Most people don’t read much of the manual that ships with a camera. Some because they already know what they’re doing, and just need a few keys facts about specific features. Others because the quick-start guide covered batteries, power, and how to get at their pictures, and they really have no use for 90 pages of details on what every possible sub-menu does.

This, however, is no excuse for putting useless information into the manual. For instance, the descriptions you’ve chosen to explain the “image styles” in my a850, a high-end DSLR aimed at serious photographers:

• Clear: For capturing images in a clear tone with limpid colors in the highlighted area, suitable for capturing radiant light.
• Deep: For capturing images with deep and dense color expressions, suited to capturing the solid presence of the subject.
• Light: For capturing images with bright and uncomplicated color expressions, suited to capturing refreshingly light ambience.

Compare to some of your other descriptions in the same section, where for instance the Vivid style is described with the words “saturation and contrast are heightened”, Neutral with “saturation and sharpness are lowered”, Landscape with “saturation, contrast, and sharpness are heightened”, and Night View with “contrast is attenuated”. These factual statements are followed by descriptions of their effect and intended use, where Clear, Deep, and Light are just fluff.

This is not a translation problem, because they’re fluff in the Japanese manual as well: “クリア：ハイライト部分の抜けがよく、透明感のある雰囲気に表現する。光の煌めき感などの表現に適 している”. This is about as clear as “limpid”, which is, ironically, as clear as mud.

dpreview’s test images from the optically-identical a900 suggest that Light and Deep are roughly equivalent to mild over/under-exposure, but sadly there’s no side-by-side of Clear and Light to see how they differ.

The current generation of S12 with the ION graphics chipset has been discontinued, with all remaining inventory now in the Lenovo Outlet Store for $399. I’ve been quite happy with mine. The ION gives it decent performance for HD video and light gaming, and it has a full-sized keyboard and bright, crisp screen with decent resolution.

[Update: they also have hundreds of brand-new power supplies for $16. For that price, I can have one at home, one at the office, and one in the trunk of the car, and never carry one around. They also have a hundred or so of the 10-inch netbooks in a major scratch-and-dent sale ($220), and some refurbished 10-inch tablet netbooks]

Add a few pounds of rhinestones, some nice feathers, six clashing styles of accessories, and maybe some nice bunny ears and an asymmetrical hairstyle, and she might even qualify as a Hello!Project trainee. The colors are still a bit drab, and it doesn’t do nearly enough damage to her figure, but idol fashion is definitely getting international attention. (via powerline)

The Miss Universe designers are still amateurs, though; as I said before, “if she can still fake a smile, you didn’t use enough hot-glue!”.

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Melon Kinenbi managed to go out with a decent bang, with two final albums and a concert DVD, and three of the four members quickly started off on new careers. Quirky re-signed with Up-Front, Psycho picked up some decent acting jobs, and Bambi signed with a new record company and is working with a vocal coach.

All Smoky said was that she was retiring from show business, but now the news is out: marriage.

[Update: Psycho has a new single as well, currently available for cellphone streaming in Japan. Title is “Kill my caddy”, so she’s keeping the WTF alive and well]

The current weather in Palo Alto, CA, as reported by The Weather Channel:

This seems to be about as accurate as the data used to claim that 2010 is the “hottest year on record”, recently announced with breathless excitement by teams of increasingly-desperate climatologers.

“Congratulations. You’ve moved your unit.”

Suppose you had a big XML file in an odd, complicated structure (such as JMdict_e, a Japanese-English dictionary), and you wanted to load it into a database for searching and editing. You could faithfully replicate the XML schema in a relational database, with carefully-chosen foreign keys and precisely-specified joins, and you might end up with something like this.

Go ahead, look at it. I’ll wait. Seriously, it deserves a look. All praise to Stuart for making it actually work, but damn.

…

Done? Okay, now let’s slurp the whole thing into MongoDB:

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Before I ramble, let me sum up my feelings about MongoDB:

Good: easy to install, easy to start using, easy to dump a metric crapload of loosely-structured data into, easy to write basic queries and indexes, rapid high-quality (free!) support from the core development team, phenomenal cosmic power.

Bad: hard to install some drivers (Perl in particular pulls in an amazing number of poorly-specified dependencies), hard to get a metric crapload of data back out quickly, hard to write advanced queries and indexes, easy to reach “here there be dragons” territory outside the scope of documentation and guarantees and available tools, easy to lock up a server process for minutes or hours with simple operations, easy to lose everything unless you replicate to at least one other machine that has independent power, eats RAM like you wouldn’t believe.

It is, if you like, the Perl of databases, immensely powerful and versatile, but extremely dangerous in the hands of amateurs. And, like early releases of Perl, it is a rapidly-moving target that grows new functionality every time you turn your back on it.

The past few weeks have been a heady mix of excitement, frustration, satisfaction, and annoyance, as my first large-scale use of MongoDB has moved from simple prototype, to initial production version, through major bugs and poorly-documented limitations (often “already fixed in next release”), to what I hope is finally “stuff I can just leave running and go work on other projects again”.

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