Category Archives: Worthy Feeds

Shelved Books

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Jeff Mather

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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Photography Podcasts

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Jeff Mather

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.

Posted in Computing, Fodder for Techno-weenies, History, Photography, Software Engineering, This is who we are, Worthy Feeds | 1 Comment

Sunil Gupta talks about Mr. Malhotra’s Party at Tate Modern

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Jeff Mather

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.

Posted in India, OPP, Photography, Worthy Feeds | 1 Comment

Makefiles. Why Projects Fail. Process. Etc.

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Jeff Mather

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. . . .

Posted in Life Lessons, Software Engineering, Worthy Feeds | 3 Comments

Getting to Know All about You, pt. 5 – Fun Stuff

Posted on November 17, 2007 by Jeff Mather

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.

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

Posted in General, Worthy Feeds | 2 Comments

Getting to Know All about You, pt. 4 – Typography

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Jeff Mather

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:

[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.)

A comparison of OpenType and TrueType typefaces on Mac OS X 10.4.10

Posted in Computing, General, I like type, Worthy Feeds | 1 Comment

Getting to Know All about You, pt. 3 – Software Quality Assurance

Posted on October 31, 2007 by Jeff Mather

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.

Posted in General, Software Engineering, Worthy Feeds | 2 Comments

Getting to Know All about You, pt. 2 – Moribund Adobe Blogs

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Jeff Mather

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:

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Getting to Know All about You, pt. 1 – The Beeb

Posted on October 27, 2007 by Jeff Mather

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:

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