Ralph E Jacobson, Sidney F Ray, Geoffrey G Attridge, Norman R Axford

Focal Press, ISBN: 0240515749,  Publisher, Buy online.

This book is simply wonderful. It is a detailed and comprehensive treatise on the physical, optical, chemical and otherwise scientific theory behind photography (the authors all have a bevy of these wonderfully quaint British learned society titles, in addition to a hefty list of PhDs and graduate degrees). Also distinctive is that the first edition was published in 1890 and thus it spans three centuries!

That said, the coverage of the latest developments like digital photography is impressive, and this is one of the first photography textbooks that have been updated completely for the coming migration to digital, rather  than treating it as an afterthought.

I’ve been looking for a long time for such a book, that explains the theory without patronizing a scientifically literate reader. For instance, the book explains how ISO ratings are defined for film and for electronic sensors, how depth of field is computed, the diffraction limit on sharpness at small apertures and so on. If you are afraid of equations, this is not the book for you.

I found this interesting weblog on the subject, and a tool to use  Python IDE.

Note (2004-04-17):

I am keeping the mention of Wal-Mart in this article for historical reasons. It has since come to my attention, however, that Wal-Mart has in many cases violated racial discrimination and immigration laws, locked in its night shift employees, potentially putting their health and life in danger in case of medical emergency, and repeatedly stolen from its employees by illegally witholding overtime pay and fraudulently altering computerized time sheets. The frequency of these reports suggests these are not isolated incidents, as the company asserts, but rather actively condoned or encouraged, and the result of a system of perverse incentives and pressure on middle management that can only be achieved by resorting to these criminal practices.

I do not believe it is morally permissible for me to patronize such an ethically dubious firm, and urge you not to either. In contrast, Costco is cheaper, and yet offers decent working conditions, pay and benefits to its employees.

I received some prints I made from Wal-Mart Photo Center by uploading digital photos taken with my Canon EOS D30. I made a mix of 4″x6″ and 8″x10″. The quality is very good, much better than that of traditional silver-halide photos I took with my old Nikon N6006, and when you look at them with a 10x loupe, they completely blow the supposedly 1200dpi inkjet prints from my HP Photosmart P1000 out of the water.

These prints are made on real photographic paper (Fuji Crystal archive, rated at 25 years) by a  Fuji Frontier laser photo printer which exposes the photo paper by passing red, green and blue lasers on it, and the print is then developed conventionally.

Wal-Mart has also improved the uploading process. When using IE on Windows, an ActiveX component allows simple drag-and-drop uploading of large numbers of images, as opposed to the laborious HTML file upload-based process that was limited to 5 images.

Update (2002-09-16):

For people who live in San Francisco (and probably other locations as well), Costco is a cheaper option. They use a Frontier 370 digital minilab in their SoMa location and they charge 20 cents for a 4×6, and $2 for a 8×10. Unfortunately, their on-line service uses the inferior Kodak process. When I went there last Saturday, they took my originals on CD and gave me back my prints in about 2 hours (although they printed my 8×10 as 4×6 by mistake, which added another 30 minutes, but the lady at the counter was very helpful). Sam’s club apparently matches Costco pricing and is upgrading to Frontiers as well (including on-line).

Other Frontier locations I know of in San Francisco (much more expensive, unfortunately): F-1 Photo at 690 Market (@ Post), Ritz Camera (2185 Chestnut). Two good resources for Frontier enthusiasts: this Digital minilabs list is a directory of (among others) Frontier-equipped minilabs, and Dry Creek Photo offers a color profiling service for your local minilab to obtain optimum color accuracy (they will profile your minilab for free if it isn’t already listed in their database).

Update (2002-10-24):

There is an article on laser digital minilabs in the New York Times (free registration required). One interesting tidbit is that Fuji’s initial implementation of the Frontier was so sharp it revealed every skin blemish, and they had to add code to detect and smooth out curved areas of skin-tone color.

Update (2003-07-02):

Other good reviews:

• Jack Michaud

Update (2003-07-28):

I visited the San Francisco Costco yesterday, and they have replaced their Fuji Frontier 370 with a Noritsu QSS-3101 (PDF). This generation of Noritsu digital minilab uses a laser rather than the MLVA (LED) technology used in earlier Noritsu minilabs, and it should have equivalent quality (I will know for sure this coming Thursday when I get my prints back – it seems the word is out and Costco now has quite a backlog).

The nice thing is they now have a self-service Noritsu CT-1 kiosk where you can upload your photos from flash cards or CD, albeit with a slightly clunky interface. They also support 8×12 rather than 8×10 now, and more interestingly larger sizes as well, up to 12×18.

Fortunately, the paper used is still Fuji Crystal Archive rather than the inferior Kodak alternatives Noritsu is usually associated with (Kodak resells Noritsu minilabs, and allegedly some Agfa minilab components as well).

Update (2003-09-07):

Another Fuji Frontier location in San Francisco. Walgreens’ Fisherman’s Wharf store (Jones between Jefferson and Beach) has a Frontier 370 with an Aladdin self-service kiosk front-end. To their credit, they resisted the temptation to gouge the tourists that will probably make the bulk of their custom. They advertise a package of $6.99 for 24 4×6 digital prints, which isn’t that much more than what you would get from Costco. They also promise 1 hour delivery, as long as the machine is operating below capacity. The operator was not able to gve me ansers on the price of 8×10 enlargements (he was from the night shift, as it was past 9PM), but he thinks it is in the vicinity of $4-$5.

My original home page, started in 1994, stopped working sometime around 96 or so when the machine it ran on, an old NeXTstation at Yale named octopus, was taken out of commission. I procrastinated on rebuilding it since.

Using a weblog tool like Radio UserLand makes it possible to rebuild my web page on a limited time budget, plus the weblog format is actually more sensible for a personal home page.

Too bad Radio doesn’t support scp or WebDAV over SSL, though.

Fazal MAJID

Profile

I am a successful entrepreneur and hands-on CTO with a proven track record in the competitive and time-driven Cloud, SaaS and Big Data Analytics industries. I also have international experience in the Telecommunications and Networking fields. This background gives me a unique perspective across the entire application stack.

I am looking for technically challenging hands-on CTO or Senior IC roles with scope.

Skills

• Founding and growing startups, and making them survive recessions
• Aligning strategy and technology
• Building and managing engineering and ops teams, Project management
• Mentoring engineers
• Cost-effective scaling (Mobile, Web, Big Data and Cloud)
• Performance optimization and application tuning
• Database and Big Data design and management
• Network architecture, Telecommunications OSS and BSS architecture
• Expert in Python, C and Go on UNIX platforms
• I was granted two patents

Experience

Dirac Software

Interim Chief Technology Officer

June 2025–April 2026 — London, UK
Startup, disrupting wholesale export-import using software and GenAI.

I built Claude-based agentic workflows with MCP and RAG for sourcing unstructured brand and retailer data, and hybrid human-LLM CRM to manage the sales process. I fixed tech debt around operations, mentored two high-potential but inexperienced engineers.

Interlude: Six months' gap to deal with a family emergency (father had a heart attack and needed medevac) — January 2025–June 2025

Meta (WhatsApp)

Software Engineer (IC7, Systems Generalist archetype)

May 2023–December 2024 — London, UK
WhatsApp is the world's foremost messaging and communications service.

Senior software engineer, working in the WhatsApp Business Pillar. IC7 are ~1% of all Meta engineers.

I improved the quality of the Business Messaging experience at scale on WhatsApp, including frequency capping of marketing messages and other steps to protect the user experience. This corrected declines in read rate and other measures of user sentiment.

I developed a ground-breaking approach to business analytics while preserving user privacy and complying with WhatsApp's onerous critical commitments to regulators and users with strong differential privacy.

I used LLMs for flow classification, spam identification & control and live functional regression monitoring.

Singular Labs Inc.

Chief Technology Officer, Attribution

June 2017–January 2023 — San Francisco, CA, USA & London, UK
Startup, developing a SaaS Mobile Analytics, Attribution, Mobile Marketing and Behavioral Targeting platform. Apsalar merged with Singular in June 2017, combining best-in-class marketing analytics and attribution.

I shared responsibility for integrating the platforms, modernizing our stack, migrating to AWS, cross-training and mentoring the distributed teams (San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Bengaluru), and led on scalability for user/device-level data. I implemented GDPR and COPPA compliance, as well as data governance as contractually required by our partners.

I extended our platform to be globally distributed, self-healing with continuous delivery while further optimizing cost efficiencies using a judicious mix of cloud and facilities-based infrastructure. This includes building observability into our software stack.

Apsalar Inc.

Co-Founder and CTO

February 2010–June 2017 — San Francisco, CA, USA
Startup, developing a SaaS Mobile Analytics, Attribution, Mobile Marketing and Behavioral Targeting platform.

As CTO, I was responsible for the architecture, implementation and operations of the Apsalar platform, and building a highly productive engineering team to develop it.

I built market-leading mobile revenue analytics, mobile attribution, real-time bidding and audience creation and distribution platforms.

I scaled our architecture to traffic levels three orders of magnitude higher than Kefta for roughly similar CAPEX.

I built a data science team to create market segments to sell as a DSP. Ultimately we were not able to scale them due to poor RTB inventory quality at the time and focused on our attribution offering.

Acxiom Corp.

Senior Architect

April 2007–February 2010 — Foster City, CA, USA
Global data broker that collects, analyzes, and sells consumer information for targeted advertising and marketing.

I worked on the architecture for Acxiom's next-generation multi-channel marketing platform, integrating the Kefta technology with Acxiom's other online marketing channels. Some of the work covered scalable, yet ultra-low latency OLTP database technology for demanding online applications, where every millisecond counts.

Kefta Inc.

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

February 2000–April 2007 — San Francisco, CA, USA
Startup, funded by Softbank Venture Capital. Kefta provided SaaS behavioral targeting and email marketing solutions that helped increase our clients' online conversion rates and sales, often by 30%. We sold the company to Acxiom Corp. in April 2007.

I started the company with two partners (both Harvard MBAs), as the founder with a technology background. I was the technical face of the company on client pitches and public speaking engagements. I defined the technology vision and led its implementation, including much of the coding. I recruited, managed and mentored the engineering team (14 engineers at peak).

As a founder, I was ultimately responsible for getting things done. Just one example: after an unavoidable round of downsizing in 2003, I assumed the role of sole systems and database administrator until 2005. I led the business' reinvention several times to ensure its survival and renewal in the face of the dot-com nuclear winter of 2000–2004, one of the most challenging environments ever for technology startups.

I ran a tight ship and found ways to stretch our infrastructure dollars. One way to achieve that was insisting on performance optimization and efficiency, and mentoring engineers in my team to achieve this.

EuroNet Internet BV

Technical Director, Operations Manager, deputy CEO and interim CIO

1999–2000 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dutch commercial ISP, ran a national network with 26 POPs in the Netherlands, as well as an international backbone, with POPs in London, Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Washington and San Jose.

I performed technical due diligence for France Telecom's acquisition of the company in 1998, and stayed on to overhaul it. I limited post-acquisition turnover and recruited to stabilize the workforce, while shedding non-strategic activities such as custom web development.

I managed the core operations department with a 1999 budget of €5M in capital expenditures, €4.5M in operating expenses, and over 20 employees.

I upgraded the technical platforms (service, network and IS), reorganized operations and project management. I led the design of the long-term converged technical architecture for data services (IP and ATM) for all of France Telecom's Dutch affiliates. The first phase was an ambitious IP over SDH network of Cisco 12000 and 7500 routers, spanning over 29 POPs in the Netherlands.

France Telecom Interactive (FTI)

Deputy VP of Engineering. Acting as CTO for the division

June 1996–1999 — Paris, France
The division of France Telecom that operated Wanadoo (now rebranded as Orange), the premier Internet Service Provider in France and second-largest in Europe.

I designed Wanadoo's technical architecture to scale to 1 million subscribers and beyond by 1999, ran the RFPs and oversaw their implementation. This included the network architecture, the web portal and email services platform, the Business Support System (provisioning, billing and CRM) and the OSS. The first phase was completed in August 1997, the second in February 1999, when it served over 560,000 dialup, cable and ADSL subscribers. In remarkable test of longevity, FT/Orange is still using the same basic architecture for over 5 million subscribers across all retail Internet services.

I set up much-needed QA and project management groups, to improve reliability, quality of service and reduce time to market for introducing new features.

Service d'Études Communes des Postes et Télécommunications (SEPT)

Project Manager

September 1994–June 1996 — Caen, France
A joint France Telecom and French Post Office R&D lab, covering Internet, messaging, groupware, smart card, RFID and payment technologies.

I led Project Mercure to produce a prototype ISP platform for FT with electronic commerce capabilities, as a successor to the legacy French Minitel system. The project was successfully completed, on time and within budget, in collaboration with Netscape Communications, with a total budget of €500K and a staff of 15 engineers. The payment feature was patented and later commercialized in Wanadoo. It was generating well over €2M in yearly revenues by 2002.

Education

Télécom Paris (French National Higher Institute for Telecommunications)

MS in Telecommunications Engineering

1992–1994 — Paris, France
Telecom ParisTech is one of France's leading graduate engineering schools and is considered the school in the field of IT.

Yale University Mathematics Department

Research Assistant

1992, 1993 — New Haven, CT, USA
Under the supervision of Prof. Ronald Coifman.

I investigated noise reduction using wavelet packet analysis, leading to an international publication and a scientific software package. My research was awarded first prize for Mathematics in 1992 by the École Polytechnique.

École Polytechnique, Corps des Mines

MS in Mathematics and Computer Science

1989–1992 — Palaiseau, France
The top French engineering institute or "Grande École". It has trained France's scientific and industrial elite and the upper echelons of its civil and military services since its inception, and it continues to do so today.

Technical Skills

Patents granted

Videotex emulator in Java (French patent 96 04263 / FR 2 747 258 – A1).

Web-oriented Pay-per-view system (International patent WO 99/03243).

Highly Proficient

• Distributed systems architecture
• Scalability Engineering
• Performance Engineering & Optimization
• Building telemetry and observability software
• Python, writing Python C extension modules
• C, Go, Erlang, Rust
• HTML5, CSS, JavaScript
• LLMs: Llama3, Claude
• GenAI APIs: Llama.cpp, LangChain, FastMCP
• PostgreSQL, PL/pgsql, PL/proxy, CitusDB
• Writing C extensions for PostgreSQL
• SQLite, DuckDB, PrestoDB contributor
• Docker and Kubernetes, LXC
• Amazon AWS
• Linux (specially Alpine and Ubuntu)
• UNIX systems and network programming
• PostgreSQL DBA at scale
• Git and CI/CD
• nginx, incl. extension module programming
• HAProxy, NSQ, Valkey/Redis
• Postfix, Dovecot, DJBDNS, Unbound, CoreDNS
• Network protocol packet capture analysis

Past Experiences

• C++, Java, Scala, Ragel
• DTrace
• Apache Spark
• iOS (Objective-C) and Android app dev
• Juniper JunOS and Cisco IOS
• PHP, writing Wordpress extensions/themes
• Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, Pro*C, OCI and JDBC
• MySQL
• React, Vue.js
• Apache, NSAPI and AOLserver extensions in C
• Tcl/Tk, Tcl C extensions and embedding
• Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server DBA
• macOS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD
• CORBA, AMQP, XML-RPC
• X11/Athena and Motif
• Microsoft Project, including VBA extensions
• Memcached, Cyrus, BIND, SAMBA admin
• SNMP, NetFlow, MRTG, Cacti
• VMware, Xen, KVM, Parallels and VirtualBox
• Windows programming
• PostScript
• Solaris, Illumos (OpenIndiana and SmartOS)

Foreign languages

Native French, English and Urdu speaker. Intermediate German. Basic Dutch and Japanese.

International exposure

• 2019–Present: London, UK
• 2000–2019: San Francisco, CA, USA
• 1999–2000: Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 1992, 1993: New Haven, CT, USA
• 1982–1985: Tokyo, Japan
• 1978–1980: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• 1970–78, 80–81, 1985–2000: Paris, France