As I recently discussed, I’ve recently acquired a camera for improving my family photography (and maybe also indulging in some hobbyist photography as well). My original motivation for purchasing that camera was not just to have better quality digital photos, but especially to have beautiful photos which I can frame or put into family albums. Now that I’ve been shooting for a little while, I decided to order some prints online. Although my father (and significant photography influencer) uses AdoramaPix, I heard good things about Mpix and decided to give them a go. ...

• photography

On July 4th, I jetted over to B&H to pick up a new(ly used) camera. I walked out with a Fujifilm X100T mirrorless point-and-shoot camera. This is the story of how I chose that camera, and how I feel about it a few weeks later. It all begins… with me staying up until 4 o’clock in the morning one Saturday night. What had begun as an innocent review of my family photos perversely devolved into a compulsive episode of researching cameras with which to upgrade said family photos. Those family photos were recorded almost exclusively with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6; yet, once printed, the quality left quite a bit to be desired. ...

• photography

For the past few years, I’ve been interested in a more powerful digital photography workflow solution than the brutish practice of shuffling JPG files around on my hard drive and hoping for the best. I have really been seeking one (or more) specialized programs which can handle the common photography tasks of organizing photos from the moment they leave the camera to their final resting place on my hard drive (and/or backup server), and performing common photo editing upon them like curve adjustments and blemish removal. These solutions also needed to work natively on Windows, integrate well with NAS solutions, and be capable enough with RAW files. I was willing to pay for the software, but I didn’t want to have to spend more than $75, and certainly not over $100, considering I am at best an amateur photographer. I’m also mindful of my privacy1. After spending several hours researching the options available to me, I have decided to use ACDSee Pro 10 as my one-stop shop. ...

• photography

One of the programming languages I’ve (essentially) been ignoring for the past couple of years has been Kotlin, the “better Java” from Jetbrains, the author of IntelliJ and other IDE’s.1 Recently, Kotlin has come back into focus for me for the following reasons: Google finally announced official Android support for Kotlin Steve Yegge, that infamously opinionated programming language enthusiast, wrote a patently Yeggian post about how Kotlin scratches his itches without supporting academic or impractical features. I began to tire (after only a handful of months!!) of diligently reminding my colleagues to prefer Guava Immutable collections over Java collections, Lombok/Immutables over hand-rolled POJO’s, and to please please use the @Nullable and @Nonnull annotations or at the very least java.util.Optional instead of returning ambiguous types (such as empty/nullable/possibly full collections of possibly null values). Some features need to exist at the language level To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, ...

• programming
• java
• kotlin
• clojure
• scala

If you’ve ever been programming in Clojure and encountered an error which looks something like, IllegalStateException("Can't change/establish root binding of: *ns* with set"), read on! Preface I recently had the drive/opportunity to deep-dive on how Clojure’s namespaces function and how they provide a simple abstraction using the concept of Clojure’s “Vars”. Here is a deep-dive on how they work. This is a two-part series. The previous part of the series is available at Clojure and the Esoteric Mysteries of Vars. ...

• programming
• clojure