Blog

I bought the excellent OM System’s OM-1 camera in may 2022. Since then there have been two firmware updates for the camera. There have been a few reports of people failing to update the firmware, resulting in a camera that won’t even start, and which needs to be fixed by OM System’s support. So I was a bit apprehensive of doing it, but it went fine for me. This blog article describes how I did my firmware update, and should also be of interest to those OM-1 owners who only use Linux.

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In a previous post on recording birds with a camera or mobile phone, I described how you can make quite decent recordings just using your camera or mobile phone. In this post I will discuss how I decided on buying a Sony PCM A10 recorder. You can read more about the technical details of digital recording in my longer article The Basics of Sound Recording for Birders. Going into the equipment jungle of sound birding is a challenge!

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As part of my decision to start recording birds this year, I also decided to try start recording migrating birds over my apartment in central Stockholm. Yeah, I know I should have better things to do, but this is fun. Bear with me! This summer I bought a small Sony PCM A10 recorder, which I think is an excellent lightweight recorder, to have with me in the field. In mid July I started to leave it outside my window over the night, recording for the entire night.

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This year I decided to start recording birds more seriously. My decision was driven by a desire to learn more about bird songs and calls, but also to see what I could do digitally with sound recordings. I have, for a long time, been intrigued by Fourier transforms and spectrograms and how they could be used for machine learning and identification of bird songs and calls. Yes, we all have strange interests deep down in our souls.

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Fact 1: HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It does not stand for Hypertext Transport Protocol. Fact 2: HTTP is not a transport protocol in the sense of a computer or network communication protocol, despite it being used as such by SOAP. It is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. Fact 3: HTTP is a protocol, i.e. a specification. It can be implemented in software. Fact 4: REST is a set of software architectural principles and constraints for characterizing a certain class of systems; those that consist of distributed and independently developed and continuously evolving applications that need to collaborate.

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No, this is not about updating a Facebook or CV profile. This is about the .profile file and its friends like .bashrc on *nix systems. I admit that I still get confused about where to put my personal environment settings on a Linux machine. Nowadays I can always google for the answer, but I have now been overcome with a strong desire to try to sort it out and document it for my own sake once and for all.

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Most applications have the need to have data persistent between application sessions. Persistence means that data is saved and can be read at a later time, even if the power to the device running the application is turned off in between application restarts. The only way to achieve this is to store data to some sort of file system on a non-volatile storage, usually in the form of a hard disk.

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This post is the first in a series which I call “The flat earth posts”. In each post I discuss a commonly held truth which is a) untrue, b) hinders progress and c) causes unecessary work. Many organizations force their users to change their passwords every 3 months or according to some other regular schedule. This policy is based on old established security policy “wisdom” that has been around for a long time, and which is seldom questioned.

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Since I wrote this back in 2010, the heated and confused REST/HTTP vs SOAP debate is over. Today, a REST-ful HTTP/JSON API is firmly established as the best-practice technology for web API:s. Of course, there are many legacy systems that provide API:s implemented with other technologies based on other design principles or simply because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I still think these simple reflections on HTTP are relevant for understanding why REST-ful HTTP/JSON API:s have become so dominant today.

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