United States- A Land of Violence

This past week or so saw some of the worse high profile gun violence and killings in the USA. With 14 dead in a NY citizenship center and 3 police officers gunned down in Pennsylvania, the violence is just overwhelming. In the latter case, the gunman was reportedly wearing a bullet-proof vest and armed with an AK-47, shot gun and a hand gun. He gunned down 3 police at the door step before pinning down a SWAT team as their vehicle approached the house.

Terrible. I remember an ex-colleague of mind relating his experience of the USA. He was ex-Army reserve, served in Bosnia, had real firefights and so on. While on exchange in the USA, his team was sent out on a mission to rescue two police officers who had stumbled upon a drug deal and were engaged in heavy firefight with heavily armed gangsters.

He tells me he remembers coming in on board a Blackhawk chopper and as they were "ropping" off the chopper onto the ground below, the gunner in the chopper was firing away with his 7.62mm machine gun down at the "terrorists" below. And he remembered thinking to himself, "Gosh, this is America. This is supposed to be the land of the free." His team was fully armed with automatic weapons and body armour and it was a full on firefight against the drug dealers before they eventually had the situation under control.

I think the USA is no longer the land of the free. Many parts of the country is wrecked with violence and killing. I think its time the US government started tackling terrorism at home first instead of meddling in other countries problems and usually making the problems worse.

On a side note, think if something like this were to have happened in China, the international press would definitely play up the issue and suggest that the violence is somehow linked to some repressed ethnic group or of some ill-treated and marginalised Chinese citizen who finally lost it after not getting "justice" from the local government. Either way, the Chinese government almost always gets blamed NO MATTER what they do or don't do. And we've seen this time and time again in the international news.

I remember the time when it was reported in India that a pick-pocket who was caught by the police was tied by the ankles and dragged through the streets on a police motorcycle. No one in the international press raised any questions. Is it because India is a democracy and China is not? If this were to happen in China, the international press would be all over the story. They'll claim among other things, human rights violations, police brutality, and government inaction and corruption. These seem to be the favourite topics raised.

Irony. Full of irony.

The Importance of Post Processing Software

Post processing software is indispensible today. With cameras being digital, you have to process you digital files. Having good PP software which gives not only excellent IQ, reliable results and excellent user interface is therefore critically important.

Here are several important ways how NOT to do it...

Taken from a couple of quotes from Lloyd Chambers, renowned online author, software engineer (20+ years), blogger, camera equipment tester, Apple PC user and photographer tells of what he thinks of Nikon's Capture NX2 RAW image processing software.


Where NX 2 falls flat is with overall usability, and it is downright painful working with batches of files where each file needs some tweaks of its own. This author is hard pressed to think of a worse user interface design in a RAW file-converter. The user interface design seems to be a literal translation of some engineer’s stream of consciousness thinking about the code and data structures, as opposed to thinking about how to ease the workload on the user. The NX engineering team should study Apple’s Aperture, or Adobe’s Lightroom for example. This author, having been a software engineer for 20 years, would lay odds that the NX team has never consulted a skilled user interface designer.

To solve the batch selection issue, one must manually move desired images into their own folder. Worse, Capture NX attempts to batch-processes both NEF and JPEG files of the same name. Removing the JPEG files should not be required to batch-process a group of NEF files! And here’s the kicker: once a batch job is started, no more batch jobs can be added; you must wait. Given the folder orientation for batch processing, how does one process 10 folders... dump all the files into one huge folder? No, one waits and waits for the batch to finish. That is not batch mode, it’s waste-time mode, a colossally infuriating design.

In contrast in Canon's Digital Photo Professional, you select the photos you want to batch and hit Command B and you're done. And while the DPP worker is at it, you can continue working and add new batch processes which will immediately start working. How easy is that?

And here's the real show-stopper with Capture NX...

Make the tiniest change to a NEF (RAW) file and you lose—your time, your disk space. For example, change the white balance and save the NEF. A 14.3MB NEF file inexplicably becomes an 18.6MB file—30% larger. Worse, it takes 5-10 seconds to save (on a quad-core 3GHz Mac Pro with a 4-drive striped RAID capable of 350MB/sec). Do the NX2 engineers really think this is the way it should work? Canon’s DPP can save settings for hundreds of files in the time it takes NX2 to save them for a single file—and you don’t lose gigabytes of disk space in the process.

Worse, your file is put at risk of data corruption due to overwriting the original file. This is not an idle concern; Nikon itself warned of data corruption with Capture NX and Mac OS X Leopard (now allegedly fixed)! Your file date is modified as well. Capture NX violates a fundamental data-integrity rule: never write over an original file. At least with Canon’s DPP, space is set aside in advance for the settings, which makes it fast and low-risk.

The storage issue is a major nuisance, the potential data corruption a serious concern, but the performance issue is a show-stopper. Working through large numbers of images, one just can’t waste 10 seconds per file for a save (which includes answering the inane dialog about saving).

This is insane... it violates just about every basic rule of data integrity, efficiency, and common sense.

And now with the latest release of Capture NX2.2.0, it gets worse than "worst"

Run a batch job and the programme uses about 7% of only one of the CPU cores of the new MacPro. Or as the author states 0.4% of the available processing power of that computer. Thus, it takes 30 minutes or so to process 15 NEF files.

Lloyd Chambers calls the programme manure. Humm.... makes me wonder if Nikon even tested their software..... I shudder to think. It reminds me of Canon's QA of its L lenses.

But at least now with DPP3.6 released, more features are being added and more importantly, the programmes generally works well and its interface works pretty well too. Most of all its easy to use, fast to use and makes use of 2 to 4 cores efficiently, and it uses hyper-threading too. BTW, DPP3.6 is only available on the Japan website for now.

The problems with Nikon Capture NX 2 are so bad it actually makes it worthwhile to be shooting Canon. At least I feel better now and I'll give Canon time to launch better lenses and cameras which actually work as advertised while I enjoy my Canon EOS 50D and Powershot G10 cameras.

Earthquake

Just felt earth tremors for the first time in my life! Really scarry if you ask me. This is the first time I've felt an earthquake. I've always wondered how it felt. NOW I KNOW. And its not fun. I was just sitting there at my PC workstation when I felt the floor shift back and forth quickly and the roof of the house shake as though a very strong wind suddenly blew. But there was no sound save the sound of the plaster on the wall next to me creaking slightly.

An earthquake is definitely NOT FUN. Yes we live in perilous times indeed.

New Digital Camera for Crime Scenes

Singapore has announced the purchase of one or more state-of-the-art digital cameras to help with crime scene investigations. This camera can take 360 degree panoromas, zoom in to record details at high resolution and even measure distances between objects. Its like of like taking a digital record of the crime scene for later analysis in the lab. Sounds like the science fiction-like capabilities seen on CSI are becoming more of a reality for the Singapore Home Team's SCDF or Singapore Civil Defence Force.

Interesting

Note, the photograph shown in the news report is of the Special Operations Command, a branch of the Police, not the SCDF. Although both the SCDF and the Police are under the Home Team Command.

Democracy, Human Rights, the World Economic Crisis and Differing Political Systems

I've been reading world news recently with a feeling of irony. With the world economy generally in recession, with some economies in crisis (e.g. the United States), Wen Jia Bao Premier of China the other day expressed concern that China's investment in US Treasury Bonds could be at risk, and asked the United States to safe-guard Chinese assests and other investments.

Its ironic because here you have a Top Communist Official talking about treasury bonds - a Capitalist instrument of investment and asking the party to which it has lent money or otherwise made an investment to help safe guard that investment. Ironic isn't it? The communists telling the capitalists to make sure they are good stewards of the lenders' money.

If anything, the Chinese (and when I say Chinese I mean Chinese from mainland China, not the Overseas Chinese). Anyway, the Chinese are just about one of the most business and capitalist minded people on the face of the earth. Today, the Chinese Communists are only Communist by Name. The Chinese have been doing business, conducting international trade both on land via the silk road and via the sea for hundreds if not thousands of years.

China had its own lending and financial institutions run as private businesses during the times of the Chinese emperors. Doing business is second nature to Chinese.

Today, China holds about $730 Billion Singapore dollars in US Treasury Bonds. It is the 3rd largest economy in the world. And is today the largest creditor (aka lender) to the United States, which I will point out is supposedly the worlds largest Capitalist economy.

Ironic isn't it?

Moreover, today the Chinese Communists leadership is stressing development in the economy, social justice, human rights, scientific based progress and development in strategic areas (e.g. defence, food production, resources management), research & development, and the fight against corruption which it has recognised could cause the weakening and eventual downfall of government (in this case, itself the Chinese Communist Party). Isn't it ironic that while the Chinese communist can clearly see that corruption weakens government while justice, the rule of law, democracy (yes democracy!) and human rights leads to strengthening of government in the long term, the bastions of "democracy" & "human rights" aka the United States seems to have forgotten these very same universal values which have made it "The Greatest Nation on Earth".

Today, corporate America is rife with corruption at the highest levels and self-serving CEOs who milk the companies they run and reward themselves with fat pay-outs when they run those companies into bankruptcy. Whats worse, the current economic crisis was caused basically by the failure of American institutions - the banks, the regulators, the government in general, even the failure of ordinary citizens who spend what they don't have on what they can't afford. Today the United States within is rife with violence (esp gun violence) and crime while overseas, it carries out killing, imprisonment, and torture carried on foreign shores and justifies it as its "war against terror". America it seems has lost the very values of individual freedom, democracy and human rights as espoused by its founding fathers. Fighting terror by toppling governments, occupying other countries, killing innocent cilivians and providing arms and training to other criminals to do more of the killing doesn't guarantee a win to the war (whatever the "war" is and however the "win" is defined). One needs to go after the perpetrators of the crime and fix the root causes of terrorism. Bush on the other hand did more to ruin the American economy and strengthen the hand of terrorists and extremists than Osama Bin Laden ever could. If Osama is still alive, he's probably comforting himself that Bush the idiot has done what he alone could never have achieved. There'll be many more Osamas after he's gone.

Now back to the economic mess- If this crisis had started in Asia, the lecture from Western nations, we would not hear the end of. Lectures on good corporate governance, accountability, transparancy and the proper enforcement of law (or the lack thereof) will be the topics Asian countries would be lectured on. Moverover had this crisis started in Asia, there would no doubt be accusations of corruption, nepotism, currency manipulation, unfair trading practices, insider trading, improper government intervention and so on. True, corruption and nepotism is rife in certain Asian governments, but as someone said, "You shouldn't throw stones at others when you yourself live in a glass house."

Here and here are the related news reports on China's US Treasury Bonds.

Of Bugs and Flowers

Took these in my backyard. I didn't know they existed existed until a friend of mine spotted them. Nasty looking bugs. They look like ticks. Maybe they are parasites...




And here is a crop of the first picture...


You can clearly see how these bugs have motted. Some look really fat. They look like they are just sticking to the plant by their bellies. Yucks.

Great Home Cooked Food

Part of the joys of having your own home is that you get to enjoy good home cooked food with your family and loved ones. And what better way to show off the food than on your very own blog.

So here is a small selection... Yum, I'm feeling hungry again...