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Amateurs worry about equipment. Professionals worry about money. Masters worry about light.

According to this quote I am still an amateur, since I still worried about my camera or, rather, my decision for the Nikon D50, despite my earlier blog entry on this topic which I wrote about a month ago. Until today.

Today I went to a big photo store and had another close look at the “competition,” the Canon EOS 350D (called Digital Rebel XT in the U.S.). I finally came to the conclusion that I had indeed made the right choice and that everything is fine the way it is. What a great feeling! No matter for which of the two you decide, you cannot really go wrong. However, I personally prefer the Nikon over the Canon in terms of handling, finish and usability, even though the Canon has a more complete feature set in some areas. In any case, above all of this one should not forget to take pictures once in a while … some of which I will show on this site in the future.

(Camera pictures based on material © 2005 dpreview.com)

I have had a certain borrowed DVD laying around for at least six months now, “Chocolat” to be precise. Tonight I finally watched it, despite (or because of?) my exam preparation stress. The subject interested me, I like chocolate very much. The movie has a brilliant cast, displays an extraordinary level of craftsmanship and offers beautiful images, besides asking important questions. However, I also want to point to a basic problem. First a brief overview: A woman, Vianne, and her daughter move to a conservative, catholic French village, where she opens a chocolaterie during lent (season of fasting). She also does not attend church, where the mayor greets each and every churchgoer individually. Vianne’s freedom (or rebellion?) is a provocation for the mayor, and when a traveling group of gipsies reaches the village the conflict climaxes.

So, basically it’s about religion and fasting, self-control and enjoying life. Later, fundamental values of society are addressed and questioned. It is exactly this questioning of values that can only be the beginning of a deeper dealing with these issues, to which I want to give a small contribution here. Take, for example, fasting: What is the motive that causes someone to fast? Is it tradition year after year, or the desire to have less weight, or voluntary surrender of rights in order to show God how earnest we are in our request? I see a problem where many words have gotten such a negative meaning now that their original intent has almost vanished. For instance, self-control sounds to our ears like renunciation and prudishness, while Galations 5:23 calls it a fruit of the Holy Spirit, along with such desirable things as love, joy, and faithfulness.

I was particularly touched by the way Vianne cared about the unaddressed problems of her neighbors and tried to solve them with both empathy and resolve. Luc, the son of the mayor’s secretary, very much reminded me of myself in the way he drew pictures so quietly by himself while not really being sure of his abilities. Vianne’s drivenness, which she inherited from her Mayan mother, struck me as strange at first, but was resolved quite nicely in the end (which I will not describe here, of course).

At some point, the gipsies arrive in the village, or rather outside the village, since they stay on their boats at the river bank. The mayor feels his village in danger and has the following leaflet distributed:

Boycott Immorality! Our beloved village rests upon a solid foundation of FAMILY, CHURCH, and COMMUNITY. To keep Lansquenet safe and tranquil, we must close our doors to outsiders whose only tradition is SELF-GRATIFICATION, whose only creed is godlessness, and whose only possible effect is the moral contamination of our village. WE MUST GIVE THESE OUTSIDERS NO QUARTER! We must make them unwelcome in our homes, on our streets, and in our places of business. Thank you for your cooperation. Lansquenet Town Council

While the movie attacks the xenophobic reaction and (allegedly) old-fashioned morals of the villagers, it simultaneously drags good and fundamental values down to the ground. What is so bad about having family, church and community as a foundation? (Even the word “fundamental” is almost taboo today due to the “fundamentalists.”) And vice versa: What is so good about immoral behavior? Of course, the territorial attitude of Lansquenet’s mayor is horrible and also discredits the good values he is identified with. (Unfortunately, many Christians react the same way when they happen to be confronted with “the world;” see 1. Corinthians 5:9ff.) Here the movie does not differentiate enough.

Similar observations can be made of the scene where the violent café owner, after the mayor has tried to re-educate him, asks his wife for forgiveness with the words: “God has made me a new man!” This, of course, is not true, since a) it was the mayor and not God, and b) the change involved only the exterior, not the inner man. Religion tries to change man from the outside to the inside through rules and rituals, but genuine life changes begin in the heart – with repentance, which is confession of one’s own sins and asking for forgiveness – and will then become visible on the outside as well. (See for instance Mark 7:1–23.)

There is much more to write, but I will call it a day. Which leaves me to say that I was especially impressed by the acting of Judi Bench and Alfred Molina. And that the beautiful village’s real name is Flavigny sur Ozerain, should you happen to be in the area.

Although I try to keep the daily flood of information coming at me in check by avoiding to subscribe to podcasts, there are some that do interest me. One of them is CocoaRadio, which features occasional interviews with Mac programmers. In the episode from August 1, 2005, Fraser Speirs made a couple of statements that express my own motivation to work with Mac OS X and to develop software for it quite well:

OS X is a platform where people tend to craft their own tools.

His desire is to create tools for other people with a focus on user interaction and interface design – basically to make people happy. If more programmers would make this a top priority, “ordinary” computer users would be spared much stress …

Here are some links that I especially noticed today: Two very useful sources for Cocoa programmers having technical questions, cocoabuilder.com and cocoadev.com; and 43folders.com, a website on productivity, time management and much more.

Who or what in the world is Dumbarton? Well, in the real world it is the name of a bridge in the San Francisco area. In the computer world, it is a “bridge” between two programming languages: Objective-C, used by Apple, and C#, used by Microsoft. In the words of Allan Hsu, one of the creators of Dumbarton:

We call the ObjC<->C# bridging framework Dumbarton, named after the bridge that spans the San Francisco Bay between Fremont and Menlo Park. Our reasoning: both bridges are somewhat unpleasant to cross, but they get you where you want to go.

Why is this of interest to me? Well, I’m thinking about the right way to port Kaleidotype over to Windows, and this sounds like a great way to have a platform-independent back-end in C# (actually, Mono, a platform-independent implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework) without sacrificing the great user-interface capabilities of Apple’s Cocoa frameworks written in Objective-C, at least for the Mac version. However, I’m not sure Dumbarton will be available to me in time, so I’ll probably have to do a complete port in C#/.NET.

Having chosen Arts as my minor in university, I came across a lecture about Dan Brown’s bestseller “The Da Vinci Code.” I had heard a couple of things about this book, especially from a Christian and biblical viewpoint. In a nutshell, the book is about a conspiracy concerning the (biblically and historically untenable) alleged marriage between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, which is supposed to have resulted in a still existing line of descendants. The Catholic Church wants to keep this a secret, of course. Brown claims that Leonardo da Vinci was among the insiders and that he put appropriate hints into his paintings, such as the “Lord’s Supper,” where the figure of the apostle John is allegedly the depiction of Mary Magdalene.

I was not really sure if I really wanted to hear the lecture today, since I expected it to blow into the same horn as Dan Brown. My fear was unwarranted, however. The lecture was held by Frank Zöllner, a leading Leonardo expert (list of publications in English). With a pleasant combination of details from art history and aesthetics and an eloquent presentation, he deconstructed Brown’s claims as well as his credibility as a writer. Zöllner gladly admitted that the book was a very captivating piece of writing. It was the very success of the book that motivated him to this lecturing series and lead to heated debates on the public interest in the science of aesthetics. However, he also warned emphatically about the absolutely unprovable respectively clearly wrong picture interpretations made by the author Dan Brown. I was impressed by Zöllner’s calm and factual analyses. A thesis that I find interesting beyond this context is that conspiracy theories result from a feeling of powerlessness.

Besides the art-historical blunders of Brown which Frank Zöllner exposed, I am concerned about the spiritual motivation behind the book. I am quite critical of the institutional (state) church myself. However, Brown goes much further by questioning the authority and credibility of the Bible as God’s Word. This in itself is nothing noteworthy for a “secular” author. The danger lies in his strategy of selling things as facts which are not facts at all, combined with using style so cleverly as to let his readers quickly forget that this is a novel and not a textbook. One can only hope for a responsible treatment of such books by the readers, which I find hard to do given the increasingly anti-Christian spin in the media.

It occurred to me today how much influence the free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has gained. In a seminar for my Arts minor every student had to give a five to ten minute presentation on an artist or an art technique. I had chosen lithography and, in preparation for the presentation, looked for artists who had used this technique. Since I am interested in M. C. Escher’s work, I read the appropriate Wikipedia page. Now, one of the presentations focused exclusively on Escher. I could almost guess every sentence, that is how closely they resembled the Wikipedia entry. This was a partly hilarious, partly sobering experience – I did not prepare my presentation much differently.

I am very thankful for the possibilites which Wikipedia offers. On the other hand, one should never rely on a single source only, especially if it is not professionally edited. Of course, it is great that you can correct errors yourself immediately if you encounter them.

By invitation of our design professor, I had the opportunity today to present Kaleidotype to his class. For the remainder of the lecture, he showed a couple of films by Virgil Widrich, an Austrian filmmaker. I liked “Fast Film” best, which is a hard-to-describe but very ingenious short film. On the website you will find good background information, but I will tell you this much: Over a period of two years, 65,000 paper objects (such as paper planes) were folded, on each of which one still frame from about 300 action films was visible. These were then assembled with stop-motion techniques in order to produce a new, 14-minute short film. The “Making Of” feature on the website explains a good deal.

Here is an interesting thought taken from the interview with Virgil Widrich: Since the main characters switch constantly, being assembled from several hundred films, Fast Film employs the main story every action film is based upon: The story of a hero who has to save his kidnapped love out of the claws of evil characters. It is this abstraction which makes this film even possible. Also, every individual person watching Fast Film sees his own film, since he recognizes certain actors, films and situations but not others, and so his attention is focused on only a few of the “films within the film.”

Of course, I’m also fascinated by the incredible patience this puzzle of a project demanded. And it was all done without computer animation! Genuine craftsmanship still does have its merits.

After getting my blog started with Blogger, I quickly looked for an alternative more suitable to my needs. Blogger is nice and free, and you can even have your blog on your own domain if you have one. However, there are some drawbacks to using Blogger:

• no categories for organizing posts
• because all pages are static HTML, the entire blog needs to be rebuilt every time you modify anything
• the main database is still stored at Blogger, even if you host the blog pages yourself
• limited customization (I admittedly didn’t start to investigate thoroughly)

After a short interlude trying NanoBlogger, a nice command-line–based blog engine for UNIX geeks, I looked at some of those giant blog comparison charts, read a couple of reviews, and decided to go with WordPress. It is available as a free hosting service, just like Blogger, as well as an open source project for self-hosters, which would be me. What is so nice about WordPress?

• categories, even multiple per post
• dynamic generation of pages from a MySQL database, using PHP templates – this means you can modify anything and see changes instantly!
• completely customizable, including writing your own PHP functions if you are so inclined
• excellent user interface (very important to me), both in terms of looks and usability
• very light and small (less than 600 KB zipped)
• installs in less than five minutes, provided you have PHP and MySQL activated on the server
• local install possible (requirements are the same)
• does not (yet) officially support multiple blogs, but can simply be installed in several locations at no cost – it’s free

The only thing that is a bit cumbersome in my case is that I need to keep two copies of almost anything synchronized; one for the English version of my blog, one for the German version. On the other hand, several things must be localized for the language anyway, so it’s only a problem with style sheets and functions which are language-agnostic. Everything else is so nice that it makes me smile every time I write a post.

In a later post I will give detailed instructions on how to install WordPress locally on Mac OS X, so you can save the couple of hours it took me to figure out why I couldn’t get a database connection.

There is one thing that has been bothering me for a long time: The sad and bitter faces of people in the public. In Dresden/Germany, where I live, I use the excellent public transport system almost every single day. It’s the perfect place to watch people of all ages and backgrounds. Today, I was especially struck by the bitter looks of several elderly women. I’m sure they have been through a lot: Most probably experienced World War II and the hard times after (the memorial day of Dresden’s bombing is coming up on February 13). Some may have lost their father or brother. Then came 40 years of socialist rule in the GDR. Quite a lot of people built their life on the system, so its crashing collapse in 1989 was not a liberating experience for all, like it was for me. Economic demise and decline in population have taken their toll on the pension system too, whereas the switch to the Euro currency seems to have increased prices.

Still, Germany is one of the richest countries in the world. How is it possible that we are world leaders in complaining? (I’m not excluding myself – it’s a very easy thing to do …) We’re back to the question of meaning in life. As for me, I’m still struggling with it occasionally, but because I entrusted my life to God, I know that I am in His hands. Another thing that plays into all of this is the insecurity of older people toward the younger generation, for which I cannot really blame them. The question I have is this: How can we, how can I reach out to all those sad and bitter people?

On a happier note, I did notice an older couple in a bus who were very sweet to each other and seemed to enjoy just riding through the city. There is hope.

I am a lover of grand, emotional orchestral music. The soundtrack for “The Chronicles Of Narnia” by Harry Gregson-Williams combines this with ethnic instruments and modern drums, providing even more impact and variety. My favorite track is probably #2, “Evacuating London.” After a long time, this was the first piece of music which I liked so much that I wanted to play it myself on the piano. The composer came up with some very simple and beautiful themes, which lend themselves easily to adaptation. Other tracks I especially like are #7, “From Western Woods To Beaversdam,” #8, “Father Christmas,” and #9, “To Aslan’s Camp,” which is not to say that there aren’t any other well-done pieces on the CD.

Besides the film soundtrack, there are four additional songs by more and less known artists. Track #15, “Wunderkind,” is by Alanis Morissette. I still need to figure out some of her very poetic language … The title is peculiar, since it is a German word meaning “miracle child.” Alas, Alanis pronounces it wrong, just like the English word “kind” meaning “category” or “gentle.” However, she should have been given the clue that “wunderkind” has the same “kind” in it as “kindergarten” (which English also borrows from German), with the “i” pronounced like in “in.” The strangest track is probably #16, “Winter Light,” by Tim Finn. But all in all, it is very good CD – highly recommended!