MontlakeBlog

Entries as of Saturday, July 04, 2009
 Friday, 3 July 2009  |  More time passes

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Just judging by age, it's safe to assume that a lot of people living today don't know what Kodachrome was. It only died the other day, but film has been out of fashion for a few years now, and the film that is still available is not Kodachrome.

There is a good article on ars technica that explains the importance of Kodachrome in the evolution of color photography, but of more general interest is the fine gallery of Kodachrome photography on the Kodak site.

I started taking pictures seriously in the 1960s, but although I have certainly shot some Kodachrome, both economic factors and an urge to "do it myself" kept me using Ektachrome (still available). I think my friend Ed Robinson adopted the Fuji series of color films along the way. All these films are just wonderful, and the differences among them might well not be discernable by any but the practiced eye. In that sense, Kodachrome was more important for the commercial world than for the consumer world, which doesn't really notice which kind of film it's using.

I had reason to pull out a slide or two randomly from my collection last year, and I was sad to see that mold had eaten much of one of the slides. My goal (one among thousands) is to digitize my entire collection of slides and negatives (not an unreasonable chore, and I'm already up to 1968!), but I can see that it's too late for at least some of the images. In my experience, anyway, color film is much more susceptible to deterioration than is black & white film, and slides more than color negatives.

My collection is a mixture of color and B&W, not always chosen for some aesthetic reason but often for economic or practical factors, and I know there's not much Kodachrome in it. But 'Kodachrome' can stand for 'film', really, and as such symbolizes the end of yet another era. No real loss, I'd say. It's just the way we used to do things...
posted at 03:39 PM | | |

 Wednesday, 24 June 2009  |  Lisa See at Politics & Prose

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Went to an "author talk" by Lisa See, last evening. She's a great speaker, and my friends and I enjoyed listening.

Just as interesting was the fact that there were about 150 people at the talk. And it all took place in a bookstore larger than Elliot Bay in Seattle.

The vast majority in the audience were women, which fits her means to fame. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan brought her a readership few authors can rival, and as a member of her Google group, I observe that hardly a day goes by that some woman somewhere in the world doesn't join the group having read that book and claiming that it changed her life. I liked it, but it didn't change my life. Or did it? Because I got in contact with Ms See after reading that book (for a shared interest evident in the book), I read her earlier and subsequent work (liking it better), and even founded my website Mysteries of the East.

But that not what the ladies mean.

Her current work is called Shanghai Girls, and everyone I know tells me they've seen it featured in their favorite bookstore. It's a good read (she's a fine writer), and I don't think it's just women's literature, but what do I know.

The important thing was that in this current climate of closing bookstores and less frequent reading (I know plenty of people who don't read at all), a significant bunch of folks came together for a shared interest, and were mightily pleased.

Read on...
posted at 05:25 AM | | |

 Saturday, 13 June 2009  |  Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

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I had another "out-of-body" cultural experience last night.

In my day, there were certain literary milestones set up by and for people of my age and time. Together with Salinger and Herman Hesse, there was the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Odd, in a way, because Thomas had died about ten years previously (1953), but all you had to do was hear a recording of him reading his (or other) poetry, and you knew you had to take notice.

I have since collected all known recordings (not all of which are worth the experience), but I'm not aware that I've tried listening to the sole recording of his participation in his play Under Milk Wood. I bought a DVD release of the 1972 film with Richard Burton, but do recall falling asleep while watching it. This is not a condemnation of the film, simply of my condition at the attempted viewing.

So when I saw in my Smithsonian Residents magazine that a one-man production of Milk Wood would be presented last night, I jumped on it. It's time to see this through, I resolved.

It was. Guy Masterson has made his career from performing this nearly two-hour play around the world, and I suspect he does it better than Thomas could have. For one thing, Thomas wrote it under contract to the BBC, and the woman assigned to him to see he actually did it had to repeatedly drag him out of the pub to sit in her office and write some of it. The idea that he might be able to memorize the entire play and perform it is simply unthinkable.

Before I went in, I saw from posters around the Smithsonian that Wales is to be featured in this year's Folklife Festival, which turns out to be the reason Masterson was brought in at this particular time. And it also turns that Masterson is a relation of Richard Burton, himself born in Wales. His cousin—Kate Burton—whom you might know, as I understand she has a successful TV and Broadway career, introduced the show, with an unacknowledged reading of the Wikipedia entry on Thomas as an introduction.

What made the experience extra special was that a group of old folks sat down next to me, and soon leaned over to tell me that they are from Swansea. They were overjoyed to be inadvertantly representing Swansea and Wales on their first trip to the United States, and leaped up to introduce themselves to Ms Burton, who might have been born in her father's Wales but grew up in the US. She graciously exchanged some words with them, and told of her relations still in the old country. The old folks kept showing me pictures of their lovely country from the Visit Wales brochures much in evidence at our experience.

As always, the language of a Thomas work is beyond compare. Is it always appropriate? No. I bought a collection of his short stories a few years ago, and have never been able to finish it. The rich, rich language simply gets in the way of telling the story. But Milk Wood works just fine as a rich poem. Nothing happens, and the language is simply used to describe the inhabitants of the Welsh town and their thoughts and dreams.

There were few young people in the audience last night, and I suspect the Thomas presence so prominent in my 1960s upbringing has largely diminished, even if just because so much has happened to replace it. Here's one 60s survivor glad to have revisited an early cultural influence.
posted at 08:54 AM | | |

 Sunday, 7 June 2009  |  Montlake SiteMapper

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The weekends are killing me.

It started so innocently. I was evaluating a web site indexing service that I'd discovered some years ago. It hadn't worked then, but I had great hopes for it now. But not only did it not work this time, but my network firewall said that it was simulating a "SYN flooding" web attack. It didn't mean to (there's a way you can tell), but let's just say that it never made it to my site to do any indexing.

So, that got me thinking. How hard would it be to programmatically access a web site somewhere in the world, and examine its content. I played around a bit with the .NET classes for opening files, but didn't see anything useful. So, I asked my buddy Young Mike Pope how .NET could be used to do such a thing. He sent notice of the WebRequest class, which has been in .NET since the beginning.

It wasn't more than about ten minutes after starting up Visual Studio and creating a new Web Forms project that I was looking at a String variable stuffed with all the content from the first page on my web site (http://www.michaelbroschat.com).

What is a web site, anyway? I define it as a collection of web pages sharing what I call a 'domain' and connected to one another via links on each page. The domain is determined by the web address—the part shared by all pages, and only links to other pages within the domain constitute a given web site. For example, I have at least two web sites: www.michaelbroschat.com and mystery.michaelbroschat.com. Although they share what my ISP considers my domain (michaelbroschat.com), they are entirely different sites in my view.

The first step, then, was to identify the links present within my page content. That was easy (restricting myself to the content of that particular page), and I soon had a list of web sites represented by links on my site page. Now, it started to get hard.

I had to store each link internally, then add to that list as I encountered valid pages within my site. Each link had to be accessed as a web page in itself, and that led to such interesting discoveries as the fact that not all my pages are accessible! In other words, some of them are broken and I didn't know it. I added a feature to note this as part of the status of the web page.

By far the most difficult and complex aspect of writing this software (which I realized early on could be called a site mapping tool) was dealing with relative addressing. I don't use any on my front page, but as I moved inward and as I accessed other sites than my own, I saw how common relative addressing is. I think I've got it down now, but it took the majority of development time so far.

Although not difficult to deal with, the wide, wide variety of files offered as links within web pages proved very troublesome. I still don't think I have the full answer to that problem, but I keep adding on each file type that gives me trouble.

I used four different web sites as targets, and each presented its own challenges. My Mysteries of the East web site runs on SharePoint, and gosh that was sure different from my main site. When I moved on to the Internet site at work (for which I am responsible), it was like being in a different world.

The important thing is not that it will handle all web sites around the world (which I don't know) but that it handles four sites completely. These are the only sites I care about (at the moment). For example, I was stunned to discover that there are 1,095 pages in my primary web site.

But could someone else put this tool to use? There are plenty of Internet sites that will map your site for you, but my experience a few years ago showed that no two agreed on the composition of a site. Besides, I didn't start out to write a site mapping tool but to test a theory or two.

Some years ago, I wrote a program that sorts IP addresses, and offered it to anyone who wanted it. One guy took me up on it (but then had to abandon it in favor of his native Linux). In other words, the number of folks who have any interest or need to sort IP addresses is extremely small. The number of people who want to know what pages comprise their web site is probably larger but not by much.

All of which once again brings to mind the famous blog article by Eric Sink called "Yours, Mine, Ours." I mentioned this article in a previous post some years ago. It often happens that a developer will create a piece of software that he wants but then realizes other folks might also make use of it. The problem is that such software (which Sink calls MeWare) is seldom ready for prime time.

But I'm releasing it, anyway. If I work on it anymore (for a while, anyway), I'll go insane. I keep thinking about it and how I might go about fixing the known inadequacies. But if I put it out for download, it can act as a kind of milestone, and I can work on other things.

What will it do for you? Given a web address, it will attempt to tell you all pages within that domain that are linked together. It writes the result to a file you specify.

What's wrong with it? Well, for starters, it has no "progress bar." You launch it, and then don't know whether it's working or hung. So far, it's always been working. When finished, it says "All done" at the bottom. I've seen the problem with a progress bar before, and felt that it requires a separate thread (which kind of programming I'm unfamiliar with). The new addition to Visual Studio confirms this, and the docs give acres of sample code, all of which seems necessary to implement the new progress bar. One of these days.

The text file output is only useful to someone like me who just wants to know what pages are in his site. For folks who want a site map for Google or .NET applications, that output needs to be converted to a specific XML format or two. When I personally want such a thing, I'll add it to the tool. Until then, you'll have to convert from the raw output.

I've thought of lots of other things, but the point is to try to stop thinking altogether. So here!

Download Montlake SiteMapper here.
posted at 01:56 PM | | |

 Monday, 1 June 2009  |  More, on digital books

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The prolific Richard Curtis (he often writes two blog entries per day) has a piece about yet another development in the evolution of the book industry. In this scenario, you walk into a brick-and-mortar (=real) store, but you don't see more than one copy of any given book (actually, I'm assuming this; I don't recall his blog saying there were be any books). You buy a special card, and when you're next at your computer, you use the card you bought to download the digital item you've purchased.

The idea is an alternative to Amazon's strictly online ebook business, and would theoretically appeal to those who just have to go shopping. We'll see how that goes.

Also on the subject of ebooks, Bob Nylander told me the other day that he checks out digital books from the Seattle Public Library. The digital copy you receive evaporates after 21 days (subject to renewal).

From what I see, very few folks read on e-devices, but it is clear that the way is being paved for the next generation.
posted at 05:24 AM | | |

 Thursday, 28 May 2009  |  Another Kindle story

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Now, that was a first. I just paid $10 for the Kindle edition of a book a friend recommended, but I could have had the paperback for $6. I doubt I'll be seeing that much, but it was startling...
posted at 07:01 PM | | |