Boston.com’s “The Big Picture” feature is a favorite of mine, as it consistently curates sets of amazing photography. They have a gallery of shots for the 2010 edition of National Geographic’s photo contest, and the quality is out of this world. I mean, practically every image there could win a contest. I don’t think I could pick an outright winner, but if I had to, the second image might be it. Awesome image of an awesome moment.

Winding Road has a great gallery of pics of the 911 Turbo.

Really? A lack of good processors is the reason that Microsoft hasn’t yet created a good iPad competitor? Riiiight.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that once Intel delivers its Oak Trail processors, Microsoft and its partners will deliver Windows slates that can be considered iPad competitors.

I’m excited to see this excellent-looking remote app for the TiVo. I’ve been hoping something like this would be coming, and I’m glad to see TiVo do it. They haven’t been fast enough to do stuff like this, as far as I’m concerned. They deserve kudos for working on this kind of thing.

Going against the opinion of almost any fan of the BBC’s wonderful TV series, Top Gear, a US version premiered tonight on the History Channel. Really, there are a couple WTFs in that sentence. I mean, the original is so loved by car enthusiasts that even the best attempt is destined to be met with disdain. On top of that: why The History Channel? I guess all the first- and second-tier channels had better judgment, or at least much less tolerance for risk and scorn. At least the early idea to have Adam Carolla host was tossed; maybe the History Channel had some better sense than the previously interested parties.

Anyway, like I said, there’s really no way this show can win, and maybe that’s why I didn’t hate it. It follows the original show’s formula to a T: silly car challenges; hot, exotic cars on runway; guys palling around doing what must be a dream job (for however long it lasts); high production quality with over-processed footage; an American Stig. I’m not the first one to say this, though: Top Gear isn’t really about the cars as much as it is the personalities of the hosts. It didn’t start out that way, but that’s the Top Gear that “petrol heads” everywhere love. Seriously opinionated, damn-it-all personalities making a show that any car lover dreams of being part of.

In that way, this first episode was strained. Obviously aware of the huge shoes they have to fill, these guys clearly are just trying to have some fun and hope that shows through. It does in spots, but there are obviously scripted parts that are just plain awkward. Still, it’s the first episode and it mostly does better than it had any right to do. Here are a couple of things I think they should do in the future:

• Don’t be afraid to break from the BBC show and do something original. The Stig is a fun character on the British show, but he (it?) feels tacked on here. It would be better to leave the Stig to the Brits and just have a racing driver with a personality, a track record (no pun intended) and credentials maybe chime in with his opinions on the cars and the run he did in them.
• The track has a few smart decisions in its layout. It appears to favor cars with raw speed in the straights quite a bit, which is a good idea if the producers don’t want American cars getting trashed all the time by more sophisticated foreign competition. They shouldn’t have felt, however, that they had to give UK Top Gear-style names to the turns, but rather should have let them get named over time by events on the show.
• Most of all, we need to see that the hosts are interesting, funny guys that we want to spend an hour with. Luckily, they didn’t go out and find clones for each of the roles of the UK hosts. On the other hand, they need to develop personalities pretty quickly. There were some funny, seemingly honest moments, but they need more.
• They need to trash on some cars. Until the audience believes that they’ll dish honestly on a shitty car, even one that is too expensive for most viewers to ever own, they won’t have the kind of respect the UK hosts have.

In all, I’ll keep it on my TiVo for now. But I totally expect it to be solidly panned by both critics and fans of the original, and I don’t know how long the format can withstand the pressure. We’ll have to see, I guess.

I can’t recall anything that’s ever made me want to buy a Ford more than this. Awesome, indeed. (Really, that’s what they ought to officially name it.)

I’m not sure what to make of the new Panasonic GF2. As a happy owner of the GF1, I’m at once relieved to not be tempted by a true successor to the throne and disappointed that the GF2 isn’t a successor. It sounds like it’s a slightly smaller GF1 with a touchscreen and fewer dials. I’m pleased to hear that the ISO has been bumped and that noise appears to be a bit lower at given ISOs, but that’s it?

Ah, well. My wallet is safe.

I posted awhile ago about my dabblings into some new-to-me methods of testing Ruby. Since then, I’ve done some more work, and wanted to say that BDD in general, and specifically doing BDD with RSpec, Cucumber and Webrat is a great way to code. The tools have grown quite a bit since my last post on the subject, and if you are a Ruby programmer and aren’t using them, or haven’t looked at them recently, I’d highly recommend taking a look.

Also much-improved is the RSpec book. It was in beta back when I first read it, and it’s quite different than it was then, and is also now in print. It covers the newer versions of those frameworks, which in turn now work with the recently-released Rails 3. There is a lot to learn if you’re new to these libraries, and the book is a good way to find what you need in one place.

Serrano, my pet project, now has many of its main use-cases (user stories) covered with Cucumber features. There are some specs on the underlying objects in the codebase, but not as many as I intend. I plan to rewrite a lot of the functionality, using today’s idioms and features, and the tests will be my safety net. I just fixed some long-standing bugs in the code after covering those areas with tests, and it was a great feeling to be confident that the fixes not only worked, but didn’t break anything major. “Anything major” is a cop-out, of course. Ideally, I’d have confidence that nothing was broken, but I don’t have that many tests. I’m building them up, though.

I also updated Serrano to work on the latest 2.3 Rails release, 2.3.10. That was a much larger pain than I’d intended, but it was mostly my own doing. I host Serrano on a Joyent Shared Accelerator, and the Ruby environment there is still on 1.8.6 and RubyGems is pretty old. I bit off too much by converting Serrano to use Bundler instead of the default gem handling in Rails 2.3 and also installed RVM on the shared host to allow me to run it in a newer Ruby. Turns out that OpenSolaris has some ugly issues when compiling the rubies I wanted to try, 1.8.7 and 1.9.2. So, after wrangling and changing my gem installations and all the RVM stuff, I had to go back to what I had originally. Ah, well. Hopefully the Accelerators offer a newer environment soon. It also turned out that there are some issues with 2.3.10 and Mongrel, but Google had an answer that got me past them.

I also have been using RubyMine as my editor of choice. 3.0 has nice support for all the new toys: Rails 3, RVM, Bundler, RSpec 2 and friends. It’s really gotten a lot more useful and has some really nice tools. Again, if you are interested in an IDE for Ruby/Rails, I recommend taking a look—it’s a lot better than it was just a year ago. I just renewed my license, and think the 3.0 RC, which is the current version, is great.

Jeffrey Friedl has a good blog post comparing the various e-reader apps available on the iPad.

Wired is running an article about the CALM Act.

The CALM Act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation) would require the FCC to enforce “internationally accepted standards of television advertisement volumes” within a year of becoming law. A version of the act had already passed in the House, where it will return for reconciliation with the Senate bill. Supporters hope for a final vote next month. It’s hard to image President Obama not signing it.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the article’s premise that this is too late. With a little daughter at home, I frequently have to jump for the DVR remote to avoid disturbing her when she’s asleep and I’m watching TV. Sure, I fast-forward through the commercials anyway, but I don’t have to be right on the button like I do when I’m trying to avoid the huge blast of sound that the commercial breaks all have. I especially loathe the loud “bumpers” that AMC puts around Mad Men and its other top shows, but don’t know if they’ll be covered by this act.

In any case, this is welcome and I hope it passes. The industry has proven that it isn’t willing to self-regulate in this regard and this legislation is what they get for being jerks.

“Holy Roman empire and a side of red sauce, this mother is angry.” Awesome.

Well, here’s another potential black eye for the sport. There’s a lot of conversation swirling about the levels of the drug found in his system, and how the amount was so far under what is even required to be tested for. Even if he’s innocent, the recent past scandals around Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton have made cycling fans reticent to believe any top pro when it comes to something like this. And it really doesn’t help that Contador comes off as such an arrogant prick a lot of the time.

I hope it’s not true. We don’t need another Tour winner stripped of his title.

I’m totally in the mood to buy a new bike, even though that’s definitely not in the cards at the moment. Earlier this year, I got my old 5-Spot back on the trail and am really enjoying it. In a strange way, that makes me want to get a new bike, even though I completely understand in my head that this makes no sense at all. There are great deals to be had on 2010 5-Spot frames, which would be nice. And the 2011 5-Spot pictured above is seriously drool-worthy. Ah, jonesing for a bike is only fun when you actually get to buy one.

I was in a local bike shop and saw a new Ibis Hakkalügi that really did it for me for some reason. I’m not sure why I found this bike so attractive given that I primarily mountain bike, pretty much only road bike for occasional commuting and the odd special event, and have never ridden cyclocross. I guess it doesn’t matter though, does it?

Once I got home and looked up more about the bike, I realized that I’d seen one in pretty much the only cyclocross video I’d ever watched:

That’s great stuff and makes me want the bike even more, but that’s not gonna happen. My road bike gets little use as it is, and I can’t justify spending that money on a bike like that. But, boy do I want to.

What I really need to spend the money on is upgrades to the MTB stable….

Very cool. As I’m sure most people are, I’m wondering how it’ll compete, image quality and handling-wise, with Micro Four-Thirds cameras like my GF1. Great job getting the buzz factor up pre-Photokina, Fuji!