Harry McCracken writing on Time’s Technologizer column:

The fact that companies can fix bugs by pushing out upgrades turns out to be a powerful temptation to ship incomplete products. (It’s a little like having a college professor who lets you change your answers on an exam after you turned it in.)

If only college professors were as nice as product managers at technology companies.

Chile goverment are importing startup to their countries, offering equity-free seed capital of USD$40,000. Free as in beer. They only ask that you move to Chile for 6 months, bootstrap your company there to inspire local business:

In exchange for investing in you and your idea, we need your help to:

1. Change the way local entrepreneurs perceive risk and reward, success and failure. With the objective of promoting long term and permanent change in the local environment, we want you to help stimulate and promote changes in the Chilean entrepreneurial culture by organizing local events, presentations, workshops, and classes in order to transfer your knowledge and global vision.
2. Increase the overall amount of business operating in Chile in order to positively impact job creation and overall economic growth. We believe the mechanism of Start-Up Chile is one of the best and most tangible vehicles that will drive Chile’s economic growth in the next decade, catapulting the nation into more advanced economic status, bringing access to better education, higher health care standards, and an overall better quality of life for its citizens

These are some really forward thinking on the goverment part, and looks like its working!

Mike Johnston on photo caption:

Captions are how photographers become more than camera operators, how we are honest or deceptive, how we become thoughtful. If you’ve not been in the habit of captioning your pictures (or giving them descriptive titles), take a few minutes sometime and jot down the “stories” behind a handful of your own pictures. It might be an instructive exercise.

Captioning is the hardest part in my photo workflow.

Ask any photojournalist about their bag(s), and their eyes will take on the far-off gleam of a parent describing the birth of their first child. Chances are the photoj in question will have one, two, or maybe even three bags to suit their needs. An outsider may be puzzled by the fiendish bag hoarder, but we know better. […]

Their names are so exciting that you can’t help but dream of them. The Speed Demon. The Slingshot. The Urban Disguise. With so many compartments and interchangeable partitions, they ooze pure sex appeal.

I’m not a photojournalist, but I think he’s talking about me. Guilty of owning three camera bags.

Also:

That awkward moment when you own one of those National Geographic bags and someone asks you if you work for them, to which you reply, “No”

doc_prefix: mscameracodecpack

If you want to see the thumbnail of the RAW (NEF, CR2) files from your DSLR ¹, the only choice was to install FastPictureViewer codec.

They discontinued the free version of their RAW images codec but don’t worry, Microsoft step up to the plate and released their own codec pack. It support a whole bunch of cameras, unfortunately still no support for camera using the latest sony sensor: Sony a55, Nikon D7000, Pentax K-5.

The hunt for sunrise. Mount Batur summit, 2011.

The thing with sunrise is that they are nothing special. Afterall you can see them everywhere, everyday — unless you live in Greenland. It all just seems so normal.

Last week I went hiking to mount Batur and the sunrise was anything but normal. The way the sun peeks behind the clouds, with shining golden light clearing the mist down in the valley of kintamani, made me realize: sunrise is beautiful. Or is it Batur’s sunrise?

This picture was taken last week with my friends from Mitrais photography club (MTPC), after 3 hours hiking.

What was once an often-used design pattern is now being looked at as a less than desirable coding practice:

The problem with singletons is that they introduce global state into a program, allowing anyone to access them at anytime (ignoring scope). Even worse, singletons are one of the most overused design patterns today, meaning that many people introduce this possibly detrimental global state in instances where it isn’t even necessary. What’s wrong with singletons’ use of global state?

Lukas Mathis on capacitive buttons:

I think phones have capacitive buttons for the same reason laptops have reflective screens, and TVs in stores have their brightness and contrast turned all the way up. It looks really cool when you see it in a store, and you don’t notice how screwed up it really is until after you’ve already bought it.