Russell's Blog

The eye doctor in Davis confirmed that my magical eye bubble is central serous retinopathy. Here's a much better picture (now also on Wikimedia Commons).

That volcano-shaped thing is supposed to be a little pit (that's what "fovea" means).

I'm a bit pissed off that the Zeiss optical coherence tomography machine that the doctor used to take this image evidently keeps the data locked up in a proprietary format, and can only exchange data with other Zeiss products. The doctor says he can't even save a screenshot. The only way I could get this picture was by snapping a photo of the display with my phone.

I'm impressed with the technology, and I'm happy to pay for it. It's much better than the machine used to take the image in my first post about this, and allowed for a quick and unambiguous diagnosis. I just don't want to pay more for it than it actually costs. Ziess is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook here by leveraging proprietary data formats and locked-down data sharing to coerce doctors into buying their equipment instead of someone else's. Except, the stakes are higher for medical products.

I finally got fed up with the pathetic official Android release from T-Mobile, and rooted my G1 and installed the CyanogenMod firmware. Cyanogen feels about twice as responsive as Cupcake! It's like a whole new device.

Also, the tethering app is awesome. It turns your G1 into a WiFi base station and routes traffic from WiFi to 3G. Since I'm still waiting for broadband at my new apartment, it's a lifesaver.

I suppose tethering (and rooting the phone) technically violates T-Mobile's TOS, but I'm convinced that T-Mobile will allow both sooner or later. It's just too awsome, and it would help them sell more contracts.

It's kind of difficult to abuse tethering anyway; it sucks down the battery very quickly, and the latency is significant. It's the sort of thing you'd only use in a pinch. Those happen to be the situations where a little benevolence or selfishness from a big company can shape a customer's opinion forever. T-Mobile seems to be more sensitive to that kind of thing than the other networks. I know they've got their reasons for banning tethering apps, but I think they could be convinced to change their minds. (You can download various petitions from the Android Marketplace.)

Openness is where Google and T-Mobile could really go after the unwholesome, anticompetitive and un-American AT&T/iPhone alliance. The open nature of Android is a step in the right direction, but T-Mobile needs to get its legal department on the Open Access bandwagon if it wants to press the advantage.

After all, if some random people on the internet can roll better firmware for the G1 than their in-house developers, isn't it a strategic business advantage to let them?

I've been puzzling over how to go about manipulating the NEF RAW images my camera produces. Obviously, it is better in principle to shoot in RAW than in JPEG, but the tools for editing RAW files under Linux do not seem to be very far along. For example, The Gimp doesn't natively support them. But that isn't to say there are no tools. Rawstudio provides pretty solid toolbox of basic manipulations. I can finally fix up the colors in some of my favorite shots.

Now, if only I had some good way of doing demosaicing, I'd be all set.