It appears that DRM isn’t just an individual problem; it also depends on the size of the market and the characteristics of the jurisdiction within which you live. The web does a lot to bring us together on an equal footing, but the purveyors of commercial content have figured out how to break up the market again.

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Matteo Borrini of Florence University said he and his team discovered the skeleton of a woman dating to the Middle Ages whose skull had been impaled through the mouth with a brick – a traditional method of ensuring undead bloodsuckers could no longer feed.

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The woman’s skeleton was found in mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576 – in which the artist Titian also died – on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo.

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So let’s get one thing straight: if she was a medieval vampire, then Titian was a medieval painter. Harrumph.

I got interested in kite aerial photography last summer and bought a FlyCamOne2, which takes some fun pix (like this set from RIRI in Charlottetown) but with 0.3 megapixels, it leaves you wanting more. I’ve wanted to loft a decent camera and get shots worthy of inclusion in the KAP Pool on Flickr (where you’ll find some astounding images). The problem is to get the camera to shoot continuously at suitable intervals for a long period (so you don’t have spend big bucks on a remote control rig). The FlyCamOne2 will shoot every 4 seconds until it fills its SD card or the battery dies. With CHDK, you have control over all the parameters of the camera: as well as shooting at intervals you can zoom, change the aperture and exposure, and so on.

I’ve tried it once, last weekend, in the snow of the schoolyard down the street. The results are miles ahead of anything I got with the FlyCamOne2. My current script is a simple adaptation of a couple of scripts on the wiki: an intervalometer coupled with a zoom control script. Every few seconds it takes a shot, zooms in half way, takes another shot, zooms in all the way, and takes a third shot, then zooms out and waits for the next iteration. The zoom shots mostly didn’t turn out well, but that was at least partly due to the wild winds which made the kite too unstable. A good steady wind would probably get better results, and a larger kite wouldn’t hurt. The next step will be to make it to bracket the exposure (i.e. take three rapid shots, with one a little over- and one a little under-exposed), since the camera’s guess at the right exposure when looking straight down at a field of sunlit snow may not be optimal.

Then, how about making an occasional video? The FlyCamOne2 does video, like this one from Access 2008 in Hamilton, but to switch from shooting to filming you have to haul the kite down and reset the camera, then send it up again. The CHDK script could have a longer loop and take a minute of video every five minutes or so; and maybe a longer video at the beginning to catch the ascent, which is always the most videogenic part of the flight (barring unplanned descents involving trees, helicopters, etc.).

What’s Canon’s response to all this? Well, using unauthorized firmware will void your warranty, so nyah, but it’s not clear that CHDK falls in that category, since it’s a firmware add-on and doesn’t actually overwrite the camera’s firmware (it’s loaded from the SD card at run time). It would be interesting for a journalist with the right access to investigate the response of manufacturers of consumer products that develop an unintended open-source community, like the Linksys NSLU2 NAS storage device or the WRT54G router. (Are there others out there?). Certainly, I’m going to be a loyal Canon customer as long as CHDK works and no other cameras have such a feature, and I’m going to be very bitter if Canon pulls the plug.

BTW the first reference to CHDK I ran across was on the XKCD blag. That explains the references to kite photography in a couple of the comics.

If you’re a Java programmer interested in digital libraries, please have a look; or if you know one, please pass it on.

Karen Schneider’s keynote and Dale Askey’s talk on why we don’t share more code spoke to the ongoing professionalization of coding practices in OS development in the library world. We have a better sense that this is what we do, and we see the way forward toward learning to do it better. There was a good comment from an audience member about how the use of Subversion made him more careful about preparing his code (since it’s hard to delete once it’s in the repository), which automatically makes it easier to share.

Prominence of Evergreen: it was the subject of KGS’s keynote, and two of the three hackfest projects we heard about; and there’s more coming.

Prominence of Solr: it’s part of everyone’s toolkit.

Mark Leggott is so organized that he has postcards at the registration desk advertising next year’s Access at UPEI.

Best joke (Dale Askey, Kansas State): speaking at a Canadian library conference officially gives him enough foreign-policy experience to run for vice president.

Running observation: librarians are more worried about users’ privacy than users are.

They crush boxcars with tanks, that’s what. I know ’cause my inlaws are from there. Anyone preparing to travel to Access 2008 can look forward to gooood times.

Recently she was the subject of a harassing subpoena from an attorney in a lawsuit against the vaccine makers. She has published the relevant court papers filed by the attorney, and marked them up with lots of links to provide context and refutations of his points. And in the course of this she has revealed the source of her secret powers: where he describes her as “a person utilizing investigative ability well in excess of that available to the mother and housewife she claims to be”, she links “investigative ability” to the Wikipedia article on Library and Information Science, and “mother and housewife” to Librarian.

I’ve never seen the act of hyperlinking look so much like stepping into a phone booth.