Lightroom 1.3 export plugin for Zenfolio

Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom 1.3 a few days ago. Why is that interresting ? Well I have been using it for about 6 months and I have to admit that even if it is not the best RAW processing software, it is a very nice integrated digital photography workflow. Basically it handles everything from importing the pictures from the camera, indexing them, sorting them, setting metadata, developping the RAW, doing basic changes like color temperature, noise reduction, sharpening, curves, an excellent cropping and dust removal tool, and printing. The only thing I couldn't do with it was exporting directly my pictures to Zenfolio. This new release adds the ability for 3rd parties to develop export plugins for photo hosting websites like smugmug, flickr and my favorite one: Zenfolio. One guy developped the plugins, and you can download it from his blog : here, thank you Jeff.

I basically don't use Photoshop as I am not modifying my pictures but I would recommand Lightroom to anyone that wants to do a bit more than just viewing pictures like they are straight out of the camera, thing for which Picasa is just fine. Anyways Adobe has a 30 days demo of Lightroom there for PC or MAC, be carefull after 30 days you'll probably be paying them to keep it ;).

Zenfolio and Lightroom

So I really liked Zenfolio so I decided I would store my photos there. I spent the weekend selecting and uploading 450+ pictures from these past years. I still have quite a bit to upload but it's already quite a good sample.
Why did I prefer it over Flickr or Google ? Well it uses the same automatic scaling techniques as google but it feels nicer, is easier to browse through than Google, is almost as easy to upload to as Google using Picasa, has a better look and feel. And as I moved away from Picasa to using Adobe Lightroom to sort and post process pictures it is actually more convenient. By the way I recommand Lightroom to anyone not willing to spend hours under Photoshop CS3 but to whom clicking "I feel lucky" under Picasa is not enough. Finally it stores and display EXIF information from pictures which is really nice.
It doesn't have the social network side of Flickr nor ability to leave comments, but anyways most of the visitors of my flickr know me, so if you want to comment, just leave me a note here.

I messed up my blog's template

I tryed to fix it and couldn't get back the old template working, so I put this instead. And it's not that ugly !

Pigeons !

Today I was browsing the news and found that news on Slashdot:

Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."

This reminded me of the numerous usages invented using remote controled animals:

• Google pigeon rank technology
• State University of New York remote controled rats
• WWII US army bat bombs

Well after all this I discovered that we got one step closer to all these cyborgs stories in the SF litterature, and I am actually really impressed by the state of these research (and preparing plans to take over the world using 2 crazy remote controled mouses).

Ok, I am working too much, I am taking a break.

Elfefe blog V3.0

It's been 7 month since last time I changed the template of the blog. I did it then because I wanted to improve the readability and simplify the original blogger template I first used. I picked another blogger template and customized it, and actually never really liked the way it ended up, despite spending a lot of time on it.
Finaly I decided to remove it and put something simple. Don't hesitate to comment as I will update the styles and details that need to.

[Edit] A lot of bugs remain under IE: bold font on the left, banner border, banner height. I'll figure how to fix it, but at least now it displays correctly.

New template

I have played with various blogger templates all day, and got rid of the old one. I'd like some feedback or suggestions on the new one. Anyway, if you hate this one, I can always restore the old one, but I believe it is more readeable now.
[Edit] Played a bit with text and links colors, flickr icons, and rolled back to my home panorama instead of Jerusalem.

Bat-Mobile

I am now going through all my Barcelona pics :). I found this one taken during the Gracia festival. Many strange items were hanged in the streets. I liked the idea of a bat-mobile ( mobile=cell in french and spanish :). 

Google maps

Google started to have high resolution satellites pictures of all Europe, as far as Israel. I live here (in the middle).

If you know where to search you can find Dimona (Israeli nuclear plant) as well as all the territory pretty detailed (even Nezarim, Gush Katiff and co...). I am surprised as in the US they tend to blur sensitive spots...

X-rated X-rays

After being used on the Rafah border crossing (see Rafah Pundits here, here and here)The NYTimes reports now that the Homeland Security plans to use those new machines to screen people through clothes. They were supposed to be bad for health at that time, is it still the same machines ? Are frequent travellers risking something from exposure ? At least I guess that because of this directive the health impact will be for sure evaluated and we should have the answer finally.

Acharnement thérapeutique

Terri Schiavo est finalement morte, apres 15 ans dans le coma, des procès à n'en plus finir et une énorme polémique aux USA entre les "Pro Life" et les "Pro choice". Bien entendu cela m'effraye de voir que l'on peut s'acharner aussi longtemps à maintenir en vie un légume, mais ce qui m'a le plus choqué dans toute cette histoire c'est d'avoir vu Bush revenir de weekend et faire faire des heures sup. à tout le monde au congrès pour essayer de continuer à prolonger sa vie artificiellement alors qu'il ne le fait pas pour des sujets à mon sens bien plus graves. Bref je ne vais pas m'acharner sur le fils Bush et sa clique de religieux radicaux, j'ai juste du mal à comprendre leurs opinions et encore plus de mal à les accepter comme représentants de ce qui était sensé être la plus grande démocratie du monde.
En tout cas, si à force de pratiquer des activités à risque, j'en venais un jour à me retrouver à l'état de légume vivant (coma prolongé, activité cérébrale nulle ou proche) je ne désire surtout pas vivre, ni 15 ans ni 1... Voila, il semblerait que faire ce genre de déclarations de "living will" devient à la mode aux Etats-Unis, où le bon sens n'est plus la manière d'agire par défault.

De son côte le pape JP2 est aussi nourri par un tube, mais lui est conscient et lucide il semblerait. De toute façons je doute qu'ils réusissent à le garder 15 ans dans cet état, à moins que... peut-être dans le formol.

Google rankings hijack

I read in the past few days on the Inq and Slashdot about that 302 redirect bug that allows you to steal the target page rankings. Seems this been around for years but was mostly ignored, I wonder how long it will take to have 90% of the geeks around having their webpage or blog using that exploit to rank above playboy, microsoft, intel, nytimes and cnn which would definitely end up by a bug fix :).

Dual core everything

If you read high tech news, you probably have noticed that the future of high performance microprocessors has several core on the same die. Many just see yet another feature that will allow the famous Moore's law to remain true for an additional decade. I both agree and disagree with that.

If you look back at the 40 past years of computing you can see that the programing model where you have a single program (single instruction flow) running on single data set has been the most successfull one. Today you can find this form of computing everywhere from your washing machine to your car or your PC. Many embedded applications have several programs that they run on several several dedicated cores, but in the end this 1 to 1 mapping remains true.

The speed of this form of computing has increased at a speed of about 2x every 18 months (Moore). The sources of speed increase are technology improvement (frequency increase) and extraction of instruction level parallelism (ILP). In the past 10 years another form of parallelism has also contributed to this performance increase, SIMD for single instruction multiple data, marketing called these instructions "Multimedia". The invariant in this evolution has been the existence of only 1 flow of instructions to be executed by one processor. If you follow this idea, the generalisation of multicore/multithreaded microprocessor is a revolution as it would be the first time in the history of microprocessor that such a paradygm shift occurs.

If this was the case, neither AMD nor Intel would have taken such a risk. There are multiprocessor systems for decades in the server and high performance computing world and the next logical step was to integrate several of those processors on the same die. Getting performance our of this type of systems is a known problem and threading techniques and parallel algorithmics are well known... by a very small set of developpers.

So what does it change ? To keep providing the increase of performance the world asks to microprocessors, going to multiprocessors for everybody from the mobile market to the server market through every house and office seems pretty good. The difference between this improvement and most of the previous ones (except the SIMD one) is that it will not happen right away. It will take years to adapt the softwares, to form the developpers to use efficient threading techniques, and during this period outside of a small set of specifically tuned applications, the average speed increase of computer applications will slow down significantly.

How is this different from SIMD instructions ? It took years for them to be used efficiently, and only a small set of widely used applications were ever written to benefit them. It is now a pretty good success, and close to no programer will ever use these and this will never be a problem. So why being more concerned with this dualcore thing and multithreaded applications ? Why wouldn't it become the same kind of success, most programers ignoring it and most users benefiting it ?

The main difference between those 2 improvements to microprocessors is the cost in term of area on the chip. Microprocessor performance has increased due to frequency and miniaturisation, minuaturisation allowing to put increasingly complex and efficient algorithms in the same area. The initial area cost of SIMD was roughly 5% of the chip, the initial cost of dual core is somewhere around 50%. What this mean is that for SIMD about 5% of the area were sacrificed from general purpose performance in order to increase 1 class of important applications. Nowadays with 5% more area you can't do that much to improve general purpose performance (and anyway it will be much less than a 5% gain average) so it had a negligible impact for in the end a pretty nice benefit. The 50% that are spent on the second core however are definitely not negligible and could have been used to improve general purpose performance by a non negligible amount.

The area used by this second core is about equal to the gain in minuaturisation achieved through a process change (usually around 2x increase in density) which means that traditional non threaded applications will see a smaller performance increase than they usually saw for this type of evolution (frequency gain is still there).

So why everybody's moving to multicore if that isn't that great ? Well, the short answer is that the other options were worse... RIP Tejas (cancelled successor to the Intel P4 line of processors) is probably a very good symbol of the other options, one single big, huge, complex, fast, HOT core.

I see 2 reasons for the needed change to multi core, the first one well admitted everywhere is the power dissipated by those increasingly complex microprocessors. It is easier to manage the power for 2 simpler cores than a big fat one, especially when you know that in many situations the second one will not be used. You can play tricks like having one core down and the other at high frequency (and voltage) when you run a single threaded application, and have both at medium frequency when you run several threads. For the big cores the added transistors are usually supposed to contribute to some complex algorithm so it is harder to shut them down. Even if a lot of transistors could be micro managed to save power it ended up not being efficient enough. I will not spend time justifying the need for lower power processing it has been done a lot before.

The second reason that I haven't heard many people talking about is the failure of the microprocessor architects (I am one of them) to provide new algorithms that were efficient enough in term of power/area/performance to be a better choice over multicore. Maybe it is just because there isn't much left ILP to extract from traditional applications, and the techniques we have found require way to much masturbation to be efficient. Anyway, wether it is a failure from the architects or just an existing limit, this marks the change on relying on architecture for performance to relying on software. Remember all those mid-90s talks about ia-64 and VLIW saying that ? It seems they weren't that wrong on the root problem, it just started to appear 10 years later than they initially thought (very easy to look back and say they weren't that wrong, i know :).

I wrote a small article for Onversity about the need to increase the emphasis put on the teaching of parallelism to future programmers because of the multicore trend. The only reactions I had were disagrement, saying that it wasn' t needed, that the basics of parallel programming were already taught and that anyway only very few applications will be benefiting it and the average programmer will probably never have to deal with it. I obviously disagreed with that, having taught that subject a few years ago In France and being passionated about it but ... they are probably right in the short term (only specific applications will care about it). And in the long term assuming that multicore are a success, there probably will be software tools to provide a simple abstract model so programmers will be able to ignore the structure of what they are programming, especially multiprocessors systems(today we can just hope for these, I haven't seen much forward motion in that area in the past decade, Ok I've not been looking hard). However, for the transition period I believe that the rare architecture aware programmers will be a very sought after ressource. How long will this transition periode be ?

Spam and more

Pope getting spammed ? I just read today on theInquirer that since his email been revealed he has recieved 20000 "get well" messages on his inbox. I wonder how many penis enlargement, viagra , etc... advertising he's gonna recieve in the next few days since his address has now been publish on nerd's networks :).

Ce soir en revenant du boulot je suis tombe en arret sur la voiture d'un jacky israelien, en plus du splendide 3eme feu stop sur la lunette arriere il avait ajoute deux splendides mini girophares bleus, 1 de chaque côté. C'était du plus bel effet et ressemblait à s'y méprendre à un vrai girophare de flic israélien, à celà près que ce type a inventé le gyrophare intérieur, à quand la sirène intérieure ? (Mmm en fait je me dis que vu le type de musique et le volume auquel ils l'écoutent ça a en fait déjà été inventé).