THE HARDWARE

With the iPad Apple has again shown it knows how to do hardware. What about the front side camera? What about USB or whatever else people are complaining about? Sure! They could have included them. They didn’t – maybe they will some day. This is no big deal IMO. Get over it.

WILL PEOPLE BUY IT?

Is there are market? Well, it is a sexy little thing. And we all know people love to buy Apple products just for that. So for some people it’s just yet another luxury gadget they need to have.

The big and unanswered question I have: Is it to complete or to replace what we have right now? As excited as I am about seeing the Star Trek touch tablets becoming a reality… Will a student write his thesis on this device? Will a manager do his presentation on it? Will a designer do an illustration on this? Will a developer write code on this? I guess the answer will most likely be “no”. It looks like it is great for consuming content. But are we supposed to have a MacBook an iPad and an iPhone for the other tasks?

And how practical will it really be? I cannot yet see myself reading a book on a normal computer screen (that’s why e-ink was invented). But we will see – time will tell. The iPad certainly is something you can more easily hand out to the average Joe without getting support calls. As we have many of those Joe’s around this could actually make the iPad a hit.

THE BIG CHANGE

The iPad is quite a change in how you interact with your computer. But nether the less – after the iPhone this step is just evolutionary. What is so much more surprising to me is how many (smart) people scream “Hurray!” when Apple is taking yet another step towards the trusted computing age.

I applaud the changes for making multi-touch technologies more prominent in areas beyond the phones. I applaud Apple for the hardware. But I am certainly not a fan of the App Store concept as it is of today.

Not being able to install what I want on my own phone was already a little big of a stretch. Not being able install what I consider appropriate on my own computer is not a vision I am looking forward to. Neither were many people when Microsoft was pushing for such a thing in …was it in 2000? Maybe times are just different. Maybe more people are OK to just give up freedom for control and security these days. (Sad times!) But certainly this also has a strong business impact.

How can some people chose to ignore this? Just because this is accepted practice for Playstation and friends this does not make it a future worth looking forward to. I agree computers should become more intuitive – more easy to use. In my book this does not necessarily need to go hand in hand with having one gatekeeper to rule us all.

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• don’t want to jailbreak your phone
• aren’t using one of the “official” carriers
• don’t want to pay extra
• want to use iPhone OS 3.1 and up

The only viable solution: a proxy!

That’s exactly what the “Netshare” application was. But it has already been banned from the App Store for a long time. So I thought – I just write my own. A few hours later I was able to reach the internet through my iPhone via the “iProxy” app.

iProxy is not as convenient as the real tethering. The internet connection is a few clicks more away. But if you’ve got a developer certificate (or have a friend that has one) it certainly is cheaper than handing out the money to your favorite telco. Especially if you only need this connection only every now and then.

Now while I cannot make this app available to all the iPhone user out there through Apple, I do make it available as Open Source as of today. iProxy is released under the Apache license and freely available on github.

Enjoy!

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The blog system will change in the not so far out future on this site. The move to the disqus comments was a first step. But I no longer want to hold up until it is in place.

So for those still reading…. stay tuned and thanks for listening.

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• Canon 50mm/1.4 (270 EUR)
• Canon 24-70mm/2.8L (850 EUR)
• Canon 100mm/2.8 (390 EUR)
• Canon 70-300/4-5.6 IS

If you are in San Francisco, Berlin or Frankfurt pick up might be possible. Contact me at tcurdt@(this.domain) to work out a final price if you are interested.

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Somewhere in the last 2-3 months I decided that it’s time to finally byte the bullet and go full frame. After all photography has become a solid hobby for me (again). Something that I don’t want to miss anymore. But what were the options? Buy and (old) 5D? Go with the latest 5DmkII? Or really have a second look at the Nikon D700 that made the jealous the day it came out? Switching systems – how silly and way too expensive. Right?

The D700 it is

It was really a tough decision. I soon ruled out the 5D. Awesome camera but it’s more than 3 years old now. And it still wasn’t a steal on ebay. And who knows how long the used one would last. So I was left with the 5DmkII and the D700. But checking them out in the shop just didn’t cut it. So thanks to the 2 week return policy I ordered them both from amazon.
Just after a few hours of playing, handling and shooting. I found the clear winner – for me at least. In the analog days I was shooting Nikon. Now I felt it was time to go back to my roots. The D700 it was.

What about the 5DmkII?

How can that be? The 5D comes with a dazzling resolution of 21MP and even HD video!? People go nuts about it!

The 21MP might be nice – sometimes. But for the most place it comes at a high price. Be it storage or post processing. Certainly it gives you more room for cropping and bigger prints. But seriously – I never have (and will not anytime soon) hit the limit even with a 12MP camera.

Then there is the HD movie support. I am sure it’s fun if you are serious about movies. The movie from Vincent is great but you should also watch the making of. Just to realize that the video feature is nothing for a quick video here and there. And frankly speaking it feels just weird in a DSLR. I guess I would rather go for a “real” camera if I had the need for it.

So all I am saying is: while these two are killer features for some people, they aren’t for me. Be it the AF system, the solid body, the much better view finder or just the general feeling when shooting. These are the things that convinced me that it’s time to switch (back) to Nikon. For me the D700 feels like a much bigger steps upwards from the 30D than the 5DmkII.

Always stick with the glass! Right?

I felt really bad about losing money when I now will be selling my Canon gear. Plus I really loved the glass I have. But Nikon has excellent lenses too. And after all… while Duncan might be a pro and I am just an amateur I think his response captures it very well.

It certainly isn’t the camera that makes a good photographer. And we all know lenses are what you should stick with. Camera bodies come and go. But does that mean we are married with brand X for life? In the end we are also doing this for the fun of it. What are a couple of hundred bucks compared to the additional fun you have with your gear. Certainly that is something everyone has to work out on his own. But I made up my mind and feel quite happy with with it now.

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The Spy Lens is a really intriguing idea. Many people behave very differently with a camera pointed at them. That is – when they realize a camera is pointed at them. So quite often you get the most authentic pictures when the people are not aware. There a few things that help taking such pictures: being lucky, being quick, a long lens and… the Spy Lens. This lens comes with a mirror inside and lets you shoot around corners in an angle of 90 degrees. As you are not pointing a big lens directly at the person, it should be easy to catch the pristine and authentic moments we are after.

While the build quality feels solid you need to be aware that the lens is only available at a 58mm diameter. Now my standard zoom lens has a diameter of 77mm. While you can of course use a converter it heavily limits your view in the wide angle. Plus it looks quite strange. Unfortunately “strange” gets people curious …and aware. Which is exactly what you try to avoid with this lens. Maybe less of a problem if you have the right lens combination. Another problem is the dust though. The mirror is a dust magnet! So you better be equipped to clean up that mess. And because you have no lens cap you have to clean it a lot. The handling you have to get used to. Rotating the mirror and finding the right frame is really not that easy. Especially if there is movement or if there is little time.

For me the Spy Lens failed the reality test. While I am sure you can have fun with it, it is really nothing more than a toy. But frankly speaking I did not expect anything more. I bought it for fun. And I am sure you can have fun with it. Just don’t get your hopes up to high. It’s not the holy grail for authentic shots. But it is a fun gadget.

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Picking a place to stay in Marrakech is hard. But just because there are plenty of beautiful options. In order to get a good feeling for this bustling city you want to make sure to stay in a Riad in the old medina – the old town center. Maybe spoiled from our previous trips we expected accommodation to be a bit cheaper though. Riads start at around 70 EUR for a double – off season. 100 EUR is nothing special and of course there is no upper limit. We were quite happy with our choice – the Riad Dar Dallah. It was conveniently located, not far from the Jemma El Fna – the touristy center of Marrakech. Central but still tucked away in the labyrinth of small pristine streets providing privacy and a quiet refuge of the busy city. Also a reason why we were very happy we got picked up at the airport. We would have never found the way ourselves. Patrick, the french owner and the local staff was very nice and forthcoming. The Riad spotless. They even coped with our french – or rather the lack of it. One thing to improve would be to accept credit cards though. The whole booking process seems a little strange over there anyway. It seems to be normal to make a deposit. When we first considered a different Riad they asked for 50% deposit up front. Plus a service and handling charge (WTF!). This felt all so wrong that we searched Tripadvisor which turned out to be a good resource to check. After reading up on our first choice we picked Dar Dallah and never looked back.

While Morocco with its french influences is supposed to have great food I have to admit we weren’t that excited. While we stayed away from snail stew (uuurgh!) the Tanjias or the different couscous dishes were nice – but not our first choice of cuisine. Eating at the food stalls on Jemma El Fna is an experience. Especially when you see them pour unfinished dishes back into the pot. But that said – the food was really good! And not every booth does it like that. So be no sissy. A common dinner recommendation for Marrakech is the Yacout. But according to locals it’s quite overrated – and overpriced. So instead we went with two are other recommendations. The Foundouk and the Kosybar. The food was great at both places but the Kosybar needs to work on its service.

Sleep, eat – but what’s to see in Marrakech? Of course there is no way around Jemaa El Fna the busy and touristy market square that everyone is trying to give you directions to …or the souks with all the people trying to sell you lamps, shoes and spices. Preferably all that and more. For “a good price, my friend”. We enjoyed the smaller spice square. Just hang out in the nice Cafe de Espices and watch the hustle and bustle with a nice glass of Tea a la Mente. Medersa Ben Youssef is a pass while the Museum of Marrakech is not bad if you have some time to spare. While also quite touristy the garden Majorelle is definitely worth a trip. (Just grab a taxi – should not be more than the equivalent of 2 EUR to get there) Especially in the afternoon the light is great and further illuminates the already saturated colors. A visit to a hammam is a must as well. We relaxed a few hours at Les Bains which was just perfect and so worth the money! Of course there is also the palace, a dozen mosques and many places we probably have missed.
This is probably still not much compared to many other cities …but still there is plenty to see: that’s Marrakech itself. Just wandering through the labyrinth of streets, dodging all the mopeds and bicycles in the small streets, smelling the leather, the spices and the fresh mint (when not covered by the fumes of the mopeds). All these different facets was just worth the trip.

That said in retrospect we probably would have rather spent only 4 days in Marrakech and traveled around a bit more. We did a day trip to Essaouira which is a much more relaxed small town at the ocean. (We took a driver but there are busses going as well – I bet that’s cheaper) A nice escape from the city life. During the trip I realize that the country side was much richer in plants and green than I ever imagined. Next up there are also the Atlas moutains close by. We only barely got a peak from the distance – once. Probably the city haze is to blame. But you can even go skiing there! I personally would have loved to take a trip into the desert and stay there over night. So it seems there is quite a few things to do in Morocco. There is more than just Marrakech.

A note to the photographers: It’s picturesque but be aware that for some reason people have a sixth sense when there is a camera pointed at them. I have never had so many people tell me verbally or gestically “No pictures!” ever before. Either that or you are expected to pay for taking the picture. Talking about that: I deliberately refused to take any pictures of snake charmers, the monkeys on a leash or all the turtles in cages. While I am no animal rights activist this all felt so wrong I didn’t want to support or encourage this.

Marrakech is a great place to visit. Just a few hours from Europe. Perfect for an extended weekend. Don’t miss out on it! To get you into the mood check out my photo set in my travel section on flickr.

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Big Nerd Ranch provides classes (or bootcamps) as a full featured experience. You get picked up at the airport. And then have a full week of getting pampered. While I cannot say anything about the US location, at least the european “ranch” makes up for an only nice hotel with a spectacular location. You live and learn in an ancient monastery for a week. Breakfast – then class at 9am. A two-course meal for lunch – then class. A walk to get some fresh air – then cookies. Some learning and finally the 3-course meal for dinner. The food was exceptional. We ended up calling the class Foodcamp. A challenge during that week was to actually stop eating.

The monastery itself is located a little remote near Wiesbaden and the river Rhein. Not too far from Frankfurt. The place should look familiar to anyone who has ever watched the movie The Name of the Rose.

But not just food and location was great. Mark also did a great job teaching us about kqueue, dtrace performance tuning and so much more. I found it especially useful to get some hands on gdb debugging and being able to ask some questions to a pro with immediate feedback. (Stay tuned for some upcoming blog posts on this matter.) But even the exchange between the students was very interesting and useful. This group was exceptional small with only 5 students this time. Usually you can expect a bit more – up to 15 people in a class. Especially with the popular Cocoa and iPhone bootcamps. Which is still more than fair. The Big Nerds Ranch has probably some of the best known instructors. This makes me almost feel honored I was given the chance to even present on Friday a quick introduction to git and github.

As a disclaimer: I was the official Big Nerd Ranch representative for the week. But this post is not sponsored by any means. I can wholeheartedly recommend the Big Nerd Ranch and while the costs might look high at first – you should not forget what you get in return.

Some more impressions are available on flickr.

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Recently I had the need to build a search index of some data for an iPhone project and was a little surprised about the lack of options. Again my first thought was Lucene – more specifically the C port of it. But unfortunately it was abandoned somewhere along the way. A new try has not even reached the alpha phase. So what to do? Port the Lucene java code to Objective-C? That sounded like a bit out of scope for the iPhone project. I found two options.

LuceneKit

Good someone else already ported Lucene 2.x to Objective-C – for GNUstep though. But with only little work I got it working for both Mac OSX and the iPhone. I’ve forked the official svn repository via git-svn, applied my changes and added some examples for Mac OSX and iPhone. It’s available on github. Here is how you use it.

LCFSDirectory *rd = [[LCFSDirectory alloc] initWithPath: @"/path/to/index" create: YES];

LCSimpleAnalyzer *analyzer = [[LCSimpleAnalyzer alloc] init];
LCIndexWriter *writer = [[LCIndexWriter alloc] initWithDirectory: rd
                                                       analyzer: analyzer
                                                         create: YES];

while(..) {
    NSString *content = "..."

    LCDocument *doc = [[LCDocument alloc] init];

    LCField *f1 = [[LCField alloc] initWithName: FIELD_CONTENT
                                         string: content
                                          store: LCStore_NO
                                          index: LCIndex_Tokenized];                                         

    LCField *f2 = [[LCField alloc] initWithName: FIELD_ID
                                         string: @"the id"
                                          store: LCStore_YES
                                          index: LCIndex_NO];
    [doc addField: f1];
    [f1 release];

    [doc addField: f2];
    [f2 release];

    [writer addDocument: doc];
    [doc release];
}

[writer close];
[writer release];
[analyzer release];

The above source code is an example on how to create the index. Of course that’s something you should not be doing at runtime (if possible). Then all you need to do in your application is to open the index in read-only mode.

LCFSDirectory *rd = [[LCFSDirectory alloc] initWithPath: @"/path/to/index" create: NO];

And you are ready to do some searching.

LCTerm *t = [[LCTerm alloc] initWithField: FIELD_CONTENT text: searchText];
LCTermQuery *tq = [[LCTermQuery alloc] initWithTerm: t];
LCHits *hits = [searcher search: tq];

LCHitIterator *iterator = [hits iterator];
while([iterator hasNext]) {
    LCHit *hit = [iterator next];

    NSString *id = [hit stringForField: FIELD_ID];
    NSLog(@"%@ -> %@", hit, id);
}
int results = [hits count];

Unfortunately the Objective-C port is still quite alpha. I ended up having some problems when indexing bigger chunks of data. It doesn’t look like it’s a really big thing to fix but I didn’t have the time to look into it.

sqlite

So what about using sqlite? While it does provide full-text searching the version on the iPhone does not have the feature compiled in. Bummer! But no problem – you can just use your own version of sqlite and you are good to go. I found the easiest way to do this is to download the amalgamation source and add it directly to the Xcode project. It’s really just one large .c file. To enable full-text search all you need to do is to add a define to the head of the file.

#define SQLITE_ENABLE_FTS3

While you are now ready to go on the iPhone you still need to build the db itself. For that you also need a sqlite on Mac OSX that supports the virtual table syntax. Again just use the amalgamation source and build it with

CFLAGS="-DSQLITE_ENABLE_FTS3=1" ./configure
make install

In order to run the new sqlite you need to set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the folder that has the shared libraries (the libsqlite3.dylib file)

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/dylib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

Now you create your SQL that creates and fills the database for you. Sqlite has a special table syntax for full-search indexes.

CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE content_search using FTS3(id,content);
INSERT INTO content_search VALUES ('someid', 'content without stopwords');

For better performance and efficiency you should remove stopwords first.

sqlite3 content.db < content.sql

So once you have the database files make sure it's included in your project's bundle. That's where you will open the database from

NSString *filePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"content" ofType:@"db"];

Then on application launch you prepare the statements

sqlite3 *database;
sqlite3_stmt *statement;

if (sqlite3_open([filePath UTF8String], &database) == SQLITE_OK) {

    const char *sql = "select id, snippet(content, '[', ']', '...' ) as extract from content_search where content match ?";

    if (sqlite3_prepare_v2(database, sql, -1, &statement, NULL) != SQLITE_OK) {
        NSLog(@"failed to prepare statement");
    }
}

that you can then use to search inside the content and step through the result set.

NSString *searchText = "...";

sqlite3_bind_text(statement, 1, [searchText UTF8String], -1, SQLITE_TRANSIENT);

int success = sqlite3_step(statement);

if (success == SQLITE_ROW) {
    char *str = (char *)sqlite3_column_text(statement, 0);
    NSLog(@"found id '%s'", str);

    // step for more results
} else {
    NSLog(@"not found");
}

sqlite3_reset(statement);

So as a final word: I was really impressed by sqlite. But the full-text search engine is quite limited. If you need some more flexibility (like a different stemmer or search ranking) LuceneKit might be the way to go. I bet the fixes are not that hard. And it would be great to see the code maybe find it's way "back" to the Lucene project. At least it is already released under Apache License 2.0.

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Let’s demonstrate this on the exiv2 package. First check the versions.

$ port livecheck exiv2
exiv2 seems to have been updated (port version: 0.14, new version: 0.18-pre1)
$ port search exiv2
exiv2      graphics/exiv2 0.14   EXIF and IPTC metadata manipulation...

In this case the macport only provides version 0.14 but a much newer version was released. While macports is an open source project and always looking for contributors you can’t just update the port in the official repository – but you can create a local one. Just add a directory as your local repository.

$ cd /opt/local/etc/macports/
$ vi sources.conf

The file should now look something like this

rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/ports/ [default]
file:///Users/tcurdt/ports

Then search and copy/download the original ports file for the latest version.

$ locate Portfile | grep exiv2
/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/graphics/exiv2/Portfile

This needs to go into your local repository. With the same directory structure.

$ mkdir -p ~/ports/graphics/exiv2
$ cp /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/graphics/exiv2/Portfile ~/ports/graphics/exiv2/Portfile
$ vi ~/ports/graphics/exiv2/Portfile

Update the portfile to the latest version and then update the port index so your local version gets included.

$ sudo portindex
Creating software index in /Users/tcurdt/ports
Adding port graphics/exiv2

Total number of ports parsed:  1
Ports successfully parsed:  1
Ports failed:  0

When you now do a search you should see both versions available.

$ port search exiv2
exiv2     graphics/exiv2 0.14     EXIF and IPTC metadata manipulation...
exiv2     graphics/exiv2 0.17.1   EXIF and IPTC metadata manipulation...

Now you can just try to install and activate it as usual. Good luck with your new ports! And don’t forget to contribute the updated portsfile back to the macports project.

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