tasuki’s blog

I have an old Canon 20D. I’m pretty happy with it, the large pixels behave well in low light conditions and it’s got reasonably comfortable handling. There’s just one thing that’s been really bothering me, and as far as I know, all the other cameras suck just as much as mine.

Exposure bracketing was implemented by someone who hates HDR, photographers, and humanity altogether.

I use continuous shooting mode (hold the button down and the camera keeps shooting as fast as it can until it chokes). First, I have to press the button and hold it for exactly the right amount of time to get three pictures. In the beginning, it used to give me a headache, but after some time I got used to it. It’s stil an inconvenience, but a rather minor issue.

There’s something I don’t get at all: Why do I even have to shoot more pictures to get more dynamic range?

If the wonderful RAW format had for example 32bit depth instead of 12 or 14, we wouldn’t need bracketing at all! You would just take the longest of the exposures, and the camera could record all the data without overblowing the highlights. Or, if that is too much hassle, it could make 3 “virtual” RAW files — by simply taking a snapshot of the sensor’s state at three different times during the single exposure.

Given the amazing feedback I’ve been getting here lately, I don’t expect an answer. But I do wonder — is there anything in the way? Or are camera manufacturers incompetent?

PS: Yes, HDR is an instrument of the devil. If you look at my recent pictures, you might see that I realized that aready. But sometimes, sometimes I like to go to the dark side…

Let me start by saying that I really like the concept of a double elimination tournament. So I might be biased in my analysis.

Second, this post deals specifically with potential use of double elimination tournaments in settings of EGC/LSG side event.

What is wrong with the current approach

Current approach has two separate parts — qualification and finals. Qualification consists of several groups playing round robin system (8 groups of 6 people). First two of each group get to the finals, which is a simple single elimination (16 players in our study case). The total number of rounds is 5 + 4.

There are several related problems which stem from this concept. First, not all games are important. Some people leave halfway during the eliminations or just decide to resign the remaining games, as they have no chance of advancing to the finals anymore. This can influence who advances to the finals and has a negative impact on the tournament atmosphere. Second, the final only determines the winner reliably. Plus it just sucks that by blundering once, you get eliminated.

Why double elimination

Double elimination eliminates the unnecessary games. Every game matters. If someone decides not to participate anymore, his opponent gets a free win, but it doesn’t harm anyone but the one who quit.

You are free to lose any single game and can still win the tournament.

Double elimination is also much more accurate in determining the second to fourth places, which are available without any extra playoffs, with single playoff necessary to determine fifth and sixth place.

So where’s the catch?

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage is that double elimination of (up to) 64 players takes 12 rounds. That is considerably more than 9, and so the necessary extra time needs to be reserved. The reward is elimination of redundant games and much fairer results.

Another disadvantage might be that quarter of the participants only get to play two games. On the other hand, they can go to the beach and have fun instead of having to play.

Conclusion

Double elimination is particularly suitable for faster tournaments, where you can finish a round in under half an hour (and the whole 64-player tournament under 6 hours). The slightly asynchronous nature of double elimination allows for certain brackets to develop faster. On the other hand, there can appear bottlenecks when someone doesn’t show up. This can be taken care of by giving a default win to bottlenecker’s opponent, hence speeding up the tournament even more.

I would like to try double elimination for 9×9, 13×13, and blitz tournaments at LSG 2010. I’m all ears for your opinions on this idea.

By the way, have you already registered for LSG 2010?

We have freedom and can make a lot of decisions — isn’ it great? On the other hand, we often have to make decisions. I generally don’t like making decisions. Making a decision means that I will most probably regret it sooner or later.

I use a regret-based approach to making decisions. I try to estimate the probability that I’ll regret the decision. Sometimes, that probability is 100% for one option, so the other option wins by default.

About a year ago, in early 2009, I decided to quit my work and explore Poland. I reached that decision by realising that if I don’t do it, I will regret it for sure. My vacation time ended up being almost three times as long as I expected, mostly due to unplanned trip to Korea, which was great. I didn’t really have enough money to go there, but I knew I would definitely regret not going. 2009 has definitely been the best year of my life so far.

I wish I could apply this approach to making decisions more broadly, as it rarely fails. There are decisions for which I am fully aware of the right choice, yet can’t follow through and end up choosing the bad one.

I didn’t invent this story, I heard it from a friend. It was about a year ago, so I might be slightly off in my interpretation.

The story

Once upon a time, there was a girl and a guy who loved each other (ooh, cheesy story). She lived by the river with her mother. The girl and the guy wanted to move out, and they decided to meet next morning at the other side of the river. It was agreed that if the girl isn’t there, it’s a sign that she doesn’t truely love the guy — he would leave forever, never to return.

On the evening before leaving, the girl went to the ferryman, the only person who could get her accross the river. The ferryman said he would take her to the other side of the river only if she slept with him. Dispirited, the girl returned home to her mother and asked her for advice. Her mother showed understanding but didn’t provide advice.

The girl decided to take the deal and slept with the ferryman. Next morning, she met her lover at the other side of the river. When her lover learned that she slept with the ferryman to get to the other side of the river, he decided to break up with her. The girl and the guy had a friend, who heard the story and saw the confrontation. The friend then slapped the guy for breaking up with the girl.

Moral analysis

We have five characters: girl, guy, mother, ferryman, friend. Your task is to rate the morality of their behavior. Please don’t rate according to emotionally tinted words, which I tried to avoid.

Feel free to use concrete numbers or fuzzy words, as you like. Feel free to explain your opinion.

If you don’t want to rate their behavior, you can cheat and just sort the characters from good to bad.

Remember spam? Our email inboxes used to be full of it, it clogged online forums and was a general nuisance. My blog used to receive dozens of spam comments every day.

Now with gmail’s agressive — but usually spot on — filtering, I get a spam email in my inbox once a month. I have about 300 mails in my spam folder, which is about half of what it used to be few years ago. My blog is protected by akismet, which feels even more effective than gmail at catching spam. It also looks like spammers are giving up a little as I only received 6 spam comments on my blog during the past two weeks (that, or they think my blog is dead (it’s not, believe me!)).

So is spam really dead, or has it just moved elsewhere?

Social networks don’t suffer from spam (if you define spam as unwanted message of commercial nature) but social news sites (digg, reddit, etc.) are a different story. People try to spam them all the time. But spam on social news sites has to be disguised very well because the community tries to defend itself. If anyone even suspects that something might be spam, they downvote immediately.

Search engine spam (aka half of SEO techniques) is also prevalent and I can’t see it disappearing anytime soon. On the other hand, it’s gotten much milder and nowadays you rarely see spam-sites which are just full of ads.

All in all, I think the future is bright. Brute-force spam is easy to catch, and more clever spam sometimes even includes useful or entertaining stuff (think of viral marketing as a clever, entertaining, user-distributed spam ).

Yours sincerely,
Captain Obvious

The good:

• Polish people are extremely hospitable and helpful.
• Either there is a very low amount of thieves or I am really lucky.
• Food (cheese, bread, yoghurt, chocolate) in shops is quite a bit cheaper here than in Czechia (though restaurants aren’t cheaper at all).
• Krakow rocks. Especially the shores of Wisła river next to the Wawel castle.

The bad:

• Car drivers drive like assholes. When you’re going by bike, they drive way closer than what I find comfortable (I thought I was used to this from Czechia, but in Poland it’s even a little worse). When you, as a walker, get to a zebra crossing, in Western Europe the drivers will do everything they can to stop and let you pass. In Czechia, they usually let you pass, but not always (not when they’re going fast and don’t want to halt). In Poland, drivers almost never stop at a zebra crossing. You can see them slowing down, so you step into the street thinking “finally a decent driver” and the next thing you know is that you are jumping back onto the pavement as the driver was just slowing down to take a right turn. Similar on red lights — just because there’s red lights shining 50 meters ahead of the passing car doesn’t mean that the driver will let you pass.
• No discounts for lunch menu in restaurants. Eating out is quite expensive compared to cooking yourself.

Yeah, both lists are incomplete. Does it look like I post this just because I haven’t posted anything in April yet?

Almost everyone, myself included, underestimates the basics.

If you want to be an expert in any field, you need very strong basics. When you don’t know the basics, you tend to make many mistakes which are hard to get rid of. We are ambitious so we dive deep into all sorts of advanced stuff, leaving the basics for later, perhaps thinking we will somehow figure the basics out along the way. This sometimes works, but more often it doesn’t.

So, back to the basics for me! (in what, you ask? — in everything!)

The first time I saw square thumbnails (ie. thumbnails which are downsized and cropped to square) I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread.

The advantages of square thumbnails are obvious:

• they are really easy to align and never mess up your layout
• the layout will look more uniform and better than with irregular thumbnails
• they do not show everything so they invite the visitor to view the full sized picture

But there is a downside. Square thumbnails alter the composition of the picture. In some cases, when the photographer hasn’t thought much about composition, it can often actually improve the picture. But in other cases, when the composition is deliberate and well thought out, the square thumbnail can destroy it completely.

I use square thumbnails in my photo gallery (have you seen the pictures from my recent cross-country skiing trip?). And I keep wondering whether I should change it to normal thumbnails (normal = scaled down so as to fit into a given rectangle while preserving the aspect ratio).

Do you personally prefer photo galleries with square thumbnails (cropped) or with normal ones?

As any economist would tell you, time is money. What people sometimes fail to realise is that it works the other way around just as well: money is time.

That is, when you have time, you can work and get money. There are many things you can do with money. Most people just buy things they neither need nor want.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
– Tyler Durden from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Now, I mostly like my job. But this quote is still worth thinking about.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.
– Will Rogers

On a less serious but still related note…

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself…you’re the ruiner of all things good… you are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage… kill yourself.
– Bill Hicks

So much for quotes. Back to the topic.

I live in an abundance of luxury. I have food to eat, a warm and dry place to sleep, and clothes to wear. I’m not willing to submit to pointless consumerism.

That said, I am left with some money. I can leave it in the bank waiting for the economical crisis to eat it up. Or I can use it to buy some free time to do what I really want to do…

Happy New Year, by the way.

I remember thinking about space (as in “three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction”) when I was a little kid. I asked my dad what was outside of the universe and he told me that we do not know for sure but most probably there isn’t anything. I couldn’t quite understand what he meant by that, so I asked him, and he continued to explain that there simply is no space. I couldn’t grasp that either, so I imagined that there is a very hard rock — so hard that nothing else can fit in there, and hence there is no space.

I grew older and abandoned the very-hard-rock theory. But I haven’t found a reasonable substitute for it. And it bothers me. A lot.

There simply is no reasonable possibility for space to even exist:

1. Space is infinite and extends everywhere and never ends. I think I do not even need to explain why this sounds stupid.
2. Space is finite. Then what is outside of it? There is no space outside. Then there is no outside. Unreasonable, too.

Please note that I am talking about space, not necessarily in connection with the universe. Just the concept of space and its infinity/finity confuses the hell out of me. And it makes me scared.

It’s similar with time. According to wikipedia, universe is the “entirety of space and time”. So, if I understand it correctly, there was no time before universe. And the universe is approximately 13.73 billion years old. Which means that 14 billion years ago, there was no time. Wait, what?