Peter Bowers
October 14th, 2007
Peter Bowers is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. His canoe nature shots are just amazing, and the proof of that is that this shot has been faved by more than 1000 people already and this one is close to reaching 2000 faves, probably the highest number ever reached on flickr. He has always been an inspiration for me since I found his flickr page more than one year ago. The most surprising thing about Peter? He is just an amateur photographer, with a regular job and taking pictures on his free time.
This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure to attend a public lecture by Peter, where he explained some of his techniques, his inspiration and we even got to hear about some peculiar stories that can happen to any photographer, like encounters with bears or being gate-locked in a private property 
Peter showed 3 8-minute slideshows, and discussed a few shots from each show telling us the story and the technique behind it. Here are a few notes I got from the lecture and that may interest you if you are or want to be a nature photographer:
- the most important piece of gear for landscape photography is the tripod. You don’t need expensive lenses or ultra-modern bodies… you need a sturdy tripod so you can get sharp images. Some of Peter’s shots were taken with his camera’s kit lens.
- timing is very important, as the best light is before sunrise and after sunset. In a cold country like Canada, sacrifice is needed Some of Peter’s extraordinary shots were taken at -20C, early in the morning for example.
- Rule-of-Thirds and Near-Middle-Far rules should be used as guidelines and not strict rules.
- The “secret” for most of Peter’s sunrise/sunset shots is a ND grad filter, from Sing-Ray. Using the ND grad filter he can get the perfect exposure for both the sky and land.
- his favorite aperture if F11-F13, and he focus at 1/3 of the depth of field. With such a small aperture, a tripod and a long shutter speed, all the depth of field will be sharp.
- be prepared to fail Most of the days you will go out and won’t find any decent light to create your shots, so just try again in the future.
- another thing I noticed in Peter’s lecture is that he likes remote places. Most of his shots are taken while doing canoe trips, and even in the city he likes to take his shots from places hard to get, to guarantee a unique perspective of the scene.
Overall, it was an excellent lecture, one of the many organized by TPMG, one of the biggest photography groups in the world if not the bigger, and from which I’m a proud member.
Here are some of my favorite shots from his pool:
Popularity: 7% [?]
Algonquin pond
September 30th, 2007
Yahoo Ads vs Google Adsense
September 26th, 2007I have been running Yahoo Ads and Google Adense on my blog pages for over several months now. Although I am yet to make a few cents on advertising, the reason why I keep the ads running is that I do plan to write a detailed comparison of both tools sometime in the future. Google beats all of its competitors in context search and advertising, but in my opinion Yahoo is so behind only by self responsibility. From several constructive comments I’ve made on their YPN Blog, the answers, if any, were vague and the problems persisted, with completely out of context ads.
But today I found something really fun while browsing trough one of my articles, “The World is Flat“:
Food for thought:
- being Friedman’s book such an actual and popular topic, how can Yahoo not find any more relevant ads to publish in this page?
- Google paying for ads in the Yahoo network? This one makes even less sense
Popularity: 12% [?]
Big brother or user customization?
September 24th, 2007In a time when more and more person talk about Google Big Brother posture, new examples of their constant supervision of our actions pop up frequently. There are several webpages I prefer to search on google each time instead of bookmarking them. It may look counter-productive, but it is actually quicker, since those sites are the first search result. One of them is the Google analytics website. Today, however, my search had something new on it:
We all knew that Google saves all the information about our searches, but for some reason, the fact that they even displayed it to me, frightened me a bit, not because of my searches, but because of all the other information that we, sooner or later, exchange in an email, like banking, confidential, login credentials, etc…
I must say that I’m facilitating this task to Goole, as I use Firefox’s GMail notifier plugin, that keeps me logged in all time, giving Google everything it needs to trace all my steps… One must decide whether to surrender to the inevitable or to delay it with counter measures…
Popularity: 13% [?]
DB2 on Mac
September 24th, 2007Last week, after my presentation at University of Minho about the DB2 on Campus and DB2 Student Ambassador programs and the pureXML features in DB2, one student came to me and asked me if DB2 was available for Mac. My answer was a ‘no’, but things will change pretty soon.
My ‘office neighbor’ Antonio Cangiano just made public IBM’s intention of releasing a DB2 Express-C port to Intel Mac. This is one more big step from DB2 Express-C towards the community, after very open licensing conditions, Ruby on Rails driver and adapter, soon-to-come Python and Django driver and adapter, DB2 Express-C orum and DB2 Express-C blog, etc….
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The World is flat
September 22nd, 2007
I just finished reading the most recent best-selling book from Thomas Friedman: “The World is Flat”. It is definitely a very interesting read about how the world is becoming leveraged nowadays, mostly because of the surging of high speed internet connections all over the world and the opening of some cultures to the world.
I was both amazed and amused by Friedman’s research! It is incredible the large amount of trips and interviews the author did during the research phase for this book and the perfect location of each and every quotation and conversation. The way Friedman positions the real-world examples makes all of his concepts become simple and clearly understandable.
Along with the top quality research, another aspect of the book that captivated me was that describes several perspectives of the flat world, corresponding to several places in the world, from US, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, India, China and many others. It is also noteworthy the effort of the author in promote collaboration over and over again as the way to build our future.
I definitely recommend this book, and give it 9 in a 1-10 scale. If you decided to read it, take a deep breath, because it is 650 pages long (english version) with a smaller than average size font. Good readings!
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DB2 Student Ambassador
September 15th, 2007After reading Alcides Fonseca’s post regarding is opportunity to become an MSP and asking whether other companies have similar programs, I would like to introduce two programs related with DB2 that are targeted for university students: DB2 On Campus and DB2 Student Ambassador.
DB2 on Campus: The DB2 on Campus Program is a project designed to promote the use of DB2 in universities. The logistics and delivery of the program is performed between the DB2 Express-C team, and the local IBM Academic Initiative representative. The program consists of the following items and activities:
- A speech titled “The role of DB2 Express-C in the Information on Demand World”. This speech explains DB2 9 technology, with an emphasis on pureXML™, and encourages students to use DB2 Express-C, create university DB2 user groups, participate in the DB2 forums, and write documents about DB2. All of these activities can help them to advance their future careers.
- Introductory DB2 courses to obtain DBA and developer skills.
- Free DB2 books donated to the university library
- Free DB2 certification exams offered to the students
I will be at University of Minho on September 19th doing the speech for the DB2 on Campus program. There was not enough time to prepare the full-day event, but if you or someone at your university is interested in having this full-day event happening at your university, please feel free to email me and I’ll put you in contact with the program’s manager in order to schedule the event (my email is vrodrig at us.ibm.com).
There is a DB2 On Campus Facebook group. Follow these instructions to join.
Subscribe to the DB2 Express-C blog to keep updated on news regarding this free to develop, deploy and distribute database(1).
DB2 Student Ambassador: This is a program for individual students that want to promote the use of DB2 at their education institutions. Though the program is voluntary, it gives students a chance to learn more about DB2, develop presentation skills and marketing skills. All of these skills will be valuable in their careers. At the end of the program, the student will receive a letter of recommendation from IBM including all the details of the activities performed. The more activities performed, the better the letter of recommendation! We hope this will help the student get a job more easily in the future.
I consider this to be an excellent opportunity to get involved and interact with developers from a huge project like DB2, distributed across Toronto and Silicon Valley laboratories.
More information about this program can be found here: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/students_programs.html#ambassador
Although I’m only familiar with the DB2 programs, for the ones interested, there is also an IBM Academic Initiative program, focused on Open Standars, Open Source and IBM resources for the academic world.
The opportunities are out there, so just grab the one you like and boost your career
(1) Yes, it is the fully loaded version available for free, with one limitation: it can only use up to 4GB of RAM
Popularity: 8% [?]
Discovering Portugal
September 2nd, 2007
This year’s vacations were spent discovering Portugal’s typical villages (Idanha-a-Velha, Sortelha, Castelo-Novo, Almeida, Monsanto, Belmonte, Castelo-Mendo) and also visiting some Unesco World Heritage sites in Spain (Caceres, Merida and Sevilha).
We visited about 60% of the Portuguese villages classified as :”Typical Portuguese Village” and, in addition to last year’s vacations, completed the visit to all but Tarragona in Spain’s mailand Unesco Heritage Cities.
More photos to come on my flickr set: Vacations 2007
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XML and Databases
August 13th, 2007I just stumbled across an excellent resource regarding XML technology in databases. Ronald Bourret has the most extensive research I’ve seen on the global XML and databases state of the art. It has an extensive list of databases with XML support (native or by means of extenders/adapters) recently updated and several papers on XML and databases.
A must read, that I will be consuming over the coming weeks.
Popularity: 5% [?]
