Book review: The Art Book

I recently picked up a copy of The Art Book at a very reasonable price. It’s basically a list of major artists, one a page, with an article about a “typical” piece of work of the artist, usually a well-known one, with the bottom three quarters of the page displaying that work of art. Each article starts with a description of the work of art, and then moves on to general observations about works by the artist, sometimes with side notes about his life (rather unavoidable in cases like van Gogh). In all, 500 artists are featured, including sculptors (e.g. Rodin) and less categorizable examples (Koons, Merz). Having been shown in an art gallery may have been the criterion.
Entirely missing are Bouguereau and Spitzweg, a slight pain given the recent interest in Biedermeier art. Similarly difficult to explain is the absence of Riemenschneider, the unsurpassed genius of woodwork, while his contemporary painter colleague, Cranach the Elder, has been included (although not his son). The general impression is that while other forms of art are included, the focus is still firmly on works done in the plane, especially painting (photography is entirely absent, but Gerhard Richter is there). I had previously thought of Audubon as a highly accomplished book illustrator, but he is there, testimony to the focus on painting. Furthermore, the German traditions may have been slightly underemphasised. The Young British Artists are thankfully missing, although their predecessor, Josef Beuys, is there.
Artists are presented in alphabetic order, with cross-references suggested. These cross-connections are not always comprehensive, unfortunately. There is no link, for example, between Miro and Klee. The glossary at the end of the book is basic, and was of little utility to me, but will probably help complete newbies.
Now, what could be the value of such a comprehensive selection that gives little attention to each individual artist? For me, it makes an excellent internet companion that gives me all the essential artists that I may have missed, along with suggestions of other artists to explore. After a while, I got tired of the over-abundance of boring modern paintings which, once the experience has been had, need no longer be preserved – we have Kline, Klein, Hodgkin, Heron, Hayter, and that’s just two letters’ worth. I graduated from the book with a strong yearning for beautiful art, accomplished in craftsmanship as well as composition and aesthetics. All in all, it is a very good selection that leaves little to be desired, and a highly useful reference work at an affordable price, and given it was published in 1994, it is incredibly up-to-date and comprehensive.

Phaidon Press, ISBN-10: 071484487X, ISBN-13: 978-0714844879.

Visitor tracking – server or JavaScript?

I was annoyed a few years ago when my hosting provider decided to remove access to the server logs. Previously, they’d provided nice pie charts as well as raw access data indicating which parts of a site were more popular. Importantly, because it was server access data, it didn’t matter whether the requested items were html pages, jpegs or other downloadable items.

The removal of this feature seems to have happened at quite a few hosting companies, otherwise how to explain the demand for Google Analytics et al.? Leave the hard work for the user’s browser, they said, and send the data to a separate, dedicated server. Server speeds have increased during the same time, so why were features taken away from users? And why, indeed, hand data over to Google et al., when you could get it from your server host?

Of course, we all realise that this is why we’re now all crying for faster multi-tabbed browsing, a demand that may have helped Google to elbow its way into the browser war theatre with its new offering, Chrome.

It’s quite possible though that the penny-pinching users themselves were at fault, unwilling to pay extra for the access to their server logs – driving down the price of web hosting by seeking out cheaper and cheaper hosts, in utter disregard of the reliability of service, and features only required by people who actually care about who looks at their web pages.

While I don’t have any data available to me right now to determine the exact root cause of the current situation, I do want to point out the duplicated effort: Web browsers do send their user agent string, identifying the exact browser version and operating system, with every http request, and in the default server configuration, access logs will usually be kept by the server, of at least the user’s IP, and the file path accessed on the server.

How many of you really feel that you need more data? Do you need to know your user’s screen resolution? Do you actually compute heat maps for your pages? Have you ever used analysis software for raw server logs, and what is wrong with your hosting company providing web access to analysis tools that are solely based on server logs?

Looking forward to your comments.

Verified by Visa scandal

Verified by Visa is a mechanism by which the identity of a Visa card holder making an online payment is supposed to be confirmed. In order to pass this additional verification mechanism, the user has to enter certain digits of a previously set password. If the user cannot remember the password (or does not know because he has fraudulently obtained the card details), he has the option of clicking “Forgotten password”, after which he will be allowed to reset the password entering only information that is actually printed on the credit card, plus the date of birth of the card holder (which would be printed on any other document that would have been found in your wallet, for instance). I’m not impressed – are you? Think about it, in a password of 6 to 12 (iirc) characters, including at least one letter and one numerical digit, can you remember which is the 9th character without writing the whole password down? Not convinced that a coherently thinking individual was behind this idea.

Apple’s Mac mini timing, or, where is the spec bump?

A lot has been written about the Mac mini’s imminent demise, since at least May 2007, and again recently. I’ve never been particularly willing to believe this speculation, because the Mini is the product most in demand for shared desktop computing facilities in educational establishments. In the university I am most recently familiar with, this accounts for at least 100 machines in the libraries alone. That’s not including what individual departments may have in their computing labs (another 100 to 300 maybe?), or any orders by individual researchers, particularly where low spec machines are desirable, e.g. for grad students (scientists sometimes opt for iMacs because they have enough cash, and spare screens tend to be consumed by Windows machines or dual head set-ups; the main opportunity to target here is students who are “visiting” a lab for small projects, either undergraduate or Masters research projects, or grad students visiting from other universities, typically abroad; a completely untapped opportunity is arts students and staff, for most of whom any word processing machine will do, so why not buy a cheap Mac?). If you scale this to the number of universities in just the English-speaking world alone, you can clearly see a market of a size that Apple would want to harvest. In addition, in a “catch ‘em young” world, Apple cannot afford to lose those markets – or the revenue it makes from more unusual applications of the Mac mini, such as server farms. The compact size of the Mini remains quite competitive, in spite of being somehow spared the slimming frenzy that Mr. Jobs put the iMac, Powerbook/MacBook Pro, and lately MacBook lines under. I suspect the reason why this myth remains popular is that these educational markets are to a large extent invisible to the tech writers, who tend to focus on street and internet retail rather than large corporate/educational orders or wholesale.

It does not need saying that the anticipation of a longer recession will spur sales of low spec machines, a job description superbly fitting for the Mac mini in its current incarnation. Nonetheless, it may be true that Apple has decided to delay a spec bump until after the holiday season, to not steal the show from its re-engineered laptop line. Remember that at 1.31kg (2.9 pounds), the Mac mini is among the most portable non-laptop computers ever, and will give you much joy as long as you have a screen available in each location you want to use it (e.g. home and office; I also recommend buying a second power adapter as these are somewhat bulky, with attendant unwieldy cables, and take away from the weight advantage; final word of warning: it’s not entirely designed for being lugged around, so do treat it kindly!) So it would be a shame for it to go, and possibly too great a loss to AAPL for them to really consider this step.

A recent macminicolo article has outlined that company’s reasons for believing in a refresh of the Mini, and a response from Apple Insider points to the possibility that the Mini is an efficient way for Apple to divest of old component stock from other product lines (in this case, possibly the Core 2 Duo chip, but it’s not the only candidate I can think of, with the move away from Intel integrated components). As far as the rumours of the demise go, I can only agree with the above-cited articles that the mini is here to stay for some time yet.

Update 2008/12/17: Further evidence that Apple is making the right decision. Interesting tidbit is that the Mac mini has continued to be one of Amazon’s top five selling items, apparently all the way through 2008, in spite of the ageing hardware!

Four features Opera needs

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and finally decided to make it public. Opera is possibly the fastest browser currently out there – certainly the fastest available in a final release. There are four features that Opera needs so that I would use it. “Bookmark all tabs”, a dropdown selector showing the title of all the tabs (like in Firefox; I know about the tab preview, but gliding over the tab bar is cumbersome), a scrapbook like Firefox’ scrapbook extension, and good ad blocking. As it stands, I’ll probably be swayed to continue with Firefox if they live up to the 3.1 speed promise in the final release. Otherwise it will be a tough call. Hmmm… Webkit? V8? Except for Opera’s exceptional security track record, those other contenders offer nearly the same features.

Ratings of popular reference management GUIs

‘Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free’ – Linus Torvalds

Ratings

	macupdate (mu)	versiontracker (vt)	softpedia (sp)	mean (mu, vt)
BibDesk	4.5	4.6	ni	4.55
Bookends *	4	4.8	3.1	4.4
EndNote *	2	2.2	ni (Mac version not listed)	2.1
Papers *	4.5	3.4	ni	3.95
Sente *	4.5	4.4	ni	4.45
iPapers2/iPapers	-	ni	-
Cloister	ni	ni	3.1
Yep	4	4.2	3.6	4.1

Dashes mean not yet rated; “ni” means not listed on site. Average ratings across mu and vt were 4.55, 4.4, 2.1, 3.95 and 4.45 for BibDesk, Bookends, EndNote, Papers and Sente respectively. Meanwhile, PDF manager Yep is quite popular. Data is from sometime this week.

Popularity

	iusethis	mu d’l’s	mu d’l’ current version	sp users	download.com (dl)	dl last week
BibDesk	565	23550	942	ni	253	0
Bookends *	97	43753	1005	28	814	6
EndNote *	78	18931	686	ni	26375	240
Papers *	327	10747	718	ni	253	0
Sente *	42	15304	56	ni	677	0
iPapers2/iPapers	10	2572	1,795	0	ni	ni
Cloister	2	ni	ni	10	ni	ni
Yep	870	68267	2467	47	42	1

For iPapers2/iPapers, the iusethis users of iPapers and iPapers2 were combined.

Seven Mac trialware outfits you ought to know

1. Panic – makers of the highly acclaimed FTP client Transmit, and all-round web creation suite Coda. They have some free stuff.
2. SmileOnMyMac – they have a couple of brilliant utilities, my personal favourite being TextExpander. Also recommend looking into BrowseBack.
3. Ambrosia – search utility iSeek for quick access to popular general or topical search engines (e.g. Google or IMDB), and deep system software for video and audio capture, and arbitrary iPhone ringtone upload.
4. Rogue Amoeba – more and similar deep system software, including stuff for audiocasting wirelessly or to the web.
5. DEVONtechnologies – sell a suite of software that includes a desktop web search engine (it uses your CPU rather than Google’s and gives slightly different results), an application that combines bookmarking, PDF management software, and general file management in one interface (called DEVONthink), and a note taking application. I haven’t been able to make up my mind over whether I’d profit from using any of their software, but their search utility is good when you need more results than Google provides (but it’s not better than Google, it just returns a different set). Also haven’t been able to verify for myself that they have useful artificial intelligence in their software – which they claim. They have freebies.
6. Unsanity – makers of the well-known ShapeShifter application. Many of their applications are concerned with bringing back useful features from Mac OS 9. There’s some free stuff as well.
7. Freeverse – quite a ragbag of applications, including several applications for diverse graphics and audio creation tasks, as well as the free “Think!” – a window-shading app. You’ll also find a whole bunch of Mac games on their site which are quite entertaining.

Update: Mac OS X apps I will probably buy

This is an update to an older post of mine. I was curious whether I would still fork out for the same things that I said I would a year ago – and whether I’d actually have bought any of them. NetNewsWire, which I bought before making the first post, is now free, so we can scratch that off the list. Other than that, the list remains pretty much as was

1. Text Expander – this is very, very likely to be my next buy, even though it does mess with the paste buffer. I got Typinator in one of my bundles, and I’m not even going to set it up, because I know it doesn’t do cursor position, so it loses out in the coding department, especially.
2. Little Snitch – haven’t bought yet, but it’s a wicked utility indeed.
3. Path Finder – still thinking about buying this.
4. Parallels Desktop – still the best way to run Windows – even, by the looks of it, beyond VMware Fusion 2.0. Parallels still has the most seamless file integration, something so far overlooked by Fusion, which relies on shared folders that you have to specifically set up. So you’re always shuffling files around. Not good. Parallels FTW. And yes, I bought it as part of the mupromo bundle (about which otherwise, the less said, the better).
5. CSSEdit – elegance incarnate. This was sitting on the substitution bench at my last commenting, but I bought it as part of MacHeist. Still loving it as ever.
6. Mathematica – haven’t bought yet. Still a possibility.
7. Transmit – I now think that I will end up buying this eventually. One of those really powerful and still usable apps for the Mac, every bit like Path Finder.
8. Delicious Library – What a gem, except I don’t have a camera, may not buy one soon, and I’m not convinced that version 2.0 is so much better than the original. I might give it a spin, though. Maybe there is a way to downgrade if necessary.

And if I ever got serious about web design, I would add the following:

1. SubEthaEdit – still looks good, but getting pushed further down the list. Is now getting competition from several open source efforts, but seems to still be the best of breed in spite of everything. For one, it has syntax highlighting for every language with a shaking stick attached.
   
2. Coda – I think this would be a good investment if I got serious about web dev. Not likely to happen right now.

On a further note, I’m still looking for a tabbed, syntax-highlighting text editor that recovers an entire crashed session (not like Vim, where you have to remember which files you were working on to have them re-open). Also, Cocoa would be nice. I was working with Smultron for a bit, but I’ll have to ditch it because it kills my files when it/the OS crashes (yes, surprisingly, Tiger does crash – I’m sure Leopard does, too). I’m also beginning to think that BrowseBack is kind of a neat idea.

Revival of patronage

It’s now clear to me that with our capacity to distribute large works of art, such as books, music, and films, to global audiences of millions, and many computer programmers’ opposition to paying for digital goods (resulting in quick breaking of any digital rights management system yet deployed), that we will have a re-emergence of patrons who will support artists for recording albums, writing books, and making films. It is also possible that these patrons will be corporate bodies rather than individual persons, especially in the early days of this cultural trend. Once audiences have become fully accustomed to TV and online ads, such sponsorship will be the best way to reach audiences disenfranchised from traditional media, whose advertising already communicates little about the product and services portrayed, and instead tries to appeal to emotions, which can be seen as deceptive. Additionally, it is clear that many corporations are wealthy enough to pay for high quality works of art and may prefer this opportunity to not be limited to the typical duration of a TV ad. Agencies that put corporations in touch with promising artists stand to make good margins, and will be a desirable employer. Most of the actual trade will be carried out online. As an example of this trend, I would cite the TED conference.

Addendum, same day: I also think it’s likely that this will raise the quality of pop culture, as patrons with economic interests won’t want to be associated with mediocre contributions. More education and genuinely witty entertainment, less l’art pour l’art.

Apple for seamless backup

Bear with me for a few seconds more. I’m the first person to see shortcomings in the MacBook Air, and I was disappointed with Apple’s MacWorld announcements in general, BUT their backup concept is beautiful, and finally coming together. Time Machine was included in Mac OS X Leopard, and initially looked like a bit of a gimmick. The 3D representation for time going backwards is of course well known and established in many academic fields. Nothing new there. However, further research reveals (and their marketing material won’t satisfy here) that backup is incremental, that is, it focuses on the files that have actually changed. And now it seems you can use your laptop anywhere in your home and send files to the imo very reasonably priced $299 or $499 Time Capsule (essentially a network drive). The maximum data rate based on the 802.11n specification used, would seem to be 31MB/s, with a range of about 70m through walls (using SI units, m=metres). It remains to be seen exactly how seamlessly Time Capsule integrates with Time Machine and multiple user accounts on multiple computers. It also remains to be seen whether connecting a 1TB drive externally is seamless and, once connected, invisible to the Time Machine user. I have a suspicion that although using hubs, you can in principle connect up to 128 (iirc) devices through a single USB port, Time Capsule may not support this at the data rate one would hope for. On the other hand, I would be quite upset having to buy multiple Time Capsules and not know which one holds the data I want. Certainly, a recent software update re-enabled Time Machine backups to USB drives connected to an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule. It’s not clear what market Apple envisages for the device, because 1TB is not enough for people who seriously work with video, so the eligibility of Time Capsule for that market will crucially depend on whether several devices can be connected by USB, and whether the device keeps performing well under such conditions.