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… and I haven’t even gotten it yet. I’ve placed an order with Adorama for a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and expect to have the new full-frame body in about three weeks. I was never in love with my 5D Mark II, which was subject to massive autoexposure errors in contrasty outdoor scenes (i.e., the very conditions in which most families would be taking photos) and whose autofocus system was at best fair. From what I’ve read about the 5D Mark III I’m already a bit disappointed. Despite having a massive battery and enormous processing power, the camera lacks an 802.11 modem. A $49 Android phone can trickle JPEGs up to Google+ for sharing with friends, etc.; why can’t a $3500 camera? I’m sure the image quality will be higher than from a camera phone, but the workflow for simple photography tasks will be vastly worse.

I will try to write more after I receive the camera from Adorama.

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I decided to try out Carbonite for online backup of a desktop PC. The machine has a 160 GB solid state C: drive and a 2 TB traditional hard drive. After 1.5 months, Carbonite is about 74 percent done with the initial backup (about 300 GB total?). The seasonal pace of the backup isn’t a serious problem for me, but the fact that the software has built up a 31 GB log file on the C: drive is. WinDirStat (awesome free software) shows that this single carbonite.log file is now larger than all of Microsoft Windows 7. I spent two hours this morning in chat with Carbonite support (in Lewiston, Maine) and was eventually simply disconnected. I tried another couple of hours on hold with their technical support phone line, but never reached anyone with any technical knowledge.

I’ve tailed out this log file and it doesn’t seem as though it could be useful to a computer program. It has entries such as

1330816462 # 7336:Backup progress: completed 1%, file counts last 1:41:31 A
ll: 42 (490M bytes) Unique: 42 (490M bytes), Compressed: 499M bytes.
1330816462 # 7336:Backup progress: remaining 12 days, file counts All: 1030
722 (174G bytes), Pending: 290 (58G bytes).
1330816476 # 6824:Pending file "K:\AdobeMediaCacheFilesFromCDrive0076.MTS
48000.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214382-G1-V1:V1).
1330816476 # 7224:PutFile: Backed up part 1 of file/folder "K:\AdobeMediaCa
cheFilesFromCDrive0075.MTS 48000_1.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214380-G1-V1, 129 bl
ocks).
1330816476 # 7224:Backed up file "K:\AdobeMediaCacheFilesFromCDrive0075.M
TS 48000_1.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214380-G1-V1:V1), size 8M, sent 10M (126%).
1330816479 # [Activity] 7232:CPU usage: 0% process, 3% system
1330816479 # [Activity] 7232:DISK usage: 366892 bytes/sec process, 644193 b
ytes/sec system
1330816509 # [Activity] 7232:CPU usage: 0% process, 2% system
1330816509 # [Activity] 7232:DISK usage: 139762 bytes/sec process, 37003 by
tes/sec system
1330816512 = 18:15:12

I’m reluctant simply to delete the file, however, because I’m afraid that it might cause Carbonite to start over and throw away 1.5 months of uploading. The software does not seem to have any settings where one can specify that a drive other than C: be used for logging.

Thoughts on this? Or suggestions of an alternative to Carbonite that won’t result in unchecked consumption of C: drive space?

[November 1, 2012 update: After seven months, Carbonite has managed to back up 384 MB of data and still has 88 MB to go. Buried deep within the Carbonite web site, very far from anyone making a purchase decision, is a disclosure that bandwidth is throttled at 100 kbps or 1 GB per day. So while Carbonite technically is “unlimited” in its ability to back up a desktop PC, it will take 2000 days (5.5 years) to back up a standard 2 TB hard drive. A photographer who captures more than 40 digital SLR RAW files per day will never be backed up. A parent who takes more than 8 minutes of HD video from a compact digital camera (AVCHD format) per day will never be backed up. Carbonite never developed a fix for the “creates huge log file on C: drive” problem, though maybe it is by design. If Carbonite itself fills up the C: drive then the user can’t add too many photos and videos!]

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Greece is in trouble because its government spends a lot more than it raises in taxes and because their society allocates a lot of resources to the unproductive and/or non-working. How did the U.S. Congress respond to this crisis today? Our leaders cut the payroll tax while maintaining growing government spending and simultaneously continued the practice of paying former workers to stay home and play Xbox for more than one year.

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I enjoyed an outdoor lunch today with a young Dutchwoman. She is married to a hard-charging American litigator and there is a big age difference. I asked whether this wasn’t a recipe for epic problems. She said “I established a system where if one of us does something to upset the other, he or she says ‘I put something into the complaint box and we can discuss it tomorrow.’ Chances are, the next day I will already know what he was talking about and I will bring it up.” Ultimately, though, she said it was necessary to accept the other person. She knocked on the square wooden table and said “You can round off the corners, but your spouse will still have the same basic shape.”

[In case you’re wondering who eats lunch outdoors in February… I’m in Puerto Rico, staying in a charming family-owned hotel (i.e., the 646-room Caribe Hilton) and taking a daily holistic mood-improving medication made with local ingredients (i.e., pina coladas, supposedly invented here at the Hilton).]

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Some good things about the movie “A Separation”… It is dramatic even though nothing extraordinary happens, a tribute to the filmmakers (I think it is much more challenging to make a movie that is realistic than one in which amazing stuff occurs). The characters spend the entire movie enmeshed in the Iranian legal system, which seems to be a lot more efficient than ours and perhaps just about as effective and fair. The judge, parties, and witnesses interact in a cramped office, not in an august courtroom. Generally speaking, there are no lawyers. The judge asks questions himself and tries to figure out who is most credible.

Given the extent to which Iran is demonized here in the U.S., it is helpful to see a movie in which Iranians live more or less as we do. Husbands and wives argue. Aging parents need to be cared for. Children study. People get stuck in traffic or wait for buses.

There are some big issues explored in the movie, but they are presented in the context of fairly small events.

Wikipedia says that the movie was made for $500,000 in Iran. If so, that’s a pretty damning comment on Hollywood.

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One of the changes from having a child in the house is that friends and relatives want to have video chats with me whereas previously they were content to talk by phone (or not to talk at all!). I’ve tried Skype and Facetime and Google Chat on computers ranging from a 6-core monster to an iPad 2. Whether hardwired to the 5/15 Mbps Verizon FiOS connection or connected via 802.11n, the quality is almost always terrible, with jerky video and unreliable audio.

I can’ t figure out why this is. A reasonable voice phone call can be had with a 12 kbit/second connection. The same computers and Internet connection are used very successfully to stream high quality videos down from YouTube and NetFlix. The same network was used very successfully with Vonage for smooth voice calls. It can’t be a server issue, I don’t think, because these services should be peer-to-peer. I don’t think it is a too-hard-to-compress issue. The 6-core machine can compress a 1080p AVCHD video into a 720p .mp4 file in about 50% of real-time (i.e., can process 2 minutes of video in 1 minute), so presumably even a single CPU core should be able to do compression on the low-resolution videos that are standard for these services.

Why is it that the golden age of video conferencing is not yet upon us?

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We finished our three-day RDBMS/SQL programming course yesterday at MIT. It was a very satisfying experience for me and a great one for many students due to the heavy teacher-student ratio (this weblog was very helpful in attracting volunteers, another triumph for the Web!). I was pretty wiped out after three days of 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. It is easy to understand why lab courses aren’t more popular among computer science teachers. Consider how painful it is to debug your own code and then imagine a room full of 50 newbies pointing to 15 lines of rather bizarre SQL and asking “Why doesn’t it work?”

One funny moment was the student who showed up to the lab course without a laptop computer. In the old days, of course, it was not uncommon to show up and ask another student to borrow a pen. But a whole computer? Yet sure enough, another student pulled out a spare laptop, freshly installed with Ubuntu, and said “You can use this one.”

Michael Stonebraker gave an amazing 2-hour talk and question/answer session. Afterwards, my friend Avni gushed “That was fantastic. It made volunteering for all three days worth it.” When I complained about the implication that my own mini-lectures and solutions discussions were less than inspiring, she tried to make me feel better. Somehow this included saying “Wow, John [Morgan], you’re exactly half Philip’s age.”

Considering that students flew in from as far away as Indiana and San Francisco and almost unanimously said that it was worth the trip, I will check off the class as a pedagogical success. Fortunately we won’t be teaching this again for another year, so my ego will have a chance to heal…

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Folks:

Back in November, I published http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/11/03/where-does-google-actually-say-that-they-wont-read-gmail-messages-or-google-docs/ wondering if Google ever promises not to go curiously through one’s Google Docs (or elaborates beyond a single FAQ on the question of whether Google employees are allowed to read Gmail messages). Lately I’ve been getting a variety of notifications from Google about the new improved privacy policies but I still can’t find anything on the subject of “Can Google read my word processing docs and spreadsheets?”

Thanks in advance if you have figured this out…

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Politicians anxious to keep feeding the government are talking about new tax ideas, e.g., a special tax that would kick in when a person earned over $1 million per year. One problem with this approach is that it represents a further discouragement to investors and entrepreneurs in a country that is already looking like a bad place for most kinds of investment.

Employees and managers have done a lot better than U.S. investors over the past 10-20 years. A mid-level employee might earn $400,000 per year. An investor or entrepreneur, by contrast, might earn very little for 5-10 years and then finally cash out with $1-2 million. For that one good year, the investor looks like a rich guy, ripe for high taxation, but in reality the employee has done far better, especially on a risk-adjusted basis.

This is not an argument against a special tax, by the way, merely a reminder that it will further push the U.S. toward a culture in which young people want to be employees and managers at established companies.

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Today we celebrate the memory of one of our greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder if any of our politicians will stand up and say “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white because probably there are at least a few hundred million people in China who are smarter, better-educated, and harder-working than you and private companies would much rather hire any of them.”

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