"Confidence, or lack there of"

Today, for the fifth time in it's 83 year history, a leader of Ireland's Fianna Fáil party is facing a confidence vote. This is the first vote that does not involve Charles J Haughey, and there can be no honour in joining a political club that contains the disgraced Charles J Haughey as its sole member. Sadly for Mr Cowen, I believe his membership is entirely justified.

That any politician can have confidence in Mr Cowen is surprising, as Minister for Finance he ignored the warning signs in the Irish economy,  as Taoiseach he oversaw the disastrous bail out of the Irish Banks and it was Mr Cowen who welcomed the IMF to Leinster House. It is his competence we should be questioning, not the confidence his political colleagues have in him. At this point what we are watching today is simply political theater.

His talk of remaining in charge to make the tough decisions ignores the fact that had he made the right decisions in September 2008 there would be no tough decisions to be taken now. Unlike other European countries we did not suffer from a stagnant economy or mislead the ECB about our deficit, our crime was hubris, and while there are many whose over confidence contributed to that hubris, as leader, Mr Cowen must accept the blame.

This vote can have no effect upon the outcome of the impending general election. That Fianna Fáil will suffer a humiliating defeat is now beyond doubt. What is still in doubt is the magnitude of that defeat, and quite how Mr Cowen thinks the margin of that defeat can be lessened by his remaining in control of both party and country perhaps goes some way to explaining the mess the country is in. For the people of Ireland, the time for the TD from Laois-Offaly to step down, has long since passed.

 

Publishers, still not getting it

I enjoy throwing a good quotation into a conversation, not simply because it can give my statement added gravitas but because a good quote can communicate a point much better than I could manage on my own, and one of my favourites quotes is "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

If you could add something to that quote about pig-headedness and the expectation of a different outcome from the same actions you might have summed up the attitude of the publishing industry to digital publishing. While many businesses may favour long term profitability over their customer's experience, never had we seen it taken to such an extreme as when the record companies deliberately crippled the music they sold to us with digital rights management. They insisted that the only way to ensure the future of new artists was to limited what we could do with the music we bought. Customers aren't dumb and we all proved more than capable of working out that DRM music locked us into proprietary systems. Purchased music would only playback on approved devices and over time as DRM systems fell by the wayside you may find you music un-playable.

Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 arguing that it should stop using DRM. In April 2007, shortly after Jobs' open letter, Apple was allowed to sell music from EMI without DRM, and Amazon followed suit a month later.  While it may seem inevitable now, DRM free music proved extremely popular and one by one the other record companies followed the example set by EMI. Record companies had learnt the lesson that DRM hurts record companies more than it hurts customers.

This was all recent history but the lesson had been learnt, DRM was bad for business and bad for the consumer. Never again would we worry about DRM preventing us from enjoying that which we had purchased. Well, I say never, the TV and Movie studios are trying to prove history wrong by wrapping it's products up in ever more complicated and pointless DRM. And then we come to eBooks, the latest division of the media industry to think they know better than those who went before.

Not for you!Just as an MP3 player is nothing without music, an eBook reader is nothing without books, and despite the progress made by music publishers I was reminded recently that eBooks have a long way to go before they replace paper. I am not a great reader of fiction but I was aware before I bought my first eReader that publishers tend to offer only bestsellers in electronic form. Great if you're a fiction fan, not so great if like me you're a history or engineering fan. But as I recently discovered, the availability of a book is not simply related to how popular it is, where you are can be as big as factor.

Deamon by Daniel Suarez is a modern and popular techno-thriller which appeals to many tech-savvy readers and having heard a number of recommendations, I purchased a copy of the Kindle edition from Amazon. Once it had been delivered to my iPad I settled down and started reading. While it will probably never win the booker prize it was a very enjoyable page turner. So much so that having just finished it I decided to purchase 'Freedom', the second novel in the series, and this is where I became frustrated with the publishing industry.

A eBook version of 'Freedom' was available on the Amazon.com store, but Amazon would not sell the eBook version to UK customers. It strikes me as odd that Amazon.com would sell me a paper version of the book and ship it across the Atlantic, but the eBook version was off limits to UK customers. The same restriction applied at BooksOnBoard.com, but from previous experience I knew I could use dollar gift vouchers to trick them into selling a US only book to a UK customer, but thanks to DRM, the BooksOnBoard version was incompatible with my iPad. I would have to strip out the DRM and convert it before I could read it on my iPad. I spent about 45 minutes trying to buy 'Freedom' (oh the irony!) before I realised that the only way for a UK customer to read it was to buy a physical book.

Once I gave up trying to buy the eBook version, and not wanting to have another fiction paperback sitting on the shelf, I was curious to see if a copyright violating version of the book was available. After less than 10 minutes I not only found the book I was looking for, but it was available in an open format that would work on almost any device and could be easily converted to work with every device. I didn't download the book, having enjoyed Suarez's first novel I was keen to see him get some royalties from me for his second book as well.

This seems crazy to me, I was happy to pay for the book, in fact I spent almost an hour trying to find someone who would sell it to me, but no retailer would accept my money. Yet the same book is available to download illegally for free and in a format that is much easier to use. Having had my appetite whetted by eBooks I frequently find myself failing to to purchase new books because there is no eBook version.

From my perspective there are two major problems problems facing the music, movie and book industries. The first problem is not just that pirates are offering their products for free, it's that in most cases the pirates are doing a better job, however I believe the more significant problem is that they have created a desire for a product that they are failing to meet. While my desire to read books has increased in the last year the number of book I have purchased has dropped significantly. Now, who wants to sell me the book I actually want to read?

Whilst looking for an eBook version of his second novel, I discovered that Daniel Suarez was unable to interest any publisher in his first novel. In the end he published it for free (it's available here). He was only able to agree a publishing deal for his first novel after he proved there was a market for it. His publishers were unwilling to develop a new writer and are now preventing fans from buying his new book. In fact the only reason I may have been permitted by Suarez's publishers to buy the Kindle version of his first book was that it was available for free to anyone who wanted it and could find it.


How much snow?

While having a pint with my Dad in O'Neils on Suffolk street this week he said that in his 67 years he had never seen weather like it. While I had no reason to doubt him the fact that people are building Igloos on the street really brought the point home

Dublin, snow, like never before.

A faster way to decent panoramas?

We said goodbye to one of our colleagues today, after a few weeks with us in Dublin he is returning to Denmark, so after our regular post lunch trip to Starbucks we wandered down to the coast to see how deep the snow was. I had my camera with me and while we stood on the footbridge over the railway line I took a few shots with the intention of stitching them into a panorama.

When I shoot panoramas with my dSLR I use Autopano on OS X to create the panoramas, and when I shoot them with my iPhone I use the AutoStitch app from the the app store. When I got back to the office I realised that with the iPad's camera connection kit I could pull images from my dSLR and stitch them together with my iPad. And then I had a bigger thought. My dSLR is set up to write RAW images to one memory card and JPEG images to the second card. Why not process the RAW images using Autopano on my Mac, process the JPEG versions of the same images using AutoStitch on the iPad and compare the results.

So without further ado, two rendered panoramas from the same shots. (click the images for a higher resolution versions)

JPEG versions of the shots rendered using AutoStitch on an iPad
RAW versions of the shots rendered using Autopano on a Mac

So now for some technical stuff. My Nikon D300s shoots with an image resolution of 4,288 x 2,848, the JPEG versions of the images are 3.2 MB and the RAW versions are 12.6 MB. While images of this size present no problem for Autopano on a Mac it was a different story with AutoStitch on the iPad. AutoStitch is an iPhone app and the images my iPhone 3GS takes are a lot smaller than the images my Nikon takes, and AutoStitch seems to struggle with the higher resolution images. I could only select 7 images before AutoStitch crashed, but after rebooting the iPad I was able to select and render all ten images.

While Autopano on the Mac can pretty much make full use of the available resolution, AutoStitch seems to be limited to lower resolution output. After rendering, the JPEG image output by Autopano was 15,818 x 4,839 and 19.2 MB, the AutoStitch image was 4,130 x 1,210 and 1.2 MB. I did no selective processing, the two output images used the application defaults, but Autopano has added some exposure compensation to the final image. The only additional step I ran was in Autopano to render the larger version down to the same width as the AutoStitch version.

So what about the actual results. Well processing the images using Autostitch on the iPad is surprisingly quick and produces a pretty decent panorama. The panorama produced using Autopano on the Mac isn't perfect, the sea is underexposed and there is some colour 'funkiness' on the diving platform, but that can be fixed given some time. However it has done a much better job of de-ghosting the people on the street, and was able to use the much greater dynamic range of the RAW images which can clearly be seen in the cloud detail on the right hand side of the image.

The quality of the image produced using Autopano is clearly better, but it used almost 130 MB of image data, a computer running OS X and €120 worth of software. The AutoStitch image used 30 MB of data, an iPad and £1.20 worth of software, plus it took less than two minutes to produce and can be done almost anywhere. I'm actually quite impressed with what can be done with this iPhone app running on the iPad, and given how quick the whole process was I will have to start taking more panoramic images.

Leinster, cooler than ice. Literally.

A very cold Lansdowne road before kickoff

There are many things to take away from Leinster's match against ASM Clermont Auvergne on Saturday. The Irish Times's Gerry Thornley summed up the quality of the Rugby rather succinctly "Simply the best performance by an Irish province this season"

While it's nice to have my suspicions about the quality of the match confirmed by a professional sports commentator, my lasting memory will be of the cold. Not the usual Irish issues of wind and rain, this was cold I have rarely experienced in Ireland. According to the Irish Met office, it reached -6 degrees, and while gloves and a hat kept my head and hands warm my choice of footwear left something to be desired. Or maybe I hadn't left the house wearing enough pairs of socks, either way my desire for a post match pint with my Dad and Brother had to be put on ice so that my feet weren't.

A great day for Leinster, and my first trip to the new home of Irish Rugby at Lansdowne Road. Not, you might notice the official name of the new stadium. Despite the rather prominent advertising for the sponsors it will always be Lansdowne road to me.

Upon completion of the South stand at Twickenham the English didn't feel the need to rename the stadium. Upon redevelopment of their respective stadiums, Munster didn't rename Thomond park, Bath didn't rename the Rec, Leicester didn't rename Welford road and Harlequins definitely didn't feel the need to rename the Stoop. When the Welsh Rugby Union tore down the old Cardiff Arms park and built one of the greatest Rugby stadiums I've ever been to, they didn't name it after an insurance company, a manufacturer of sporting goods or an airline. It was named the Millennium stadium, rather fitting for a stadium that saw Welsh Rugby into the new Millennium.

The deal the IRFU struck with the stadiums new sponsor is only for ten years, so in 2020 the home of Irish Rugby may well change name to please our national team's latest sponsor. So for me, and I suspect other fans of Rugby, there will only be one name.

Lansdowne road is dead. Long live Lansdowne road!