So this week I should take delivery of a new camera. Its a Ricoh GR-1v fixed focus (28mm) compact. How many megapixels you ask? None. Zero. Nada. Or, if you want to be precise, it depends on what speed of film I load in it.

Thats right, its a non-zoom film camera. Am I some kind of technophobic luddite I hear you cry? Hardly. But I am something of a perfectionist when it comes to the deterministic parts of photography.

Let me explain. The ‘image capture’ element of photography basically boils down to the following factors:

• Lens quality
• Autofocus accuracy
• Meter accuracy
• Ability of capture medium
• Composition

Of the five, only the last one (which I am using to include depth of field, metering off the right thing, focussing on the right thing etc, as well as ‘composition’ in the artistic sense) is qualitative. All the others can be measured, and don’t depend on who is behind the camera. So my thought process in this matter is something like this:

Why a compact? I want a compact camera for all the times I’ve cursed because I didn’t have my SLR with me and missed photo opportunities as a result. I want my ability to be the limiting factor in my photos and not my equipment. Fixed lenses are easier to make well than zooms, and the Ricoh’s is rated as one of the best. In fact, all the criteria that depend on the camera (for a film camera, the first three) are highly regarded in the Ricoh. Which leaves the quality of the final results down to me, not the camera. I want a fairly high degree of control (which the Ricoh offers), and couldn’t give two hoots about automatic program modes (which it doesn’t).

Why film? Opinions differ on how many megapixels you need to match the grain size of a high quality slow (ISO 100) film. The numbers vary from 6 to 64 and higher. Obviously the more the better, but there seems to be a consensus that the current crop of 6 megapixel SLR’s are starting to approach film for reasonable sized prints (up to about 10×8, which is close to A4). The larger the desired print size, the more pixels needed. There are other factors to be considered as well, such as the dynamic range (the number of shades between black and white), colour accuracy etc. Digital generally does better here, as these factors can be tweaked after the fact, which can’t be done with film. But I digress. The upshot of all this ponderment was that I could only meet my goals with a film camera, and not a cheap one at that. If I was in the market for a new SLR, then I would be looking very hard at digital, for the reasons I’ve mentioned above, but I would want the option of a film body also, which basically limits me to Canon or Nikon (and Canon currently have a big lead thanks to the 300D).

Generate ASCII-art versions of words: http://www.network-science.de/ascii/

… or gifs: http://www.degraeve.com/gif2txt.shtml, or jpgs: http://www.glassgiant.com/misc_ascii.php

Quick reference of things I can remember from this year, categorised as Stuff (good), Fluff (hype), and Duff (just plain bad).

Stuff:

Ruby – Make programming fun again
AOP – Big, and getting bigger
SEDA – A sensible architecture for scalable systems

Fluff:

Groovy – Does the world need another scripting language for the Java platform?
Geronimo.

Duff:

Maven. The java virus.
The reflection-based visitor pattern. Are you joking?
Testing multithreaded code. Since when does ‘deterministic’ mean ‘runs fast’?

Seems I hit a limit with the traffic my last post generated. My provider has upped the cap so it should be sorted.

I’ve seen a few Maven articles and posts that say things along the lines of ‘What’s missing from Ant is all the project management facilities that Maven gives you.’

Bunkum.

Project management capabilities are not ‘missing’ from Ant, any more than advanced avionics features are ‘missing’ from JUnit.

Ant is a build tool. That’s what it was designed to do, and that’s what it does.

I’m still not sure what Maven is. It seems to try to do too much of everything, and not enough of anything. It seems to be a good fit for open source projects where your deliverable is a single library jar, but causes immediate pain when your project needs require you to stray from its predefined notion of how to to structure a project. That, and it’s incessant downloading of unstable ‘SNAPSHOT’ jars of every open source project known to man are what have made me a defiant maven-sceptic.

Great site for all those games from years ago that still remain unsurpassed. If you have never played Starflight or Starflight 2 you don’t know what you’ve missed.

http://www.the-underdogs.org/

Ahh, nostalgia.

My colleague Dan has written his first ever article (probably the first of many) for the JDJ, entitled Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing.

It was picked up by TheServerSide and promptly hijacked into a discussion about why TDD is a bad way to test software. Hello? Did you read the title?

I hate dieting. I don’t care how how you spin it, its a form of deliberate starvation. Or controlled malnutrition in the case of low carb/high fat diets.

Why do something to yourself that makes you miserable and need quantities of sleep more usually associated with hibernatory creatures?

Just because your clothes no longer fit, you get out of breath walking up stairs and your lifespan is shortened is no reason to give up the privilege of eating vast quantities of easily available food that living in western society affords.

The management would like to apologise for the use of the word ‘naked’ in the previous post. Which if you’re reading this on the main web page is in fact the next post. In which case the management would also like to apologise for using the word ‘naked’ in this apology for the use of the word ‘naked’.

Thank you.

So here I am ripping my CD’s into iTunes and blogging because I’ve got nothing better to do while I’m waiting, and half of them appear to have evaporated. So far I’ve found about 15 empty boxes. I know its been a while since I listened to a lot of them but where the hell are they? Did they feel unloved? Get bored? Take a slow boat to China? Am I going to open a cupboard door in the near future and be felled by a cascade of naked discs?