Generalising

So, last weekend, wandering through the market and wondering what to make for dinner – venison sausage stew, in the end, which was just as good as you might expect and carried me through to Wednesday – I noticed some recently deceased hares hanging outside one of the butchers; wandering a bit further on, I found some skinned and on sale. I was sorely tempted, but refrained on the ground that a) I had no idea what to do with them, and b) they were certainly too large to cook for myself, unlike a rabbit, which you can just about manage on your own.

Thinking about it afterwards, though, the temptation grew. Some research found recipies; some further questioning found some volunteers to eat it, and so on Thursday I bought a hare, stashed it in the freezer, and began to plot.

First discovery: it takes longer to thaw out a hare than you might think. Second discovery: ditto dismantling. I think I finally had it butchered about 1am on Saturday morning, with the kitchen looking like something of a charnel house. (Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?) Net product, two thighs (large), two forelegs (skinny), and a pile of chopped bits of meat. This is, I think, the first time I’ve dealt with the carcass of something wild rather than farmed – the prominent gunshot wound through the ribcage was a bit of a giveaway. An interesting, if messy, experience.

The reason I was butchering it the night before was in order to marinade it; a bottle or so of red wine, some wine vinegar, garlic, a chopped onion, some chopped carrots, and a handful of peppercorns, cloves, and a bouquet garni, something I always worry I will mistake for a teabag at the wrong moment. Stick it in the fridge (needing to rearrange the fridge in the process) and leave overnight.

Saturday, into town in the morning for some groceries, and then to work. Empty out the bowl, meat to one side, straining out the onion and carrot from the liquid; keep the marinade or discard it and start again with fresh wine, as you see fit. (I did the latter, partly because of an oversupply of cooking wine…). Fry the meat to brown it; the problem is, of course, that it has marinaded overnight in red wine, and so is somewhere between purple and black, so identifying “browned” is a bit tricky. Give it a shot.

I was aiming to feed five, so three duck legs to go with it – partly because duck would add some fat to the stew, and partly because I wasn’t sure quite how far the hare would go, and having one large leg per person seemed wise. Put all the meat into a large pot, cover with the strained marinade (or fresh wine) and some stock, begin simmering.

I ate the first of the hare at this point, one of the smaller pieces – it was cooked through – and it was… unexpectedly strong. I mean, I’d been expecting strong, but stronger than that; much more removed from rabbit than I’d expected.

The other elements were fairly simple, as well; some butter beans and a handful of carrots, which always stew up beautifully, plus the onions and carrot from the marinade, fried with a little bacon and then thrown in. Cover the pot and keep on a low heat for two hours, or longer. I served it with boiled potatoes, which were lovely, and some green beans, which were perhaps superfluous and could easily have been set aside in favour of more carrots (which were meltingly lovely).

So, the verdict? Interesting. Very strong; not unpleasant, but sharp and gamey, a bit more so than I’m normally comfortable with. I’m not sure the marinade really offset it much; I think I might try a different composition next time, and see if that helps. The other possibility is roasting it rather than stewing it – with a lot of additional fat – which does seem quite interesting but means I’d have to put a lot more effort in, and I’m not sure how the flavours would come out that way. My grandmother tells me that in the thirties she used to get hare soup after her father’s friends went shooting, which seems like it would work – the flavour would carry very well.

An interesting meal and worth it as an experiment, but I think I might stick with rabbit until I’ve had a chance to eat hare prepared by someone else and see what they do with it!

a second post in which I Show My Working in an attempt to figure out what camera to buy…

So, continuing with the Four Thirds models, the choice of manufacturers is made easy: basically, only Olympus make them in reasonable numbers. So what is there? Looking at models from the last three years: the E-410, E-420, E-450, E-510, E-520, E-620, E-30, E-3, & E-5 (in, I think, approximate order of glossiness).

The E-450 is basically identical to the E-420 with minor alterations; one down. We can cut out the E-3, E-30, and E-5 straight off, on the grounds that I do not have $2,000 to hand, and if I did I’d have better things to spend it on. The E-620 and below are a bit more plausibly priced, and all seem to still be on the market, so let’s look at those.

It’s a line of gradual improvement. The E-420 and E-520 are developments of the E-410 and E-510 respectively, with the 500 series being a bit larger and a bit more powerful than the 400 series, and the E-620 is an improvement on the E-520, but slimming down a bit. How does the E-620 look? As a kit with a 14-42mm lens, it’s $600; the E-420 with basic lens is $470, and the E-410 is, weirdly, priced higher than most of the 500 range (presumably it’s old enough to have stopped being discounted); the E-520 with the same basic lens is $500, and the E-510 with a pair of lenses is $680, $30 less than the E-620 plus the extra lens.

Is it worth saving either $100 (the 520) or $30 (the 510)? $30, certainly not; $100, perhaps. The differences between an E-520 and E-620 are an articulated screen, a larger viewfinder (although still apparently not perfect), and significantly better high-sensitivity performance. I’m leaning towards the E-620 there, but let’s keep them both in play for the moment.

So, what else. Both are flawed by reduced battery life, but a spare battery and switching them to charge should solve that problem. They both come as kits with a standard (and apparently quite decent) 14-42mm lens; lens sizes for a four-thirds camera are about half the “equivalent” 35mm lens sizes – so the base lens is 28-84mm equivalent. Coming from a camera which worked happily at 420mm-equivalent, this seems a bit of a letdown; there’s a couple of alternate lenses available, however, 40-150mm for $120 and 70-300mm (!) for $300.

So, we’ve got this far. The Olympus looks good. Pending the chance to get my hands on one and play with it, thus answering the key question of whether or not I’d like it, how low can I drive the cost?

The figures quoted above have all been from amazon.com; $500 for the E-520 and $600 for the E-620. UK prices are moderately terrifying – £450 and £575 respectively. This is definitely going to be a case where buying abroad is worth it – the E-620 plus second lens will cost almost exactly the same from the US as the E-520 from the UK. Part Three, I think, will need to be trying to figure out the cheap suppliers…

So, I am looking at replacing my camera. I currently have a Panasonic FZ-50, which I bought second-hand back in early 2007; thirty thousand photos later and three and a half years later, it’s living up to the original review:

…the nearest thing you could get to a DSLR without actually using one … without doubt the best equipped, best specified and best handling ‘bridge camera’ on the market today, and under the right conditions it produces superb output.

There’s the rub, though. The right conditions are basically outside in sunlight. The tradeoff for the FZ-50 is that whilst the ergonomics are a delight, and it has an excellent lens range, the sensor’s not very good. Once it has to cope with low-light or high-sensitivity situations, the quality of the images falls off dramatically. It theoretically can go up to ISO 1600; in practice, 200 is beginning to show noise.

And, as fate would have it, more of what I want to do seems to be indoors. So, a good time to consider moving on. (An even better time in that I am flying to Ithaca at the end of the month; I can order a camera online, at US prices, and have it waiting for me when I arrive… saving a sizable wad of cash and a bit of weight on the outbound journey, when I expect to be laden anyway.) It’s a lot of money, though, and I want to be sure of what I’m doing – so, I may as well show my working here.

There is a new model in the same line, the FZ-100, but this seems to have similar noise problems – and the lens adjustment is on a little button rather than the barrel, which I find fiddly. So, dismiss that. I like the Lumixes, though; they’re robust, they feel good, and they work well. There’s a couple of interchangeable-lens lines in the series, so let’s look at those:

DMC-L

The actual DSLRs; large cameras with Four-Thirds sensors. Two models, the L1 and L10. Reviews of the L1 are not desperately kind. Reviews of the L10 are more promising, but there’s a couple of details that worry me a little – response time and noise – and when coupled with the high price ($1500!), we can put that one aside. Pity.

DMC-G

Not technically DSLRs; Micro Four-Thirds, which is a smaller sensor and a somewhat simplified technical structure. The main issue with micro-four-thirds is that whilst they look very nice, it may turn out to be a technical cul-de-sac; it’s relatively new, and the lenses aren’t interchangeable with other designs. But on the other hand, they look very nice. Six models: G1, GH1, GF1, G10, G2, & GH2.

The GH2 is not yet on sale, which simplifies things. The G10 is a “budget” version of the G1, which apparently is quite unpleasant to use; two down. The GF1 is… weird. No viewfinder, for one thing, and a very small body; it looks interesting to play with, but not quite what I’m after – apparently it works really well with a fixed 20mm lens, since you end up with a really powerful compact camera, but that is perhaps a rather expensive toy.

So, G1 ($540-640), GH1 ($1000 GH1K), G2 ($650-800). Both the G1 and G2 have similar 14-45mm lenses, with a second 45-200mm lens for $250. The G2 provides a better degree of compatibility with older four-thirds lenses (hurrah), a better ISO range, and various ergonomic twiddles. And, bizarrely, a touch-screen display. I have to admit, I’m having a hard time figuring out how you’d use a touch-screen display on a camera, but maybe that’s just me. On the downside, the included lens isn’t as good, and the mount is a bit shoddy.

It’d do, I think. But I don’t want to spend £400-550 and class it as “it’d do”; I have “it’d do” already! So, perhaps I need to look back at the rest of the Four Thirds market – or further? Cue part two, shortly.

I am working late and procrastinating, so a quick note on the recent Wikipedia article feedback pilot:

It appears as though registered users are “tougher” in their grading of the articles than are anon users. This is especially notable in the area of “well sourced” (3.7 mean for anon vs. 2.8 mean for registered) and “complete” (3.5 vs. 2.7). It’s interesting to note that the means for “neutral” are almost identical.

Anecdotally, this fits well with a lot of what I’ve noticed with external feedback in the past; when someone writes in, it’s usually with a report of “X is wrong” rather than “the article on Y is atrocious”. When X is fixed, even when the article itself still seems to be a mess, people seem quite happy with it, even if it contains cleanup tags or ugly layout or the like.

Presumably, this suggests casual readers have low expectations of Wikipedia’s average quality; they accept bad (or terse) articles as par for the course but are pleasantly surprised by decent ones. Editors, meanwhile, are more closely familiar with the better ones, and apply somewhat more aspirational standards – a “tolerable” article is a deficient one.

On the matter of sourcing, I’d take a wild guess that if we went down to the article-specific level, we’d see a lot of this driven by the difference in articles with or without footnotes. Readers wanting a general overview may well be happy with general references or further-reading type external links; editors are more focused on the text, and more likely to prioritise specific footnoting of individual points.

The discrepancy in perceptions of completeness may come into play here, too – if you expect a terse cruddy article, then 5k of competently-written text seems relatively comprehensive. If you expect a detailed article with layout and images, then the 5k of text seems a bit of a damp squib.

A difference in expectations is probably partly driven by involvement – if you’re an editor, you’re more likely to expect good things and see room for improvement everywhere – but also partly by experience and estimation of quality. Which prompts the thought: do readers and editors read “different Wikipedias”? Do involved editors spend more time, on average, looking at or working with higher-quality text than casual readers do? An interesting question, but I’m not immediately sure how to quantify it. Ratio between raw pageviews and edits to an article, or pageviews versus talk pageviews?

Yes, I know there is nothing technically interesting about yet another grainy picture of the Galilean satellites. But…

…that’s taken leaning out of the kitchen window, without doing anything clever, using the battered camera I throw in my bike panniers and take to work regularly. It’s not even a very interesting camera – no fancy lenses, no high-sensitivity sensors – indeed, it’s famously terrible in low-light conditions, which I suppose by definition includes “photographing the night sky”. But all it needs is a quick crop and an inversion to show them up clearly.

The relentless march of technology has some unexpected side-effects. I don’t think I ever really though I’d be able to do this on a whim, and for all that it’s obvious it’s not difficult, it’s still a bit of a thrill.

A quick handful of (tastefully monochrome) street photography from Edinburgh:

(…below the cut…)

Rude though I am about the Fringe sometimes (okay, most of the time), it can’t be denied it’s good material for photography.

Back in June, I wrote about the then-almost-implemented pending changes system on Wikipedia. What’s it like two months on?

On the whole, I’m more than happy with its effects, and the feared imminent catastrophes haven’t materialised yet. Lag time to approve edits is pretty low; I haven’t dug up the turnaround times, but the page listing unchecked edits regularly changes completely in the few minutes between my first loading it and my remembering the tab is there and refreshing it. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to see the page empty entirely, and I’ve only rarely seen it listing more than half-a-dozen pages (out of a pool of ~2000). The lack of “pending pending changes” at any given moment also meant that spotting them via the watchlist, or casual browsing, was unlikely; to be aware of them, you usually needed to go to the central page. “Review conflicts” are quite common – perhaps a result of the noticeable slowness of the system on larger pages – but, then, so are rollback conflicts. This could definitely improve from speeding the page loading times up, I suspect; less time with the page pending is less time to have someone else come in.

The biggest problem I’ve found so far is, if anything, one of overenthusiasm. Whereas before we’d have a degree of “masterly inactivity” practiced on a lot of edits – someone would look at it, decide they don’t know enough to determine if it’s good or bad, and leave it be – the new system seems to have the effect of making people feel they ought to say one way or the other. Net result: more suboptimal approvals or rejections (ie, reverts), by people unfamiliar with what they’re dealing with, than we had before.

Why? Well, we have the central page, blinking at us, telling us there were four pages needing checked – four, just four! – and that there was a timer somewhere to note how long they took, and so on and so forth. There’s an impulse there, even if an unconscious one, to just do something so as to drive down the backlog.

Interestingly, this may be a problem that disappears as the system settles down, and becomes familiar and less excitingly novel. While there’s a small backlog – especially for a flagship new system – people will always feel the urge to just wipe the board clean, to keep it resolved, to have the satisfaction of having sorted it out. Once that backlog grows to a constant buffer of maybe twenty or fifty edits, the impulse to knock them all off while you make a cup of tea is sharply reduced, and so the likelihood of them being done for the sake of it is lowered; it becomes more likely that the edits will be picked up by someone who is intentionally watching the page, which is a good first approximation to “someone who knows what’s good”.

Assuming we have a fixed number of articles – protecting pages for the sake of protecting them is a bit odd – then the number of edits coming in will be constant; growing the buffer implies growing turnaround times, which is not the best thing. On the other hand, it’s probably inevitable – as the novelty wears off, and we stop thinking of it as an Important New Thing That Must Be Perfect, people are going to patrol the central page a bit less. It could well be that this inevitable decrease in responsiveness will actually have the unexpected benefit of improving the quality of reviewing.

From Alan Harding’s A Social History of English Law, 1966:

The chancellors of those days were busy administrators who would stand no academic nonsense: Lord Chancellor Ellesmere in the reign of James I ordered that the Warden of the Fleet should lay hold on an equity pleader who had drawn a replication of 120 pages where 16 would have done, “and shall bring him unto Westminister Hall … and there and then shall cut a hole in the middle of the same engrossed replication … and put the said Richard’s head through the same hole … and shall show him at the bar of every of the three courts within the Hall.”

Here’s a nice little piece of software: dynamic travel-time maps for the Tube, redrawn to show the system, adjusted for time, splayed out around your preferred location.

So, for example, we can see that Brixton, Ealing and Hampstead are all equidistant (20min) from Paddington. Clicking around a little also tells us the longest single journey, not counting interchange times – Upminster to Chesham, 108 minutes – and the temporal centre of the network, which is approximately in the Oxford Circus-Baker Street area, 55 minutes from the edges.

Earlier this year, I finally bit the bullet and bought a smartphone. (Thanks to a bit of fiddling, and an up-front purchase, it is costing me less over a two-year period than my old phone contract was. No, I don’t understand that either.)

It is marginally more powerful, computationally speaking, than my old laptop was. Given it seems to be able to tell me where I am as well as what time it is and what meeting I forgot to go to this morning, it may indeed be smarter than I am as well.*

* I actually went back to work a day early this year because I misread the calendar. I did wonder why it seemed so quiet. Er.

Oh, well. I for one welcome our new robot overlords, etc. It has so far usurped the roles of my phone, mp3 player (at which it is showing surprising competence), portable radio, compact camera and calendar; a little hackery with gmail and it absorbed my address book. It’s also surprisingly useful for shopping lists. A couple of quick notes:

The feature which did faintly surprise me – but worked well – was using it as an ebook reader; whilst iterating around Europe I managed to read a novel on it, using WordPlayer, without any particular discomfort or inconvenience. The screen is small for this, but not ludicrously so. For entering text rather than reading it, the internal keyboard (and predictive text) is excellent under normal conditions – I was expecting to hate it – but sometimes a bit tricky to use when in a moving vehicle, because it’s very easy to slip to adjacent keys.

Google Maps is a useful navigational tool, but relies on an internet connection – abroad, this is an expensive habit to have – and so an offline map program is an excellent thing to have. In this case, MapDroyd, which is a simple map display – no navigation – but runs off preloaded caches of OpenStreetMap data, so there’s no connectivity issues and no delays in displaying different areas. The only problem here is the size of that lump of data – as the phone has a decent onboard memory, it doesn’t limit things too much, but actually getting it on there can be tricky. (Thank goodness for wifi.)

Now, the downsides. Three months in, and a couple of problems are becoming apparent:

• SD storage issues

• Battery life
• Phone network connection

…in approximately ascending order of irritation.

The SD card – supplied with the phone, in an internal mount – regularly (every few days, at least once a week) fails to be recognised by the phone. (Usually, this manifests as the MP3 player getting confused and skipping over all its tracks claiming it can’t find them.) I have not yet figured out the cause of this, but so far it’s always been solved by a reboot; it may perhaps have something to do with prolonged uptime? I originally pegged it as a side-effect of having connected the phone to the PC (which mounts the card as a drive), but this doesn’t seem to be the case; it can turn up without it.

So far, it’s not a problem at all – it just means I need to remember to reboot the phone every couple of days to avoid it. We shall see if it turns into something worse. A cursory search suggests it’s a widespread problem, but with no obvious origins – “dodgy SD cards” is a popular theory, but it doesn’t really make sense when it’s reported as occurring with other cards as well.

The battery life is low – charging in the evening, leaving overnight, then moderate usage tends to be running quite dry after 24 hours. I was used to going three days before – but then, the old phone did much less to use up power.

The real problem, though, is that since at least early June (I got the phone at the end of April) it’s been rejecting calls for no apparent reason; the phone remains connected to the network, and will happily receive text messages – usually the ones saying “I tried to call you but your phone was off, will try tomorrow”. This is, to say the least, exceptionally annoying – I’ve usually no record they’ve tried to call, and no obvious reason the call couldn’t be connected. Earlier in the month it briefly developed a different issue with text messages; any outbound text would stall unsent, continually reporting failed transmission; some actually got through, whilst some didn’t.

(The two combined, at one point, just after I arrived in Copenhagen. We had the marvellously convoluted situation where Iona could text me to say she was stuck in Munich airport, and I could call her back, but she couldn’t call me and I couldn’t text her…)

I suspect this might be a network problem rather than phone-specific; I’m tempted to switch the sim card out into the old phone and work with that for a few days to see what happens. Either way, it’s not good; I’ll be talking to them about it, I think.

On the whole, though – connection issues aside – I’m quite pleased with it. For daily internet use (reading mail, etc) it’s excellent; less functional than a laptop, but far more useful than carrying a netbook around and hoping for a wireless connection.