May 2009 Archives

I hereby nominate the following photograph for Photoshop Disasters:

Typical PSDs involving missing or grotesquely deformed limbs in Victoria's Secret catalogs. This one's different because it's a disaster that nobody used Photoshop to create this picture. Here's what I was able to do in eight minutes:

1. Search Google Images for "Statute of Liberty" and find this:

2. Find this on the web:

3. Spend four minutes in Photoshop Elements (the lobotomized version of PS) and produce this:

Does it look horrible? Sure, but this is what an amateur can do in eight minutes. Imagine what a professional could do in an hour. Including stock art purchases, labor costs, uh... electricity to run the computer, and maybe even a brand-new retail copy of Photoshop, you're still talking under $1,000 to produce the same picture. Save a third of a million dollars, lots of 911 phone calls, and unemployment insurance.

If anyone with real Photoshop talent reads this blog, please start a meme: do your best faked version of the real photo and post it on your favorite photo site with tag whitehousephotoshopdisaster.

Update 5/10/2009: Great work, Marius!

I have two Linux machines and a gigantic file on one that I want on the other. The two machines are connected by Ethernet. scp is incredibly slow, about 1.6MB/second. I don't feel like setting up samba or nfs on either. I don't care about security, authenticity, or integrity; I can md5sum if necessary, and both machines are isolated from the Internet.

I assumed the scp slowness was a CPU thing with ssh encryption, but someone on the web said the problem was in fact at a lower level (64K buffer sizes in ssh). The best solution I came up with was python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()" on the source machine and then wget source:8000 myfile on the other machine. That got me about 8MB/sec, which was barely fast enough to get the job done, so I stopped investigating.

But for next time, there must be a clever command-line solution that a Linux guru can recommend. Maybe piping through nc?