standards – Page 8 – dangermouse.net

Taking it easy… until 2:30 am

Last night I had the second night of Zoom meetings for ISO Photograph standards. We got stuck into the technical sessions. First up was a presentation by some people from JPEG (by which I mean ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29), mostly about the new JPEG XS streaming image file format they are developing. They explained briefly how it worked and the advantages over other streaming image compression methods. They also gave some updates on other things that JPEG are working on. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about image coding formats so didn’t get a whole lot out of it, but some parts were interesting.

Next was discussion of the revision of ISO 12233, a standard for measuring camera lens resolution. This has been being updated for nearly 3 years now, and we’re still not converging on something agreeable to all the technical experts in all countries. We ended up with the project leader deciding to give it one more go and submit a new draft for balloting, to see if we can get it finalised before the looming project deadline. If we can’t get consensus with that, we may have to cancel the project and restart it afresh.

Then we had updates on the adoption of Adobe’s DNG digital negative format as an ISO standard. That seems to be progressing slowly, as it has for a couple of years now.

And finally we had a new liaison proposal letter from the International Telecommunications Union, suggesting a formal liaison with a new group under that organisation who are proposing to standardise material related to (1) automatic white balance, (2) image metadata related to aesthetic qualities, and (3) metadata related to computational photography. This was interesting, because as the ISO committee on photography, these things very likely fall under our scope, and other organisations trying to standardise them pose a danger of proliferating/incompatible standards. And a further issue was that every single person listed on the liaison technical committee leadership was Chinese. The Chinese are known for pursuing their own standardisation goals, including existing cases where China then adopts a commercial standard that other countries don’t use, but which manufacturers in other countries suddenly need to follow if they want to continue doing business in China. So this is quite a delicate situation. It was further complicated by the US delegates pointing out that they are forbidden by the US State Department from conducting closed meetings (i.e. meetings not open to the public) with representatives of Huawei. The proposed liaison could be construed as such a meeting. So we actually have a very tricky situation to deal with. Most people at the meeting last night suggested that the best thing to do was ignore the liaison request, while others suggested a measured response to probe exactly what their intentions are and to point out that their proposals fall within ISO scope, and hint that they should back off. It’ll be interesting to watch this play out.

After the meeting ended, a few minutes late at about 02:40 this morning, I finally went to bed. I couldn’t sleep in too late this morning, as I had my face-to-face ethics class at the local school. I was extremely tired last night, but my body is still in the same time zone, so during the day today I didn’t feel too bad. Tonight at the meeting is going to be difficult though.

After ethics I had a booking for my first COVID-19 vaccination shot. It was very quick and easy, but I had to drive a few suburbs away to a clinic that was doing them. As it was lunchtime, I found a bakery afterwards to grab some lunch, which I reviewed once more for Snot Block & Roll.

This afternoon I considered taking a nap to catch up on sleep, but I’ve never been able to have naps effectively. I just can’t fall asleep during daylight hours. And I didn’t even feel all that tired, so it would have been pretty impossible. So I just relaxed and did some fun things. Let’s see how I go tonight…

New content today:

Sausage roll expedition

After writing yesterday’s entry in the early evening, I had the first night of my late night ISO Standards Zoom meeting, beginning at 11pm. The opening session is administrative stuff, and much of it was taken up with discussion of how to schedule the next meeting in October this year. Some people believe that they will be able to travel and are keen to begin starting face-to-face meetings again. Apple has offered to host a physical meeting at their offices in Cupertino. Normally I’d like to go, but there’s no way that Australians will be allowed to leave the country that soon. And there’s the prospect that ISO’s current ban on physical meetings (currently to the end of August) will be extended to October, forcing the meeting to be virtual again. But despite this, enough people were keen to try for a physical meeting that we ended up with a convoluted contingency plan that will try to encompass both options.

The next thing was to settle—if the meeting became fully virtual—what time slot it should occupy. The present meeting starts at 09:00 New York City time, which translates to 23:00 here in Sydney, and ends at 02:30 in the morning for me. Which is pretty bad…. but the chair proposed that to make things easier for the US west coast next time, who currently are beginning at 06:00, we begin the next meeting three hours later. Midday in NYC and 09:00 on the US west coast… and 03:00 here in Sydney (it’s 4 hours later since we go onto daylight saving at the start of October).

Yeah, you can bet I spoke up and pointed out that I’d have to start the meeting at 04:00, and also Japan would have to start at 02:00. After some discussion it was decided the time should be moved another 3 hours later, beginning at 07:00 Sydney, and 05:00 Japan, which was deemed acceptable by the Japanese delegates. So phew!

There was one technical session following the administrative stuff, but it was the one I personally have the least knowledge about, so I basically just listened silently and waited for the session to end so I could go to bed.

Today I slept in a little, but probably not enough. I decided instead of sitting at home all day I should go out and get some fresh air and exercise. I went on an expedition to a new cafe that was recommended to me for its sausage rolls. I’ve written up the review for Snot Block & Roll.

Back home I did a bit of work for my online ethics class planning. And made pumpkin soup for dinner. And now I need to stay up for another late night Standards Zoom meeting.

New content today:

Double sized Ethics

Today I did the grocery shopping in the morning. Then spent most of the day working on slides for my planned Outschool class on atomic theory. First I did an outline for the last of the 6 linked classes, on the Big Bang, so I now have completed outlines for them all. I started writing slide descriptions – I’ll leave most of the images and artwork for later, as I’ll need to either find public domain images or draw my own diagrams for everything.

At 4pm I had my Friday afternoon ethics class on Outschool. Last week I had 2 students, but today I had 2 new enrolments, for 4 total. It made it a little more difficult, because I no longer had time to ask every student every single question individually. I had to ask a couple of them and then see if either of the others had any further points to add, or if they wanted to disagree. It worked reasonably well, but of course it was noticeable to me that each individual student didn’t get as much time to speak as before. But it was fine.

And this evening I had the opening session of the Plenary ISO Photography Standards meeting that I’ve been mentioning. It was only an hour long, and at 8pm, so not too much of an issue.

New content today:

Triple baking

This morning I had my Monday Outschool ethics class – same subject as last Friday with different students. It was interesting because another part of the discussion was about the difference between trusting doctors versus people advocating traditional/herbal medicines. Last Friday, the students all said definitely trust the doctors more. Today they both said definitely give the herbal medicine a go first. Obviously these opinions come from their upbringing, and it’s interesting to see how that can vary across a range of children.

I took care of some odds and ends today. I had to finish writing comments on a photography standards document draft and send it off. The ISO meeting begins on Friday, with a plenary session from 8:00-9:30 pm in my time zone. That’s not so bad, but the technical sessions during the following week are all going to be 11:00 pm-02:30 am each night, for five nights in a row. That’s going to be a very tough week.

Last time we had a plenary meeting, it was in Lisbon in 2019, and I flew there with my wife. I had a week of meetings while she did sightseeing, and then we spent another week doing more sightseeing around Portugal together, so it was very pleasant. This meeting should have been in Okayama in Japan, which would have been lovely too. But COVID made sure that didn’t happen as planned.

I also made two batches of dough today – one sourdough for a loaf of bread, and one pizza dough for dinner. We just had dinner, and I baked the sourdough straight after while the oven was still hot.

The title above is “triple baking” – the other one refers to last night. My wife decided she felt like an apple for dessert, but didn’t want to just eat a raw apple because of how cold the weather was. She commented casually that I could make some apple crumble…

So I did! Peeled a couple of apples, made some oat crumble topping, and baked the result. We had it hot out of the oven, and it was delicious! Although normally I like to cook with Granny Smith apples, which are nice and tart, but all we had were my wife’s apples, which are pink ladies. I thought they’d soften more quickly than Grannies, but they really didn’t and were still a bit too firm when we ate it. Oh well. Maybe next time I’ll buy a lot of Grannies.

New content today:

Home alone

My wife was out for much of today, for a yoga class in the morning, and to go see a movie with her mother in the afternoon. She took Scully to yoga as normal, but I had time with Scully all afternoon.

I worked on Darths & Droids comics, writing and assembling. And I also did some prepwork for the upcoming ISO Photography Standards meeting – downloading and reading documents, and writing up comments on drafts.

In a piece of home maintenance, I swapped out all the batteries from all the remote controls and put in new ones. I’ve decided to do this once a year, whether the batteries need changing or not, to avoid leakage ruining the remotes, after I found some batteries in one of them had started leaking and corroding the terminals. Fortunately it wasn’t far gone and I cleaned it up, but I don’t want to risk this again, and would rather just get new batteries annually to prevent the mess and inconvenience of losing a remote to corrosion.

New content today:

Unethical Wednesday

I don’t know what’s going on with this weather. The Bureau told us it would rain today, but there wasn’t a drop, and it was another fine day, although a bit chilly rather than warm. This seems to be a long term trend with weather forecasts here. Often they forecast rain, and it just never eventuates.

Normally I’d have my face-to-face Ethics class at the school today, but the kids are doing their NAPLAN tests this week, so my class was cancelled. I ended up driving over to the same car park by the school anyway, because my wife wanted one of the Aldi supermarket specials that was released today. They had super cheap dog beds a while back and she bought one, and of course it turned out that Scully loves the cheap Aldi dog bed and ignores the expensive dog bed from the pet store. So she’s been looking out for the specials ever since, and finally it reappeared, so she despatched me to get another one for her office.

Back home it was a comics writing day, interrupted by some more prep work for the ISO Photography meeting next month. Unfortunately for me, this time the meeting is being held in a time zone that works for the USA and Europe… which means it’s going to be the middle of the night for me. The sessions run from 23:00 to 02:30 here in Sydney, Monday to Friday. So it’ll be a week of very late nights.

In COVID related news, the Australian Government released their annual Budget last night. Notably, there was a strong underlying assumption that Australia’s borders will remain closed until at least mid-2022. That means no tourists visiting, and no residents in Australia allowed to leave the country. I’d been imagining we could start travelling again by the end of 2021, but now we’re looking at still more than a year until that’s possible. We’ll probably have to have a COVID vaccination shot, and then the next annual shot after that before we can travel… (I’m assuming this is going to end up as an annual thing like flu shots.)

New content today:

And a perfect half day…

After yesterday’s perfect autumn day, the forecast today predicted rain, although not until the afternoon. So I decided to take advantage of what may be the last fine morning of the week to go and play some golf. And I decided to take advantage of the New South Wales Government’s COVID stimulus voucher program by getting them to pay for my round, so it was a free day out.

It really was a nice morning, although cooler and cloudier than yesterday.

This is the “pitch and putt” course where every hole is a par 3. My local full-sized course doesn’t (AFAIK) accept the COVID vouchers, so I travelled out here to use one. The course was fairly empty today, and playing by myself I used two balls in parallel, playing each hole twice as I went around the course once. I kept score separately and managed my best ever total for one of the balls, so that was good.

On this hole, 13, I managed to hit both balls from the tee onto the green! I was playing one pink ball and one yellow ball. The pink one should be easy to see – the yellow one is way at the back of the large double green (left of the big light pole on the right)… but that still counts!

After golf, I drove over to my favourite pie shop for lunch, and ate pies by the beach. There were pelicans hanging out there.

This afternoon I spent time working on some ISO Photography standards stuff, in preparation for the next meeting we’re having, which is coming up in June. I had to write up some comments on a draft document and submit them, and do some admin stuff with the meeting agenda and so on. Nothing particularly exciting, but it consumed much of the afternoon.

New content today:

Standards meeting and ethics course

Today I chaired a Standards Australia meeting on photography, following up on the ISO Photography standards meeting held a few weeks ago. This is where I report back to the Australian expert committee on events and discussions from that ISO meeting. We also discuss the standards currently up for ballots and decide what Australia’s vote will be. COVID is still keeping our local meetings virtual, so it was all via Zoom. We had a good attendance today, so that was good.

The other main thing I did today was complete work on my Critical Thinking and Ethics course for Outschool. I’ve submitted the completed course description, but they need to go over it and approve it before it becomes public, which can take a day or two. When it’s ready for students, I’ll let you know.

New content today:

Virtual Sydney meeting day 5

This morning was the last day of the ISO standards meeting. It was all just administrative stuff to finish off, going over summary reports of all the technical discussions, listing action items, and so on. One important thing was to decide the timing for the next meeting, which is on 7-11 June. I’ve been fortunate to have this meeting and the previous on at a favourable time in the morning, but the European delegates have been up in the middle of the night. The June meeting is going to allow the Europeans to have a comfortable afternoon, while I will be stuck beginning the meeting at 11pm here in Sydney.

At this stage the plan is for a physical meeting at Apple in Cupertino in October, but realistically I expect that will probably be virtual as well. Even if it isn’t, there’s no way I’ll be going.

Meeting done, I spent the rest of the day preparing for tomorrow’s market. I have a stall at Kirribilli Markets, which will hopefully be busy and full of people wanting to buy my stuff. I had to collate a pile of greeting cards and envelopes and stuff them into cellophane baggies, ready for people to buy, and then print out some more price signs and stuff. Then I collected all my stuff and did a test pack of the car, to make sure I can transport it all to the market in two trips. I’m not hiring a large car this time, as the market is not far away, and I worked out that I can get everything there in two trips (with the first taking my wife so she can mind the gear while I return for the second load). It was a bit like working out how to cross a river with a lettuce, a goose, and a fox.

With that, it’s an early night, because we have to get up before 6am to start moving stuff to the market nice and early.

New content today:

Virtual Sydney meeting day 4

There were only two technical sessions in the ISO meeting today, as a spot opened up during the agenda planning meeting, and it was decided to put it at the end of today, so we could finish early. The day that is – we have one more day of meeting tomorrow.

Today’s first session was on autofocus, measuring the speed and the accuracy of camera autofocus mechanisms. The project leader has been experimenting with methods to measure these things. It’s not as straightforward as you might think. We care about digital SLR cameras, where you have manual control over things like triggering the autofocus, but most cameras these days are also phones, and we have to be able to measure those too. When was the last time you manually triggered autofocus on your phone?

Right… you don’t need to, because it’s continuously refocusing. So you can’t just place a phone camera in front of a test calibration chart, defocus it and then time how long it takes to focus and repeat 100 times to get good statistics, because there’s no way to force it to defocus. The only way to change the focus is to point the camera at something a different distance away. So the project leader was running experiments where the camera would be pointed at a distance wall, and a mechanical arm would swing in a test chart at a near distance, thus forcing the camera to refocus, and then take a photo, and then measure the photo image of the test chart to see how good the focus is – and repeat hundreds of times.

He reported that while this method seemed like it should work, there was a problem. The camera typically refocuses in a fraction of a second and then takes the photo, which we should be able to analyse for any defocus blur to see how good the autofocus is. The problem is that by the time the camera takes the photo, the test chart is still vibrating from the sudden movement into the field of view… so the photo has significant (several pixels) of motion blur in it! This makes it very hard to figure out the defocus blur. So he wasn’t sure what to do about this. I suggested changing the experimental setup to have the nearby chart fixed, but to put an angled mirror between it and the camera, which would reflect the image of a distant wall into the camera. So now the camera can focus on the wall, and the mirror can be removed quickly, forcing the camera to refocus on the near chart, which hasn’t moved – no vibration! He said that was a good idea, and he’ll try it out. There were a bunch of other technical details reported as well, which I won’t go into further.

The second session was about measuring the accuracy of depth cameras – which produce images telling you the distance to points in the scene. This is a preliminary exploratory stage of what will be a new standard. The main difficulty here is that there are several very different technical approaches to making a depth camera, and a test method that will work for one of them won’t work for another. So we’re compiling a survey of what we want to measure and how we can do it for all the different types of camera. We seem to have put together an agreed list of things, and the project leader is planning to write up a first draft in time for comments and discussion at the next meeting.

This afternoon I started planning for my market stall on Sunday. I’ve done three markets at a small local suburban market last year, but this one is a bigger market in the inner city, with many more stalls, and hopefully many more customers. It’s going to be a jump up in complexity and experience level, and I have to figure out how to get all my stock and gear there in our car with my wife’s help, without hiring a larger car to put it all in. This market is much closer to home, so we can make two trips, which after test packing of the car today I’m pretty sure we can manage. I was a bit worried about one of the items being too big to fit, but turning it a certain way I managed to get it into the car boot and close the door.

I’m going to be having early mornings both Saturday and Sunday this weekend… for the final day of the ISO meeting, and then getting up super early on Sunday to haul gear to the market and be set up and ready to go before 8:30!

New content today: