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The guys at Strobist posted today a series of tips on how to get the most out of your webcam. Very interesting. One thing that still is puzzling me is why after I installed Windows XP on our 17 inch iMac with BootCamp 1.2, the quality of the webcam image on Windows is better than what I’m getting on MacOS!! Really strange.
The Windows drivers that come with BootCamp make a USB emulation of the built in iSight, and perhaps there is either some color correction done during the emulation, or what would be most ironic, that the color correction algorithms on MacOS are actually trying too hard to compensate and end up making the image worse.
That iMac’s setting is problematic for video conferencing because the iMac is in the opposite side to a window, and facing the wall. The back light coming through the window creates a dark webcam pic. If anyone has solved this problem, I’d love to know.
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The sites I refer to when I talk about charting, data analysis and good (and bad) charting techniques are normally quite different from the ones where I satisfy my gearhead lust with the news from the latest car models in the market. This time the guys at motortrend did it for me in their article “Finding the best-handling car in the US”: both fixes in just one page 
Look at the following chart: well, it’s easy to tell the winner on their tests is the yellow line (if you are curious, the Porsche 911GT3). But can you tell from the green and red lines in the middle of the pack which one is better?
If you go to their gallery, you’ll see many other charts that fight fiercely for the top place in the Junk Chart museum. Just a couple of samples below
Spider charts may be useful, but only in very limited cases. Leave the webs to the guy in the custome, enjoy the movie, and stick to other chart types in your professional reports. You would be better off. Your audience will get it faster.
Read on to see a proposal on how this chart could be better.
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