With a jury-rigged Canon G9 on a Gorillapod poking through the moonroof I filmed a time lapse movie of my daily commute. I’d been looking for an excuse to try out the movie modes on the G9. The roughly 11 mile drive becomes 90 seconds of racing out of Watertown, through Fresh Pond in Cambridge and out Rt. 2 west to Rt. 128. And thankfully the camera stayed attached to the car for the whole trip!

(YouTube had problems with the original uploaded AVI, so I converted it to MPEG first. I’m not sure how YouTube converts to FLV, but the result is definitely more blurry than the source video.)

Tonight was the 16th Web Innovators meetup in Cambridge. The event has grown huge, clocking in at around 400 people. Due to general exhaustion a couple quick thoughts, bullet-list style:

• As usual, there were several demos that had potential. I liked the political quiz and information site Glassbooth.org. Could be a good way to learn more about candidates, which I think I would benefit more from locally than nationally. And parking-spot finder SpotScout could be useful for city-dwellers.
• There was the usual refrain of “what is your business model?” with an answer of “targeted ads *garbled*” (while wildly hand waving). Rod & I joked there should be t-shirts made up with “How will you make money?” on the front, and some AdSense ads printed on the back.
• I took photos of the speakers, with mixed results. The room is quite dark, with a bright white screen behind the speaker. I tried bouncing a flash as well as without the flash and raising the ISO. The results are noisier than I would like, but Lightroom helped salvage a few of them. Good learning experience at any rate.

Last week I picked up a Canon Powershot G9 (through Amazon where the price has been moving up & down $70). I’d been looking for a point & shoot that would be easier to carry around than a dSLR with good performance. The G9 has solid specs and has been receiving very positive reviews. Overall, it seems like a winner with some predictable limitations:

• Phil Greenspun made a point I liked about P&S cameras, that one advantage is you are much more likely to actually have it with you than a dSLR. The G9 can slide in a jacket or bag easily, but won’t fit in your jeans pocket (unless you wear amazingly baggy pants). It has a satisfying feel and weight to it, but I wouldn’t call it light the way some ultra-compacts are. And black is a nice choice.
• That the G9 can shoot RAW was a selling point for me. Shooting RAW helps it fit in nicely with editing within Lightroom and allows greater freedom in adjusting the white balance after the shot.
• The lens seems reasonably sharp and at f/2.8-4.8 is reasonably fast for a P&S, but doesn’t excel in low-light situations. Above ISO 400 the noise becomes more noticable, and very prounced at ISO 1600 or the in ISO 3200 mode. I’m quickly growing to really like the dedicated ISO dial on the top. Much simpler than adjusting it through menus, like on the Digital Rebel.
• It’s a funny fact that lower end cameras often have more features, like shooting movies and live-preview than more expensive dSLRs (at the expensive of optical quality and flexibility). The G9 has the expected shooting modes, and the movie mode could come in handy.
• I think the G9 with its short focusing distance will take decent macro shots, like Boba Fett above. Flickr has some impressive macro shots taken with it.
• The optical viewfinder is pretty small, and I haven’t found it very comfortable. Thankfully the 3” LCD screen is beautiful.
• The delay between pressing the shutter button and the picture being taken is annoying. While the amount of time might not truly be that long, any lack of immediacy is unsatisfying. In a crude test involving my cell phone’s stopwatch, it seems like it is ~3 tenths of a second. Whereas with my Rebel it is ~1 tenth of a second or less. The G9 lag is just long enough for it not to feel instantaneous.

CADR LISP Machine,
MIT Museum

Software Engineering Radio had Richard Gabriel, of Lucid and “worse-is-better” fame, on for a chat about Lisp. Gabriel provides a interesting, quick history of Lisp and some of the important concepts it introduced. Included some trivia I didn’t know like “car” and “cdr” stand for “contents of address of register” and “contents of decrement of register”, respectively. (So obvious for getting the first/rest elements of a list!) When asked about the state of Lisp in use today, he mentions some AI research, ITA and Yahoo Stores (Viaweb), which are the only ones I knew — there must be more, right? Gabriel also talks a little bit about his MFA in poetry (a true code-poet!) and the study of software, which I wrote about related to “Dreaming in Code”.

Although sometimes the topics are too dry or enterprise-y for my taste, SE Radio does a great job for a tech podcast. The interviewer is knowledgable, asks good questions and lets his guest speak, which is surprisingly rare.

I recently noticed that iTunes 7 had deleted several songs and podcasts out of my music library. The song still appears listed, but with an “!” next to it, and the actual file is gone. Others on the web have witnessed similar problems with iTunes 7, often times with far worse consequences. My set up is not exotic; all the the files are on a local hard drive that has plenty of space left. (And don’t think I could have accidently deleted them myself.) Of the 4 songs I know I was missing, I found two in my Mozy backups, by looking at the metadata in iTunes about when it was modified and then going back to a backup point when it existed. But two songs (the New Pornographers’ “Spirit of Giving” and The Knife’s “The Captain”, for the record) never appear in any backup, and I didn’t go looking for the missing podcasts. It seems the songs were deleted before they made it into the nightly backup. I filed a bug report with Apple, and haven’t received any response to a posting in their support forum. All the songs were purchased through the iTunes store which doesn’t permit redownloading purchased songs (except supposedly once if you contact support). Let this be my lesson about sometimes chosing convenience over DRM-free.