Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

New photos uploaded

The past few weeks I went through my slide folders and scanned some of the ones I liked the most.

Shooting film is a lot of fun. Especially the slow film - ISO 50 or ISO 100 - forces you to shoot from a tripod. This in turn forces you to slow down and do the right thing with exposure and composition. The equipment is bulkier and heavier than carrying a small digital camera, but the results are much nicer.

To eliminate most of the costs associated with shooting film, I decided to do my own film development, which so far has provided very good results, with only few failures. I shoot and develop color slides, since it's a lot easier than with print film. With slides I can look at them on the lightbox or project them on the wall screen, without going through the complicated print process.

Few months ago I updated to a better Canon camera to have the ability to download the shooting information. I've written a small Java program that takes this information and generates a PDF file for printing slide labels, that I attach to individual slides.

I've setup few albums in my picture gallery. The pictures in Valley Of Fire were made in the (very) early morning of the first day at ApacheCon 2003. The ones in Red Rock State Park were made the next early morning, when I convinced Steven to come along for a hike.

If you feel inclined to critique, please leave a comment.

SCO attacks GPL

SCO has decided to attack GPL by drafting this letter to Congress. (via The Register).

This attach is remarcably similar to Craig Mundie's attack on GPL and Open Source, from almost two years ago.

All of the usages of "free" in both letters are associated with money, not with freedom. In fact such freedom is deemed dangerous to our national economy and security. I hope not to see free software/open source developers labeled as terrorists.

Both letters completely ignore the fact that many companies make money by extending or building on top of these free software projects, while at the same time playing nice with respect to the communities involved. They also don't mention the innovations made possible by exactly this model: how about GCC, GDB, Emacs, Perl, Python, PHP, Apache, and many others?