Blogcritics Author: Aspi

Book Review: The Photograph - Composition & Color Design by Harald Mante

Aspi — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:26:27 EDT

Mante's book - translated from German - is a colorful explanation of the theory of photographic composition.
Harald Mante's The Photograph (Rocky Nook, 2008) - translated from German by Thomas C Campbell III is my first text on picture composition and design. I've read books about the technologies involved with photography and books that explain why a particular photograph really works, but Mante's book explains the principles behind good...

Book Review: The Digital Photography Companion by Derrick Story

Aspi — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 21:43:19 EDT

A book that shrugs off a slow start by offering valuable tips that enhance your understanding of the digital camera.
Derrick Story's book The Digital Photography Companion is sized conveniently enough, like a slightly oversized mass market paperback. And the intent is obvious. Story wants to create a manual that is easy to take along with you pretty much wherever you go (hint: vacations). He follows it up by writing in a conversational style and includes lots...

Book Review: Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

Aspi — Sat, 1 Mar 2008 10:58:21 EST

An insightful look at the art and science of hacking.
In the preface to his book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, author Jon Erikson does a crisp job laying out the counter argument to letting the art of hacking flourish unfettered by artificial legalities. "There's nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge". Being unfamiliar with actual hacking...

Book Review: Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop CS3 RAW

Aspi — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:12:56 EST

A full color book that argues and instructs on the need to process RAW files for digital photography.
The outstanding thing to note about Mikkel Aaland's book Photoshop CS3 Raw: Get the Most Out of the Raw Format with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Bridge is that is organized very systematically. Instead of being a breathless description of everything you can do with the software, Aaland focuses on why you would do something and how to do it....

Book Review: Photoshop Lightroom Adventure - Mastering Adobe's Next-Generation Tool for Digital Photographers by Mikkel Aaland

Aspi — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:18:48 EST

Part coffee-table book, part tutorial, Aaland's high-concept book on digital photography is flawed but fun.
Mikkel Aaland's tutorial of Adobe's next generation digital photography application is called Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, and it's a high-concept spin on a photography expedition to Iceland that resulted in a book.The idea behind the expedition -- Aaland's brainchild and sponsored primarily by Adobe -- resulted in a team of...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Graphic Novel Review: The Astonishing X-Men Vol. 2 - Dangerous by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday

Aspi — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:43:07 EDT

I confess I’ve never watched a single episode of the hipster bloodsucking saga Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But such is creator Joss Whedon’s cachet (Firefly, Angel) that I was more than curious to explore his work when he signed up to script the Astonishing X-Men for Marvel Comics. Whedon’s work on the series has been collected into three graphic volumes: Gifted, Dangerous and Torn. A lot of the ground covered in Gifted was the source material for the final installment in the X-Men movie trilogy – The Last Stand. I found Dangerous to be the collection where Whedon’s set up in the first volume really starts paying off. Dangerous starts with an emblematic scene. The X-Men have flown in to fight a lizard-like monster tearing up Manhattan. As each mutant battles the monster, you can read his thoughts in caption balloons. Colossus dwells on the leadership of Cyclops while Pryde wonders if she is scaring Colossus by her closeness to him. Saving the day, Whedon seems to be telling us, is just a job for these X-men. They have rich, complex, messed up lives they have to contend with – which gets in their way. This idea is at the core of what Marvel has been about over the years: the superhero saga as a soap opera that touches real lives. You can see its lasting legacy in modern day interpretations such as NBC’s Heroes.Whedon’s talent lies in being able to create page-turning plots, interlacing them with emotional turmoil and conveying all of it with minimal, almost abstract dialogue. Take the opening action sequence mentioned above. We also see Wolverine throwing himself at the monster and slashing it apart. Over several panels a single thought occupies him: “I really like beer.” It’s enough to tell us volumes about Wolverine.The series has been penciled and inked by John Cassaday. Primarily using panels that stretch across the breadth of the page and using open spaces judiciously, he creates a wide-screen feel to the comic book. The coloring by Laura Martin is underplayed by today’s standards – especially for prestige projects such as these. And it’s a smart move because it really pops the characters and the action out of the pages.I’ve consciously stayed away from describing the plot points because the less you know going in the better. But I’ll say this – Emma Frost is compelling, Professor Xavier gets to kick some butt and the X-men face an enemy so intimate it comes from within. I know, I’m beginning to sound like the back cover of a comic book myself. So in the words of one of the greatest writers of our generation – ’Nuff Said.

Aspi lives in Chicago. He is average at everything, except Math at which he is terrible. He blogs on a variety of topics.

A Closer Look at Britney's Shears

Aspi — Wed, 7 Mar 2007 02:36:41 EST

It's not difficult to understand why Britney Spears' shaving her hair off has shocked the nation. Britney was part of the Mickey Mouse club growing up, for God's sake! Her life has been rocked lately by a string of setbacks increasingly bizarre. The head-shaving shocked the nation because of the readily available images of Britney shaving her head that were splashed throughout the media. Dozens of eyewitnesses added their accounts of how much of an emotional wreck Britney was during the process.It's easy to mark her act as that of a whacko, as someone whose reported use of recreational drugs and alcohol has spiraled out of control. It's not as if Britney hasn't done some particularly ill-advised things in her life (the nuptials that lasted all of 55 hours, hooking up with Kevin Federline, a messy break-up and war of words over child custody, and the loud re-emergence of the party girl aided by Paris Hilton and the flaunted lack of underwear), but shaving her bleached locks, Britney's trademark since the beginning of her career, is significant because this is different from all the other stuff she's done. There are reports that Britney did it because her hair implants were bothering her. We'll ignore that one on the grounds of implausible reaction for a relatively minor problem. A lot of reports swirling among the bloggerati tend to suggest that Britney wanted to make sure she wouldn't be nailed in a drug test via a hair sample (which, you have to admit, fits in nicely with the shaved privates displayed to gratified paparazzi during the lack of underwear incident). Hair can carry traces of drug use for long periods of time. Given the length of Britney's hair at the time she cut it off, you could bust her for any use probably going back six to eight months. Cutting off your hair to avoid failing drug tests is pretty prevalent. Your urine carries traces up to 30 days, but that can be manipulated by diuretics and fluids to flush out evidence faster. Was it really the act of a desperate mother who wanted custody of her sons at all costs? A woman with a shaved head carries different meanings in different cultures. In South Asia, it's associated with widows or terminally ill women. In the United States, you'd get labeled as a lesbian, punk, or a cancer patient or survivor. In most cases, it is associated with a loss of femininity. Britney has been in the music business since she was a little girl. When her single "Hit Me Baby, One More Time" conquered the airwaves, she was 19-years-old. She is now 25. There are tremendous pressures on young girls to look and act feminine and sexy far beyond their years. Unless you are in the singer-songwriter category like Sheryl Crowe, Sarah McLachlan, or Fiona Apple, this means you have to sexually mature very quickly or at least pretend that you have - and your femininity is marketed just as much as much as your music, if not more.Is Britney reclaiming herself as a person, freeing herself from what the music industry and media made her out to be? Was she discarding her vulnerability in an attempt to invoke a new, tougher woman? Is she too emotionally and chemically addled to be connecting the dots so clearly? Or was it an in-between decision borne out of her subconscious? Take your pick, but of all Britney's weird acts, this one seems to have stirred something deeply rooted in a number of her female fans and friends.

Aspi lives in Chicago. He is average at everything, except Math at which he is terrible. He blogs on a variety of topics.

Music Review: Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

Aspi — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 07:55:15 EST

“I told you, I was trouble. You know I’m no good,” mourns English singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse on her terrific new album Back to Black. Winehouse’s voice is as ferocious as her tumultuous life has been. At age 23, a perennial bad girl whose continuing travails with alcohol have followed her everywhere, Winehouse might be trouble, but her jazz and soul inflected 60s sound is exceptional. Already hailed in the UK with a Brit for Best Solo Female Artist, her sophomore effort Back to Black is scheduled for a March 13 release in the US.What is remarkable about Winehouse is how mature and diverse her vocal talents are. Her voice morphs so much on songs, it feels like a vocal multiple personality disorder. Back to Black is produced by Mark Ronson (Robbie Williams, Christina Aguilera) and Salaam Remi (Fugees, Toni Braxton, Ini Kamoze) who smartly put the focus on Winehouse’s pipes, allowing them to play out her personality.On the song quoted above, "You know I’m no good," which is slated to be the first stateside single, Winehouse admonishes a lover for believing in her but is quick to admit that it's herself she is cheating. On the up-tempo opening track "Rehab" - reportedly about an incident in which her management suggested she check herself in resulting in Winehouse parting ways with them - she snarls out a refusal: “No, no, no”. On "Just Friends," she softens her voice visibly when recalling the good times and steels it when lamenting about how her lover’s two-timing is sucking quality time out of their affair.Arguably her best work is on the title track where she captures the cloudy desolation of a hasty jilting. “Life is like a pipe. And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside”. You can read the fading of hope in the lyrics and hear it in her voice.In fact, love and heartache are very much on her mind. She mines themes of betrayal and loneliness in Tears dry on their own and Wake up alone, but effortlessly changes gears from foot-tapping R&B to jazz-inflected soul between the two tracks. Throughout the CD, you get the feeling Winehouse can take the hard knocks with the best of them. But a sense of doomsday prevails. You’re not sure if she is learning her lessons; that it’s only a matter of time before her next personal disaster. It’s a deliberate play brought about by how she responds audaciously and ambiguously to driving events in her work.Winehouse ends the CD with an ode to not sharing weed called "Addicted." That’s a good word to describe what her songs can do to you.

Aspi lives in Chicago. He is average at everything, except Math at which he is terrible. He blogs on a variety of topics.

Clicking on Physical Objects (Part 2 of 2)

Aspi — Fri, 2 Mar 2007 18:42:01 EST

How does the “click” itself work? There are several technologies to simulate a click. In each case, your mobile must take a picture with its in-built camera. The first technology we’ll look at is called qr-codes. A qr-code is like a bar code, but two-dimensional and designed for very quick processing. Each qr-code contains a tag which is typically an Internet address (or a URL for now). A mobile scans the qr-code by taking its picture and decoding the embedded URL. This decoding requires some software to be installed on the phone. As the technology becomes widespread (it is currently in use in Japan, which leads the markets in a lot of mobile innovation), your phone might come installed with this software when you purchase it. It is important to understand that the mobile doesn’t have to know what the object is that it just clicked on. If it has that URL, it just sends an SMS with the URL embedded in it for processing to some server. The server can then use a variety of protocols including web services to grab the information about the object and send it back in an SMS to the mobile.There is also a set of technologies that can be put on an object and used to send information to your mobile but they all require special hardware on your phone. Some examples are RFID and Near Field Communication (NFC). These technologies require a small device, a hardware tag, which could be as small as and not much thicker than say a postage stamp, attached to the object. On the other end, a hardware reader needs to be present to talk to the tag. That reader needs to be spliced on your phone. The implication here is: your mobile today won’t work without hardware modifications. Newer mobiles might well have RFID or NFC readers. RFID in particular has been generating a lot of heat as a technology with endless applications. And when implemented, they can give us more information than a printed tag like a qr-code. But until phones with RFID or NFC readers become widespread, we’ll have to wait to use this technology.So let’s say qr-codes are our best option for the near future. You still need to go put the codes themselves on objects everywhere before they can be processed. This is a fairly daunting task that can take years to accomplish – after everyone agrees it is in their best interests. The workaround is to take a picture of the object and send it back to a server, where special image recognition software will identify the object and figure out the related information to be sent back to the user. No qr-code tags are necessary on the object.This technology has some issues to be worked out. First, a picture cannot be sent as an SMS. You need a Multi Media Service (MMS) message to send an image from a phone. Current latencies in networks means that the window for receiving an MMS message after it is sent is anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours. Most MMS messages arrive pretty quickly but a shorter window of delivery is not guaranteed. So if it takes long, the information may have well lost its value along with the urgency of the user’s attention. In addition, image recognition, itself, is a tricky problem to solve. While it’s improved vastly over the years, recognizing a wide variety of objects photographed in real world conditions that involve different lighting conditions and angles is unproven at best. If there is money to be made, challenges can be addressed. And proximity marketing (the ability to market a product that is in a user’s immediate proximity) is such a holy grail that the money should be there in the short term. But the problems aren’t technical as we’ve seen. They are social (acceptance) and political (adoption). Several companies are betting these barriers can be surmounted. Shotcodes, Smartpox, Scanbuy and Semacode make qr-codes and the mobile readers to go with them. Daem Interactive recently showed its image recognition technology at 3GSM in Barcelona. Ontella and ScanR operates in the same space. MotionDSP has technology to enhance images taken on a mobile.Read Part 1 of Aspi's Clicking on Physical Objects.

Aspi lives in Chicago. He is average at everything, except Math at which he is terrible. He blogs on a variety of topics.

Clicking on Physical Objects (Part 1)

Aspi — Fri, 2 Mar 2007 18:24:20 EST

If you’ve ever seen anyone approach a desktop computer for the first time, you appreciate what a terrific concept the mouse is. But more often than not, newbies will look at the monitor then look down to see how they can interact with what is on screen. They’ll focus on that cool looking oval thingy – the mouse - and move it. The cursor will move with the mouse and the light bulb goes off immediately: “This oval thingy here allows me to move to the different objects on the screen”. Eventually they’ll click on those inviting buttons and figure out how to start programs. If you care about usability, it’s an exhilarating lesson in natural design.So what if you could take this concept and allow people to click on objects like billboards, cars, tables, clothes that triggers an interaction? Let’s say I’m walking down a street and happen to see a billboard for War of the Worlds. I see a picture of Tom Cruise and go “I absolutely need that jacket”. I “click” on the picture and figure out where to buy it and how much it’ll cost. In fact, I might even be able to order it right there and have it shipped out.Even if you aren’t impulsive about getting all kinds of information delivered to your phone, the underlying theme here is to be able to connect the physical world with the cyber world – importing objects in your surrounding areas into the digital world so it can be processed there. The potential use cases are mind-boggling.How would something like this work? There are three things that need to happen before you can click on a real world object: (1) you need a device that can perform the click (2) the device needs to be able to recognize what it’s clicking on and (3) it needs show relevant information about the object to its owner.Let’s break down (1) first. What’s the most ubiquitous device that you could find on a person today? If you answered “cell phone”, you did great. Wristwatches would also be a good answer but we can’t use those for what we are about to do. A lot of people have mobiles on their person at all times so it’s a perfect device for pulling out and clicking on something. How do you actually perform a click? You use the camera that your mobile is likely to have and take a picture of the object (we’ll get to the details of that in a little bit). A mobile phone is a highly connected device. If it is in coverage, it can then take the picture, extract some information and send it via a Short Message Service (SMS) message to a server somewhere. The server figures out the relevant and related information. It then sends the information and sends it back to the mobile via an incoming SMS. SMSs move very quickly through the phone network, so seconds later you may find your SMS ringtone alerting you that the object you clicked on has been identified and everything you need to know about it is now at your fingertips.In other words, you can’t tell your guests you bought that Target furniture at Marshall Fields. Not if they have a cell phone with a camera on it that they can then use when you are not looking.In part 2 of this installment, we’ll talk about how the “click” itself works and I’ll catch you up with up and coming technologies and companies that are working to make this a reality.Read Part 2 of Clicking on Physical Objects.

Aspi lives in Chicago. He is average at everything, except Math at which he is terrible. He blogs on a variety of topics.