Arthur Chang

Journalists may be telling their stories to the wrong audience

Journalists are currently hard to believe.  There's so much skepticism around what they're reporting, that sometimes the truth is skewed with just a fanciful exaggeration trying to elicit some interest from the world.  But think about why journalists do this?  Why do they have to go to such great lengths to make anyone interested in what they have to say?  Maybe because they're trying to show their stories to the wrong audience.

The goals of most good journalists are to expose stories that are not common knowledge.  Telling the stories can just end there, or they can have a purpose of trying to get people to take action and fix the problems that are happening.  Journalists are trying to reach people who can actually make a difference, people who they think have the immediate power to make create a change.

The people who seem to be able to help are those with money, in the governement, and individual adults who can be effective as a group.  But I wonder if this is the right crowd.

It's true, you will get the few government officials intrigued, you will get a few altruistic celebrities to help out, and you'll also get a bunch of people tweeting something and making a big stink.  But in the end, these things sort of die out before they're solved.

Has anyone thought of kids?  Let's take the movie Inception that we've all seen as a trendy analogy to what I'm about to talk about.  In the movie, they have to persuade a person to genuinely believe in an idea.  They do this by "inception," by planting the idea in a dream (well, if you want to get technical about the movie, it was a dream inside a dream inside a dream inside of another dream...).  But think about kids.  They live in a world that is less polluted by what society deems as responsibilities, they are much less desensitized by extreme issues, and if you can show them the problems out there, the goals in their lives may be less about becoming the next G.I. Joe fighting terrorists or becoming rich plastic surgeons, but more about fixing the issues that already exist in their world.

What if journalists and photo journalists especially, can paint a picture of current events that affect the world, which eventually becomes something a kid really becomes aware of.  What if all kids understood all of the problems going on, when they became old enough to act upon these ideas, could it be much more effective?  Why try to persuade someone with a home, kids, investments, money, lobbyists, to do something out of the ordinary?  Instead, get kids to understand that the world isn't perfect, and that they need to already have experience looking outside of the little sheltered bubble they live in, so that when it's time to act, journalists don't need to persuade them to think out of their learned abilities.

Journalists persuading adults who didn't grow up understanding issues results in exaggerations, which lessens credibility, which leads to no action.  But journalists who can persuade adults who have lived their whole lives understanding the issues since they were little, will need much less sugar coating.

I think it's worth thinking about shifting classes for kids from past historic problems, and give them more wakeup calls on what's happening right now, as brutal as it may be.  If you want to change the future, you have to start from who the future is.

* the photo at top is part of a series of photographs I took at the San Quentin Prison, telling the story of high turnover inmates.  One day I hope to speak to kids about the program, to show them a brighter side of the prison system that can make a difference in the world. See more here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kinetic/sets/72157615878263928/with/3384729400/  

Nikkor 85mm f1.4G AF-S

I've been waiting for this lens for a long time now.  If I had an all time wishlist, this would have been the #1 item on the list.  Yes, it would be above the Aston Martin One 77!

I've been looking for a replacement for my current AF Nikkor 85mm f/1.4D, which is nice but painfully slow to auto-focus and inaccurate in really crazy situations that my D700 camera body excels in.  I'm finding myself in awesome low light situations, but hindered by the 1.4D's inability to focus that quickly and accurately in the same conditions.  With AF-S lenses, like a 50 1.4G, it's magnitudes faster.  I love the D700 + 85mm matchup, this just makes it an even better tool.

The key differences between the two lenses at first glance are:

AF-S vs. AF
Way faster auto focus is key here.  I'm totally excited about this.  Low light shooting will be revolutionized! 

Weight, 1.4G is 23.3 oz, the 1.4D is 19.4oz
Gosh, the 1.4D was already heavy enough, but with better technology in lenses, usually means heavier.  I'll have to hit the gym even more. 

Size, 1.4G is smaller in length by two whole inches
Even though the lens is heavier, it's smaller by more than 2 whole inches! Going from 5.7" down to 3.3".  That's great. Much easier to pack and much more subtle.

1.4G has a longer minimum focal length, 3ft vs. 2.8ft
Which is fine, not that big of a difference here

Cute lens nano crystal and silent wave things
Whatever these are, who cares.  If the picture quality was at least as good as before, then this won't make them any cooler!

I'm already deciding which kidney to sell in order to fund this purchase.  I'm already really poor due to starting Fanvibe.com, so hopefully kidneys still go for at least the going rate of these lenses of $1700, slotted to be available this September 2010.  I bet the backordering will be painful.  I'm guessing I won't get a copy of this lens until January. 

We'll just have to see if this lens can hold up to my hope for glory and enlightenment.

Internet Explorer doesn't play nice with Rails 2+ respond_to blocks

One out of the millions of things wrong with Internet Explorer, is that it has strange Accept headers when sending a request to a server.  What happens in the end of it all is that IE request hits the first format you define in a respond_to block.  I found this funny transcript from http://garrickvanburen.com/archive/workaround-for-ie-overly-accepting-in-rail...

Here’s a conversation between Rails & Firefox

Firefox: “Hey Rails, I want this url”
Rails: “No problem, which format would you like it in?”
Firefox: “HTML, please.”
Rails: “Here you go.”

Here’s the same conversation with Internet Explorer

IE: “Hey Rails, I want this url”
Rails: “No problem, which format would you like it in?”
IE: “Whatcha got?”
Rails: “I’ve got Atom, and…”
IE: (interputting) “OK THANKS!”
Rails: “…um, what? I wasn’t finished, really? ok, here you go.”

The workarounds are pretty gross.  Every html request just pass along a :format => :html.  You can also make sure your AJAX calls goto .js if you put format.js blocks before anything else, or specifically set the request header for all AJAX calls as well like so:

xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "text/javascript" )

This google group thread is also a good quick read: http://groups.google.com/group/wellrailed/browse_thread/thread/619ad1b3c5a487cd

(photo is unrelated to topic! picture I took of my friend Anna)

Three Different Kinds of Photographers

There are three main kinds of photographers: Film, Digital, and Did not answer.

Film photographers are usually hardcore film people.  Almost all of them do not have any form of Digital SLR, nor do they have any plans for ever owning digital.  These Film photographers pride themselves in processing film, and using super old tools to show that they are far superior to digital photographers, since it's more difficult.  They also believe that photography as an art, is still just being able to process film.  Most take their film to Costco unfortunately, or have those "mom and pop shops" process them because that's way more hip.  If any processing is done by themselves, it's usually in black and white.  They generally don't do Flickr, but hitup forums talking about how old their equipment is, and what cool camera body they found at a garage sale.  The older and more plastic the camera is, the cooler they are.  They try to find digital photographers in order to show off a superior skill.

Digital photographers love their gadgets.  They always ignore and try to avoid talking and mingling with film photographers, mostly because they don't want to realize that their photography skills might just be because of their awesome digital tools, and not their actual ability to take photos.  Thus they avoid film photographers if they can help it, and flock together in packs, usually picking fun at those who have a different brand of camera than them (Nikon vs Canon is a usual argument starter).  Digital guys usually have a Nikon or Canon strap that they uncomfortably use, but must wear to show off their gear brand.  Digital photographers also almost always use Flickr, and brag about the exif information and like to tag their photos with their equipment information.  You're a good digital photographer if you know how two use all sorts of equipment, including flash, strobes, white balance techniques, etc.  Conversations you will hear include: "crop and full frame sensors," "Nikon is so slow to provide updated lenses, hence my photos are being hindered," "Canon's quality control has gone down, I might have to switch if it wasn't for their awesome 1080p," "read the manual, it tells you how to set your white balance".  In order for some digital photographers not to feel like they totally depend on technology, they claim to only shoot in JPG and not RAW because they're hardcore and a pretty big hypocrite (analogous to film photographers resistance towards digital film in the form of RAW).

Then there are the photographers who didn't answer if they were film or digital, mostly because they're actually out taking good photos that everyone else is missing.

So don't be like me, sitting around writing blog posts and reading about gear, get out there and take good photographs.

(photo taken of issa when we were at Sterling Vineyards in Napa)

set the environment on local rake tasks

I just learned the hard way that running rake tasks on your development machine doesn't mean it uses the development rails environment.  In fact, if you don't specify, it puts you in production!

I was trying to run a DelayedJob worker that cross posts to Twitter.  I was trying to sign the rest api call to Twitter, but I use a token / secret depending on the environment.  Unfortunately, running the DelayedJob locally, I didn't specify development environment, so it kept using the wrong token/secret pair to successfully sign my Twitter request.

Finally, this worked:

rake jobs:work RAILS_ENV=development

This is how I shoot

A few people have been asking me what equipment or how I get the photos that I get.  I used to say that equipment didn't matter, but I now believe that's wrong.  It does depend on the equipment, and how little you fiddle with it in order to concentrate on capturing the moment.  It all comes down to how you see the photograph after it is taken, after the post processing is done, how it shows up on a website or in a frame, and what story it will tell, all before you even take the shot.  If you're totally preoccupied with all your cool new gear, your fancy flash unit and gels, getting white balance right even before you take a shot, you're going to get distracted.  That's not to say all this gear is good, but you have to really practice it so that it's second nature on how to use it all, in order to really get the pictures you want.  That said, I know plenty of awesome photographers that use a nice medley of gear really well, so well that they can give 100% of their concentration to the composition.  For me, I keep it extremely simple:

Equipment:

Nikon D700
Nikon 84mm f/1.4
Nikon 20mm f/2.8

Settings:

Camera body:
Aperture Priority
Auto ISO (200-Hi.2)
Min-shutter speed (1/100s for the 85, 1/30s for the 20)
RAW lossless

Lenses:
85mm: f/1.6 - f/2.8 for most shots, landscapes get f/8 +
20mm: f/2.8 - f/4 for most shots, landscapes get f/8 +

That's it =)  I set all the above, and all I need to play with is aperture, which even stays consistent unless I am changing what I'm shooting.  I rarely take any other lenses out anymore, except a macro lens when I need an extreme closeup. 

My Sister's Wedding

My sister is absolutely beautiful. And one could argue that the dress, the hair do, the makeup, her amazingly warm and thoughtful heart really makes her that beautiful... but I am going to let you in on a secret. There's something that sets this moment apart from her usual and perpetual beauty, something that's far more powerful yet simple than the love she spreads around to whomever she can reach out to: happiness.

I have known my sister before we were both even born. We were probably eggs back then in our mother, but she was that one egg that kept looking out for all the others. She made sure that every other egg was happy, and knew what was going on. I'm sure that when it was her turn to become the beautiful person that she is today, she gave me a reassuring nod that everything would be ok. And it would be, because of her. Yes, super strange egg story, but let's continue =)

Since I was born, my sister has been there for me. I lived a very spoiled life, and still do! She has been my role model, my inspiration, and my sister, the best sister ever. She's taken care of me beyond anything I could even imagine. Even through her shouting and yelling at me whenever I turned her "My Little Ponies" into my Gi-Joe's warhorses, and when I snuck into her room to look at all her cool stuff when she wasn't home, she always took care of me.

And it wasn't only me, everyone she met was touched by her kindness. She also attracted the most awesome friends ever, and with them they became successful in their own ways, but the closeness and unconditional care for each other always makes me look on with awe. Her friends and our family were there for my sister as much as she was there for us, but she has always been incredibly independent and strong.

I remember when she wanted to scan negative prints of her film camera into our computer at home. She struggled with it for hours and hours, and when I came home she had given up. It was a simple and trivial thing, but when she saw me she smiled and went to her room. My mom told me she had been trying to do something with the computer all day, and said I should go help her. I realized what she was trying to do, and at that point, I felt sad that she wasn't able to do it for so long, never asked for help, and now that it didn't work out, she was able to calmly go on to something else. Me? I would've asked for help within 10 seconds of something not working, I would've screamed and shouted. But she was strong.

When she got into college, it was all her. My parents didn't even know she was at the age for college. I remember the morning when she went to my parent's room, and I was able to her. She announced that she was going to a college called "Columbia." My dad said, "South America? College already?" My sister had applied and gotten into one of the world's best colleges, all on her own. The frustration, stress, and everything she took on herself. I couldn't be any prouder than that. My parents were amazed. She got as many scholarships as possible to pay for it, and she made the most out of her education. I never heard a single complaint from her through anything.

After graduating undergrad, she went on to Boalt Law School, and while there she met Pete.

The only times I see my sister stress out, is when she's trying to figure out something for me (like college apps), or if she's trying to help parents or friends out with something. When she went to Law School, that was the first time I saw her stress about something for herself. Studying and all that was hard on her.

When she graduated, she went on to a huge law firm in San Francisco. She quickly took on big cases, one noteable one took place in Los Angeles. I went to visit her one day, since LA was pretty close to my college (UC Santa Barbara, go gauchos!), and expected to see my usual friendly sister, who went way out of her way to make me happy. She was the one person I could turn to, no matter what, to make me smile. But when I saw her, I was scared. She was stressed, she couldn't smile, and she was frustrated at everything. Never did I ever think or even expect the world to come to a point where she was beyond calming herself down.

I didn't know what to say or do.

It was around 9:30pm, and she just had a 14 hour work day (or so). Her company gave her a really nicely furnished temporary apartment while she was working on the case in LA. I was just gonna hangout and crash with her over the weekend since I wanted to be wherever my sister was. Heck, I was even planning to goto Law School myself, so why not try to shadow her?

By that time, Pete was already with my sister, and he had come down to LA to visit her as well. I wondered if he was just there to hangout as well. I liked Pete, but I didn't know exactly why yet, it was just a feeling.

The whole day while my sister was at work, and while I was waiting for her to get back to her apartment, me and Pete hung out. We walked around downtown LA, and just chilled at the apartment. Pete had been checking the T.V. throughout the day, and was doing some work of his own.

When my sister came back, and after I was surprised by how stressed she was, was the precise moment I realized why I liked Pete, and why I would always like Pete.

He came to the rescue. He told her he had recorded all her favorite T.V. shows, and brought some movies if she wanted to watch that, and kept asking her if she'd like to take a nice shower and then come back and watch some T.V. with him on the couch. He kept gently encouraging her to relax and to come hang out with him. She refused for a long time.

I think I must have stared blankly in silence at my computer for about 2 hours, but by the time I realized what I had been doing (which was nothing) for that time, I heard my sister laugh. I looked over at the couch, and there she was, smiling and laughing with Pete. Sharing her day with him. Pete never ceased to smile at her, to listen to her, and to help her through the stress. His patience, respect, and love for her became crystal clear to me. At that moment, I knew that my sister had finally found the one who could give her the one piece of her life that makes her completely beautiful: happiness.

Last weekend at my Sister's wedding, I saw her happiness, and she was beautiful.

You should check out more photos I took from the wedding here

HTC EVO 4G to replace iPhone

I'm considering replacing my iPod Touch, I mean my iPhone with AT&T.  I have an old 3G, which is slow, and doesn't ever work as a phone thanks to AT&T's horrible service.  I've been struggling with it for a year now, and the only reason I'm still hanging with it is because it's an Apple product.

My friends have been recommending the Incredible and the Evo 4G, but the fact that the EVO 4G can act as a MiFi device definitely started making me think.

Tethering is a big deal for me.  I love to work on the go, and putting myself in weird spots to work somehow motivates me.  I hate being constrained to an office, or a desk at home, to do all my work.  Routine kills me.  If I can sit in front of the 200,000 gallon reef tank at the California Academy of Science while coding, or at an awesome cafe that's void of people because it has no free WiFi, I'd be the happiest person ever.  Unfortunately, my work consists of constantly using the internet.  Tethering to devices with AT&T is unavailable now (without gross jailbreaking and unlocking that I still haven't figured out how to do successfully).

I came up with a few pros and cons using the iPhone as a basis for how I'm going to make a decision on whether to switch or not.  Ditching an Apple product is going to be hard.

Pros:

• Tethering up to 8 devices
• It can be used as a phone with Sprint (hopefully)
• 1GHz processor: apps etc. will feel much faster than on my 3G
• Video camera (720p!) - my iPhone 3G doesn't have video
• $10 data plan as opposed to the usual $30 from AT&T

Cons:

• Not an Apple product
• $30 for tethering plan, same as the Sprint 4G Mifi device, so not that much more compelling other than it's just one phone device rather than two devices
• It's pretty wide (I already thought the iPhone was a bit too big)

The pricing will be: $69.99 (unlimited voice/txt) + $10 (data) + $30 (tethering) = $110 / month

My iPhone costs: $100 / month (no unlimited text, no tethering... hell no voice either most of the time)

Kind of a no brainer?

Rails.cache override in development

My friend Calvin (IntoMobile Developer) and I were just talking about keeping your app from caching with Rails.cache in development mode.  One nice way to do it is to wrap all your Rails.cache calls in your application_controller.rb.  In this wrapping call, you can determine whether or not to execute the caching or to just let it through in development.  Another benefit is being able to change your caching behavior in the future without needing to mess around with every single line of code that you've written for caching.

In my development.rb file, I define the following:

I am using the memcache gem, rather than the more popular memcache-client gem, and running memcached on my development box as well (I like testing with it running, rather than using the built in rails way of storing it in memory).  The reason for using memcache gem is because I'm currently hosting our app on Heroku, which requires this gem to work in tandem with their cloud solution for memcached.

The CACHE constant is setup to use this memcache gem's caching mechanism, which would be equivalent to the built in Rails.cache.  Setting this constant up allows me to change this in my environment files once, without ever needing to worry about all the places I set it up.

Then there's the cache_store, which I set correctly to use Memcached gem.  This will help me store the cache correctly.

CACHE_DEVELOPMENT constant is for me to turn caching on / off for development mode.  You'll see how it works in the next piece of code below.

The last two lines that are commented out basically control action and class caching, which doesn't really effect if Rails.cache even goes through.  So just setting these two things to false, Rails.cache will still try to cache.  In order to keep this from happening, we have to do some logic in our application controller wrapper, here it is:

The cache_fetch method will be called everytime I want a cache call from a controller.  I pass in the cache_key as the first parameter to basically name this cache result, and I also accept the period of time the cache is kept before it expires.  0 means it never expires, so that is the default value.

The conditional statement basically allows me to turn caching on or off.  If I'm in the development environment and the constant CACHE_DEVELOPMENT is set to false, I just let the block through without hitting any caching.  Otherwise it goes into the caching logic.

Check out that # CACHE.fetch(key, time_expire){yield} block.  This is how it used to work, but recently a few things changed so that I needed to do a get, and if that didn't exist I'd have to manually set it.  I'm not sure why this happened, or if it's still needed, but you can see how I was able to change this detail in one place, rather than everywhere I tried to cache.

The rest shows you how I'm caching.  This would be ugly if I had to do all of that everytime I wanted to cache a result, and even worse if something changed.  This way I can control the development environment for testing caching, as well as keeping code as DRY as possible.

Here's a simple example of how I call the cache_fetch action from my controller:

Hope that helps!

Nic and Christy's Wedding

I absolutely love weddings! Everyone is always happy, excited, and there's love everywhere you go.  Nic and Christy's wedding was all that and more.  These two are always smiling, laughing, and having a great time.  The friends and family of Nic and Christy's I met were awesome people.  I had a blast, and was honored to be a guest at this celebration.

As usual, I brought my camera with me!  Between chatting and sips from the wine glass and mojitos, I was able to grab a few snapshots.  Below are a few teasers, all photos that I took from the wedding can be found here: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/2fiRy8

Check out Nic's face on the left:

Here are all the friends, family, and other outtakes from the day: