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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