Dear readers, it’s time for a roundup of topics that just aren’t big enough for their own posts. I’m just going to jumble them all together. Enjoy!

It’s Olympics time. Woo! I don’t understand people who profess not to love the games. You may not like every event — bobsled, ice dancing, whatever — but how can anyone not love the whole Olympic ideal? Me, I particularly enjoy the nordic events, especially biathlon.

DiabetesMine interviewed skier Kris Freeman, the first type-1 Olympian in an endurance sport before the 30km cross-country race and afterward — I think he’s my new role model. They’re both great reads for any athlete with diabetes.

Freeman was “pissed” about going hypo during the 30km race, but he was “really, really pissed” about a bad ski choice during the 15km. I’m sure he will rock the 50km on Sunday!

Thinking of Canada, Lisa and I went to Montréal early in January. It was sooo cold (-14ºC for a high). How do people live that way? We went to see a J. W. Waterhouse exhibit at the Musée des Beaux Arts. While there, we ate some great food — check out Paris Crêpes on the corner of Ste. Catherine and Crescent — and I enjoyed the city’s polyglot lifestyle.

(And as for art: Last week the MFA installed its first painting in the new Americas wing. I can hardly wait!)

While we were in Montréal, I procured a bit of Francophone music. 90% of Canada’s population may live within 100 miles of the border that sees the most commerce between any two nations; but it’s almost as if there’s a Mounty-patrolled iron curtain separating the US from bootleggers French music. You can find a little bit on iTunes, but it’s hit or miss. Here are some names to look for: A.D.N., Amadou & Mariam, Marie-Luce Béland, Daniel Bélanger, Carla Bruni, Cali, Camille, Caracol, Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, Cœur de Pirate, Les Cowboys Fringant, Étienne Drapeau, Dumas, Mylène Farmer, Grimskunk, Indochine, Kaïn, Karkwa, MC Solaar, Prototypes, Mara Tremblay, etc., etc., etc. The CBC nominated the top 50 Canadian francophone bands from this decade if you need more choices.

We also saw “Up in the Air” a month or two ago. Definitely recommended. It stars George Clooney, opens with a fabulous sequence of arial footage, uses a version of “This Land Was Made for You and Me” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and has a really strong story line. From time to time, I feel a bit like intern George’s character — at least I share his attitude toward flying, but certainly not his brand loyalty (though I do have my preferences). But I’m not very savvy when it comes to getting the most of my air travel dollar, which is why I’ve been reading the Cranky Flier’s web log.

Are you going on a trip anytime soon? Need reviews of places to eat, stay, visit? The Times gives a rundown of where to go online and in-print to figure where to go in real life. They mention TripAdvisor.com, IgoUgo.com, Oyster.com, and printed guidebooks. I’m starting to use TripAdvisor for hotel reviews, but books and magazines are still my destination for where to go and how to get there. Give me glossy pictures, a travelogue, and a map or two and I’ll be ready to pack my bags.

But my travel dance card is kinda full for a little while. I actually can’t believe how much I know about where I’m going in the coming years. Australia in just over three months. Bicycling in Provence, France sometime next year. England (and maybe Paris) in 2012. It’s not what I usually do . . . but I’ll take it.

More substance to come soon, I promise.

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If you don’t already subscribe to the New York Times‘ Idea of the Day weblog, you should.

(If I weren’t at work with a lot to do, I’d write about how it aggregates some of the best articles in print from the web concerning culture and the life of the mind. I’d say something about how it goes a little way toward fostering the kind of society-wide philosophical debates that are a common fixture in a certain Gallic country that I love. I’d delve deep into the contradictions between those last two sentences, digging into the inherent conflict between a time-shifted, remixed, excerpted, low-bandwidth form of communication (web sites) and the more active but ultimately futile discourse (about, say, the “hyperreal” in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation) that tends to occur in the café or coffeehouse. But I am at work, and no one really wants to read about that anyway.)

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Well, dear readers. I’m almost done with this entire month of posting here, and I’m kinda glad that it’s almost over. It’s a bit like having homework again. Although, I have to confess that it’s been a good exercise in writing again.

Lisa and I are in Wyoming. We’ve been here since Sunday evening and are having a good time. I like visiting Casper, seeing my mom, and meeting up with high school friends again. (Although in the background now, someone is telling me all of the reasons why Casper is no good. Anyway.)

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which promises to involve lots of food. Diabetes-wise, it hasn’t been a great few days. All of these highs tend to suggest to me that there’s still a lot of tweaking I should make with my pump settings and food estimation and whatnot. But tomorrow is another day. That doesn’t make it less stressful, but it does help with perspective.

The “diabetes online community” (D-OC) has been wonderful with giving me some perspective. I was part of a diabetes support group for a few years after being diagnosed, but I found that I needed a different kind of support experience. This ad hoc online community makes it easier to find and share the kind of information that’s important to me as a someone with type 1 diabetes. Beyond that, though, my fellow type 1 writers are so wonderful to read because they help remind me that we’re people, not just patients. We have happy diabetes moments. We have total WTF? moments. We have moments that would be almost impossible for people without diabetes to really get — not that we wouldn’t trade those in for non-diabetes lives.

There are lots of diabetes peeps out there, and I feel funny singling out anyone by name. But there are a few people who I just really love to read:

• Kerri’s Six Until Me weblog
• George’s Ninjabetic site
• Cherise’s Diabetic_Iz_Me weblog
• Allison’s Lemonade Life journal
• Etc. Etc. Etc.

If you have a favorite which you think I should read, let me know in the comments. And have a happy Thanksgiving.

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This has been the busiest year ever. True, last year I was in school and (consequently) working twice as much. But this year, I’ve actually gone places and done things that have generally kept me away from posting here.

In January, I went to the Electronic Imaging symposium in San Jose, promised to write about what I learned and then did not. In February, I went on a “business trip” to Cozumel — via cruise ship — and then posted some of the photos I made on my Holga camera. Then in March, Lisa and I went to Paris to celebrate my graduation. I could talk your ear off all day about how much I love Paris; and if you’re Lisa, you’re probably sick of hearing me walk around the house sighing and saying “I miss Paris.” (Sorry!) Most recently, I promised to post pictures from my backpacking/camping/hiking trip to Utah. I did put some of them into a photoset on Flickr, but I haven’t gotten them here yet. Tomorrow I’m off to Iowa for a family reunion.

“But what about the other 15-or-so weeks of the year? Why no posts?”

It isn’t that I haven’t had any ideas. Here are some of the things I jotted down that I should write about:

Physical architecture vs. software architecture, with respect to the visibility and communication of design — I actually started writing a bit about this after some lengthy conversations with coworkers. Basically, I yearn for the day when software engineers can have books like this, this, and this. We need a shared visual grammar, shared materials, and shared processes so that we too can have coffee-table books that inspire our cohort.

A response to Jeff Atwood on (not) reinventing the wheel again . . . and again — Given what I just wrote above, it’s no surprise that I would be disappointed after reading an article that advocates waste. I hope one day to live in a software engineering world which is more like a real engineering world, a world in which there are two kinds of software businesses: (1) the businesses where almost everyone buys off-the-shelf or special-order parts and uses them to build incredible things, innovating very broadly and (2) the businesses that specialize in making those off-the-shelf and special-order parts, making them well, and innovating very deeply.

Design blogs — I’ve been making a little list of design blogs that I like. . . . I’m a total tease, though, so I’ll share them later.

My notebooks — One of those afore(un)mentioned design web sites has an occasional series looking inside designers’ notebooks. (For example.) I keep most of my thoughts (and some designs) worth remembering in journals and took some beauty shots of them. I’ve actually downloaded the photos off my camera into Lightroom.

French music — The French are different. Especially in their musical tastes. I like some of it and thought about shilling for folks like Mylène Farmer, Mara Tremblay, A.D.N., Abd al Malik, Karna, MC Solaar, Cœur de Pirate, Alain Bashung, Dumas, Karkwa, Noir Désir, Prototypes, Vulgaires Machins, and Indochine.

Women in Software Engineering — Though I’m not part of the Ruby/Rails communities I was disappointed to see the kerfuffle over a recent presentation which reminded many of us how few women there are in our profession, how they’re often (subconsciously) typecast, and how their accomplishments don’t often get enough attention. So here are some belated congratulations to Barbara Liskov, winner of the most recent Turing Award. And I like Liz Keogh’s web site.

My grad program — In a nutshell, I enjoyed my time at Brandeis as I worked toward my master of software engineering (M.S.E.) degree. I learned a lot of practical things related to software construction, tooling, and process (just as I hoped that I would).

And finally, Lent and my year-long cleaning project — After graduating I looked around my office/library and was shocked at how cluttered it was. So just before the new year, I resolved to get through all of the magazines, papers, articles, etc. in my big cardboard “in-box” — seriously, it’s big — by the end of 2009 and recycle whatever is left on January 1st, 2010. My progress is slow. (I’m being very generous to myself right there.) So for Lent I decided to better myself by working on my reading pile. In particular, I forbade myself to add more things to it. Basically, I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I need to put myself on an information diet or two. Which I’ve done, although I find myself snacking a lot.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing: reading from the big in-box, watching some of the 499 films in my Netflix queue, reading other people’s web sites*, writing in my own journal, photographing, gardening, carpooling, and more-or-less not writing here. More to come, eventually. . . .

*   Thanks for nothing, Facebook and Twitter! Just kidding. You know I love you.

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A while back I wrote about the value of revision. The Shelved Books design weblog reminds us that this can go too far.

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I am a serious podcast junkie. I currently have over 16 days of unheard podcasts. News, arts and culture take up most of my bandwidth.

Recently — and by that I mean the last few months — I’ve been working on two big podcast series.

Earlier in the summer I finished listening to Jeff Curto’s excellent History of Photography Podcast. As someone who liked school, loves photography and dabbles in history, I found myself really getting into the fifteen-part rebroadcasts of Curto’s college course.

I can hear some of you out there now. “But, Jeff, it’s an audio podcast. And photography is an inherently visual medium. How does that work?”

Well, the podcast has two things going for it. First, the podcast is enhanced with a lot of photographs, which are in sync with the lecture. Furthermore, Prof. Curto is a very gifted lecturer. He describes the photographs quite well, along with the ideas they contain and the artists who made them. (It probably helps that I had previously seen many of the photographs, too.)

A new semester of classes just started, so consider subscribing to it.

I also want to mention Adobe’s Lightroom podcast.

I love Lightroom! It’s a brilliant piece of software for photographers, taking all of the most important parts of Adobe Photoshop that a photographer needs, adding superb image management features, and putting it within a user interface that emphasizes workflow. It challenges the widely held view among geeks (and probably most software users) that powerful software has to be difficult to use. It makes me want to write better software myself.

So what’s so great about a podcast about Lightroom? George Jardine, formerly the product manager of Lightroom, brought together a diverse group of people during the public betas of Lightroom and had them talk about a bunch of subjects that really interest me. Professional photographers discussed photography and their digital workflows, which gave me ideas how to improve my own. A couple of analog printmakers took the long view, helping me think about how to make better digital prints. And then there were the software engineers.

Software engineers? Really?

Yeah, it sounds odd, especially since I try to keep my photography discussions about art and not about gear or f/stops or color profiles or pixels. But . . . I know a few things about image processing, color science, and software engineering. And I know how hard it is to make really great software. So I really appreciated being able to learn tidbits from people with more experience than me, as they talked about the things that interest me. And these guys aren’t just dilettantes. No, these Adobe engineers are deep into it; they know the trade-offs you have to make in the real world when implementing image processing and I/O algorithms. And did I mention that they worked really, really hard with Lightroom to get it right.

If you use Lightroom and want to get some ideas how to use it more effectively, you should listen to the podcast. Or if you just want to hear about the evolution of a software project, it’s also for you.

Finally, check out Edward Burtynsky’s SALT lecture on the “10,000 Year Gallery”. The SALT (Seminars about Long Term Thinking) podcasts by the Long Now Foundation cover a wide range of subjects, all of which attempt to get us to think on a millennium-long timeframe. (At first I thought it was something like a cult or a Burning Man-esque art project; but now I see it for what it is: transcendent, if somewhat eccentric.) Anyway, Burtynsky is helping create a gallery of photographs about who we are today that should last at least 10,000 years and will be installed inside an enormous clock that will toll every 10,000 years. Seriously… Not the most exciting podcast episode, but in general the whole seminar series is worth listening to.

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I haven’t done much with my perhaps overly ambitious project to examine contemporary Indian art photography. Last year on a short trip to the time-warp Iowa, I collected some notes on the many photographs I found on the web. And I did manage to make it to Harvard last month to attend a lecture with Sabeena Gadihoke and Homai Vyarawalla. Not exactly contemporary photography, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Unfortunately, I missed the earlier lecture with Ram Rahman and Sunil Gupta. They’re both very provocative and accomplished photographers still doing work. The few photographs from Rahman that I’ve seen concern cinema imagery and the influence of film on Indian visual culture. (Hint: It’s huge.) On a related note, I rather like Pushpamala N, and her quasi-cinematic work.

Sunil Gupta really intrigues me. Sotheby’s describes him as “an artist, curator, writer, and cultural activist [who] has made a significant contribution to contemporary art practice and discourse around the globe. Through his work he challenges stereotypes and questions beliefs, by exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and related issues of access, place, and identity.” Like a number of other Indian photographers, such as Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, his work examines (in part) what it’s like to be an Indian in diaspora.

So I was quite happy to see a TateShots video show up in my iTunes podcast playlist earlier this week:

Click for larger

In the short video, Gupta discusses the context for a couple of images currently on display in the Tate Modern’s Street and Studio exhibit.

They were taken in 2007 and they are part of an ongoing series called Mr Malhotra’s Party and the name of the series comes from what gay nights in Delhi are referred to, which are held in commercial bars and clubs, but because it’s illegal there, they are deemed as private parties.

Part of the underlying motivation is to show to people, especially in Delhi itself, that gay people are very ordinary looking, and part of just the social scene, part of the family structures that people live in. . . .

But what I like about India is that the street is like a theatre. So as you can see, tons of stuff happens around. So although the main subject and I are fixed and static, there is all this business, like it’s changing every second, what’s happening around the person. It’s like, it’s very lively. So I’m quite drawn to something that’s quite solid-looking, you know, compositionally.

Check it out.

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It feels like spring today.

This year is turning out to be like the last. There are still no flowers, although the bulbs we planted last autumn are pushing through the ground. The leaves will likely come late, too, despite budding after a 70 degree day in January.

Even though it might snow tonight, I’ve come out of my den to look around and survey a winter’s worth of earnest work. Here are some random thoughts mostly in a software engineering vein that I’ve had over the long, cold winter. (If you’re looking for something related to human vision, consider V1, a site about “the primary visual cortex.” If you come here for photography, stay tuned.)

Makefiles are what UNIX-based programmers (and ambitious Windows programmers) use to build software, manage dependencies, and create a common set of compilation parameters. Working with makefiles is hard, and I think that most of the difficulty comes down to the difference between imperative versus declarative languages.

In the real nonacademic world more than 99% of software developers develop applications in imperative languages, where you tell the system how you want it to do things. Makefiles take a radically different approach. As a declarative language, you tell what you want the result to be and then leave it up to the make application to figure out how to do it. It takes a bit of brain rewiring to shift from working with code where you can trace what’s happening to code where you look at the inputs, the desired outputs and the parameters. It’s a shift from knowing what individual commands do to knowing how the whole system works behind the scenes.

Construx Software, Steve McConnell’s software best practices company, published a white paper on classic software engineering project mistakes a couple months ago. I participated in the survey and was interested in seeing the results. Here are the biggest mistakes according to risk exposure:

1. Unrealistic expectations [2]
2. Overly optimistic schedules [1]
3. Short-changed quality assurance [4]
4. Wishful thinking [7]
5. Confusing estimates with targets [9]
6. Excessive multi-tasking [3]
7. Feature creep [6]
8. Noisy, crowded offices [5]
9. Abandoning planning under pressure [11]
10. Insufficient risk management [8]

The numbers in square brackets are the ranks of how often the mistakes happen in projects.

Jeff Atwood posted a very interesting article about software process. He doesn’t come right out and say “Process! Bah, who needs it?” But he does invite a contrast between what professional software organizations need when they aim for process compliance and the open source projects that frequently shun repeatable processes. He also highlights the trade-off between process management and delivering features. The comments provide interesting food for thought for people seeking to optimize their process and/or deliver new features.

This is the final week of the spring semester. Shortly I’ll be 7/10 done with my software engineering program. This is my first semester without any theory classes, which is why I’ve had to go to the web for the deep insights. Instead, this semester I’ve been learning about the mysteries of UNIX programming: users, filesystems, processes, pipes, etc.

If all goes according to plan, my last three courses will be all C++ all the time, with an object-oriented design course thrown in for good measure. It’s nice how all of my courses have dove-tailed with what I’m doing at work. I’m going in a new direction at work, and I think this pattern of learning things I can use right away will continue. . . .

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It’s Friday . . . at least until I go to sleep, when it magically turns into Saturday. Here are some fun feeds to explore over the weekend.

• xkcd (feed): You’ll probably like it more if you’re geeky, but as Leslie said, “Herpes is always funny.”
• Strange Maps (feed): Old, incorrect, original, and unusual maps.
• If it’s on teh interweb it must be true (feed): Sadly no more, but even the old ones are great.
• Calvin and Hobbes (feed): A little bit of perfection everyday.
• avant-garde fashion photography (feed): Lovingly ripped from the best fashion mags worldwide.
• Go Fug Yourself (feed): The best website with the worst feed ever. (Thank you NYT for this bit of heaven.)
• Manolo’s Shoe Blog (feed): The Manolo he loves the shoes of the Jimmy Choo and of the many other designers too.

Update: And while you’re strutting around the ‘net, why not visit Shoe Blog?

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At The MathWorks, new hires have to post a brief introduction about themselves. The messages are rather formulaic and goß a little something like this:

Hi, I’m Jeff Mather, a not-so-new software engineer in the Image and Scientific Data Formats team, which is a part of the Image and Geospatial Computing group. Before starting at The MathWorks, I attempted to defend the business model of a late-90’s dot-com start up in Cambridge, Mass., from people who said you had to sell things to make a profit.

In my spare time I like to photograph, catalog names at cemeteries, and watch obscure dramas and documentaries. A little known fact about me is that I’m a bit of a dilettante and hate bad type.

There you have it, friends, my secret shame. I’m a type aesthete who can’t abide bad page layout and artless kerning. That’s why you’ll only see em-dashes and smart quotes here. (Of course, you wouldn’t know the depth of my feeling from the current layout of this web site; but I’m working on that, and self-flagellation is a very old family trait.) But my shame is also pleasant, because I revel in good design, too.

To feed that font- and type-loving part of me, I follow these typographic weblogs:

• I Love Typography (feed): The appearance of this newcomer is so nice that I die a little whenever I read it in my news reader rather than a browser. [1]
• fontblog (feed): They put a pro-Microsoft spin on type, but then again Redmond’s type technology is actually more interesting than Apple’s, though not necessarily better looking. [2]
• Typblography (feed): Adobe’s take on type.
• Typographica (feed): One of many font-porn sites out there.
• Mark Simonson Studio/Notebook (feed): A font designer’s virtual scrapbook.
• Microsoft Typography — News Archive (feed): Newsy but worthwhile.

[1] – For example:

(Click for larger…)

[2] – I love the way that text and graphics look on my Mac, but Microsoft is going to win the future if Apple isn’t careful. For several years now motivated Windows users have been able to get dead-simple multilingual support. The Windows type engine does a really good job of creating the complex ligatures in various complex scripts. Furthermore, for several South and East Asian languages, you simply type what you want in a Roman alphabet you get nicely transliterated script. On the Mac, if you don’t have a TrueType font, you won’t get all of those nice features, and forget about input method editors if you aren’t using CJK. Here’s a simple comparison that shows the incomplete support for OpenType fonts on Mac OS 10.4.10. (Note the appearance of the combining character “ ् ” and the awkward positioning of vowels with all faces except Devanagari MT.)

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Last year I took a software testing course. A handful of software testing and quality blogs still hang out in my feed reader. In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, you might find these interesting.

• Software Testing Zone (feed): Howtos and gotchas
• Tester Tested (feed): “Discover Pradeep’s enormous passion for testing in this blog.”

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Adobe is really big — trust me, I visited them once; they have a whole tower for PostScript and its children — so you’d think they have some good blog writers. And you’re right.

But today let’s remember some of their better public blogs that have one foot in the grave or are no more:

• Gunar’s Site (feed): So you want to know about XMP, IPTC, or other metadata?
• Jeff Tranberry’s Photoshop Crawlspace (feed): With a name like that all I can say is “Please come back. Please.”
• Living Photoshop (feed): More like “Barely Living”
• Sean Parent’s blog (feed): Nice, longish posts about “programming, the Adobe Source Libraries, and Adobe’s Software Technology Lab.”
• Technical Perspectives on Digital Photography (feed): That pretty much says it all.

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I have way too many RSS feeds. Most go unread, which means I might as well just remove them and let the people who are less lazy than me that I trust summarize the web for me. But some I rather like and would surely miss, even if the information is months old by the time I get to reading the feeds.

But I believe I should simplify, simplify.

My plan is to visit each of the 100-or-so feeds in my reader, read some articles from the feed, and then either post it here for you, my dear friends, or just set it free.

First up, three feeds from the BBC:

• BBC World News (feed): Great one-line summaries of important news from every part of the globe with links to in-depth reporting.
• BBC News | South Asia (feed): Ditto, but just for South Asia.
• BBC News Player (feed): Full video segments from BBC News broadcasts

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