I wanted to get an idea of what the Brits thought of this whole scandal with the US allowing their ports to be run by a company owned by the country United Arab Emirates. I found a British article with an interesting side to the story. As you know, the ports used to be run by a British company. The article said that he couldn’t believe that a company based in England for over 140 years could be sold away to another country. It was, he said, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. The former CEO was nearly outraged at this. The biggest irony in the whole situation is that the new company is owned by the state of Dubai, a former English colony. So a symbol of English colonialism was bought by a former colony. I couldn’t help but smile a little at that. That particular article didn’t have much to say about port security and Arabs. Personally, I think most of the American outrage came over the fact that the proposal came out of nowhere. Even pres Bush *claims* not to have known about it until it came out in the news even though he said he would veto any negative responses. Kinda weird for someone who was supposedly in the dark. In the end, it’ll probably pass, but his credibility has been sorely damaged. I heard the other day his approval ratings were down to 34%.

England is, well, England

Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales

United Kingdom is England, Scotland, Wales, and South Ireland.

The British Isles are England, Scotland, wales, South Ireland, North Ireland, and some other little islands.

Sure, this is mostly a technology (read linux) blog with some politics thrown in. But long-time readers know I am a religious person. Not a religous fanatic, but religious nontheless. I just wanted to take a post to express my gratitude for things that have been going so well for me. For instance, my mother’s flights to and from, and her time in, Mexico were safe. There are many other things, some of which I may be able to discuss in the future. Thank you God.

Webmonkey has run a special on the ten best flickr mashups. What is a mashup with respect to flickr? I only know of mashups as songs where different groups put their songs together to create something new such as Jay-Z and Linkin Park. Basically, since flickr has opened up their API (as has Google with most of their web stuff), users can create all kinds of neat applications based on flickr without needed permission. You may have seen on some of my Linux screenshots where I have one such application that runs through my photostream. Well, these people have all kinds really neat website they have strung up. My favorite one is the sudoku one where instead of numbers, one has to play sudoku with pictures. Putting in djotaku for the username will allow you to play as me. I will be linking to my favorites on my links on the right over the next few days. Enjoy!

#6 this photo has been wonderful for me because not only is it one of my most favorite of my recent photos, but others have agreed! In just one week it went from #99 to #6. In fact, it was originally #8 when I was writing the list of #1-5.

#7 - taking this picture gave me the creeps. What if the glass broke?

It’s amazing how much of a difference there is between the number of views of my #1 viewed photo and my #2. They then follow in groups close to each other in number. (#5-10 to follow tomorrow) #1 with 352 Views is

#2 with 246 (more than 100 less!)

#3 with 242

What GIMP needs to implement for me to stop using Adobe. (Thus saving myself and others $600+)

1. RAW Support (preferably the new standard of DNG)
2. 16bit File Editing
3. XMP Tag support
4. Panorama Tool
5. Adjustment layers

Number 1 is important for those of us who wish to capture the camera’s RAW data and then losslessly manipulate it before getting it into the image editing program. There are some plugins which do bits here and there of RAW support, but I need it to be much closer to at least Adobe CS 1. For those who, like me, do editing on nearly every photo, 16 bit files are important because each pixel holds more data and, therefore, less is lost overall with each edit. XMP tag support is important as it is the standard for applying tags, titles, and copyright notices to photos. Many agencies expect this and it also allows for pretagging of photos so that they upload to flickr with tags already in place. I was so happy when flickr finally adapted that ability. The panorama tool is alone amongst these five as just me being spoiled. There are many ways to create your own panoramas by meticulously lining up the photos and messing with the layer masks. But I don’t want that! Why? Because Photoshop almost always gets things perfectly, allowing me to do what a photographer is supposed to be able to do - be creative! I don’t want to fiddle endlessly to get a panorama to work or it’s not fun for me. Endless tweaking is ok when I’m programming, but it frustrates me to no end with photography. Finally, #5 is almost the most important feature. In Photoshop adjustment layers are layers for some of the adjustments one normally makes TO a layer. In other words, instead of tweaking the luminosity on a layer, you create a luminosity layer tweak. This does many important things. First of all, it is non-destructive to the photo. If, twenty steps down the line, you don’t like the effect anymore, just remove the layer. You don’t have to undo through 20 steps and lose all that you’ve done along the way. Ever since I discovered adjustment layers they completely changed the way I worked. Second, you can make adjustments to your adjustment later without having to go back through the undo stack. If you know what I’m talking about, you know how useful this is.

Leave it to content providers to mess everyone up. Slashdot reports that, in an effort to stop piracy, the HD signal in the component jacks of HD DVD players will be down-sampled because it’s analog and letting it come out at normal quality would allow pirates to get around their copyright protections. This is BS! I say we make this into a HUGE issue. Every company is trying to mess with us on the grounds of copyright protections. Sony thinks it can install rootkits onto your computer without permission. HD DVD people think they can render your HD TV obsolete before the first HD DVDs even come out. They should cut the crap! If someone really wants to, they’ll find a way to circumvent it - look at DVDs. Given enough angry geeks, things will be “solved”. Not only that, but they are assuming that consumers of pirated DVDs wouldn’t want to see the down-sampled video. If that were true, no one would be downloading and buying (in Chinatown) video taped footage of Hollywood movies. The fact of the matter is that, except for Star Wars, LOTR, and Harry Potter, no one cares how good the movie really looks if they want a pirated copy.

So, as readers of my blog know, one alternative to Windows is Linux. (Formally GNU/Linux) Another alternative I haven’t talked much about is BSD, another Unix derivative. Both of these are great operating systems, but they aren’t Windows. For the most part, this doesn’t matter. If I can do the same stuff on Linux, why not use an operating system unencumbered by patents and other nasty things. However, some people need to use Windows. They need the programs or they just don’t want to learn a new OS. On Linux (and possibly BSD), an imperfect solution is to use Wine. Wine is not an emulator (that’s what Wine stands for, incidentally) but rather implements DLLs in order to run Windows programs. They get closer and closer every day, but it’s imperfect and will probably continue to be for quite some time. For gamers, there’s Cedega, but that costs money - a monthly fee to be exact.

The other day I decided to read the Constitution of the USA. I don’t know what compelled me to do this, other than the fact that I stumbled upon it online. I don’t have anything specific to say about it except that I’m amazed at how they thought of nearly every contingency. For example, the House can Impeach the President, but the Senate conducts the hearings. Thus neither house has complete power. Also, they can’t change the President’s salary while he’s in office in an attempt to coerce him. Below I will just mention little things I noticed as I read it.