Brumes Matinales

Creative Commons licenses for photographs on the Web

Interesting conversation between James Duncan Davidson and Tim Bray about photos and licenses on the web.

• James wrote about its reluctance to use creative commons licenses for his professional photographs
• Tim then explained how one of his photographs that he uploaded on Wikipedia (in a compressed size) under Creative Commons licenses was chosen to be a book cover and that he got paid for the full size version
• James then replied with additional food for thought

At the moment, I upload my photos on Flickr under an "Attribution, Share Alike" Creative Commons license. I do not take photos professionally but if people would be interested to use them in commercial products, I would like to get paid for their use.

Tim's proposal to use different licenses depding on the resolution is a good idea:

• use a creative commons licenses for low-to-moderate resolution and make them available liberally (on Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.)
• keep a more restrictive licenses on the full resolution

⇨ How Browsers Work

As a web developer, learning the internals of browser operations helps you make better decisions and know the justifications behind development best practices. While this is a rather lengthy document, we recommend you spend some time digging in; we guarantee you'll be glad you did.

All you have ever wanted to know about the internals of Web browsers and more...

I link to the document on HTML5 rocks which is nicely presented but the original is available on Tali Garsiel web site.

(via FunctionSource)

Jaguar XK 120 Roadster

I don't care much about cars but when I see a beauty, I know it.

A friend's father owns the Classic & Sports Auto garage and kindly invited me to shoot a Jaguar XK 120 roadster that he is renovating:

It was a great opportunity to shoot such a beautiful car with enough time and freedom to compose the shots. I waited for the late afternoon and the sun was starting to be low enough to reveal the curves of the car.
I shot on top of a stool to remove the noisy background behind the car and put the emphasis on the car's front. A 3/4 view was the best way to show the length and curves of both the car's hood and left side.

I used my Nikon 16-85mm at f/11 to shoot it. At first, I tried to shoot at 16-18mm but I found it made the car's hood too much proeminent at the expense of the rest of the car. I stepped back a little bit, zoom to 35mm and shoot it on top of the stool to get a more realistic perspective which still highlights the long and curvy hood.

If you like this car, you are lucky: you can buy it once it is renovated.

I really enjoy the experience and I am looking forward to the next opportunity to shoot such a beauty again. I may even start to care about (beautiful) cars a bit more!

⇨ node.x, a Asynchronous Event Framework for the JVM

Tim Fox:

What is Node.x?

• A general purpose framework that uses an asynchronous event based style for building highly scalable network or file system aware applications
• Runs on the JVM.
• Everything is asynchronous.
• Embraces the style of node.js and extends it to the JVM. Think node.js on steroids. Plus some.
• Polyglot. The same (or similar) API will be available in multiple languages: Ruby, Java, Groovy, (Python?, JS?, Clojure?), etc
• Goes with the recent developments with InvokeDynamic in Java 7 and bets on the JVM being the future premier runtime for dynamic languages.
• Enables you to create network servers or clients incredibly easily.
• True threading. Unlike node.js, Python Twisted or Ruby EventMachine, it has true multi-threaded scalability. No more spinning up 32 instances just to utilise the cores on your server.
• Understands multiple protocols out of the box including: TCP, SSL, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS, Websockets, AMQP, STOMP, Redis etc
• Provides an elegant api for composing asynchronous actions together. Glue together HTTP, AMQP, Redis or whatever in a few lines of code.

A framework a la node.js (and some more) in a multithreaded environment on the JVM is an intriguing idea with a lot of potential and the examples look both simple and powerful.

This project is based on Netty, an asynchronous event-driven network application framework, that I can't stop to praise. We use it in HornetQ and is a big reason why HornetQ is so fast.

Tim is an ex-colleague from Red Hat and the previous lead of HornetQ. He knows his stuff about performance, concurrent and asynchronous code and I am intrigued to see where he will go with node.x (esp. if he adds a Clojure layer on top of it, functional programming is a good match for an asynchronous event framework).

Kodak Junior 620

While talking about photography with my father, he told me that he still had an "old" camera from my grandfather and, lo and behold!, he showed me a folding camera: the Kodak Junior 620.

I have not found a serial number and I don't know exactly which series it is but Kodak Junior 620 cameras were manufactured between 1935 and 1939 (depending on the series).

My grandfather's model has a Kodak Anastigmat f/7.7 lens and the shutter speeds are 1/25, 1/75, T, and B. The camera is in pretty good shape (except for a bit of leather skin that I need to glue) and if I buy a 620 film roll, I could shoot like my grandfather did when he got it.
I even found its user manual to use it properly (I have never owned a camera with roll film).

What a family treasure to discover!

⇨ Clojure on Heroku

Heroku explains why they have added Clojure support in addition to Ruby and node.js:

Ruby, Javascript, and Clojure are all general-purpose languages, but they each excel at certain use cases. Ruby's highly dynamic nature and emphasis on beauty makes it a natural fit for user-facing web apps. Node.js's evented concurrency makes it a great fit for the realtime web. Clojure covers a new use case on the Heroku platform: components which demand correctness, performance, composability; and optionally, access to the Java ecosystem.

The right tool for the right job.
More choice for the tool helps get the job done simpler and faster.

Fête de la Musique

The best thing with the coming of the summer in France is that it starts with la Fête de la Musique.

On the 1st day of summer, every music band can go out and play in the streets until late in the night.
Everybody can enjoy this celebration listening to a gospel in a church, laughing with kids fascinated by a big band, or just spending the evening with friends listening to rock and irish music in a small pub.

⇨ Red Hat Wins "Most Innovative Java Company" at JAXconf

Red Hat rightly deserves this award with all the innovative Java projects managed by its middleware division JBoss.

Congratulations to all Red Hat developers who drive this innovation with a special attention to my ex-teamates on HornetQ who are doing a tremendous work on the best and fastest messaging service :)

⇨ An RSS-feed and location-based iOS application

Cocoa With Love's Matt Gallagher:

The purpose of this post is so that I will have a link to give people when they ask: how do I write an iOS application that pulls data from an RSS feed, displays it pretty and can put things on a map. I'll show you all of that and more as I rewrite my oldest iOS application from scratch: FuelView.

A recommended article which explains how to design and write a simple but not too simple iOS application.