Symbolic Forest

Hurrah, it’s Friday again. I have a busy busy weekend ahead, though, so I’ll probably be more tired on Monday than I am now.

I haven’t bothered to find out how the local elections went, but I have discovered one thing: one of the Labour candidates round here is Colleague M’s ex.^* If he’s won, I’ll have to tell you more about him some time.

Tip for you, if you’re thinking of buying a digital camera: don’t get a Samsung. Big Dave did, and frankly it just didn’t work. It would crash, lock up, or just not take photos – when you went back to look at the memory card, nothing but blank black images. So it’s back at the shop now, and Big Dave has his money back. I tried to persuade him he should buy an expensive SLR, but he wasn’t having any of it.

I was thinking that my post about Flann O’Brien hasn’t made it onto the site yet – but then I remembered that neither has my planned post about the late Jan Mark. The problem with literary posts is that I feel I need to reread all the relevant books first, which really acts as nothing more than a delay…

The Plain People Of The Internet: Hang on a minute. If Jan Mark is the late Jan Mark, why isn’t Flann O’Brien late also, as they are both equally as dead as the other?

Myself: Shut up, you.

Anyway, time to get away and get on with the rest of the day. The sooner Friday’s over, the sooner it’s the weekend.

* Recent readers might not have come across Colleague M – I haven’t heard much from her at all since she became Ex-Colleague M.

Keyword noise: photography, Samsung, Colleague M, Big Dave, weekend, local government, elections, The Plain People Of The Internet.

Life has many simple pleasures.

One of my favourites at the moment: cleaning keyboards. Take one can of compressed air, hold can and keyboard at arms’ length, push the nozzle, and be amazed as a huge cloud of dust^* is blown before you. FSSSST. FSSSST. It’s great fun, it really is.

* and biscuit crumbs, if it’s mine.

Keyword noise: cleaning, compressed air, crumbs, IT, keyboard.

On top of the timezone confusion, work is getting a little pressured this week. I’ve been driving about between branches carrying equipment backwards and forwards, because if you’ve got a large amount of data in the wrong place, the quickest way to sort things out is still to put your computer in the boot of your car and drive it down to Another Part Of The Forest’s branch office. Squeezing it down an internet pipeline takes all day; driving to the other side of the county only takes an hour.^*

The best part of that, of course, is that an hour of driving down the motorway is an hour of not having to answer the phone to be given more work.

* Well, the other middle of the county, at any rate.

Keyword noise: busy, commuting, data transfer, driving, Sneakernet, travel.

Well, I was glad Gordon Brown did take my hints on a couple of things.^* I’m just disappointed that he didn’t single out blue cars for rebates.

Current small reasons to feel pleased with myself: I’ve managed to completely avoid watching anything at all to do with the Commonwealth Games, even though one of the medal-winners is a teacher at my old school. Hopefully I’ll manage to keep avoiding it until all the fuss is over again.

Current small reasons to get pissed off: the computer keeps crashing, usually at the most inappropriate moments. I know what the problem is: a very obscure bug in the disk controller driver which very few people have come across, and nobody seems to know the cause of.^** Bah.

On the other hand, I do have a large box of biscuits on my desk at the moment. But not for long, I suspect. Hurrah!

* although, to be fair, everyone else in the country had already vaguely guessed the road tax changes.

*** it only comes up if you have a Promise SATA disk controller, a Maxtor SATA disk, and are running one of some Linux 2.6 subversions. But not all – the problem apparently disappeared in one revision of the driver, only to come back in the next.

Keyword noise: biscuits, budget, Commonwealth Games, computing, crash, economics, Gordon Brown, Linux.

I was a little doubtful when I saw, on the front page of Friday’s Guardian, the tagline “Steam trains – the great aphrodisiac”. I do like trains, but I wouldn’t say that about them.

It turned out to be subeditor’s hyperbolae. The article, by a former director of British Rail, turned out to be about the radical romanticism of the steam engine. Eroticism was only briefly mentioned. I’m rather glad, to be honest. Train-into-tunnel might be a classic visual metaphor, but I don’t think very many people would say that the train itself is what gets them going. There are people out there who haven’t just had sex on the train, but can remember the numbers of the trains they’ve had sex on – but I somehow don’t think it was the train itself that was turning them on.^*

What I do like about trains is what that article calls “the rigmarole of trains”. The ritual surrounding the railway. The little bits of peculiar terminology that you don’t get anywhere else.^** The natural romanticism of rail travel, and the community feeling that can spring up around the line.

* but if it was – on balance, I think I’d rather not know!

** phrases like “not to be used outside possessions”, or “not to be loose or hump shunted”.

Keyword noise: culture, locomotive, railway, ritual, romantic, steam engine, steam train, The Guardian, Simon Jenkins, trains.

I always enjoy W’s parties, even the ones I can’t remember afterwards.^* And, because it was their wedding, this one seemed extra-special.

I’d been given the job of semi-official photographer, so I tried to stay more or less sober. It also gave me an excuse to constantly rush around the building shoving my camera into people’s faces. I would probably have done this regardless, but it was nice to have an excuse for it.

Eventually, people started dancing, so there was nothing for it but to put the camera down and bounce around like a mad thing. I don’t think I did anyone any serious injuries, but equally I’m not going to be winning any dancing prizes in the near future. Then, when I was exhausted, I’d flop down on the sofa for five minutes before picking up the camera again and repeating the cycle. If I saw someone posing for someone else’s camera, I’d try to quickly grab a sneaky shot from the side. Hopefully all the other party guests think they look good in profile. The main room was lit by beautiful blue fairy lights: it looked wonderful, but it was so dark that half the time I had no idea what I was photographing.^**

I was still emotional by the end of the evening. I hugged W before I left, and wanted to tell him: have a wonderful life together. W and P make an amazing couple, and everyone who knows them wants them to be happy forever after.

If you want to see the rest of the wedding photos – not that they will be of much interest unless you know P and W yourself, of course – most of them are here.

* such as the one where I got so drunk I collapsed in a flowerbed. There are quite a lot of people in London who have no clue what my name is, but if you say “you know, the one who collapsed in the flowerbed at W’s party” will know exactly who you mean.

** One technical photo tip: I was lucky that the house has very light, almost-white walls and ceilings throughout. This means that – if you have a swivel-head flashgun with good automatic metering – you can point your flash directly up at the ceiling to get nice, even, flattering lighting. It does mean, though, that the photo lighting is nothing like the original scene. This photo was taken in a room barely light enough to not walk into other people, and all the light comes from the flashgun attached to the camera.

Keyword noise: bounce flash, celebration, Civil Partnership, London, marriage, party, photography, travel, wedding.

If you’re a Boing Boing reader, you might remember the post from a couple of weeks ago about photographs that look like tiny models. I was intrigued, partly by the photos themselves, and partly by the way we perceive them, the trick that makes our brain think they are tiny.

The pictures were taken with tilt-shift lenses, expensive things which distort the perspective of a photo and move the perspective vanishing points around. However, I don’t think it’s that which is mostly responsible for fooling the eye here. Rather, it’s the minimal depth-of-field that these photos have.

For non-photographers: depth of field is, essentially, the amount of a photo that is in sharp focus. Because of the basic physics of light and camera lenses, distance photos normally have an enormous depth-of-field, and close-ups have a tiny one.^* Tilt-shift lenses, though, wreck your depth-of-field, making every photo look like a close-up.^**

You can fake this effect yourself, given a suitable photo and some image-editing software. Here’s a photo I took earlier. I chose it because it shows an isolated, lonely couple on a depressing, cold, windswept beach, so it’s ideal for Valentine’s Day:

The other reason I chose it is that as it shows a wide, flat, muddy plain, it’s ideal for mucking around with depth-of-field effects. After a bit of trickery to make sure the groyne beacon^*** stayed sharp, I applied plenty of blur to the foreground and background. And – look, tiny little people on a model beach!

(the effect doesn’t really work in the thumbnail, so click on the link to see it properly)

It might not look as good as the photos on Boing Boing, but you can see the effect starting to appear with only a few minutes’ work. The interesting thing, though, is that you probably didn’t know all that stuff I said earlier about depth-of-field and how it varies with distance. Unless you’re interested in photography, I’d be surprised if you did. Subliminally, though, you already knew it all. It’s hard-wired deep inside the visual centres of your brain somewhere, and that’s why these photos look like models.

What I’m not sure about, though, is whether we’re used to this because it’s how our eyes work, or just because we’re so used to seeing photographic^**** images. I suspect it’s the former, but I don’t know enough about eyes to be certain. For my next experiment, I’m going to take a small child who has never seen a photograph and raise them out of contact with pictures or TV, just to see how they respond. Now, does anyone have any spare babies they won’t be needing for a few years…?

* If you have a decent SLR camera lens to hand, you can confirm this, because it will probably have depth markings on the lens. For example on a 1970s Pentax lens I had to hand, with the lens focused on the horizon, it claims things 25 feet away should still be in focus – a depth-of-field measured in miles, in other words. However, if it’s focused on something 18 inches away, the depth-of-field will be about one inch either side.

** It’s all in the tilt – the lens’s imaging plane is tilted so it no longer aligns with the film plane, so the only in-focus part of the picture will be a narrow band where the planes intersect. Another experiment to try at home: if you have a projector of some kind, try tilting your projection screen, and watch the picture distort and go out-of-focus – essentially, that’s what a tilt-shift lens is doing.

*** Heheheh! Groyne! Snigger!! No, I am sophisticated and grown-up really – why do you ask?

**** Which includes TV and cinema for this purpose – the lenses aren’t that different.

Keyword noise: Depth of Field, DoF, fake tilt-shift, focus, miniature, photography, tilt-shift.

New Channel 4 comedy series *The IT Crowd* starts tonight; being a big geek, of course, I had to watch it. And, overall, it’s rather good.

So far I’ve only seen the first episode, and I think you have to give the first episode of any new series a little leeway. It takes a lot of time to make sure the characters are all properly introduced, after all. Nevertheless, it seems to hold up rather well.

In writing this, I’m trying not to take the easy route and start comparing it to Father Ted. It’s written by one of that show’s writers, it has a similar production style, and it has a central trio of characters. Moreover, both have a small kernel of darkness which is occasionally revealed. It might not be as gloomy and despair-filled as, say, Peep Show, but the darkness is there.

Of course, the main reason I like the show is probably the comedy of recognition. The writing isn’t particularly technical, but they do have a ZX81 lurking in the background,^* not to mention the Perl Camel stickers and Flying Spaghetti Monster posters scattered around the set.^** I don’t get beaten to a pulp by the non-technical staff on a regular basis, but only because they think I’d probably enjoy it. And, of course, there is that stalwart technical advice of IT staff everywhere. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

* Unlike my own, modern, up-to-date IT office – our last 1980s computer in service was retired last summer, and the last one on the spares shelf was sent off to long-term storage a few weeks ago. Scarily, I’m not joking here – until last summer one department did rely on a mid-80s PC running MS-DOS 3 and with Windows 1.0 installed on it

** Update, 4^th February 2006: another thing I’ve noticed in the background of the set: a poster of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa

Keyword noise: Channel 4, comedy, computing, Great Wave At Kanagawa, Hokusai, IT, review, television, The IT Crowd.

Quite a few people, recently, have come to this site looking for information on Aramiska, the European satellite ISP which apparently collapsed last week. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any information, anywhere. The company promised to release a statement on January 30^th; it never appeared. Their disappearance is still a mystery.

Moving on, this email came in to one of our work addresses yesterday:

I noticed whilst browsing your site that there were problems with some of your links, when I tried again with Internet Explorer the problems were not there so I assume that they were caused by me using the Mozilla browser.

Very nice and helpful, you might think.^* However, if you read on, you might get a little more suspicious…

I have enclosed a screen capture of the problem so your team can get it fixed if you deem it an issue.

Hah. If you’re not suspicious yet, you probably shouldn’t be allowed near the internet. If you look a little closer, the attachment is a .scr file – which could, I suppose, look like “screenshot” to the non-technical. If you try to open it,^** then: congratulations, you have a virus, one known as W32/Brepibot. It’s a “backdoor”, a tool that then enables hackers to connect into your computer and harness it for their own nefarious purposes. Well done.

* As our work website was designed by an apparently-clueless PR chap with no previous knowledge of website design at all, it is also entirely believable.

** and you’re using a Windows computer, and don’t have up-to-date virus protection

Keyword noise: Aramiska, Brepibot, broadband, internet, ISP, out of business, satellite, satellite broadband, security, service, trojan, backdoor, vanishing, virus.

At the office, our main internet connection for many years has been a satellite broadband link, from Dutch company Aramiska. When the directors first wanted broadband, it was the cheapest solution. It’s slower than ADSL, and a lot more expensive,^* but it’s still more reliable. Well, it was, until this rather surprising email arrived this morning:

We regret to inform you that Aramiska and its services are shutting down and the company will be unable to provide you with internet access after today, 27th of January 2006

Yes, that is the entire email.^** It’s repeated on their website as a Customer Care Announcement, but otherwise their website is up as normal. They’re not answering the phone. Noone seems to be able to find out what has happened. Their executives have promised a statement next week, but for now they’re not admitting anything.

Luckily, we have – I mean had – two broadband links at head office now. So, after a bit of reconfiguration,^*** I think we’re safe now. I feel sorry for the people in my position who didn’t have a fallback, though.

* Several thousand pounds a year – but it’s still the cheapest option in some rural areas.

** And it turns out that not everyone received the email, even.

*** Geek footnote: our main problem was that all our MX records pointed to Aramiska’s SMTP relay. In fact, they still are, even though we got on to our registrars about it this morning. They’d better sort the bloody thing out.

Keyword noise: Aramiska, broadband, internet, ISP, out of business, satellite, satellite broadband, service, utilities.