Blog: 2008-05

IKEA MALM Storage Unit: The Incredible Adventure

I spent much of the weekend getting settled in the extra housing/office/studio space, including installing three additional pieces of IKEA MALM collectibles from my acquisition target list.

The weather today was especially nice today, so I carted home the IKEA MALM Storage Unit, snapping a little photo essay with my point&shoot along the way. (The title was supposed to be "...Journey" rather than "...Adventure", but I edited the images too hastily, botching the reference.)

This photo essay includes the first known image on the Web of an open MALM Storage Unit. We can now state with confidence that the lid slides width-wise.

The Storage Unit only cost me $30 and a few hundred in billable hours.

And, yes, the key to living in Cambridge is to own not much more than IKEAs, laptops, cameras, and a full complement of carts. I myself possess four carts.

Comment on RadioPopper Jr. Plans

If you care about affordable high-quality wireless strobe triggers, check out the RadioPopper Jr. - Initial Development blog post. Add any useful input you have.

Arizona-based Leap Devices LLC, developer of the RadioPopper products, is likely to become one of my favorite small companies. I'll definitely be sending them some business.

Opening of the Big New Apple Store in Boston & The Folly of Toy Cameras

Yesterday, I happened to be outside the new Apple Store, Boylston Street in Boston, a few minutes after they officially opened.

I hadn't planned to shoot, and atypically had none of my real camera gear with me; just my Canon SD450 ultracompact point&shoot in my pocket. Just for fun, I took a couple building&crowd establishing shots, zoom in on Apple logo, some up-close snapshots of Red Sox players and their models, quick shot of the greeting line, and this image of a demonstrator proclaiming Eliminate DRM (DefectiveByDesign.org). (Sorry, no caption on that shot; I would've felt like an idiot playing reporter at this commercial event with a pocket camera and no notepad. I'll also refrain from editorializing on the event itself.)

The main thing I learned is that my pro gear still has useful strengths compared to point&shoots. With the flare, and as things got dark, I needed high-ISO, f/2.8 and my 50/1.4, a real flash, a good polarizer, and quick control over both aperture and shutter speed. Extra sharpness, contrast, and color would've been nice too, but not necessary.

I cannot condemn the SD450's flash enough. Try shooting an arriving personage when your flash throws a token amount of light about 5 feet and then takes 10 seconds to refresh.

I wasn't the only one who was underequipped at the event. The day before had been media day, and three TV news teams crews showed up on opening day, but there wasn't much still photography going on. One experienced shooter for a couple of the big-name industry news sites had a silver 300D (maybe 350D) body with an 18-55 kit lens on it. The only photog who had real gear was a familiar-looking pro with a Canon 1-series and what looked like a 24-70, and he was followed around by a guy (reporter?) holding what looked like an unmounted 16-35.

So, in summary, a store opened to people waiting in line for hours, and there was much cheering, but there was not much photography love happening outside.

Debian OpenSSL Fiasco

In various forums over the years, while mostly being a fan of Debian and recommending it to others, I've condemned the tendency of many Debian maintainers to make gratuitous changes to the upstream packages.

Well, we finally got bit hard by that Debian practice.

For the past couple years, Debian has been generating OpenSSL keys without crucial entropy. Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, is affected as well.

Reportedly, this was due to bizarre unnecessary and erroneous code changes by a Debian maintainer.

(He shouldn't have done it erroneously: had he been willing to do it intentionally, he could've gotten paid many millions of dollars, to surreptitiously compromise the security of all those systems and communications.)

In light of this situation and another one that I'll mention later, I'm currently disrecommending Debian for servers. As it is, I have to eat crow with some clients and colleagues.

The rigorous processes and principles of Debian that drew me to Debian in the first place do not mesh with the paradoxical cowbow screwing-around that is all-too-common on an individual package maintainer level.