If your looking for a detailed review of the camera written by professionals I recommend the article on dpreview.com.  Its detailed, horribly technical, massivly geeky and generally very good.  This article is just a collection of my initial thoughts and some sample photos taken this weekend and last.

In a nutshell: It’s an excellent camera though obviously weighted towards the amateur side of the pro-sumer category.

Build

The NEX-5 and NEX-3 differ substantially in build.  The NEX-3 is cheaper to purchase but has a substantially more plastic feel to it. The NEX-5 however has a pleasingly solid all metal build to it.   This differences does not extend to the lenses however which are metal in both cases.

The screen is large, bright, has good blacks (Sony X-Black technology at work).  Its rather reflective but I found it bright enough even in daylight to see without any problems (there is a daylight mode that ups the brightness even more but I’ve not needed to use it yet).  Finger prints are a bit of a problem but with no EVF you are unlikely to raise the camera to your face so nose smear is less of an issue.  The screen is hinged (up and down) with a solid heavy mechanism that keeps it in place when moved and means it does not accidentally flip open when going in or out of a bag or pocket.

The NEX-5 is a bit heavier than you would expect for its size but not so much as to be of concern.  With the kit zoom lens (18-55mm, 27-83mm equivalent) it sits nicely with the right hand on the grip and shutter and the left under the lens with access to the zoom and manual focus.  The kit wide angle prime lens (16mm, 24mm equivalent) is significantly smaller and makes the camera a lot more portable, though I find it does not sit as well in my somewhat large hands.

The NEX-5 looks substantially sexier than most of the other interchangeable lens small form factor cameras (GF1, E-PL1 etc.).  The NEX-3 not so much due to its plastic build and overlly rounded corners.

Sensor

The NEX-5 has a APS-C sensor, that’s the same size of sensor used in Sony’s larger DSLRs. It does not have a mechanical shutter of any kind, removing the lens exposes the sensor (caution!). The sensor gives a crop factor of 1.5 (so the 18-55mm zoom lens is an effective 27-83mm in 35mm sensor terms), this is smaller (better) than the 2.0 crop factor of the Four Thirds sensors used in Micro Four Thirds Cameras such as the Olympus E-PL1.

The large sensor should give low noise levels and probably contributes to the impressive low light performance.  Noise levels are excellent up to ISO800 (and from test shots it still looks good at ISO1600 though I haven’t tried that myself yet).  The camera can be pushed all the way up to ISO12800(!) if needed, though noise gets worse rapidly.

This high ISO, low noise combination is one of the primary reasons I picked this camera over a Olympus E-PL1 or E-P2.  I take a lot of photos in galleries that don’t allow flash and where a tripod would be cumbersome, high ISO will be a saviour.  I can’t wait until I get a chance to go back to the deYoung and get some decent photos for a change.

Lenses

The camera can be bought with either a wide angle prime lens, a zoom lens, or both.  I elected to buy the kit with both though after some playing around I’m not sure how much I’ll actually end up using the wide angle prime.

I’ve not done any detailed testing with the lenses (not that professional) but both seem to give good image quality (there’s a detailed review of the lenses strengths and weaknesses on dpreview but coming from a point and shoot camera these are both significant upgrades for me even if they are not top tier for interchangeable lenses).

I have noticed barrel distortion using the zoom lense that can give strong horizontal lines a wobbly look.  This isn’t unusual for cameras and, I guess, as it’s an interchangeable lens camera no correction is applied in camera.  I’ll definitely be picking up software (either PTLens or perhaps Adobe lightroom) to correct this for architecture shots.

I think I would have been happier if the prime lens had been a 24mm (effective 36mm) or even slightly higher.  If my understanding is correct something with an effective focal length in the 35-70mm is considered a normal (not zoom, not wide angle) lens. As the primes are much smaller this would have been a good lens for when I just want to put the camera in a pocket.

I think the zoom lens will get the most use until an E-Mount 20-30mm (30-45 effective) lens is released.  I could use an adapter ring and a non E-Mount lens but then I’d loose auto-focus and that would defeat the point of having a lens for use when I just want a point and shoot camera as well as negating a lot of the size benefit of the prime lens.

Controls

The controls are definitely geared towards the consumer end of the market.  Almost everything is done via two buttons and a up/down/left/right/scroll combo-button.  Changing settings other than those primary to the shooting mode can require you to go a few levels down into menus.

For example in manual mode the f-stop and shutter speed are easy to change but altering the ISO or switching from auto-focus to manual focus requires you to enter the menu, select the camera or image menu, select the item you want and change the setting.

This isn’t as big an issue as I expected as the menus are fast, responsive and once you get the hang of it relatively well laid out.  I do wish however that options not available in the current shooting mode were hidden instead of greyed out as this would speed things up.

The camera has a button for bringing up a digital “how to shoot” guide and while usefull for people new to cameras or needing a little help the ability to bind this button to another function would be a major improvement.

All together the controls don’t significantly hinder the camera but they’re not a stellar example either.

The addition of a dedicated video record button may be useful to some but is not something I am likely to make significant use of.

Features

The camera features a bulb mode for recording long exposures at night or with a neutral density filter. It also has the usual variety of options; Automatic, Program (automatic with some user over-rides), Aperture Priority, Exposure Priority, Manual, Scene, Anti-Motion Blur. There is a decent variety of scene modes including a low light options designed to reduce noise even more by combining multiple pictures.

The cameras two standout shooting modes however are:

Auto HDR takes three photos and combines them into a single HDR photo. Its useful when taking pictures of static scenes with high dynamic range (e.g bright sky, dark woods).  It won’t handle moving scenes without significant ghosting but for more static pictures you can get some impressive results that you couldn’t get with a single exposure.

Sweep Panorama is impressive.  You hold the camera and press the shutter button then sweep the camera from one side to the other.  The camera takes a large number of shots and then auto-stitches them into a single larger image inside the camera.  The results are very impressive with minimal problems at the merge lines.  Its easily equal to the sort of panoramas you can create with standalone software and considering its all done in camera its substantially more useful.

The Over Exposure Issue

There is a some talk about the camera slightly over-exposing shots in automatic mode when taking pictures outdoors.  Based on recommendations from various places a -0.3EV compensation is often needed on these shots.

I typically take shots on a bracketed +/-0.3EV setting as I’m terrible at judging exposure on a camera and I take lots of shots with bright and dark areas that make things harder to judge.  With this camera, on well lit landscape shots, I’m setting a -0.3EV compensation with +/-0.3EV bracketing for shots at -0.7EV, 0.3EV and 0.0EV.  From these I’ve mostly been keeping the -0.3EV shots.

I’ll probably stick with this shooting mode for now until I get a better grasp on the camera.  I do wonder if this tendency to overexpose some shots is related to the fact that the cameras rated ISO levels are actually somewhat underestimated (e.g the cameras ISO1600 is actually closer to ISO2000, coincidently this is about 1/3 of a stop).

I’m moving towards more manual setting of these values as I improve my abilities and I know enough to set the compensation but I do think this is probably the biggest negative issue for general users.  That said someone picking the camera up as a high end point and shoot and who won’t take it off automatic modes may actually appreciate the bright images.

Conclusion

The camera is not without it’s faults but all in all I’m rather pleased with it.  It’s about the right size for me, the images are significantly better than recent images from my Cannon G9.  The low light performance looks to be excellent and will come in useful in the future.

Once more E-Mount lenses are available the camera should increase in flexability.  I don’t expect I’ll pick up the just released super-zoom lens but as mentioned above a prime in the 20- 30mm range would be useful.  There is some talk of Carl Zeis lenses later this year and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

The Auto-HDR feature is useful and I can see me making use of it in combination with a tripod or gorillapod.

The Sweep Panorama mode is a nice surprise.  I’ve never bothered with panoramas due to the added processing step of combining the photos manually and the inability to preview the completed photo until you get the photos off the camera for processing.  With everything being done on-camera as soon as you take the photo I’m far more likely to take panoramas shots when out and about.  I’d have loved this feature when I was in Alaska a few years ago or in Yellowstone at the start of this year.

Examples

These images come from The last two Saturdays.  some are from Dirleton Castle and gardens the rest from Rosslyn Castle.  The internal shot in the barrel vault was taken at ISO3200.

I’ve done a fairly large overhaul of both my blogs and changed the way I’m using them from now on.

blog.TheIlluminatedEngineer.com is expanding to be my main personal blog. I’ll post anything about work, technology, holidays and my photography there. If your a member of my family that’s the one you want to follow. Any software projects I work on will also be covered here.

As part of this I’ve moved most of my image hosting on to Flickr which should make it easier for me to upload larger numbers of images. Keep an eye on the recent pictures widget for new photos that don’t warrant a post of their own.

blog.TheCircularSnake.com will be reduced down to just geek and gaming topics. It’s where I’ll cover rpg and computer games, movies, comics, music, found videos and web-sites. Gaming projects, like the GEAR setting or my Artesia system updates, also go on this site.

Hopefully this means both blogs are more likely to be active and have a clean delineation of content.

I’ve recently setup a VPN server on my OSX box so that I can connect my iPhone and iPad to my home network securely.  This lets me use tools like Air Video (to stream my video collection to my iPhone) without having to make them available to the internet as a whole.  It may also let me view sites like BBC iPlayer when on holiday abroad (though that is still to be tested).

OSX ships with a VPN server but the configuration GUI is only present in the server edition of the operating system.  Some digging around shows that everything you need is already installed and waiting to be configured.  There is a shareware tool called iVPN that offers to do the configuration job for you at the low low cost of $15.  There is also an older version of iVPN that’s open source.  Something sits wrong with me about these tools that I can’t quite place so I decided to do it from first principles.

Most of this information comes from a Mac OSX Hints page (big thanks) and from searching the web.

Steps:

1. An Introduction
2. Store a secret key in the OSX Key Chain
3. Configure the VPND service
4. Set up launchd to start the vpnd service at startup
5. Configure the Firewall
6. Configure the iPhone

Step 1: An Introduction

There are lots and lots of different types of VPN setup and I honestly don’t understand how most of them work.  I do know that we will be using the L2TP protocol.

The phone will need 3 things to connect to the VPN server on the mac; a user name, password and a shared secret.  The user name and password correspond to an account on the local computer.  The shared secret is a code known only to the server and client and is used to secure the connection.

Were going to do a lot of tasks on the command line as the root user so start up the OSX terminal and enter the command:

$ sudo -s

and give it your password when it asks.

Step 2: Store a secret key in the OSX Key Chain

The shared key will be stored in the OSX Key Chain, this puts it some place secure rather than storing it in plain text where it can be seen by anyone with access to the box.

Ideally the shared key should be complex and hard to guess.  Personally I use a 64 character random hexadecimal key from https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm but you may want to use something a little less awkward to type in.

To store this run the command:

$ sudo security add-generic-password -a com.apple.ppp.l2tp \
    -s com.apple.net.racoon -T /usr/sbin/racoon -p "shared key" \
    /Library/Keychains/System.keychain

Replace “shared key” with whatever shared key you picked above.

The VPN server is two part.  The actual server is called vpnd but there is a second task called racoon.  Racoon is, I believe, responsible for setting up  the initial connection and handling the security.  The “-T” option in the above command gives racoon permission to access the keychain and read the value

Step 3: Configure the VPND service

VPND takes it configuration from a standard plist configuration file.  Start up vi (or the editor of your choice) and edit the file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.RemoteAccessServers.plist

The file content should be:

{
    ActiveServers = ("com.apple.ppp.l2tp");
    Servers = {
        "com.apple.ppp.l2tp" = {
            Addresses = ("XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX");
            DNS = {OfferedSearchDomains = (); OfferedServerAddresses = (); };
            IPv4 = {
                ConfigMethod = Manual;
                DestAddressRanges = ("YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY", "ZZZ.ZZZ.ZZZ.ZZZ");
                OfferedRouteAddresses = ();
                OfferedRouteMasks = ();
                OfferedRouteTypes = ();
            };
            Interface = {SubType = L2TP; Type = PPP; };
            L2TP = {
                IPSecSharedSecret = "com.apple.ppp.l2tp";
                IPSecSharedSecretEncryption = Keychain;
                Transport = IPSec;
            };
            PPP = {
                AuthenticatorPlugins = (DSAuth);
                AuthenticatorProtocol = (MSCHAP2);
                IPCPCompressionVJ = 0;
                LCPEchoEnabled = 1;
                LCPEchoFailure = 5;
                LCPEchoInterval = 60;
                VerboseLogging = 1;
                DSACLEnabled = 1;
                Logfile = "/var/log/ppp/vpnd.log";
            };
            Server = {
                Logfile = "/var/log/ppp/vpnd.log";
                MaximumSessions = 128;
                VerboseLogging = 1;
            };
        };
    };
}

There are three values above that you need to set for your own network:

• Set the value marked XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX to the IP address of the server.  If you have more than 1 network interface set it to the one you want the server to listen on (e.g 192.168.2.10).
• The values YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY and ZZZ.ZZZ.ZZZ.ZZZ indicate the range of IP addresses the VPN server should assign to clients when they connect.  Make sure this range isn’t in use by any other computers or DHCP servers and its big enough for the number of clients you want to connect. (e.g 192.168.2.100 and 192.168.2.120).

It’s important the file has the correct permisions:

chown root:admin \
    /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.RemoteAccessServers.plist
chmod u+w,a+r,a-x \
    /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.RemoteAccessServers.plist

Step 4: Set up launchd to start the vpnd service at startup

We need to make sure the vpnd server starts up each time we restart the computer, doing it manually would get boring quickly.

Starting boot tasks is handled on OSX by the launchd service.  Create a new plist file using vi (or your editor of choice) at:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ppp.l2tp.plist

Put in the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.apple.ppp.l2tp</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>/usr/sbin/vpnd</string>
            <string>-x</string>
            <string>-i</string>
            <string>com.apple.ppp.l2tp</string>
        </array>
        <key>OnDemand</key>
        <false/>
    </dict>
</plist>

It’s important the file has the correct permisions:

chown wheel /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ppp.l2tp.plist
chmod u+w,a+r,a-x /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ppp.l2tp.plist

There is two ways to get this file to read in and the server to start.  You can reboot your computer or you can issue the following command:

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ppp.l2tp.plist

You should now have a running vpnd fully configured and ready to connect to.  We can check this by examining the log files:

tail -f /var/log/ppp/vpnd.log

This file should contain lines of the form:

2010-05-26 01:38:10 BST Listening for connections...

If it doesn’t your going to need to start doing some debuging.  Check the contents of the /var/log/ppp/vpnd.log or /var/log/system.log for useful messages.  The comments on the Mac OSX Hints page have a lot of usefull information on things that could go wrong.

Step 5: Configure the Firewall

Make sure that your firewall / router is configured to forward UDP on ports 500, 1701 and 4500 to the server box.

There are so many different routers out there that you’ll need to go read the manual or search online for how to setup your specific brand.

Step 6: Configure the iPhone

If everything above went well you should now have a fully running and secured VPN server that can be accessed from any place on the internet.

To set your iPhone up to use the server go through the following steps:

1. Open the settings app
2. Select “General” > “Network” > “VPN”
3. Add a new VPN configuration
4. Set the VPN type to L2TP
5. Configure the following settings:
   • Description: Anything you want
   • Server: The IP Address of your server (This is the public address given to you by your internet provider.  Depending on your provider this address may change frequently.  I recommend setting up a dns alias account with http://www.dyndns.com/ to make this step easier and more robust)
   • Account: The user name of an account on the server (this can be the one you normally log in as)
   • RSA SecureID: Off
   • Password: The password for the account you set above
   • Secret: The shared secret you picked above (enjoy typing in the 64 character hex key if you used it. It’s worth it!)
   • Send All Traffic: Yes
6. Turn the VPN connection on via the switch at the top of the “General” > “Network” > “VPN” page.  A switch also appears near the top of the launch screen of the settings application
7. Once your connected you should see a blue “VPN” icon in the bar at the top of the iPhone screen

Some of these settings could use going over in more detail.  The VPN connection uses two levels of protection.  The first is a user name and password that can be used to log on to the server machine, you can use your normal user account or create a new one with less permissions.  The second is the shared key, which wraps up the entire communication.  The longer and more complex your shared key is the harder it will be to break.

The “Send All Traffic” option tells the iPhone to send all traffic over the VPN connection, not just traffic directed at the VPN server.  You want this on as it protects all of your traffic to any site by encrypting it and sending it to your VPN server before it then makes it out on to the internet.  This makes it almost impossible for someone to monitor what your doing when your on a public WIFI or using 3G.  It also has the effect of making your public IP address appear to be that of your home internet connection, in theory this lets you use UK restricted web sites when you’re out of the county (iPlayer etc.), but it may not work if the site uses more than just IP to determine where you are.

If you have any problems check the /var/log/ppp/vpnd.log or /var/log/system.log files for useful messages. The comments on the Mac OSX Hints page have a lot of useful information on things that could go wrong (keep an eye out for the dreaded MD5CHAP error that seemed to plague people on older versions of OSX, though I didn’t see it on 10.6).

Hopefully that’s you now up and running.

I’m back in the UK now, have been for a couple of day.  Looks like I took more than a 1000 photographs over the entire holiday.  I’ve already deleted about 300 as duplicates or just no good and I’ll do another pass through as I sort them in to albums for the various locations and events.  Unfortunately while the circular polariser I used for a lot of the blue sky shots in Yellowstone has given amazing photos it’s left shadows in the corners of any photo taken with no zoom, I’ve got a lot of cropping ahead of me to repair the shots.  I’ll have to be more careful using it in the future to make sure to zoom in every shot just a little bit.

Last post was on Yellowstone so this post is for San Francisco, my favourite American city.  Not sure why; it just seems to have nice people, excellent views and a good blend of culture (both art and people).  We had 3 days to see the city and while the weather was meant to be “meh” for all but the last we lucked out again and it was clear skies for most of the visit.

With surprise sun on the first day we decided to have a late start and head out to Golden gate park. First stop was the Conservatory of flowers, which had a surprise exhibit of a model railway featuring all of the cities famous landmarks rebuilt from household junk. The main point of the visit however was the De Young museum.  I’ve been to the De Young before so I’ve already seen most of the exhibits, the African crafts exhibit is always worth another visit though.  The big draw, for me, this time was the touring King Tutankhamun exhibit, it was great to see with my own eyes some of the things that I’ve only read about or seen on TV before.  We hung around a bit later than originally intended to see a display of carnival themed music and dance being put on in the main hall.

Day 2 was booked in for the MOMA in SOMA (The Museum of Modern Art in the South Of Market District).  However we took a quick detour up in to Chinatown first.  While the Chinese new year was not for a few days there was a small kick off parade cutting through the heart of Chinatown that we both wanted to see; Dragon dancers, kids on stilts and a marching band were a nice start to the day.

I’m afraid to say that a second visit to the MOMA did nothing but confirm my low opinion of most modern art. It did bring up one interesting question though: Can something that is pretty but has no emotional impact or no meaning beyond being pretty count as art or does the label of “real art” require something more than just looking good. Some of the large murals were rather pretty in an abstract kind of way and the roof sculpture garden was impressive, but for the most part it all left me uninterested.

The one really good exhibit was a display of  local photography from the last 100 or so years.  A lot of really nice views into how the city and people have changed over the years.  The pictures of the devastation caused by the 1906 quake were strangely poignant with the Haiti quake still in the news every night.

Day three was a day to myself and a chance to visit the one museum that I really wanted to see but had failed to on my previous visit: The Asian Arts museum.  I mixed up what days all the museums were open on my last visit and showed up to closed doors, I’m glad to say that this time the doors were not only wide open but as it was the first Sunday of the month entry was free (Thank you Target).  It did not disappoint, the place was much larger than I was expecting.  Unfortunately the special exhibits section was shut as they set up for a new show, but the general gallery covers two floors; over 2500 items chart the course of Asian history over a couple of thousand years.  It’s organised by cultural group and era so that you can walk through it at your own pace.  The first, and best, section is South Asia (India, Pakistan etc.) and has a host of fantastic religious sculptures. Maybe I’m biased but how can you not like statues of 6 armed warrior goddesses and boar headed gods fighting demons.  From there the route takes you through South East Asia tracking the spread of Buddhism and then into Korea, China and Japan.  The Chinese section was a little disappointing, it focused a little more on china and pottery than I would have preferred but still had a few standout pieces.

What was left of the afternoon gave me just long enough to head back out to Golden Gate Park to see the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences.  Last time I was here it had relocated to smaller quarters while their main building was renovated so I gave it a miss.  The new building is pretty impressive, a living roof of grass and bushes complete with security cameras and Telly Tubby style round windows.  Inside there is a planetarium showing a very impressive trip through the galaxy, narrated by an only slightly annoying Whoopi Goldberg.  The core of the whole building however is the tropical bio-dome; You start at ground level and walk along a spiral walkway around a big pool of fish, as you move higher you go through the various layers of the jungle canopy with exhibits on the animals that inhabit that zone.  All the time its getting hotter and hotter as birds and butterflies swarm around you.  By the time you reach the top your ready for the elevator which plunges you down through the bio-dome and in the the aquarium where the first thing you do is walk through a tunnel under the big central pool and look back up at the people just starting the trip round.

With the holiday basically over all that was left to do was pack. Unless of course I could squeeze in one last thing. Thankfully a band I follow happened to playing: Nouvelle Vague.  It’s a strange band; technically it’s the two musicians with various singers that have changed over the years, these short term relationships aren’t a sign of problems in the band though, its the way it’s structured to be.  In fact Nouvelle Vague has helped launch a fair few careers.  They only sing covers of other peoples songs, with their own unique twist.  The current singers seem a bit more forceful and “rock” than some of the other incarnations and this suited the live venue more than I expected.  Overall it was a great gig.  I’ve posted a bunch of youtube videos at the end of this post, after the photographs.  Unfortunately the one video I tried to take didn’t work brilliantly, but the internet comes to the rescue: The first was taken at the gig I went to, the rest appear to be from the same tour and feature the same singers.

I’ve spent the last three days bouncing and jolting across uneven snow covered roads at 35 miles per hour on a snowmobile, the sun and wind in my face (for most of it at least), looking at some of the most stunning scenery in the world.

Yellowstone in winter definitely ranks as one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. When the skies are clear and blue the views are stunning, when they close in and visibility drops to less than a kilometre it becomes mysterious and haunted.

Day one started early with a bus ride from Jackson up to Yellowstone where we set eyes on our snowmobiles for the first time. Big beasts that sound like rabid lawnmowers when moving. All the mod cons though; heated seats and handle bars, digital speedometers. The first day took us round the south west side of the park past Old Faithful (somewhat anti-climactic), the paint pots (impressive) and through the three geyser basins (stunning). That night we stayed in the town of West Yellowstone which is, surprisingly enough, on the west side of Yellowstone Park. Drove the snowmobiles right in to town down the main street mixed in with various 4x4s. Medium rare Buffalo fillet and baked potato for dinner.

Day two had us back on the road early and heading up round the North West side of the park past Obsidian Cliff, Roaring Mountain and the Lower Yellowstone Falls before heading towards Gardiner and our hotel for the evening. The trip up offered us our first real expanse of flat land and a chance to open up the throttle a bit. The snowmobiles are limited however and only get up to about 45 miles per hour, outside the park the model we were on can hit 100.

The weather closed in on our third and final day. While this reduced the chance for photography, I don’t have the skill to bring out the best in those conditions, it didn’t really detract from the beauty of the park. In fact one of the most memorable moments came on the third day; as we swerved down toward the shore of Yellowstone Lake the sun broke through the clouds and turned the haze over the lake in to a white so bright it was hard to look at, the bank at the edge of the road seemed to plunge out into nothing. We spent 5 minutes driving along the edge of the world.

Where the first two days were mostly about the view the third was increasingly about the driving experience. We covered almost 100 miles, often at top speed over uneven terrain, our snowmobiles swaying left and right while bouncing up and down. You can’t really keep them on a straight line, the best you can do is guide it back to the direction you want to go.

Somewhat shaken and stirred we arrived back at our starting point arround 4pm for the bus back down to Jackson. I think I speak for all of us when I say that a couple more days in the park would have been welcome.

So the flight out was a bit of a pain. Virgin advertise this big fancy economy plus class ticket with nice big seats, on demand entertainment systems and so on. What they don’t tell you is that the good stuff aint on all of the flights yet. I think there’s a complaint letter going in about that once we get back.

First full day in Vegas was good though, spent most of it out in the desert at the Valley of Fire (state park page). There’s a lot of old petroglyphs, probably Anasazi in origin. Amazingly stark, amazingly beautiful scenery (see the photo above).  Back in the city for a buffet dinner. Looks like the prices have gone up a bit since last time I was here. Before they were amazingly good value, now its just an okay deal. The second day was for exploring the city itself.
Most of the big casinos have a gimmick or show to get the punters in the door.

The first night we stayed in the Luxor, who’s main gimmick is that its a massive hollow Pyramid of black glass, that shouts Blade Runner at you.  Second and third nights we were in the Treasure Island, the gimmick there is a miniature lake out front where they put on the “Sirens of TI” show. It used to be just pirates, but scantily dressed women are better for getting the mentourists in the door. There are two boats (one mounted on hydraulics so it can move and “sink”), pirates, a guy dressed up like a parrot, the afore mentioned scantily dressed women, pyrotechnics and a couple of fireworks for good measure. All in all a fun 15 minutes.

But if you want really really over the top its the Venetian. It’s gimmick is a massive indoor shopping centre, done up to look like the canals of venice, with actual canal and gondolas (if you can afford the price they’ll take you up and down the hundred metres or so of the canal).

So far I’m about even on the gambling. I’ve only been playing the $0.10 games. Put in about $10 each night and I’ve got about $15 on a game card I can cash out at will.

There is a pinball museum just east of the strip with a collection of arround 100 pinball machines from the last 30 (at a guess) years. Don’t think Kay enjoyed it as much as I did. But there’s something really relaxing about all the bings, clangs, bangs and boops. Especially as the casino slot machines don’t actually pay out coins anymore.

The second evening however was reserved for culture; Vegas style! We had tickets for Zumanity. Cirque du Soliel’s somewhat raunchy show. The show started with two large ladies in fishnets squezing down the seating rows handing out strawberries and shouting friendly abuse at each other while a comedy lothario chatted up the women in the front row. From there it detoured into two woman doing very impressive and dangerous acrobatics in a giant champagne glass full of water, swerved into another suspended 15 feet above the stage while keeping 20 hulu hoops going and then crashed to an end with some truly impressive wire work as the performers flew right up out over the audience. There was a guy dressed up as Pan or perhaps just a Satyr who was amazing as he worked himself through and arround the performance without ever really being in it.

That would have been the end of the night except Vegas is quite quiet at the moment and we managed to pick up tickets for Mystére, one of Cirques other shows (they seem to have one in every casino). It’s a very different show; where Zumanity is a fun and personal variety show that atempts to pull the audience in (sometimes physically), Mystére is more grand and epic. It atempts to tell a story, be it a surealist dream, with it’s super sized see-saws, trampolines, giant animatronic snail, trapeze acts 5 stories over the stage and of course the baby driving a golf cart.

It’s almost impossible to compare the shows or to pick a favourite. What I can say is that both are unique, fascinating and well worth the rather heafty admission fees.

I’m getting ready to head off on holiday for a couple of weeks. Having to be careful how much entertainment I carry.

I appear to have a phobia of boredom.

One of Kit’s favourite poems was Warning by Jenny Joseph. I read it this morning and for those that don’t know the poem I’ve attached a recording of it to the post (do I really sound like that?).

Full text of the poem (if you don’t want to hear my dulcet tones) after the break.

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

According to Google Analytics the SSS breached the 1000 unique visitors mark last night.

While this is a tiny number of people in terms of the internet, or even in terms of the Spotify user base it’s still significant to me as probably the most widely seen thing I’ve ever created (bar job related stuff).

Looking in to the stats in a bit more detail we can see:

• While there have been 1012 unique visitors there has only been 1404 actual visits.
• 72% of visitors only visit once, look at the curtains and then leave
• 3% have used the site more than 15 times (and less than 25)
• 88% of people stay less than ten seconds (why did they even click through?)
• 8% stay more than a minute
• 1 person visited the site via a translator service, but I don’t know what language they wanted
• 223 people were sent here from comments on the Spotifty blog and 532 from Afront’s site

From this I deduce that lots of people dipped a toe and a few people are finding the site quite useful.  All together not to bad for a 3 or 4 days (if you add all the nights together) work.

UPDATE (18th March 2010): While moving the web page to WordPress I had to take a new screenshot for this post, and it looks like the app has just gone over 15,000 visits.

UPDATE (10th September 2010): Another web site update and a new screenshot, looks like the SSS is over 21,000 visits.

This version adds a history tab to the interface. Your previous 10 queries will be stored in a cookie in your browsers cache (thanks to Klaus Hartl for the jQuery cookie code).  There’s no identifiable info in there, it’s just the queries.

On top of that there’s a few small interface tweaks and clean-ups.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: 2.2.1 pushed up. Had to change the layout a bit due to a bug in firefox causing graphical corruption and an issue with IE7 handling of div tags with scroll bars. I’ve switched to a cleaner layout that causes less problem, theres a few other little clean-ups and optimisations in there as well.  Assuming we don’t find any issues in the next few days this is likely to be the last update for a while.

This version adds support for auto complete style searching on the genre list (thanks to Ryan McGeary
for that code) which makes the newly updated genre list (now sitting
around a 1000 entries thanks to a definitive list from Spotify) more manageable.  I’ve also included Afront’s how to video (which will hopefully soon be updated for the new UI).

The search should now work on IE 7.0 and later, Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

UPDATE: Pushed a 2.1.1 up at lunchtime, turns out a couple of the genre entries had been merged together.  This should fix this.  Also a minor UI update to make the right bar look a little cleaner.

Web App: Spotify Super Search

Spotify is an interesting (I’d like to say wonderful, but it has too many flaws for that category yet) application that lets you stream a large catalogue of music directly to your PC for free.

“Free” costs however and you pay in terms of advertising, a single advert every 30 minutes or so inserted directly into the audio stream.  30 seconds every 30 minutes isn’t much to ask and its less than most radio.  Personally I can’t see how the service can survive on that level of advertising and their current subscription service isn’t worth paying for.  I really hope I’m wrong however (and I know what they’d have to add to get my money each month).

Spotify is missing a lot of features that would take it that step beyond the competition.  The biggest problem is the search feature; it’s limited in scope, full of inconsistencies, has no documentation and lacks a cohesive UI.  It’s fine for the basic searches you’ll do 90% of the time, but that one occasion where you want 90s rock metal by 3 different artists you’re in trouble.

Here then is my solution: Spotify Super Search.  Based on the original SSS by Afront and incorporating his input on the new UI this web app provides a shiny GUI for building spotify queries.  Click the query and it launches in Spotify.  I’ll try to keep this up to date if (or hopefully when) Spotify updates their search capability.