This is a test for edgeio…

I’m sure many people will be doing the same thing. It will be interesting to see how edgeio manages these junk postings…

This is not necessarily new news, but I had a heated discussion with my good friend Bill about this issue today. A federal lawsuit accuses Craigslist of violating fair housing laws by publishing discriminatory classified ads, and this really pisses me off.

I don’t understand and thus cannot agree with the logic that a website is responsible for its user’s misbehaviour. I understand that’s how it worked in the off-line media such as the newspapers, but Craigslist is a totally different environment that does not produce any content itself, it is just a tool. I think this is like punishing an organization for the fault of its members.

Several Internet law experts said the suit seems likely to fail, citing a 1996 federal law that says an online service provider isn’t considered a publisher or a speaker when it merely passes along information provided by someone else.

I believe, as long as the web site does not make any editorial contributions to the content, it should be the person who published the content that should be responsible. I think the legislators are suggesting that web sites should start policing their own community, and therefore asking them to moderate the content.

I think this has huge implications to this new way of living that we are getting used to. This law suit will not only affect the big players like Yahoo! and eBay, but pretty much any web sites that supports user generated contents – can you spell ‘web 2.0′?

I don’t think Craigslist will lose this battle, but I guess I am just frustrated. Am I totally missing something?

Now that I am blogging almost daily, I started thinking about ways how I can increase traffic to my blog. Robin Good wrote this great article titled, "RSSTop55 Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites".

This was probably the most informative article on this subject. But now what? Do I have to submit my blog information to all these sites? Somebody’s gotta come up with a submission service for all the 163 sites listed in the article. I know I will pay for that. — Now that sounds like a good business to me!

Digital SLR is great. Only if you can manage to avoid dust on your sensor. I took my relatively new Canon EOS 5D to my recent trip to Squaw Valley. When I looked at the files after I got back home, I found that all of my landscape pictures had serious sensor dust effect in the sky.

Sensor dust is a serious problem because it affects all the images taken with the camera body. You will have the problem until you clean the sensor. The enlarged (actually 50% reduced) black box portion of the left image is shown below. How ugly is that!!!

I’ve had this problem with my old D60 and 10D as well, but it was only after I used it on several field trips that I noticed the dust. I’m not sure if 5D is more prone to dust (because of its larger sensor?), but having serious dust problems for a relatively new camera is truly disappointing.

 I bought a sensor cleaning kit about a month ago, and I guess I finally found a true reason to use it:(

For those who are looking for information on how to clean you sensor, here is a very useful article.

I just started reading a book called, “The Search” by John Battelle. In one of the early chapter titled, “Search before Google”, John spent half of the chapter talking about the rise and fall of the once popular search site – AltaVista.

It is a truly amazing story – started as a research project to demonstrate the processing power of DEC’s Alpha processor, becoming the most popular search site and then slowly having faded away from our memories. This is one company that had a chance to become what google is today.

I always thought that I kept good track of what happened to web companies, but I didn’t know that AltaVista was sold twice after Compaq taking control of the website. I actually would bet that there are not many people that know who owns AltaVista today — it is owned by Yahoo!

At the peak of it’s sucess, it was first sold to Compaq as part of DEC ($9.6B total value). Unfortunately, once again, AltaVista was run by a hardware company and they had no clue. In 1999, after the founder Louis Monier finally left the company, AltaVista was again sold to CMGI for $2.3B. Although CMGI invested a lot of money for a massive PR campaign and even filed for IPO, the ill-fated AltaVista now had to face a bigger downfall – the Internet bubble had burst just before their planned IPO. It was then sold to Overture in 2003 at $140M, which was, as we all know, eventually sold to Yahoo!

I thought it would be fun to take a look at the Internet Archive’s “WayBack Machine” to see how AltaVista has changed over the years:

1996~1997

Who knew this would be a big thing years later? It has a simple search box, but the bottom part is cluttered with marketing messages for their hardware and software products.

1998

They got rid of the marketing message and now it is a search site in it’s purest form. I didn’t know they were the first to implement the ’simple is beautiful’ philosophy, ahead of google.

1999

After Compaq acquires AltaVista, they decide to make it a ‘portal’ to compete with Excite and Yahoo! Only if they stayed as a pure search play…

2000

Now it’s a full blown portal. I can even see ‘comparison shop’. Mp3/Audio search is added also. Look at the new logo – makes me wonder why they wanted to change a successful brand image?

2001

The mountain is back! I guess CMGI realized that they need the vista to be altavista…

2003

New (and current) logo. I’m guessing this is Overture’s effort to change the corporate and brand image. They also realized that they should focus on search and search only.

2006

Today, it is even simpler than google. I did some quick searches and I don’t think google’s better than altavista. It focuses on keyword, image and mp3 files search. Other links points to Overture and Yahoo pages.

If you know me, you know I am a black & white photographer. I started with digital 4 years ago, but soon switched to film. Over the years, I’ve tried basically every type of camera – 35mm SLR/rangefinder, medium format SLR/rangefinder and large format. I also tried all the different types of medium – b&w negatives, color negatives and positives. Of course I tried all kinds of printing – b&w printing, ilfochrome, ra-4, digital scanning and printing.

Now, my favorite combination is medium format SLR/Large format View Camera + B&W film + Darkroom printing. However, last year, I sold some of my unused gears and bought a Canon EOS 5D, which is a 12.8 megapixel full-frame digital camera. I love the wide angle, high resolution images that it produces. I’ve been thinking how I can use this digital camera while printing with the analog method – the darkroom.

How can I print digital files in the darkroom?

One way to do this is to create a negative that you can enlarge in the darkroom. Unfortunately, the equipment for this is very expensive so you’ll have to use a professional service. I am known to be impatient and I never tried this method.

Another way to do this is to use a digital enlarger. There are equipments that you can put in the negative carrier of the enlarger, but this is also a very expensive solution. Obviously, I never tried this method either.

Finally, there is a now widely used method, which is to create digital negatives for contact printing. The digital negatives can be created by service bureaus, but it can also be printed at home using an inkjet printer. The resulting negative can be printed in any darkroom and any alternative printing methods can be used as well.

Digital Negatives for Contact Printing – First attempt

I first tried this method about 2 years ago. Dan Burkholder is a pioneer in this field. I bought his book, “Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing” and then also bought his “Inkject Negative Companion“. After trying several ohp films, I finally bought Pictorico’s OHP Transparency Film and PGHG White Film.

When I tried 2 years ago, the OHP Transparency Film produced decent results. Well, at least in terms of contrast and gradation. I tried Dan’s curve for silver printing, and in fact, I got better results without it. The problem with the OHP film was that it got scratched easily, and sometimes I could see some nozzle patterns and they would show up in the print. The PGHG White Film didn’t have much of those issues, but the base was so thick that it required long exposure and I couldn’t get good contrast at all. What’s strange is that Dan’s curve actually reduces the contrast, so it only made matters worse.

The whole experiment was a big failure. The only positive outcome of it was that I found that the Pictorico’s Film products are much better than any other regular OHP films for negative printing.

The Second Attempt – In progress

Last week or so, I ran across some forum postings talking about a new reference for creating digital negatives using an inkjet printer. The book (actually a CD-ROM) is called, “Precision Digital Negatives“, and is written by Mark I. Nelson. This approach is different from Dan Burkholder’s in that he doesn’t believe in a universal curve for different processes. So, the book is about how to create the ‘curve’ with your own printing process.

I liked his theory and it sounded very logical. I ordered the CD-ROM and it finally arrived the day before yesterday. The process takes time, thus I don’t have any results yet. I’m in the process of callibrating the standard printing time and I hope I’ll be able to make my first print this weekend.

I am using my old Pictorico OHP Films that I bought two years ago, and it was only after I made several prints that I remembered the scratch issues. I’ll probably try the PGHG White Film this weekend as well.

I’ve been looking for a smartphone for a while. My main use of it will be schedule management and email, maybe a little bit of web browsing. So, about a year ago, I looked around and tried Treo 650 and Samsung i730. I heard that a new version of Treo was due and I decided to get an i730.

i730 was great – windows mobile is great, bluetooth/wi-fi support is great, email support works perfectly – but I returned it after a week of use mainly because of the size. I ended up getting a RAZR. I am very happy with my RAZR. It’s a great phone that’s small. But I still miss the scheduling/communication features of a smartphone.

Ever since, I’ve been waiting for the Motorola Q, which was supposed to be released last year. I saw it at the CES earlier this year, and I really liked it for its functionality and form factor. I only wish that it had bigger screen. But it seems like that one is going to take at least 6 more months for me to use it with Cingular here in the US. (They are releasing the CDMA version for Verizon first)

Now I am looking forward to the new Samsung SGH-i320. This one looks really  promising, and if I get this, I’ll be able to contribute to my mother country’s economy:) The problem with these cellphones are that they make the announcements too early. It usually takes 6months to sometimes more than a year to actually start selling them at storefronts. They should all learn from Apple’s announce-today-sell-tomorrow practice, if you ask me.

Ning is a new venture from Marc Andressen which provides a web service that lets you easily create a simple, social application through cloning existing applications created by other members. This is very interesting because there are hundreds of thousands of potential simple social applications – such as ‘best of xxx’, ‘worst of xxx’, ‘xxx sharing’, etc.

Mike Arrington has written about ning several times (here, here and here). He was especially harsh on them on the second one and I agreed to most of his issues. The recent announcement of launching new features took my attention and I decided to try it out myself.

First, I looked at the very nice demo/tutorial which claims that you can create a photo sharing site with Flickr lookup in 5 minutes (or so). It seemed so easy and I decided to create a ‘KoolSites’ application where people can vote for the ‘coolest website’. I started by cloning the ‘Cinecrap‘ application.

Since this is a very simple application and the user flow is almost identical to Cinecrap, I thought I would be able to create the app in 5 minutes. However, it took 5 minutes to load a page! I tried to be patient and spent about an hour trying to edit the pages, but I finally decided to give it up.

I’m pretty sure that they are getting too much traffic because of the new launch and they will resolve the problem pretty soon. However, as an intermediate php programmer myself, I found it kinda hard to start-off. I tried to change one sentence in the first screen, but I couldn’t figure it out without reading their documentation.

It seems like they have pretty good set of reference materials, faqs, and guidelines but I truly believe that in order for them to succeed, it should be really straightforward to use. I just think they need to be able to attract ‘blogger’-level of techies to create applications, not programmers. In my opinion, Typepad is probably the limit in terms of programming complexity this type of service can get.

Browster is my latest discovery, which is also one of my all-time favorites. Basically, it is a plug-in for a web browser (IE or Firefox) that lets you navigate through websites much more efficiently. It is especially useful when you are browsing through a list of links (e.g. search results, news articles, forum postings, etc.) or when you’d like to peek at a page without having to open a new browser window.

For example, when browsing through the search results, instead of opening a link in a new window or tab, you can just move your mouse cursor to the little box that appears over the link and the actual page will load immediately in a virtual browser. One of the cool features is the ‘next/prev’ button within that virtual browser, which lets you look at the next item on the list from the original page (in this case, the search result).

For google search results, a little box appears in front of each search results. For other pages, it doesn’t automatically show the box next to every link (that would be ugly!), but you can still use the same feature, in which case the little box will show up on top of any link when you put your cursor on a link. (e.g. I am right now using that feature for previewing this article while editing) The ‘prev/next’ feature will be available if the selected link is part of a table. Browster also pre-loads the pages, so the browsing is really quick and easy.

I only have used it with my new IE7 (which I also like very much), and considering the fact that this is a new browser it has been surpringly stable. I never experienced any malfunctions whatsoever. However, my colleague told me that it crashes quite regularly on his machine where he is using Firefox and AvantBrowser. It didn’t help him when he upgraded to IE7. So the verdict is yet to be made.

I am guessing that their business model is to make money via the keyword/banner ads in the virtual browser. When I looked at the alexa rating, it didn’t seem like they have a lot of traffic. What a shame!

I’ve used it for only a week, but I am totally hooked.

Here is a list of websites that has something to do with ’social bookmarking’ or ’search based on human indexing’.

• del.icio.us
• digg
• wink
• furl
• spurl
• blinklist
• del.irio.us
• feedme links
• linkroll
• netvouz
• scuttle
• snap
• clusty
• blingo
• rojo
• simpy

… and here is a great resource for understanding the players.

Now, I can surely see the value of this approach — automatic indexing based on links and keywords is very limiting and it is believable that human-indexing can improve the search results.

However, at the same time, here are the problems:

• There are too many pages on the web. Human indexing can cover only a miniscule portion of the available web pages
• People who understand and willing to contribute to the index (by bookmarking and sharing them) are the long-tail, geeks.
• As a result, this approach only seems to work with subjects that would be interesting to techies and geeks.
• It’s hard to expect people to just sit and bookmark random, generic web pages, and newer, more interesting pages tend to get bookmarked.

So, as a result, digg is one of the most popular, successful sites. I’d like to see a website with a business model that can attract my mother to use and bookmark all the pages she knows. Now, that’s what google should be worried about.