A few people accused me of “trolling for riots” – most did it humorously, one or two seemed genuinely confused about what I was doing. So I’ll try to account for myself here…

First and foremost, I was going for a bike ride. It’s something I’ve done a lot recently (especially since getting my new bike), generally heading West from our house into the Peak District, the hills and moors around Strines and Bradfield. I’d already been considering taking a more urban ride, exploring some of the parts of Sheffield I hardly know, and I was running out of country lanes within easy cycling distance.

But I think what really galvanised me was the steady stream of rumours I’d been reading about incipient riots in Sheffield. As I follow a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook, and a majority of them are in Sheffield, I’d seen endless rumour and counter-rumour – in particular about civil disorder starting up on London Road. The excellent South Yorkshire Police twitter feed had been quashing these rumours all day, but I felt that some people would feel more reassured if they heard that someone they know had been there and reported back that all was peaceful.

And so I set off in the direction of London Road. My initial plan had just been to go there, check out the area, and then return home, but as I got closer my head started whirling with memories of other “riot-prone” areas people had been tweeting earlier, and as I felt like I could handle a much longer cycle ride, I decided to roam further afield. The idea for “#noRiotHere” literally came to me as I was cycling along (as is true of so many good ideas). I didn’t just want to give people the bare fact of “no riot here”, I wanted to emphasise the fact that normal things were going on, that people could and ought to make an evening of it, walk in the evening sunshine, go to the pub, treat it as a normal evening and not hide behind closed curtains. And so I started to tweet one mundane but beautiful thing that I saw in each suburb I passed through (admittedly I eventually started to tire of the mundane but beautiful, and resorted to the slightly comical instead).

I realised, of course, that to anyone outside Sheffield reading my updates, I could come across as insufferably smug; I thought (with apologies to all in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and elsewhere) that this was a price worth paying. Civic pride breeds more civic pride, and I thought it better to try instilling some of this before riots started. Last night’s #steelcitynotstealcity/#steelnotsteal hashtags did the same thing. To be honest, I thought there was already enough pride in this wonderful city to prevent people from smashing it up (particularly while the city’s youth are still basking in the memory of the incredible and inclusive Tramlines festival). But how to know what other people think? This week I’ve heard, via Twitter and Radio 5 Live, many cries of confusion and disbelief from residents of the riot-hit cities; how are we to know until something kicks off whether our civic pride that “Sheffield is different” is justified or just hubris?

And finally, I wasn’t trolling for riots, and was 95% certain I wouldn’t find any, but I was prepared – at least inasmuch as I had a fast bike, a mobile phone, and my wits about me. If I had stumbled on some disorder, I would have informed the police if necessary, informed Twitter whether necessary or not (it’d be stupid to deny that I’d feel the slightest bit smug for sharing the news before anyone else, massively outweighed of course by sadness at unrest in my home city), and a small part of me hopes that I might have been able to mobilise a public tut-mob early enough to shame potential rioters into going home. A stupidly vain fantasy, of course, but I think we should all be defined by our stupidly vein fantasies.

As it turned out, I had a lovely cycle ride, got to see parts of this beautiful city which are normally hidden to me (including the most amazing view from Gleadless), had a bit of fun along the way, and spawned an idea which was proudly reported on Radio Sheffield this morning. Sorry to be smug (and fingers crossed that this isn’t hubris), but it was a good night for Sheffield.

One which sticks in my mind is the art of giving gratitude. This is a little like the “positive affirmations” beloved of other self-help books, but unlike vague and even counterproductive affirmations (“every day in every way, you are getting better and better and better”) it’s a specific and proven way of making oneself happier. The trick (established via a study by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCulloch) is to regularly list things that you are grateful for. Not necessarily big things, just… anything: a beautiful sunset, the taste of pale ale, the love of a partner or parent. The reasoning is that we become habituated to the constants in our life (in the same way that, if you work in a bakery, you will come to blank out the smell of freshly-baked bread). By bringing these small positives to the front of mind, we see them afresh and learn to appreciate them more.

Similarly, bringing to mind recent positive experiences (even if they’re as small as finding a parking space or managing to drag oneself out of bed on time) has the effect of reinforcing those experiences. (Other writing exercises which lead to significantly improved mood include writing out your perfect future – something realistic, but in which all of your choices produce a successful outcome – and writing affectionately about somebody you love or care about)

So, for a short while after reading the book I practiced writing things down, but, as already mentioned, I rarely manage to keep something like this going. It slipped back onto the list of “things I really ought to do if I had the time”. Then, just recently, I had a revelation. And here’s how it came about…

I had started using the web service OhLife to keep a diary (OhLife is a little like a standard blog, but entirely private; it emails you once per day to ask “How did your day go?”; you reply with an email saying what you’ve been up to; a building archive of your responses is kept on the web for you to read back through whenever you feel like it). OhLife has got me keeping a diary for the first time in years. But sometimes I can’t be bothered to write anything, or don’t feel like it, or there aren’t enough hours in a day. It was on one such occasion that I was reminded of the diary schedule recommended in 59Seconds. And while I didn’t have time to write, in any kind of detail, how my day had been, plucking out three vaguely positive things from the previous day and sticking them in bullet-points hardly seemed like a chore.

Since then, I have continued using OhLife, sometimes as a diary, other times just as a brief list of positives, however small (“smiled at the postman; heard a bird singing; enjoyed a TV programme”). And it’s early days yet but it seems to be working: I haven’t had any real black moods since I started doing it, and it seems as though my up-times are swinging even higher up. It takes up so little of my time (perhaps two minutes per day) that even the most time-poor person could easily squeeze it in. And I even get some little joy from knowing that, five years hence, I will be able to look back and know on which day the postman’s smile made a difference to my mood.

Buy 59 Seconds from Amazon UK

My job then was to delete these files. Macs then (OS5 or 6 – or was it 4?) were a lot simpler than they are now, and I myself was no Apple genius. So I had to drag all 9-gazillion of the files into the Trash. Which was a problem. Because the Trash (and, indeed, the hard drive) was an icon on the desktop. And the Desktop was geological-layers-deep in icons. (And, because the Mac wasn’t totally locked down, the Trash icon itself could be anywhere on the Desktop).

And so I began an elaborate game of Towers of Hanoi. Before I could delete the files, I had to find the Trash. So I would painfully drag the files, one at a time, until I unearthed that little waste mpeg basket. After an hour or so of this, I would unearth the Trash icon. And then the work would begin all over again, dragging the files into the Trash and, finally, emptying it.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that this may be what first triggered my RSI; and my hatred of drag-and-drop as an interaction mechanism; and, quite possibly, a lasting suspicion of all Apple products.

Ever since the launch of Playlist Club, I’ve been dead excited about getting my weekly hit of curated sounds, and even more excited at the prospect of contributing a playlist myself. So much so, in fact, that ever since the club launched I’ve been filing away ideas for submission (currently 12 playlists-in-waiting, and growing).

Most of these will never see the light of day, and it could be months yet before I’m assigned a slot, so in the meantime I thought I’d toss something out for shits & giggles. You Shouldn’t Do That [Spotify] follows the rules of the club; almost. Admittedly, there are 30 minute tracks, but they were not sneaked in so much as paraded slowly in on a juggernaut covered with bells. Thing is, this playlist is so irredeemably self-indulgent that I wouldn’t have the balls to unleash it under anyone else’s banner, much less expect someone to bother listening to it the whole way through.

I love proggy, choppy, changey, lenthy, self-indulgent twaddle. I spent way too much time listening to this sort of stuff in my teens, then became a bit too self-conscious and swept-it all under the carpet; but in the comfort of middle-age, I’m ready to out myself as a fan of excess. I think the turning point came when Karlheinz Stockhausen died, and I played 25 minutes of his “Sirius” on my Sheffield Live radio show. I cringed a bit while doing it; I fully expected to be shot down in flames. But something surprising happened: I started getting emails & messages of thanks, in fact I got more positive feedback about that one track than anything else I ever played on the show. And it made me realise: sometimes I self-censor far too much for the benefit of an imagined everyman. There’s nothing wrong with following one’s own peculiar urges once in a while, in fact, it’s healthy. And so I produced a laughably decadent, egotistically baroque Spotify playlist, and am putting it out there for the world to hear ignore. Enjoy it. I, at least, will.

Postscript: there is a big hole at the centre of this playlist where some Cardiacs ought to be. Sadly, none of their tracks are on Spotify (there’s some amazing videos on Youtube though). Originally, I made a nod towards this by including William D Drake’s Stone Carnation [Spotify] as the first track, but last night I heard Proper Rock by The Chap and — although it’s a bit, you know, poppy — it’s a gorgeous tune, with a slight Cardiacs feel to it, and the lyrics make a wry commentary on the rest of the playlist.

Listen to You Shouldn’t Do That on Spotify

Proper Rock – The Chap

My Favourite Things – John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones

Elders – Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society

You Shouldn’t Do That – Hawkwind

Yours Is No Disgrace – Yes

Down In The Sewer – The Stranglers

Spillane – John Zorn

You Never Blow Your Trip Forever – Gong

Here is a PDF copy of my presentation, complete with vaguely-cryptic presenter notes.

private function createAndDestroyLoader():void
{
var loader:Loader = new Loader();
loader = null;
}
}


Compile this in Flash Builder and test it under the Profiler. Change the filter to include objects in the flash.* package. Observe how many Loader instances are in memory. Hit the garbage collector. Observe again.

If your system is running anything like mine, you will see 500. Which, in itself, is crazy. loader is just a local variable which, anyway, is set to null. But bear with me, this is going to get crazier...

Now try playing with the value of NUM_LOADERS. Again all things being equal, you will see this crazy behavious (NUM_LOADERS Loaders persisting in memory) for any number between 1 and about 600. Somewhere around that figure, perhaps a little higher (it doesn't seem to be predictable) you will see the number of Loaders persisting drop to either 1 or 0.

Now what the hell is going on here? My guess is that the Loader class is somewhat resource-intensive to create, and so Adobe are maintaining a pool of them somewhere, although the strategy for doing it seems a bit random.

Please can somebody, anybody, enlighten me?

Flash seems to automagically detect the MIME-type of your embedded content (in this case, image/png), so that when you call new MyImage() the resulting object can be cast to a Bitmap.

You can, however, explicitly set a MIME-type for the embedded asset. If you’re crazy enough, you can do this:

[Embed(source = 'myImage.png',mimeType='application/octet-stream')]
public static const MyImage:Class;


This time calling new MyImage() will return an object of type ByteArray; in order to convert it into a bitmap, you will need to load the ByteArray into a Loader object.

Now, what caught me by surprise is the way in which the Flash compiler embeds the file myImage.png; I had foolishly assumed that the binary file would be embedded as-is, and then handled appropriately at run-time, but the compiler is a little smarter than that, and tries to handle the binary data according to its MIME-type. This is probably best demonstrated by example. In my test case, I embedded a large uncompressed PNG – the file was 1280×720 and came out at approx. 2.7MB.

With the first style of Embed (the “regular”), my compiled SWF was approx. 1.7MB or so in size, and when I ran it it decompressed to a similar size.

With the first style of Embed (the “byteArray”), my compiled SWF was a much smaller 800kB in size, but when I ran it it decompressed all the way back to 2.7MB.

I’m still trying to get my head around the implications of this (with a lot of help from Tish!) – it seems counter intuitive to me that the decompressed file sizes are so different, when presumably the “regular” version will have to be decompressed to a full 1280x720x4 (ARGB) bitmap data object. Any thoughts?

Amy Dutronc wishes that iPlayer worked properly. It’s like listening to the radio and watching a really boring slideshow.

It soon turned out that lots of other people were having the same problem. They all have good Internet connections, so that wasn’t the issue- actually, even when bandwidth is low, iPlayer has some amazing built-in logic for detecting this and respondng accordingly. The issue is that some of the high-quality video now available on iPlayer requires lot of decoding power, and some computers – especially older ones and Apple Macs – aren’t up to the job. (NB. I believe there are improvements in the pipeline which will help iPlayer to improve playback even on slow machines – but if you’re still unable to get decent quality playback, the tips below may help).

The first thing to check is that you have the most up-to-date version of the Flash Player plugin. Adobe have done a lot to improve video performance (and performance in general) in recent releases. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you can install the beta version of Flash Player 10.1 which has even more performance improvements. This will especially benefit Mac users, as the new “Gala” preview release is the first one featuring hardware video decoding for Macs. NB if you do install the Gala preview, you will sometimes see a white square in the corner of your video – so you may want to wait instead for the public release.

If, despite having the latest Flash Player, video still runs jerkily, here are some tips. Try them in the order shown below until you reach a level of quality which your computer can play back without stuttering.

• Don’t play the HD version of programmes. Obviously, HD is amazing; if your machine will play it then you should definitely choose the HD option. But if your machine is a bit old, or does not have a good video card, then HD can slow it down to a crawl. On each HD programme page is a link underneath the video saying “Also in normal quality”. Click that link for a version less likely to hammer your machine.
• Play the smaller version of the video. On “normal” programme pages, the video has an icon in the top right-hand corner showing two arrows (Update: on the new beta version of iPlayer, the size-toggle icon has moved. It is at the bottom of the media player, in between the volume and fullscreen buttons.). If you click on this, it will toggle between a big and a small version of the video. If you have problems playing the big version, click on the arrow to shrink the window down. The two actually use different video files (encoded at 1500kbps and 800kbps) – you can tell which version of the video is playing by right-clicking in the video window: a menu will pop up, and the second line will say something like “1500kbps | h264 | AK 3.5 (1) | 832×468“. The first part of that line tells you the bitrate.
• Play the low-bandwidth version. If your machine is so clunky that it struggles even with the 800kbps video, then there is one more option: the low bandwidth version. Normally you would only see this version if your Internet connection is very poor – but you can force iPlayer to play it by clicking on the “Use lower bandwidth version” hidden near the bottom of the page. Once you’ve done this, right-clicking on the video will tell you that you’re looking at a 480kbps version. If you want to swap back up to the higher-quality version, the link at the bottom of the page will now read “Use normal version” – just click it.

Hopefully by following one or more of these suggestions, you’ll be able to find the best performance level for your computer.

Disclaimer: this is not an official post from the BBC: although I worked on iPlayer and am familiar with most of the technologies used in the Embedded Media Player, I am no longer affiliated with the BBC in any way. Also, iPlayer technology can and does change rapidly: I cannot guarantee that all of the above information will still apply.

]]> http://www.sumption.org/2010/05/21/some-iplayer-performance-tips/feed/ 0 http://www.sumption.org/2009/07/22/my-life-in-photography/ http://www.sumption.org/2009/07/22/my-life-in-photography/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:03:51 +0000 Dan Sumption http://www.sumption.org/?p=1642 A while ago, Theo Simpson interviewed me about my photography, for a project he was doing. I just stumbled upon the interview, while cleaning up my hard disk, so here it is:


How did you first begin interest in photography?

In childhood – my dad gave me a Kodak Brownie when I was 4 and we developed & printed the photos together.

Have you had any formal training in photography?

I took a photography O-Level when I was 17 in 1986, and did a week’s photojournalism course in 2006, but am mostly self-taught.

What kind of photographer would you say you are?

Always hard to categorise, but I think the term “documentary photographer” more-or-less covers it.

Is there any particular photography you prefer?

Photographs of people, photographs at night… but to be honest most types of photography interests me.

How did you start working commercially?

I was approached by the Mail on Sunday to buy a photo I had taken. Most of my commercial work has been through approaches from others, but this is because I don’t make most of my living from photography and still often feel uncomfortable about promoting myself as a photographer.

Did you start working alone?

Yes, I always work alone.

What steps did you make to set up a company/business? Or did you test the waters so the speak first?

See above – I haven’t gone very far in this direction. I already have a company, specialising mainly in website development, so have used this to manage the commercial side of my photography, but I’ve never formalised my commercial work.

What are the pressures you have found working commercially?

There is a great pressure to perform and get everything right, although this mostly comes from myself. Also I suppose keeping the business side of things organised: keeping notes of expenses, insurance, tax etc.

What kind of portfolio do you have?

I have a self-produced book, as well as a website. I also have a large, rather chaotic but more often updated Flickr account.

How do you get people to see it?

Various ways – I give out copies of my book to people who may be commissioning photography. But mostly I tag my photos extensively on Flickr and ensure that my website has good, descriptive and relevant text, plus plenty of links, so that search engines will rank it highly.

Has your website been a part of your commercial success?

Yes, my own website and my Flickr portfolio have probably been the main source of business for me – although I don’t think this would be sustainable if photography were my main business.

How much competition is there?

There is a lot of competition, although a lot of it is not great quality.

What do you do to advertise yourself?

I have done some online advertising, e.g. using Google Adwords and Bidvertiser, but mostly I just use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to make my photographs easy to find online.

What makes your work stand out from other people?

I like to think I have a fairly well developed personal style – this is not necessarily something I’ve planned, rather something I can’t help. I don’t like covering the same ground that people have already covered, so I am always looking for different approaches to a project, and I think this helps my work to stand out.

Do you advertise?

See above – I have done a small amount of advertising in the past, but don’t at the moment.

How much creative input are you allowed when working for certain clients?

I’ve usually been allowed a fairly good degree of creative freedom. I’ve come to realise that my photography doesn’t always fit easily within rigid guidelines, so I would be unlikely to accept any future commissions without a great degree of creative freedom.

How much free time do you have for yourself to work on other photography projects?

Not a great deal, but I squeeze in whatever I can.

What advice would you give to someone starting working commercially?

I’m not sure that I’m best placed, but I would say try to stay true to yourself while always pushing yourself in new directions. Don’t write anything off out of hand – learning can come from the most unexpected directions.

How do you maintain your client base?

I don’t really have one

What equipment do you use?

Camera bodies: Canon EOS 40D and 20D.
Lenses: 16-35mm f/2.8
24mm f/1.4
50mm f/1.4
70-200mm f/2.8 IS
Flash: Canon 480 EXII
Tripod: Manfrotto

What computer software do you use?

Mainly Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Also occasionally Adobe Photoshop.

How do you back your work up?

External hard disk.

How do most clients want the work presenting to them?

Initially by web gallery. Then prints, photobooks or high-res files.

How are you equipped for that?

I use Lightroom to produce quick web galleries, and produce other formats as required.

How is your client base spread?

Most of my clients have been in Sheffield, with a few in London.

How far do you travel to get work?

Usually not far, but will travel all over the country for the right job. Furthest so far has been to Glasgow.

In a situation where you might feel technically challenged, what steps do you take to make sure the job is carried out properly, for example in unusual lighting conditions?

Experiment with conditions, check details of photos (and download to computer if possible), take as many photographs as possible, using different settings/lighting.

What do you do if you make a mistake?

Keep going and try to learn from it!

What photographers have influenced your current work?

So many… but particularly Garry Winogrand, Brian Griffin, Terry O’Neill.

Is Sheffield a good place to set-up a business?

Hmm… not sure!

Do you maintain copyright on all your work?

Yes.

Do you arrange royalties and rights before you do a job?

Generally.

Do you ever work for free?

Yes, depending on the client and the job.

What are the most important aspects to working commercially?

I am lucky in that I don’t need to make most of my money from photography, so for me the most important aspects are the opportunity to learn & to take interesting photos.

How do you take yourself forward?

In fits and starts, but usually through intense bouts of taking photos & contemplating photos.

What are your plans for the future

Watch this space!

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