Topical Tropical

To reach the end of a good book is such a sad thing. I flipped through the index illogically hoping to find more to read until I hit the definite hard blue back cover. The End. Then I held the closed book in my hands for a few more moments before putting it down.

How could it end? Why did it end? This wasn't meant to happen. I could feel the book thinning out as I got through it. The fat index fooled me into thinking there was more left. I felt cheated. But happy. But sad.

After a few more moments spent reminiscing there was only one thing left to do - get onto the Internet and see if there's more to read on the topic :-)

I have a theory that I've been cultivating for many years about sociopaths, that I call the gullibility filter theory. A gullibility filter is a statement that sociopaths use to separate the gullible from the not gullible.

For example, if I were to make the following claim, and act like I really believe it:

The world is flat.

Very quickly, people would separate into two groups - those who think I'm a nut, and those for whatever reason believe in me. That second group are gullible. They're possibly easily manipulated.

A sociopath could use a gullibility filter to identify his or her victims very quickly. Words are just a weapon. Well, a very powerful weapon.

You come across statements like these all the time. Here are a few examples that you may have heard before:

Get rich quick!
Lose 50kg in a week!
I am your saviour!

Everybody knows that those statements aren't true right? Wrong. There's a small number of people that for whatever reason believe such outrageous claims. They're the ones that get conned quite easily. They're the ones that the con artists victimise.

With the rosy glasses that my theory gives me, I can sort through religious types, con men, politicians, and other not so nice people :-)

Someone else has got to have had the same realisation as me right? There must be a name for this in psychology. If you know of it, please leave a comment :-)

I've just come across the most sensational thing I've read in a long time about biology! Apparently some cancers can behave like viruses, and transmit from host to host, suggests an article on biologynews.net.

According to my reading about cancers so far, cancers grow when cells mutate, and somehow turn into blood sucking vampires within our bodies. They evade our immune system because, well, they're made of the same stuff as us, and thus the immune system is blind to them. They get connected to the "blood mains" (arteries) to feed themselves. When their hosts die, they die with them.

Scientists have found a lineage of cancer cells that jump from dog to dog, and have survived for about 200 years! They came to this conclusion after finding cancer cells that have very different DNA to the dogs that they were found in!

So these cancer cells have mutated enough to be accepted by the immune system of multiple dogs. That I think is the only mutation they would need to become what they have. The transmission to other hosts bit is quite easy if the cancer cells exist in tumours that are with easy reach of other dogs - like on the skin, or mucus membranes.

That just blows my mind!

Read Contagious cancer in dogs confirmed; origins traced to wolves centuries ago at biologynews.net.

While waiting for Lightroom to upgrade itself from Beta2 to Beta3, I discovered that Lightroom uses SQLite! SQLite of course is a lightweight embedable SQL database that also just happens to come with Mac OS X!

This can only mean endless possibilities for software developers like me, who are also interested in photography!

(note: After I upgraded to Beta2 of Lightroom, I found that the bundled sqlite3 client was no longer able to open the database file! To solve that, I had to install the latest version of sqlite (3.3.6 at the time of writing), and all was fine again)

LightZone is primarily a photo editor. I'm really after a photo browser with some photo editing capabilities. That little mismatch is going to taint this review - you have been warned :-)

While it's no contender for Adobe Photoshop, it has some interesting features that set it apart from Photoshop. The developer seems to have taken a fresh approach in developing it - rather than copying the interface or user experience of other established photo editors.

As you use tools to edit your photo, little tool windows appear in the left hand pane. If you apply say a blur followed by a colour balance change followed by a clone tool application, you see their respective tool windows stacked in the that order. As you work, tools keep accumulating - kinda like a visible undo buffer. You can always scroll through the list of applied tools, and change parameters. You can also delete tools from this list - removing their effect :-) Finally, you can hide the effect of each tool. Oh, and each tool is really another layer, and can be blended into all layers underneath it using various settings :-) I found all this quite interesting :-) This felt very natural compared to the hoops you have to go through (comparatively) with Photoshop.

As a photo browser, it's medium fast (fastest in my experience so far being Picasa, and slowest being iPhoto). When you open a folder, it does a quick scan of the files - perhaps to grab metadata. Unfortunately LightZone doesn't use embedded JPEG thumbnails. This means that you have to watch the thumbnails being drawn. This process is a bit tiresome, but performed in a background thread, so the user interface remains responsive.

LightZone doesn't have a metadata library. This means that any searches that you perform with it work with a single folder at a time only :-( That makes its search feature quite useless in my opinion. It does support some EXIF metadata searching like aperture size, etc., but it doesn't support the all important keyword search!

My quest to find a Picasa like tool for my new MacBook Pro is still on. I've tried a lot of tools, but nothing compares to Picasa - which is a real shame because Mac's are supposed to be really great for Arty people right? :-)

The top two contenders are Apple's Aperture, and Adobe Lightroom. They both suit my needs very well, but they have quirks nevertheless that make me unhappy.

This is what I'm looking for in order of preference.

1. Speed - I have to be able to quickly scroll through photos in the thumbnail view or in the fullscreen mode. There should be an illusion of motion when I flick through my photos. I take thousands of photos in rapid fire mode, and Picasa is able to scroll through them fast enough to give me the illusion that I was watching a movie.
   
2. Search - It has to be able to search by keywords, the directory name that the photos are in, and other EXIF details like aperture, etc.
   
3. Multiple libraries or catalogues - This is something that Picasa is bad at. My library of photos is currently about 260gb. I don't have a single hard drive that can fit all my photos unfortunately. I wish I had two 500gb drives (one as a backup), but until that happens, I need a tool that can seamlessly refer to multiple photo libraries on different disks - some that may not be available all the time.
   
4. Minimal photo editing - exposure adjustment, sepia, b&w, smudge tool, etc.
   
5. Ability to interface with other programs - I should be able to select a few photos, and 'pipe' that list to a command. I want my photo tool to be extensible and scriptable if possible!
   

Lastly, but most importantly is the user interface! I need a responsive UI that stays out of the way most of the time, and one that makes maximum use of the keyboard. Mice are nice, but when I'm tagging photos with keywords, or assigning ranks, I really like to use my keyboard.

I hope I find something that I can work with :-)