been here a long long time watch him glance at us for an instant as he walked towards the door. He turned around and stared at us. In the most humblest words he said “I am so sorry”. He is a most honorable man. He made this company great! It was great working for someone who really cared about his employees and his customers. I walked over and extended my hand. He did the same. I thanked him and that’s all I could say without getting too choked up. Next tech did the same and so on. Sorry if this is a bummer but It is an end of an era. - Xtech

Tomorrow is a new day. Sony is in an amazing position to take over the DSLR market by storm. But Sony being Sony, they are just as likely to ruin everything just like they did with the Walkman. I doubt they will make any new announcement before May/June. Its going to be a long wait…

Okay, first a disclaimer. You are going to hate me for doing this to you (just as I can never forgive Debasish). You will spend sleepless nights staring at the computer screen and scribbling on paper, you’ll be thinking of this when you work, sleep or eat, and your entire life will revolve around this. So if you want to continue living the normal, sane, boring life you are used to, STOP READING NOW!

Good (I knew you’ll continue reading), with that out of the way, let me introduce you to notpron. The self proclaimed “hardest riddle available on the internet” is not only the hardest, it is also the most addictive, interesting, and clever. It has 138 levels (so far), and each one of these can take days to solve. The riddles involve interesting computer tricks, math tricks, google searching, html tricks, and just about anything you can think of. I am currently stuck at level 16. It is very frustrating because I think I have decoded all the clues, but cant figure out how to put everything together so that I can unlock the next level.

So if you believe you can think laterally, and fancy your computer, math or searching skills, give it a shot. You’ll never forgive me

BSG is without doubt one of the best shows on TV ever created. This fact was made ever more obvious in the 90 minute Season 2 finale. Wow! What can I say about this episode. Very rarely have I been so impressed by a single episode of any show (maybe a couple of the X-files or Band of Brothers). This was one of the most boldest and unexpected moves by the series creators. Without giving up any spoilers, all I can say is that this episode throws the entire series wide open, and in some senses means starting from scratch with an almost completely new story line. This bold step might eventually cost the series a lot (many people will hate the changes!), and I applaud everyone behind the show for not taking the easy way out. Bravo BSG, you’ve just outdone yourself and more than made up for the 2-3 mediocre episodes in the second half of Season 2.

If you have never heard of BSG, and are even mildly interested in science fiction (or even if you are not), give the miniseries a shot to see if you like it.

I have always been a little skeptical of the four-thirds system mainly because if the lack of cheap and high quality Olympus lenses. Inspite of everyone and their dog predicting the death of the system soon, Olympus and Panasonic seem to be the only companies that are even trying to innovate with digital SLRs these days. And this in times when all the big-shots (Nikon and Canon) are doing is increasing the size of the LCDs on their cameras!. First the radical Olumpus E330, and now the new Panasonic DMC-L1 can both be viewed as trend-setters in the industry. More on the Panasonic here.

With the death of Minolta, and the future uncertain with Sony, it is good to see atleast one camera company has the right idea. The new Panasonic has a dedicated shutter speed knob (when was the last time you saw one on a new camera!?), and even has a functional aperture ring! To top it all off, Leica announced support for the four-thirds system with their new 14-50 mm lens with image stabilization. If the camera+lens is reasonably priced (instead of the snobish Leica price), this is sure to be a killer camera.

Cant wait for Sony’s announcement on their new camera and lens lineup. I only hope they keep the Minolta design, ergonomics and glass and improve it in Minolta spirit, instead of Sony-izing everything…

This is probably the only blog I religiously read every day. Not only does it have a nice review of the latest photography/camera news, it also has interesting articles and mini-reviews well worth a read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in photography.

Over the past few weeks the homepage of Times of India has been posting picutures of hollywood and (sometimes) Indian celebrities. The pictures go with some absolutely ridiculous piece of news under them (such as, some one famous brushed her teeth today). What really bugs me with these photos is that about 9 out of 10 times the whitebalance on them is WAY off. The skin tones are horribly wrong, and there is either a greenish, or a bluish, or a yellow cast to the whole picture. I am amazed as to how a newspaper the size of ToI can let such a thing get by for so long. Tells you the state quality control with Indian websites…

Konica Minolta announced today that they are withdrawing from the camera and photo business. One of the most innovative and creative camera company is coming to an end. Luckily the Maxxum mount will live under the Sony name. As much as I would hate to carry a Sony camera, this is good news since it means my investment of A-mount lenses would eventually be worth a lot more. Also the bottom line is that my KM 5D will continue to take the same great pictures, and I have no intentions of replacing it for a couple of years at least. Time to pile up some more lenses while people are still dumping them for peanuts on ebay!

For those unaware about Minolta’s heritage, here is a brief history. Minolta was the first company to introduce an Autofocus SLR, wireless flash, first (and till date the only) to incorporate anti-shake in the camera body, and a bunch of other firsts. It was perhaps the only company that actually put some thought into the camera user interface. Nikon is really quite bad, and Canon just downright pathetic in terms of the user interface on SLRs. As long as Sony doesnt try to impose its “memory-stick culture” on these cameras, there is bright future ahead for the Maxxum/Dynax mount. Now if only they would make a formal announcement on what their plans are, it would silence a lot of speculation and fear on various forums.

Update: A day after the announcement the dust is starting to settle and more information is slowly coming out. According to Sony, they are aiming at a 25% share of the DSLR market. Also, ebay prices for Minolta lenses is already starting to rise. I saw an old Minolta 100-200mm/4.5 lens (good but not great) go for around $80! Just last week I almost bought one for under $30! I knew I should have gotten more lenses earlier :p

I’ve used gnome as my default desktop for the better part of the last three years. Why? Because it “looked” better than KDE back when I tried them both. KDE was a tad faster, but everyone wants some eye candy! But it looks like KDE has come a long way. This post has convinced me to give KDE another spin. Of all the things mentioned, I think amarocK looks the most impressive. A serious iTunes replacement? We’ll see…

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to decide on a photo sharing website. flickr is extremely popular and the pro account has unlimited bandwidth and storage. It also has an amazing community with millions of cluncky but functional groups. However, I could never get myself to like the flickr user interface. Sure, there are quite a few intelligent features, but for the most part the UI is simply unusable. The amount of whitespace wasted on each page is absolutely ridiculous. The slideshow feature is really a joke (who would want a slideshow in a tiny part of the window!?). I even setup a flickr account for myself, but never really uploaded much.

pbase was one of the very first photo sharing sites on the net. It has some really cool features like searching the camera/lens database. Unfortunately the interface is somewhat antiquated (though very flexible), and they offer very little storage space.

And then there is smugmug. It has the best UI by far (though not very configurable for the standard account). They offer unlimited storage and a generous bandwidth cap per month. They have a fairly decent API for third party apps (though not as popular as flickr). Nice full screen slideshows, print ordering, and the option to upgrade to a power user for a highly customizable look are added benifits. The only thing that really goes against smugmug is the lack of a real photo-sharing community like flickr.

So, I was really jumping between smugmug and flickr and finding it hard to decide until I came across this thread on their smugmug’s support forum. This guy basically wants to upload 2+ terabytes worth of images, and is wondering if smugmug can handle this. Here is the response that he got from those incharge:

Wow, that must be close to 500,000 JPEGs! Quite a collection - I can’t wait to see them.

So we’ve always said “unlimited storage” and we mean what we say. We’re happy to take your photos and host them, but we need a little time to prepare.

Just so you know, this is something like a $20,000 first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling, and physical space. You’ll basically have two complete RAID arrays to yourself in our datacenter. Of course, you’ll only pay your $30, $50, or $100 per year, depending on your account level. Again, we’re happy to do it - but I want to be up front here and let you know that we need to order some equipment and get it installed to accept your photos. We’re not geared for accepting 2.5TB overnight.

We’ll also be buying extra image processing machines just for your batch of photos. Luckily, once yours are done, everyone else at smugmug will get to benefit from them, so I don’t consider that a cost to host you.

Does that sound fair? Can we ask you to hold off while we order and install the equipment and power required?

Thanks!

Don

Wow! This is called customer service. I immediatelly signed up for a standard account at smugmug

Here is my smugmug webpage. I’ll be adding pictures and organizing it in the coming weeks. Will also post links here, and hopefully have something like a photoblog that is linked to smugmug soon.

Finally, if you do decide to go with smugmug, use this referrer code while signing up MwBAowRs6Oiis - it will save you $5, and give this poor graduate student a $10 credit towards next year’s service.

… or am I? Its been a long time since I wrote anything here. Have lots of stuff to add and lots of pictures to share. I hope I’ll try to update this more often. Meanwhile, upgraded WP to the latest version - was really straightforward.

To get started, here is a nice little twenty minute special on the best TV serial on air - Battlestar Galactica. Its not much, but atleast something to chew on while we wait for the rest of the second season.

Just saw story on /. about how the Simputer is turning out to be a failure. About 3 years back I was really interested in linux on the hendhelds, and came into contact with several people working on the Simputer project at IISc, Bangalore. While it is a really fascinating idea to have an open source hardware/software solution, I was never convinced it would succeed. In fact, I would say it was a really bad idea!

Unlike software, having an open source project for hardware does not work very well in general because electronic hardware is a numbers game. The more you manufacture, the cheaper it gets. For a big manufacturer such as Compaq or Dell or Palm, the actual manufacturing cost of the handheld turns out to be very close to negligible. For a company like Picopeta, however, it the cost turns out to be orders of magnitude higher! A hardware product for a niche market was never going to work.

What is interesting is thinking about what should have been done. The need for an electronic computing device for the rural environment is understandable, but developing a new piece of dedicated hardware is wrong in my opinion. A better alternative would have been to take a compaq ipaq (which retailed for about $150-$200 even back in 2001), and develop custom software for it. Linux ran great on the little ipaq 3100 even back then. Developing a nice and easily usable UI would have been the smart thing to do. Since hardware only gets cheaper, and older handhelds can be had for peanuts, this would make the “simputer” far more affordable and would have had a much greater chance of success.

In the end, the simputer still costs $250+, while you can get a modern Pentium 4 with decent graphics and a 19″ monitor for under $200. I hate to say this, but I guess this is what happens when a company is run solely by academicians!

Ever since I started reading Alistair MacLean, and watching World War II movies, I wanted to hear the story from the other side. The thing I was most interested in seeing was how a German movie would portray Hitler, and if it would explain some of his actions differently. While Das Boot is widely regarded as best German war movie, it has very little about Hitler or even the Nazis, and other than the end could very well have been a story fromt he Allied point of view.

Downfall is a movie about the last few days of Hitler’s life in his underground bunker in Berlin. Not only does it shows how Berlin was captured by the Russians in twelve days, but it also shows the more human side of the Germans generals, and particularly of Hitler. The movie has Hitler ordering the execution of his one of his generals who he thinks was a traitor in one scene, and asking a doctor for advice on how he should commit suicide in another.

One of the things that I really liked about the movie is how it brings across two somewhat contradictory points at the same time. It shows the amount of destruction and suffering a single man can cause all over the world, and at the same time shows how the whole country claims responsibility for all that had happened. In a war, no one is innocent. It was really interesting to see people give everything they have for what they think is the right thing. Everyone thinks that he/she is doing the right thing, and still the result are disastrous.

Technically, the movie is about as good as it gets. The acting is so close to being perfect all around that you get the impression you are watching the actual thing. Bruno Ganz, who does the role of Hitler is a real treat to watch. The picturization of the war scenes and all the destruction is absolutely amazing. This is easily one of the best war movies that I have ever seen.

Highly recommended if you are into war movies - it is perhaps the best ever made. Others can watch it as the missing chapter in most history textbooks! The movie has really inspired me to read Mein Kampf, which has been collecting dust on my bookshelf for quite some time.

Quentin Tarantino wrote the script for True Romance, but never got to direct it himself. As sad as that is, the movie is perhaps one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen in a long time.

The movie is about a newly wed couple who, through a series of events, find themselves in possession of a suitcase-full of drugs, and the mafia and police looking for them. What follows is a series of amazingly bizzare, violent, hilarious, and explosive events, as they try to offload the drugs to a famous movie producer.

The story is fast, dialogue is sanppy and Tarantino-witty, background score is excellent, violence is gruesome, and just about everything is technically perfect! The movie stars some really big names, though most play really small parts. I thought the performance of some of the characters was not the best at some places, but who cares, everything else in the movie is so brilliant, you hardly notice it.

Would it have been different if Q had directed it? Yes, no doubt. Better? Most likely. It wouldnt have been as straightforward and hollywood-style for sure. Also, Q had originally written a different ending, which I think might have been interesting if he was directing it. That said, the movie is still pretty amazing. A highly underrated gem; beg, borrow or steal, but watch it now if you havent already!

I generally trust imdb’s movie ratings quite a bit. A rating of 6.5/10 generally indicates an average/below average. This is what kept me from watching M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village for a long time. I finally got around to watching it, and oh boy, I dont think I’ll ever blindly trust imdb’s ratings again!

I would The Village better than Shyamalan’s more popular Sixth Sense, and in the same league as Signs. I think too many people want him to do an encore on Sixth Sense in every movie. Too many people watch The Village expecting a horror movie, or a story with a twist in the end, and are disappointed on both counts. In fact, the main twist The Village has is that it keeps the viewer guessing what it really is about till almost two-thirds into the movie. I have to say that I really liked the story and the setting, and even the little twist that it had.

The acting and direction is absolutely brilliant. In particular, I think Bryce Dallas Howard deserved at least an Oscar nomination. But then we all know how bad the Oscars are at identifying real talent! The cinematography, lighting and the use of yellow and red to contrast the humans and the “monsters” was really amazing. The music was really good and suited the story perfectly, and did end up getting nominated for an Oscar.

There were a few flaws in the movie though. It is a little slow for the average viewer. Also, there are a few small loopholes in the story here and there, but most of it is quite consistent and coherent.

Its a real pity that most people (even too many “film critics”) go in expecting a horror movie, or another Sixth Sense, and are dissatisfied and disappointed when it is not. Watch this movie without any expectations, and I am sure you will like it for what it really is. Highly recommended, in fact one of the best of 2004!

After two back-to-back paper deadlines, and weeks of 16-20 hour days, finally got a small breather. Luckily the International office was organizing a ski/snowboarding trip this weekend (just a day after the paper deadline), and it sounded like a great way to unwind.

I chose snowboarding because many people said that it would be more fun than skiing. While it was a whole lot of fun, I seriously doubt skiing involves as much falling over as snowboarding atleast on the first day. And at a place like the Alpine valley which makes new snow every night, this means that you fall on ice rather than fresh and soft snow most of the time. I am not sure how many days before I can move without crying!

One thing I find very hard to understand is the lack of the safety concerns with skiing. While everyone is super careful while riding a bike, and helmets and other protective gear is almost mandatory, I dont think I noticed anyone wearing a helmet while skiing. Another alarming thing was the lift to get to the top of the slope. The lifts never stop, and require you to jump on and off as it slows down slightly. While getting on it was only a minor challenge, getting off was almost impossible with the snowboard strapped to the feet. There was always a pile of people down on the ground in front of the landing area. What was even more surprising was that there was no rail or something to prevent slipping and falling on the ground 20-50 feet below on the lift. It almost felt like a disaster waiting to happen.

Installed captcha to prevent comment spam. Hope it works! Comments enabled again.

Well, this obviously doesnt take care of trackbacks. Disabled all trackbacks for now…

I dont know how I missed this movie when it first came out. I happened to finally come across it thanks to its phenomenal sound track! This is one of those rare movies that is sad, funny, and has a rather deep story at the same time.

The acting is so close to perfect, that you almost forget it is a movie you are watching! Natalie Portman was great as usual (well, as long as you dont count the Star Wars movies). But the real surprise for me was Zach Braff. While being the director, writer, and the lead actor does give him complete creative flexibility in the movie, I imagine also makes it all the more easier to mess up everything! Definitely a director/actor to watch out in the future.

Another thing I liked about the movie was its visual appeal. This is one of the things where it is hard to say what exactly makes it so good. I guess it is great photography, intelligent use of color, interesting camera angles, etc. Everything is just so slick, you want to see more of it, and the story and acting are just an added bonus. There are some really amazing and memorable scenes in the movie. Such as the Sam doing the wierd dance just to be the only person who has ever done it. Also the whole expedition to find Andrew’s good-bye gift is simply amazing!

I cant end this “review” without mentioning the soundtrack of the movie. One song that I have been playing over and over and over again for the past few weeks is “Fair” by “Remy Zero”. I think the song captures the essence of the movie very well. Sad and happy at the same time!

The only thing I did not like in the movie is the ending. It really lets the movie down, in my opinion. I thought the ending was not as crazy as the rest of the movie, and a better ending might have done better justice to the movie. Maybe I just was expecting too much by the end…

All comments and trackbacks on the site are disabled as of now thanks to all the comment spam that I have been receiving. It will be re-enabled once I manage to find a nice solution to the problem. Also, expect regular posting to resume only around the end of this month. Until then…

I know I am a little late, but a happy new year to everyone.