Yearly Archives: 2011

Beware the Cloud

Software

A catastrophe waiting to happen.

Apple duly rolled out its bunch of cloud-centric offerings this past Monday to the usual stomach churning hype. It was one of the worst presentations I have seen from the fruit company, unfocused and confusing. None of this aided by a CEO who is clearly (and tragically) on his last legs. Steve Jobs looked awful, his voice was hoarse and he had difficulty with movement and memory. Far worse than before. Sad. But none of that resulted in moderation of Apple’s ridiculous hype. That trait is truly embedded in the corporate culture at One Infinite Loop.

Amongst the ridiculous claims of ‘new features’ were things like Autosave and Versioning which saves your work as you type. “Brand new”, “Apple only”, etc. Of course, this only works with Apple’s apps – sorry, but I know of no working finance professional who uses Numbers in preference to Excel (which has an Autosave feature in any case) or prefers Pages to Word, awful as the latter may be. It’s called ‘industry default’. These users, myself included, will not be migrating to Apple’s products just because of Autosave. Lightroom has been saving on the fly since Version 1 years ago on Macs and PCs, and allows you to step back through versions. Even the wretched Intuit Corporation has had on-the-fly saving in Quicken for well over a decade. And that’s in a PPC app!

But the hype meter was really cranked up for iCloud, Apple’s desperate attempt to catch up with Google’s Android and related offerings. Before writing more, let me just relate a little personal chronology.

  • iDisk at MobileMe went down and files stored there were inaccessible. Mercifully I had local copies.
  • MobileMe went down and I could not receive or send email.
  • This site went down owing to server problems at BlueHost, the hosting service I use.
  • Snap!, my daily Photoblog, went down – same hosting service, same issue. Twice.
  • There was a power cut and all computers here went down for the 30 minute duration. (I do not have battery back-up).

Time frame? How about all happened during the past seven days? And this is in a big city environment with relatively stable infrastructure, not Tornado Alley, though we do get the occasional earthquake here in California.

Now let me illustrate how AT&T pipes its broadband into the home here. This is typical not unusual in America where doing everything at the lowest cost is the prime dictate. Homes here are separated by easements which act as locations for utility poles – power, telephone, broadband. Here’s the utility pole whence broadband enters the home – even the US Congress could not have made this mess:

Thereafter, the precious length of copper cable conveying broadband goes through a couple of junction boxes, a few more twists and turn, then enters the home through this high tech orifice, also known as a hole in the wall:

And you expect me to trust my data to the cloud? No matter that it will likely be hacked by a fourteen year old from the Ukraine next week, how do I get at it when one of the many variables between the remote file server and my desktop goes down?

Want more hype? Apple will replicate your music catalog at its data center giving you download access on many devices to your catalog wherever you have a broadband connection. Something Amazon has been doing with Kindle for years now. They keep one copy of each book, as does Apple of each tune, and a list of what belongs to whom. It’s hardly magic. You have long been able to access your Kindle catalog from any device. Delete it to make space and you are still the owner should you eventually decide to re-download it later. The biggest advantage of Apple’s approach to music storage is the effective amnesty for thieves. Those who have stolen music on their computers now get an iCloud version for $25 a year – presumably a chunk of that goes to the record companies. But for serious music lovers this approach does little. First, fully 50% of my iTunes music catalog is missing cover art as iTunes cannot recognize the music (no, it’s not Lady Gagger). So this feature adds little and means I will instead have to upload my unrecognized files to iCloud to make them available on multiple devices. Now my files are all in uncompressed form ripped from my original CDs, as my ears cannot stand compressed music, so now I’m looking at the prospect of uploading hundreds of multi-megabyte files to the cloud. Remember how long that took with CrashPlan? I think I’ll pass – it’s faster to move them locally, and much more secure.

But there is one positive to all this iCloud hype. MobileMe will be killed some fifteen months hence, replaced with a free account with up to 5gB storage in iCloud. It will provide email, iCal, Safari bookmarks and so on synchronized across multiple devices, just like MobileMe does. Sometimes. And you will even be able to get a partial refund of what you just paid for MobileMe using this. I have no idea how competent or reliable iCloud will be, but it could not possibly be worse than MobileMe.

I believe the next global financial meltdown will result from over-dependence on cloud storage (unless the villains on Wall Street get there first, again), with some simple human error or hostile act rendering much of the civilized world without internet access. No web purchases, no bank access, no credit card transactions, no national defense, no medical records, you name it. Our enemies no longer need nukes. A pair of cable cutters will do. Alternatively, if it can go wrong it will. There’s no reason for you to lose your photographs in the process. Store them locally and back up, on-site and off-site, often. Who would you rather trust with your data – you or a cloud vendor about whose technology and procedures you know precisely zero?

What happens when you trust the cloud. G1, kit lens.

And now, the cartoon of the year:

HC-B on The Decisive Moment

Photographers

An interesting narrative.

A friend sent this along. What makes it especially interesting is Cartier-Bresson’s narrative, in charmingly accented English, about his philosophy of street snapping. It doesn’t hurt that it opens with the two greatest street snaps of the last century – the man with the monocle in Valencia and the puddle jumper in Paris:

Click arrow to view.

Some favorite quotes:

  • “Life is once. Forever.”
  • “Facts are not interesting. It’s the point of view.”
  • “After a certain age you have the face you deserve, I think.” – On portraits.
  • “You shouldn’t overshoot. It’s like overeating.”
  • “You have to be quick, quick, quick.”
  • “For me it’s a simple pleasure, photography. It doesn’t take any brains.”
  • “I never think. I act quick.”
  • “When you take a good picture it’s like milking a cow. You need a lot of milk to make a little cheese.”
  • “I like English people very much. It’s the most exotic country for a Frenchman.”
  • “Everybody has done ten good photographs in their life. What is important is to go on, on, on.”
  • “I like life. I hate people also.”
  • “Even if it’s ugly, it’s an affirmation”

The very best eighteen and a half minutes a street snapper can invest in.

Update June 15, 2011:

Bother, Vimeo has been forced to take the video down. If you can, try to see it elsewhere. It’s worth it.

Tall boys

Photographs

Sometimes it helps to stick out from the crowd.

In San Francisco’s business district, on Montgomery Street.

G1, kit lens @ 45mm, 1/400, f/5.6.

Front Street, San Francisco.

G1, 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic pancake lens, 1/2000, f2.2.

Gustave Caillebotte

Paintings

A street snapper amongst painters.

If you are of the persuasion that Renoir’s confections are nausea-inducing, but one step removed from the modern horrors of Thomas Kinkade, then like me you may find yourself hewing to the astringent vision of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894).

As Paris became the city we know, magnificently laid out with wide boulevards and mansard roofs, Caillebotte was there to record the most perfect city in the world. He had no need to paint for a living, having inherited a fortune, but as history has shown time and again, poverty is not a qualification for great painting – or photography. For every impoverished Monet I can show you a wealthy Degas. For every Doisneau struggling to make the grocery bill, there’s a Cartier-Bresson enjoying his balcony view of the Tuileries.

And both Degas and Caillebotte were very much infused with a photographic vision, the street paintings of both replete with photographic framing and decisive moments all over the place, long before HC-B saw the light of day. Caillebotte’s best known canvas is his ‘photograph’ of a rainy day in Paris in 1877:

The passerby on the right is cut off by the frame and the horse drawn carriage largely obscured at the left. Caillebotte loved the vision photography made possible but lacked access to gear with the technological prowess required for snapshots. The perspective in the painting is very much at the wide angle end of the spectrum – he was seeing through a 21mm lens.

Nor was Caillebotte’s technique less than the finest. Look at this magnificent use of backlighting and the rendition of glass worthy of the finest from the Dutch school:

Modern photographic vision thinks nothing of compositional techniques which seemed so shocking back then. The reality is that we have all learned from the French street painting masters.

In San Francisco. G1, kit lens at 18mm, 1/2500, f/5, ISO 320.

In San Francisco. G1, kit lens @ 18mm, 1/1600, f/5, ISO 320.