That’s the first time this had happened to me. I wasn’t sure what to do. Fortunately for me, before I did anything too extreme, Adam suggested I get a filter wrench. So I headed over to Wolf Camera to get one.

Wolf didn’t have one, so I asked where I could get one, and they suggested someone else who also didn’t have one, but they suggested Keeble & Shuchat Photography, who I had been to before. They did have wrenches, but not in the size that I needed. They suggested I just bring the lens to their repair department, which I did.

Fifteen minutes later, the filter still wasn’t off the lens, and they had given up. My lens is now on its way to Canon USA for a repair, and hopefully I’ll get both parts back, separated, and in usable condition. They estimated the cost would be somewhere between two and three hundred dollars. I guess that’s what happens when a lens that costs $1000 and a filter that costs $100 decide to misbehave in tandem. And I was hoping the repair would be a simple $5 filter wrench!

Enter Strobist.com. I already had the 580EX II Flash, so I got a stand, umbrella, and reflector, told my sister-in-law to stand between it all, and the results turned out much better:

The background there is actually an empty room with all of the lights turned off, which I was pretty impressed with.

Since then, I’ve convinced Lisa to let me set up a photo studio in the garage, complete with backgrounds. I picked up a background stand (no backgrounds yet though) and a Calumet Genesis 200 1-Light Kit, which is pretty awesome. I’ve also signed up for some classes to try and pick up some tips on all of this.

In other news, I picked up the WordPress iPhone app. Maybe I’ll actually start posting more regularly.

harsh hasn’t changed in eleven months (and that change was just about making the location of its configuration file configurable), but I still remembered how it worked pretty closely; at least enough that I didn’t have to really go searching through its code too much. That’s probably also a function of how small harsh is; in terms of lines of code (excluding blank lines):

  config.c: 139
  cookie.c: 221
 display.c: 709
    feed.c: 577
    list.c: 96
    list.h: 16
    main.c: 96
    main.h: 84
     md5.c: 360
     md5.h: 76
     rss.c: 120
     xml.c: 276
     xml.h: 17
     total: 2787

It uses expat to parse the HTML, libnbio for socket management (which is available in Debian), and ncurses for the UI. It doesn’t have any sort of threading (libnbio does a good job of making sure that, other than DNS lookups, there’s never anything going on long enough to prevent responsiveness). About its only feature is that it will use my cookies.txt file, so that I can see my LiveJournal friends’ protected entries.

I originally wrote harsh in about a day or two. It was really easy because of the 2800 lines, about 850 of them had been written in some of my other projects (list.c/h and xml.c/h) or are standard (md5.c/h). I was also really familiar with the three helper libraries from writing grim (my IM client) and stark (a tool for viewing GnuCash data files).

As a learning exercise, rewriting harsh in Haskell was excellent. It’s incredibly small, does a lot of standard things (like networking and console UI), and doesn’t do a lot of non-standard things (like an AIM client does). I got to play with the Haskell light-weight threads and STM; I learned how to create a Debian Haskell package; I learned how to use ghci as a debugger with breakpoints; and I’m much more comfortable with monads and with the language in general.

It did take me significantly longer to write than the C version, though that’s more due to me having to learn not just the language but some libraries along the way (like HTTP, Vty, and HaXml). I still think that it would take me just as long to write the Haskell version as the C version, but I’m still much more comfortable with C, and imperative programming in general.

From a code size perspective, the Haskell version is about one-sixth the size (excluding comments):

Config.lhs: 53
  Feed.lhs: 144
 Harsh.lhs: 272
  Util.lhs: 26
     total: 495

However, that’s not a very fair comparison. In the C version, md5.c/h are included in the total count, when really they should be considered a standard library (and on the Haskell side, I used Data.Hash.MD5 from MissingH). On the C side, I did all of the HTTP request and response processing myself (which is what more than half of feed.c is about), while on the Haskell side I left that to an HTTP client library. Excluding all those things though, the Haskell version is still about one-fourth the size.

Anyway, I put the Haskell version of harsh up here. If any Haskell hackers out there could take a look at it and let me know what I’m doing wrong or oddly, I’d appreciate it.

Today ends week eight of my forty-eight week Invisalign treatment. I originally was looking at orthodontic work to correct the crowding on my lower teeth, and have been considering getting either braces or Invisalign for about four years now. I’ve talked to several dentist and orthodontists, and the ones who offer both braces and Invisalign have tried to persuade me to get braces instead. The main reasons they’ve pushed braces are that they’re cheaper, they’ll probably take less time, and they’ll be able to correct more things, such as my overbite. I decided to go with Invisalign instead for several reasons: vanity, comfort, convenience, and protection. Invisalign so far has been much more comfortable than braces were, especially since they don’t cut at my lips and gums like braces did. I can eat whatever I want, unlike with braces, since the retainers come off while I eat. And I grind my teeth at night, so the Invisalign gets worn down instead of my teeth. The biggest inconvenience so far with Invisalign is that I’ve stopped snacking, since there’s such a huge time cost involved with brushing my teeth before putting them back on, and I’m not supposed to have them off for more than two hours per day.

It started with the telephoto zoom lens, which I ended up getting, and love. I’m really happy that I got it, especially since Lisa and I will be going on a hot air balloon ride in Napa for our anniversary, and then to the Salinas Air Show the following weekend.

Then it was the new TiVo HD. We already have a Series 3, but we’ve occasionally thought that we might like to get a second TiVo for our other TV. Now that it’s been confirmed that Multi-Room Viewing is coming to both the Series3 and TiVo HD soon, there’s even more incentive to get one. Fortunately right now they’re selling them to employees at a discounted price (limit one per employee).

And now it’s the iPhone. I can’t explain why I feel compelled to buy this other than iWant. A few of my coworkers have one and they look pretty slick. Plus my current iPod battery can’t hold a charge very long. Plus I like the idea of having an integrated iPod and phone (it’s part of the reason why I got my current phone, the Motorola SLVR L7). Plus it’s roughly the same size as the SLVR and only slightly heavier.

In related news, I need a lens that has a much longer zoom. The pictures I posted aren’t scaled (just cropped). I wish I’d thought of this a couple weeks ago so I could have finally ordered the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L that I’ve been looking at for months now. I’ll probably get it soon though, so that I’ll have it for the Salinas Air Show at the end of September.

IMG_2959.jpg,
originally uploaded by warmenhoven.

I’ve been playing around with my flash a bit. I’m more comfortable with the extra weight and all the controls now. I still haven’t gotten used to using it to add light very well though.

A while back when I was looking for my tripod, I got to play with a 30D. The extra size felt really good in my hands, and ever since I’ve wanted a slightly bigger camera. Not that I’ve been unhappy with the XTI at all; it’s just that it could be better. And so, I’ve been following the rumors of a 40D somewhat closely, even though I don’t think I’ll get one. I’ll probably wait until next August in hopes that Canon announces an update to the current 5D.

The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby: This book is, as advertised, not a book about concepts and theories but rather about practical advice and tips. If you already know some of the theory, it’s pretty easy to see how it plays out in practice in this book.

Composition Photo Workshop by Blue Fier: I love the name “Blue Fier”, even though I’m probably pronouncing “Fier” wrong (”Fire”). Anyway, this book started off a little slow for me because he covers things like aperture and depth of field and focus, and shutter speed and ISO and other things I’m already fairly familiar with. When he started getting into framing and rule-of-thirds type stuff it got more interesting. He also covered several different styles of photography (landscape, macro, portrait, etc.) and so it was a pretty good introductory book.

Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting by Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick: I’m only half way through this book so far, and already it’s prompted me to spend hundreds of dollars on a new flash, and gotten me thinking about getting lights and umbrellas and reflectors and setting up my own miniature studio. I’ve spent the past few days trying to take portraits of Pixel and Lisa and myself, and haven’t had much success, mainly due to poor lighting (hence the flash and the dreams of better lighting equipment). When taking self portraits I’ve had such trouble getting the camera placement and focus and lighting right that I haven’t even gotten to really working on posing much. Which is fine, since I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet anyway.

There’s a portrait workshop being held in Los Gatos at the end of September that I think I’m going to enroll in, but I’m worried based on the description that I’ll have already heard most of it from the portrait book I bought. In the spring I may enroll for a photography class at the local community college as well.

So I decided that there really wasn’t a whole lot that I could say that isn’t already somewhere else on the web, and figured I’d just add in some technical explanations to questions that are likely to come up.

For example, the remote that we will ship has the thumbs buttons, but the Comcast remote [pdf] doesn’t. If you compare the remotes closely (there’s a picture of the TiVo remote in the article linked above), you’ll see the Comcast remote has two buttons that the TiVo remote doesn’t: Page Up and Page Down. There you go. The TiVo UI uses Channel Up/Channel Down as Page Up/Page Down in lists, so we don’t need separate Page Up/Page Down buttons, and use them for Thumbs buttons instead.

Also, to confirm what was written in that article linked to above, we really did rewrite our software in Java. Sort of. As the article states, we run on top of TVWorks’ TV Navigator middleware. It’s not a full OCAP implementation, but rather an implementation of OnRamp To OCAP, which is (from Informitv) not a precursor but “a subset of OCAP so that applications will be forward-compatible with the full OCAP specification.” In other words, we didn’t write the OCAP layer, nor the OS. And the Java-based software so far only runs on the Motorola hardware.

Or at least, we tried to go to a bunch of different stores. Los Gatos Camera closed, and we weren’t able to find a couple other of the stores on my list.

The Wolf Cameras that I’ve been to have had an extremely limited variety of tripods, and I wouldn’t consider buying any of the ones that they have.

Are there any decent camera shops in the San Jose area?