Thursday 15 March 2007 @8:18
My surname is a common noun, but an uncommon name. So I expect some false hits in my Google space, such as a page for one Christopher Williams — a Welsh football/soccer player — that lists “Christopher’s League Stats.”
But here are some uncanny clips I found via Google this morning:
Christopher League is something I love and look forward to throughout the week.
Aw, thanks… is that from one of my students maybe? Just don’t turn into a stalker!
Christopher League has become such an important part of my life and I look forward to the years to come.
Uh, okay. You turned into a stalker.
There is no better legacy that I can think of than to take the Christopher League to new venues to allow others to experience the thrills, joy and elation…
Woah, that’s spooky. I’m happy to provide thrills, joy, and elation, but what’s with the definite article in front of my name?
Last Saturday I went to the baseball field to begin a new season of Christopher League.
Okay, now I’m seriously confused. When did this become about sports?
The Christopher League is a baseball program for disabled children and is run in conjunction with NYO’s youth baseball program on a “buddy system.”
Ah, got it! NYO is the Northside Youth Organization in Atlanta, Georgia. Presumably, their Christopher League co-opts the name to honor an early participant…?
Anyway, I’m proud to have this organization as a namesake. Somewhere, I’m sure there’s an unfortunate woman with the name Megan Law.
Monday 5 June 2006 @17:34
Flickr is pretty popular as a social photo management application. I end up visiting it at least weekly, although I’ve never put my own photos on it. One thing that bothered me about Flickr from the very beginning is that they use square thumbnails all over the place. That is, they ignore the natural aspect ratio of your photos, and cut a square segment out of it for use as the thumbnail.
Occasionally, the effect is somewhat disturbing. I guess it’s natural to see people’s heads cut off in amateur snaps, but what about the photo all the way to the right? Is it a tile plaque in the washroom of a deviant sex club? Or something altogether more innocent? Click through to find out!
The auto-cropped square thumbnails bug me because I happen to think the aspect ratio is an essential part of the photographer’s statement. I do actually take the time to crop and otherwise post-process (some of) my photos, which is one reason it can take so long for me to get them published. But still I think it’s worthwhile. Here are some before/after examples…
Before: a pretty scene, but my parents are so far away!
After: they are more recognizable, but without losing the feel of the surroundings.
Before: just some people milling around, but there is no clear subject.
After: I chose the subject in post-production.
Before: I kept the shutter open and successfully blurred a jogger across the center of the frame… but the wires overhead severely detract.
After: not only are the wires cleaned up, but the cinematic aspect ratio emphasizes the motion.
I wonder whether any of the Flickr enthusiasts are the same who complain about the aspect ratio of TV movies or pan-and-scan DVDs. Don’t get me wrong: as an amateur web designer myself, I fully understand the convenience of square thumbnails. You can stack them into very neat grids. You can design little user interface widgets around them without having to fret about a wide variety of image sizes. But in my opinion it’s really worthless if your thumbnail does not accurately represent the image itself.
8 June 2006 update: Serendipity! A useful article on cropping for impact (with good examples) just appeared at the Digital Photography School.
Thursday 1 June 2006 @11:50
WordPress 2.0.3 was released today, so I had a chance to try out the vendor drop technique in Subversion… and it worked well!
The idea is to maintain a branch in the repository that mirrors the releases of the vendor. Mine now has this directory structure:
vendor/wordpress/latest/
vendor/wordpress/2.0.2/
vendor/wordpress/2.0.3/
Where the numbered directories are tags (snapshots) of the latest versions of WordPress at different points in time. The copy with my revisions — the code that powers this site — is in trunk/wp/.
Once the vendor branch was up to date, I just merged the changes made between 2.0.2 and 2.0.3 into the trunk. The changes touched many files, but since this was a point release, most of those changes were minor. In fact, only one line of code conflicted, and that was just a simple syntax issue. After fixing the conflict and briefly testing it, I uploaded the changes to the server, and now I’m running Wordpress 2.0.3.
Of course, a more substantial release (2.1 or 3.0, for example) would cause more problems. Probably some of my hacks will have to be rewritten. But still, the version control is an indispensible safety net. I won’t have to remember everywhere that I made revisions.
I had been programming for more than 10 years before I learned about version control. (But remember, I started programming when I was 10 years old!) So when I first encountered it, I thought, “where have you been all my life?” And that was just SCCS on Ultrix — pretty primitive compared to what we have now.
Subversion is pretty usable, but my first choice on new projects lately is Darcs. I like its distributed/disconnected nature, and its clean design. But there is some question as to how well patch-oriented (rather than snapshot-oriented) tools handle vendor drops. I’ll have to experiment more.
Sunday 23 April 2006 @16:33
My research pages have now been ported to the new site design. I’m proudest of the publication list, which now contains nifty JavaScript doodads to reorganize the list without waiting for a round-trip to my server. Try the ‘Research’ tab at the top of the page.
This also serves as the first post in a few significant WordPress categories (aka topics, aka tags). I will post to the ‘publications’ topic whenever I add a new publication to the list, and I will post to ‘talks’ to announce upcoming talks. Finally, the ‘research’ topic will be for any ideas, commentary, or other tidbits that are relevant to my research interests.
Monday 10 April 2006 @16:26
My web site is getting a much-needed reboot! Welcome to the new design, and better ’blog functionality, thanks to WordPress. This is the first post to the new site, but I will bring forward some of the old features (especially photo pages) over the coming weeks. Feel free to comment here on the new site design… it is my own creation.
So, things may be a little messy for a few weeks, but in the end I will have all the old pages forwarding to their equivalents on the new site (so as not to lose my Google cred).
Thanks for visiting!
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