Brains' Photography

Digital Music

2008-07-28T04:20:31Z

So I read that AC/DC was going to release a new album and went onto Amazon and iTunes to download some of their older albums. Turns out they're not available.

Since iTunes and Amazon released their DRM-free music, I've made the transition to buying all of my music online. I'm no longer patient enough to wait the 2-3 days to get CD's shipped to me (or go to the store) and I want to hear the music I buy immediately. This is directly due to the availability of digital content. It now takes me more effort and money to get my music any other way. This is a great thing for consumers like me.

I had a short conversation with a coworker recently who made a comment that he didn't understand how music and movies could survive without DRM. I don't see how they can survive with it. Here's a great example of why. Yahoo is shutting down it's music content service. They will also be taking down their DRM servers! Any music you've bought through Yahoo will be useless after September 30. Microsoft went through a similar collapse, but decided to keep it's DRM server up through 2011. Why would anyone ever consider buying DRM content after getting burned like this?

Back to digital holdouts like Metallica and AC/DC. I genuinely want to pay for the music I enjoy. If the artists don't get paid, then I won't have that music to listen to. One of the major factors in piracy of music is availability and accessibility. With DRM-free music, there is now a legal option for people that want to do the right thing to download music in a way that is just as easy, if not easier, to obtain than pirating. DRM "protected" music actually encourages people to pirate their music. Especially when major DRM content distributors like Yahoo and Microsoft are failing.

Granted there are people who are after the free aspect of pirating music. These are the people that should be discouraged or punished and not the average consumer who tried to do the right thing and got burned.

Solving Sudoku

2008-01-13T03:25:23Z

So I've been playing Sudoku for several years and I've developed several strategies that I finally put into a program. I'm an engineer, a mathematician, and a bit competitive so I'm not only concerned with solving the puzzle but coming up with a way of consistently solving it as fast as possible. I'll describe both how to solve Sudoku with a computer as well as describe my strategies for solving it with our inferior brains.

What I realized is that the algorithm for solving the puzzle is actually very simple. The majority of the strategy is figuring out how to implement the algorithm with a brain that is terrible at keeping track of more than a handful of numbers at a time.

To start off I'll state the obvious. You have to solve the puzzle by row, column, and within each 3x3 grid. The solution has just two parts, each involving a solution by row, column, and grid. I'll describe each of these parts, then how to put them together to solve the puzzle.

The first part is what I'll call reduction. For each unsolved square, you reduce the possible values based on the numbers you do know. For example, if you know there is a 9 in the top left-most square, you know that all squares in the row, column, and in the same grid cannot have a 9. You do this with all the known squares and you have a reduced puzzle. Easy enough, but not necessarily solved.

The second part is after reducing the puzzle, looking at all the possible values left for each square and finding unique instances of values. I'll call this finding unique squares. For example, say a square can have a possible 1, 3, or 7. By looking in the squares row you see that 3 and 7 are also possible in other row entries, but not 1. You know that square must be a 1. The same check happens for the column and within the grid.

Given those two parts, here's how to tie them together to solve the puzzle:

1. Reduce until no new squares are found.
2. For each unsolved square check for unique squares. If a unique value exists in any row, column, or grid, assign it to the square and go back to the first step.

Simple! This will solve any sudoku puzzle that doesn't require you to guess.

Here's a proof. Let's say you have a reduced puzzle with a row that has two unsolved squares. Both squares have the same two possible values. There is no way to solve this without guessing or without solving a square elsewhere that reduces the possibilities. For an unsolved puzzle to be solvable, there must always be at least one square that has the quality of part 2 above. It is either a unique value with no other possibilities or it's a unique value with one or more other possibilities. In either case, the unique value is the solution to the square. In other words as long as there is a solvable square, the puzzle can be solved. If there is ever a case where the puzzle is reduced and there are no unique squares, then the puzzle cannot be solved without guessing.

Photography Resources

2007-08-25T02:27:52Z

I'm still a photography newb, but here are the resources I've been using so far:

Websites

Photoshop Elements Users
BetterPhoto - I get their daily picture of the day emailed to me, which I actually look at
Shutterbug

Books

BetterPhoto Guide to Digital Photography - I found this book to be extremely helpful. It doesn't go into a lot of depth, but it is ideal to get started in digital photography. The writer, Jim Miotke, I believe lives in Issaquah. I started posting some of my photos to his site.
The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers - I wasn't willing to shell out the $600 initially for the full Photoshop package. Elements is a watered down version targeted at digital photographers. It costs about $70 and is much more reasonable if you're not sure about taking the plunge.

Magazines

Digital Camera Magazine - this is printed in the UK and is a bit expensive imported, but worth it. I've found it to be by far the most educational magazine so far.
Digital Photo Pro - also good, although it's not as technical as DCM. It does however seem to have more photos.

Software

Adobe Photoshop Elements - for newbs like me
Adobe Photoshop CS3 - for pros
Adobe Lightroom - a photo organizer with minor photo editing that integrates with CS3
Irfanview - a popular and free photo viewing application with some minor editing features

Groups

Meetup.com has a local photography group which I started to participate with. We'll see how it goes.

Stores

Glazers Camera is a well known camera shop in Seattle. Don't go to kits or any of the chains unless you need some basic accessories. Glazers is where photographers shop for gear.

Camera Buyer Beware

2007-08-25T01:58:27Z

I've normally been pretty good at buying stuff online and I've never had a bad experience till I tried to buy a camera. It appears the online camera industry is saturated with scams. You can go to froogle.com and search for a camera and it's guaranteed that most, if not all, of the advertisements listed are scams. Here's an article from PC World about online camera scams. I hate to admit I fell for it. They advertised a Canon Rebel XTi camera body for about $300, which is a steal. Turns out they won't ship it to you till you buy other stuff... like the battery that comes with the camera. It ends up being more expensive if you buy everything that came in the kit from the manufacturer. I waited 3 weeks for them to ship my camera before I got suspicious. They won't ship the camera as advertised.

Moral of the story... Buy from B&H Video Photo and maybe price check against Amazon.com or Buy.com. I've found that B&H usually has the best prices of all the reputable shops.

Exposure Problems

2007-08-24T22:27:19Z

I'm clearly not that great at getting good exposure when I take the shot yet. It also doesn't help that I have been shooting in just about the worst possible conditions... pictures of people on a sailboat in the summer in the sun. Very few of my photos have come out with proper exposure. Here's an example:

An underexposed Jaime as shot...

However, there is a bright side to this... I'm getting good at editing photos in photoshop. I've been learning to correct some rather bad photos. Here's the same photo after a couple hours of massaging.

Mostly properly exposed Jaime...

I'm still not completely happy with the photo, but I was just glad to get it to an acceptable state. Here's a list of what I did to it:

Exposed the entire photo to get proper exposure on her face
Whitened the whites of her eyes
Saturated her eyes then lightened them to bring out the color (perhaps I brought a little too much out)
Sharpened her eyes to get extra sparkle and clarity
Removed 3 or 4 hairs that were across her face
Softened her skin a bit to make the color even
Dodged her hair (lightened it)
Burned her face (darkened it)
Removed some blemishes
Removed some red out of her nose
Used an overlay on the background to increase contrast
Used curves to tweak the midtones
Added some red to her lips
Very slight unsharp mask (to sharpen) on the entire photo

Also notice that the lower part of her hair is too dark. This is because the photo was too underexposed. There's very little color data in that area, so it's black. There's not a whole lot I can do about that other than transplant her hair from another photo.

So the solution to my problem seems to be filters. The contrast between the subject and the sky is often too wide to fix, so I need something to darken the sky a bit, but not darken the subject.