November 2004 Archives

In Guadeloupe for two weeks. Without a computer (my first Internet detox in years!). See you later, be nice.

Read the following text:

       Finished Files are the Re-
      sult of Years of Scientif-
      ic Study Combined with the
      Experience of Many Years

Got it? Makes no sense, huh? Don't worry about that. Read it again and just count the number of times the letter 'F' occurs.

How many did you count?

Due to a recent epidemy of comment spam on this weblog, to the point that I now waste a significant time every day cleaning this shit, I've forced comment moderation. I can't get MTBlackList 2.0 to work since it requires a Perl library that is not installed on this shared server (Storable.pm). Obviously this will slow down conversations (at least when I'm away), but it will indeed nullify the effects of those scumbags droppings. I need to change my templates to allow for TypeKey-authentified comments to appear directly.

Update (to be cont'd): ah ah, not funny, the old SimpleComments I was running was outputting the unapproved comments (bad, kind of defeats the goal isn't it?) but the latest version now requires Storable.pm! Private joke for Damelon: OK, I know I need to get a better host ;-). So I guess it's time to get back to the good old MTComment tags...

So be it. For a few hours I hoped that all my American friends were wrong, but they were right, all those I kept asking, in predicting the outcome a long time ago.

Had Kerry not conceded and, instead, enforced the "every vote counted" promise, this election would have surely ended in a juridical imbroglio reminiscent of the 2000 Florida mess. As Le Monde wrote today in its front column, "What image for a democracy that sets itself as a world example, with voters lining up at night in Ohio, anticipated votes, provisional votes, unreliable voting machines, endless recounts!".

I might lean towards Le Monde in thinking that the US electoral archaism is worrying, because it has an impact far beyond the US frontiers.

Le Monde writes, to explain why the Bush administration has no inclination to concede to America's traditional allies anything that relates to US security, that:

Americans do not understand that for Europeans, 11-9 (Nov 9, 1989, i.e. the fall of the Berlin Wall) is more important than 9-11 (the Sep 11, 2001 attacks on US soil).

For the Europeans, the key date is one of reconciliation ; for the Americans, a declaration of war. The American politics expert Robert Kagan has painted this gap in opposing a Europe coming from Venus and an America coming from Mars.

I do not share the newspaper hypothesis that the second Bush's term will mark a fall of the neocons influence in terms of foreign policy (I might be pessimistic though). But I share their views in both the fact that Europe and America cannot ignore each other in many key international issues (terrorism, Palestine/Israël, vigilance against the proliferation of WMD, etc.), and that Bush's re-election should be an electroshock for a Europe that needs to decide for itself rather than react to Washington's policy.

No system without balance is stable, and a world with just one superpower (from Mars) is not one I feel safe living in.

Phil Askey from Digital Photography Review writes about the iPod Photo:

Last week Apple announced the much anticipated iPod Photo. This unit is identical in size to the current fourth generation iPod but instead of the monochrome screen it gets a color 2.0" 116,000 pixel LCD. The iPod Photo is capable of displaying photos synced onto its hard disk using iTunes, it can do so on the built-in screen and also a TV via supplied cables or the dock. So far so good, we have an ultra-compact photo display unit.

However that's pretty much where it ends, and to me at least rules out the iPod Photo as that killer app 'bridge' product digital photographers have been waiting for. What it really should have had: (1) Either the ability to act as a USB/PTP host (so that images could be transferred in the field directly to it) and/or a Compact Flash slot (yes, this may have made the device slightly larger but that would have been a happy compromise), (2) The ability to handle full resolution images straight from the camera (apparently iTunes creates downsized copies of your photos before sending them to the iPod Photo so that it can handle them), (3) A remote control for the iPod Photo Dock so that when it's connected to your TV you can browse from the comfort of your armchair.

This then would have been the killer app for both music and photo, display, downloading, browsing and in-the-field storage (yes others already do this, but none with the design panache, quality build or marketing capability of Apple). Maybe the next generation iPod Photo will be more feature rich.

After what I wrote about the Belkin Digital Camera Link, I completely agree with him. The iPod Photo will remain uninteresting for me until I can connect it directly with my camera.