wounder full you go to the dentist to replace a filling and they tell you that they can't make a new filling, since the material they use is not sturdy enough,
so you end up to replace a perfectly fine filling with a crown and have 500$ out of pocket expense...

...at least I finally got rid of the amalgam filling and also of my sensitive teeth problem, which seemed to be related to it.

I finally managed to take my camera with me to lake Tahoe, since we got our scientific retreat here and it's just wonderful to take pictures of this area. Everything is just so beautiful.


you can find more in my galleria!

after reading some more and more about my spontaneous shopping I came to the conclusion that I have to find a osx 10.4 cd or have to install a bigger hard drive.


Currently it has 40GB and only syncs recently added movies and songs. Sadly you can only sync with on pc. Since we got 5 pc's this brings some kind of a challenge.

If I could sync at least two pc's it would help alot since it would be able to sync with lindsays laptop and with my main laptop.

the easiest would still if it could just access an external hard drive as it's supposed to be,
...at least in my opinion...

today I finally managed to get my car smogged (AU) and went shopping for new toys. I was way to brave in February.



20 Minutes later I got a new airport extreme (our wireless router just died :( ) and an apple TV. Now my idea was to share a 500GB HD on the airport extreme with the apple tv, but this worked not out since I don't have a leopard 10.4 cd laying around and so have no way to enable ssh accss on the apple tv...

new plan

airport exteme + HD --> minimac (mounts the HD) --> itunes --> apple TV (display data from itunes)

an image (not taken by me, i tried, but didn't get it done)

after we had a nice evening with friends which provided home made pizza, which was extremly tasty. I went shopping and bought a pizza stone + peeler + cutter.

Why? Pizza stones make the pizza so tasty and it's not burned. And they are cheap, 35$ for a stone and peeler and cutter is not to bad.

I also finally bought an umbrella and lightstand to improve my flash based photographies.

night of the mojito,


this night I decided to make some mojitos,

with some I mean I went to the store and went nuts on buying different kind of rums. Which means I end up with:

1 x 10 cane rum - 40$
1 x barcadi lemon - 20$
1 x pitu - 20$

several limes, soda and mint.

now my favorite recipe for the night turned out to be

• 2 shots of barcadi lemon
• 2 shots of soda
• 10 leaves of mint
• 1 lime - dark greeen, the light green just don't cut it
• fill up with crushed ice
• 2 tsp brown sugar
  

the 10 cane needed to much sugar to taste good (better for caipirinhas) and the pitu was just to strong.

and I'm really looking at the SB-600 or the nikon F1/8 80mm as my personal birtday gift...

today I received a 250GB hard drive for my laptop and I honestly have to say I'm amazed that you can put so much stuff in a small laptop drive. Now I actually can really use the laptop to its full potential (linux + windows XP + windows vista + several VMs)

and it only cost a little bit over 100$,

after a couple of hours of frustration with my mac and the eternal question:

why wont java use more than 2GB of RAM, if the system has 8GB Ram I found the answer here:

http://developer.apple.com/java/javaleopard.html

basically you need to provide the JVM flag -d64

thanks apple for doing something simple so complicated. On every other os java automatically uses 64bit without the need to set some stupid flags...

it finally happened, my software project is now available as opensource (at least parts) and I also got accepted by atlassian, which means we get all there cool tools for free.
jira,
bamboo,
confluence,
crowed,
fisheye

binbase uses them all for code management and documentation.

You can find more out under:

http://binbase.sourceforge.net/

or at our ohloh account

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11844?p=binbase

which is very helpfull to push our google hits higher and higher.

oracle is back to live after a long time - 36h give or take,

procedure was:

1. connect sqlplus sys/******* as sysdba
2. shutdown immediate
3. startup nomount
4. restore control file
5. shutdown abort
6. startup mount
7. exit
8. export MALLOC_CHECK_=0
9. rman catalog rman/******@BACKUP target sys/******
10. restore database
11. recover database
12. alter database open resetlogs;

a simple 9 step procedure once you got it all figured out and just because a ******** barge hat to cap the cables at the sacramento river and took me out of business.

Helpfull links: this

or like a wise man said:

boss: how long do you need to fix the problem?
wise man: 10 seconds after I found the solution

fighting with oracle since 16 hours because of a stupid bug.

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

connected to target database: BINBASE (DBID=3083741697, not open)
connected to recovery catalog database

RMAN> recover datafile 1;

Starting recover at 15-FEB-08
Starting implicit crosscheck backup at 15-FEB-08
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=155 devtype=DISK
Crosschecked 103 objects
Finished implicit crosscheck backup at 15-FEB-08

Starting implicit crosscheck copy at 15-FEB-08
using channel ORA_DISK_1
Crosschecked 10 objects
Finished implicit crosscheck copy at 15-FEB-08

searching for all files in the recovery area
cataloging files...
*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (!prev): 0x0cc2f3a8 ***







RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of recover command at 02/15/2008 23:46:02
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================


basically it is some cglib mojo with the glib library from centos which kills your application if it thinks it founds a bug...

it is pretty well described here


In short:

The version of glibc provided with CentOS 4.3 performs additional internal
sanity checks to prevent and detect data corruption as early as possible. By
default, should corruption be detected, a message similar to the following will
be displayed on standard error (or logged via syslog if stderr is not open):

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x0937d008 ***

By default, the program that generated this error will also be killed; however,
this (and whether or not an error message is generated) can be controlled via
the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable. The following settings are supported:

0 Do not generate an error message, and do not kill the program
1 Generate an error message, but do not kill the program
2 Do not generate an error message, but kill the program


3 Generate an error message and kill the program

After I set this variable I made some progress.

...need to take more pictures...
...need more spare time...
...need to figure out how to get a new visa...
...dentist, need togo to dentist...
...need more mojitos...

it's the 14th of febuary and at it happened we won a gift certificate at a raffle from our apartment complex. What is it about? 30$ for the resturant fuzzios, but since I really can't stand fuzzios and another person won a 30$ gift certificate for Bistro 33, which is my favorite resturant around here...


...I started talking and trading and convincing the other person and got her certificate in exchange for my certificate since she didn't like bistro...

Yay I finally can eat the 25$ coffee powdered rib eye steak this saturday \o/

i finally managed to get my continius integration system running in the way I like it. The current configuration contains:

1 x Bamboo trial license
1 x Trac for issue management
1 x maven2

and tests my code against the following services:

1 x oracle 10g - filled using DBunit snapshots
1 x postgres8 (todo)
1 x jboss 4.2.*
1 x rocks linux cluster 4.3 - simulated using vmware server (2 nodes,1 frontend)

and all this runs on my 3year old workstation and performs quite well.

The official address is currently: bender

now I just need to get a Bamboo license for our opensource projects and write a lot more testcode. I just wished I would had started such a thing 3 years ago, since it would make things a lot simpler...

drink of the week:

daiquiri de nase

1 x fresh orange
1 x fresh lime
1 shot tripple sec
2 shot mailibu coconut rum
1 TS brown sugar
1 CuP (250ml of ICE)
5 frozen strawberries

put all in a blender (lime/orange just the juice),
blend it,
trink it

tasty with a nice sour note

currently I'm wasting my time with the hopeless attempt to develop better code. For this reason I'm migrating right now to maven from ant, which is just a nightmare.

Maven itself is a pretty cool and fancy tool and my ant scripts where always written in a way that they simulate the behavior from maven. But since my projects get more and more complex, it's just no fun to keep adjusting antfile for N projects. So I switched last friday to maven...


...one week later I'm still trying to figure out why the stuff does not work as it should and why it is so complicated. I'm actually ending up with setting up a complete continius build enviroment including:

- rocks cluster based on vmware
- maven mirror for artifacs
- continium, a continius build tool
- a postgres testdatabase
- a oracle testdatabase
- an apache
- a bugzilla

Which all takes forever since the cluster installation is so buggy that it's really no fun todo it.

Which also complicates things alot is that my car, mhm basically blew up. I have no idea yet what's wrong, but I'm looking forward to look in the greedy eyes of my mechanic when he tells me how much hes going to charge me, if he is fixing it...

now the first week in berlin is over and tomorrow we will fly to to paris, france.

yay...

...and a merry christmas

So weihnachten kommt naeher und wir waren in vacaville einkaufen. Nun ja wir wollten weihnachtsgeschenke kaufen, aber wie immer kauft man natuerlich mehr als man eigentlich wollte und das was man kaufen wollte gab es nicht...

Bedeuted ich habe mir endlich das eine messer gekauft welches ich seit einem Jahr kaufen wollte und habe auch einen kleinen Dekanter gekauft.
Als Referenz das santoku ist das Messer welches ich vor 2 jahren in Berlin gekauft habe und das untere ist ein spezielles Gemuese Messer.

Desweitere habe ich mir endlich einen Messerschaerfer gekauft, da ein Messer nun doch etwas stumpf geworden ist, nach knapp 3 Jahren, und bin begeistert wie scharf sie wieder sind.

halloween is now officially over and lindsay, from now on referred as honey, babe, sweetheart, sunshine or other names decided to make cookies.

now I decided to make a cocktail and it was a little bit strong I think...

3 shots malibu rum
2 shots black rum
some mango juice
some orange juice
some ice

blend it all and give one to honey and one to me.

result, funny shaped cookies and pictures of funny shaped pictures. Btw the pictures include 0 postprocessing. Only one flash, one 10-20mm lens and a snoot + some cardboard to direct the light in direction of the smilling pumpkin.

more Halloween pictures, this time provided by Kate and Dave

Forgot to add,

pictures from the Halloween party at Dave's place last weekend.

All pictures can be found here

(taken and provided by martin and sara)

During the game I also discovered a new problem with my camera, I don't got enough storage. So i had 3 x 1GB and 1 x 256MB card and was constantly switching cards and in breaks reviewing and deleting pictures from burst sequences. So maybe I need to get a 4GB or 8GB SD card someday so that I can store a little more than only 80 pictures on one card and don't have to worry about this issue all the time.

Btw these black marks you always see in football movies, they are actually doing this. To remove reflections from the sun or som lame excuse.

Another problem I discovered, I don't know which autofocus modus I should use to get the sharpest possible pictures. If I manually select the focuspoint, it get's pretty hard to track the player in the current point.

If I choose the automated focus selection, it happen's quite often that the camera focus on some total random objects instead of the player of my choice. Time to read Tom Hogans book again.

here we got an example of the pictures I like to archive. The subject, in this case the priceless model amber, is nice and sharp and the background is nice and blurry so that we have a perfect isolation.

This can be archived over the used aperature + focal lens + distance from background.

Btw I didn't take this picture, martin played with my camera and happend to stalk this perfect stranger who happened to be his girlfriend.

Hier haben wir ein beispiel was fuer Bilder ich haben will. Das Model war in diesem Falle Amber und die Abbildung ist scharf und der Hintergrund unscharf. Um diesen Effekt zu erreichen muss man wissen das es 3 Parameter gibt. Die Blende, die Brennweite und die Distanze zum Hintergrund. Je groesser die Blende und je laenger die Brennweite umso besser ist der Fordergrund vom Hintergrund getrennt.
Das Bild wurde uebrigens von martin geschossen und das Motiv ist amber seine Freundin.

mhm after this football game I want a lens with 300mm + worse than ever.

So something like the Nikon 300mm F/4 + 1/7 tc
The sigma 100-300mm F/4 + tc

or a faster lens like the 80-200mm F/2.8 to blur out the people in the background and get shutter speeds of 1/2000s to stop the motion and get tack sharp pictures.

Would i sell my 70-300mm VR? i could and would get like 420$ for it and I paid like 470$ but I really like it because it's so small and light.

why can you spend money only once...

i need to find some nikon shooters so I can borrow stuff and don't have to buy everything. For some reason everybody and their dog uses canon...

today I spend some time with trying to establish contact's with some of the photographers I saw at the game yesterday in the hope to get, I don't know maybe some interresst in my pictures or the possibility of access to the sidelines of event's.

Den heutigen Tag verbrachte ich damit emails and diverse photographen zu schicken um kontakt herzustellen und zu sehen was fuer vorteile man mit ein paar netten worten worten haben kann. Da ich auch bekannte habe welche als security guards arbeiten sollte es moeglich sein irgendwie bilder von den seitenlinen zu schiessen. Ich brauche nur einen presse ausweis dafuer...

today I had the possibiliy to watch my first football and It was actually fun. I don't give much about the sport, but to take pictures, lots of possibilities. Specially to figure out what the right focus mode is to get nice and sharp pictures.

To the left you the see the pictures I liked most and the rest you can find online under
http://berlinguyinca.zenfolio.com/p535351542/

i will defnatly watch another game and try to improve my picture taking possibilities.

it's getting colder and asparagus is one sale, so what does this mean?

Time to cook some tasty soups. After years and years of trying to find the perfect recipe, I came up with my own....

3 lbs asparagus - green because we are lazy and cheap
1 piece of butter
a handful of flower
3 mid sized potato's
2 cups of whipping cream
1 large white onion and I mean large
1/4 gallon of chicken stock
1/4 gallon of water

- chop and dice the veggies and keep the asparagus head
- cook all the veggies for 25 minutes in the chicken stock
- blend the now soft veggies till you get a disgusting green thick soup
- create a roux from the flower and the butter
- add the disgusting green thick soup to the roux
- add the water
- blend it all again
- add the whipping cream
- add the asparagus heads, cook it another 20 minutes and enjoy
- spice it up with nutmeg, salt and pepper

Now you got a tasty soup which a light poison green color.

same picture but without noise reduction.

Accidentally applied to much to the picture before and lost lots of details.



After I read just another review I'm very certain that I will order the Tamron instead of the Nikon. it's 450$ instead of 1200$ online an supposed to be optically equal.

And last but not least, this price difference is a nice vacation.

Today we went to sacramento to find a halloween costum for me, but gave up pretty fast. I just hate to shop in totally crowed areas with people all around me.

I also got the chance to play with a nikon 17-55mm F/2.7 AFS at the ritz camera store in sacramento. And boy this lens is nice. It's not as large as I though and the pictures quality looks just great.

is it 1200$ worth? I doubt it, but it is nice.

To the left a sparrow shot with the nikon 70-300mm VR at 300mm and ISO 1250. Picture is basicall uncropped.

current project,

a friend got me two itanium 64bit boxes which where laying around and so I decided to install an application server on it.

3 weeks later we finally got the right serial cable/null modem adapter and got the beasts to boot from cdrom.

reminder:

1. straight serial
2. connect to the parallel port
3. don't connect usb keyboard with usb->ps2 adapter, causes the box to crash
4. use parted instead of fdisk
5. jrockit java is different to sun java

ok how is jrockit different?

we use a framework based on hibernate (which is based on serialization and reflection of java objects)

And there are some java standards.

- a property is accesed using getters and setters
- if its a boolean property you use get* or is*

now the original develop of the webframework used

int getValue();
void setValue(int value);
boolean isValue();

which works fine on a sun java box, because hibernate checks first for:

int getValue()

and calls than

setValue(int ....)

on jrockit it works like:

boolean isValue() --> hibernate thinks now it's a boolean type and so decides to

setValue(boolean ....)

which causes all kind of nasty class cast exceptions.


so we fixed the method name to:

boolean isBooleanValue()

The second nice problem was that jboss didn't like the mysql backend and gave me all kind of nasty exceptions. The solution to this problem can be found here

once I got this all running, I have to admit that itaniums are nice and fast, but deserve to be extinct!

I just noticed that I bought nearly nothing computer wise in the last 3 years. At least for home. All i got is

1 x PC 2.4 GHZ, 1 GB Ram - 100$
1 x Graphic card 150$
1 x 20" LCD 300$
1 x color calibration tool 60$

and today my 500 GB external harddrive arrived, 120$

So are I'm still a computer geek? I some how doubt it.

...but the new harddrive won't sync with my xbox360 :(

To the left "line up"

right now I try to figure out if I like this picture or not. The left side looks nice, but the right side ends seems missing a part. I think it could be improved if I get the right border of the street in the picture, but than I run into even more problems with the sun...

I think I need to give this picture a second try over the next couple of days and try to find a time where shadows are thrown away from me, but the sun is not in the picture.

I think my weekly driving around in davis finally starts to pay off, at least I hope that my landscapes start to improve.
My main fuzz with the sigma 10-20 is that I love the 10mm perspective, but I still don't like that it's not very sharp. It's one of my most expensive lenses and sharpness wise one of my worst.

ok whats new,

1. booked flight's for paris

so now it's official, we will be over christmas in germany and paris

2. got addicted to my xbox360 again

i made the mistake and bought an xbox live membership and halo 3, it's amaizing how addicting it is. Only thing I don't like that it tracks everything what I'm doing in this game online

3. now that we are going to Paris i got into a minor problem, I don't got any lens which can work as walk arround lens. So I'm looking right now at 2 lenses,

the Tamron 17-50mm F/2.8 and the Nikon 17-55 F/2.8. The tamron is cheaper and lighter, the nikon heavier, more robust, weathersealed (paris = rain) and last but not least cost double what the tamron cost.

So it seems that I'm going with the tamron, except that there are problems with the quality control and it's supported to be very bad arround the corners of the lens. Related to it's curved front element.

But 500$ vs 1000$ is a damn good argument to go with the tamron. I actually doubt I get the cash together anyway, i just don't want to be as disappointed with a lens like I am with the sigma 10-20 I have. The pictures still don't seem sharp to me. So maybe I convince myself one day and drop the lens on craigslist. I should be able to sell it for 80 - 90% what I paid for it.

today I finally figured out how to use unison to sync all my pc's. Basically what it does it keeps two directories in sync. In my case I want to keep my workspace at work in sync with my workspace at home.

2 days later, I managed to find out that ssh under windows just sucks and you need to use socket mode. Once done all worked perfect and it took only 4 hours to sync 4 GB over my home connection.

today i read a little bit about the zen API. Basically it allows me to access my gallery using a simple webservice.

I have no idea what I going todo with this, but it's very likely that I will write a small tool to generate runtime statistics :)

a very amazing project i just found online. Shot with a nikon D200 and a Sigma 8mm lens

http://pano.1drey.com/panos/bulgaria/sobor4b.html

to the left is a wounderfull example why a 5.6 zoom is to slow and VR does not help in every situation.

As we can see we have quiete a cluttered background and a bad sepration of the motiv and the fence. At F/2.8 I could have used a shutterspeed of 1/800 instead of 1/400 which would make sure that the ball was sharp instead of blurred by the motion.

Maybe someday I can find a nice used 180 mm F/2.8 or 80-200mm F/2.8 which fits the budget.

So far I going to stick with iso 400 or 800 and try to shoot from an angle where I don't have the problem with the background.

during the football game i tried to use the automatic focal point detection feature. Which turned out to be not the best idea, because all pictures seem pretty unsharp.

To the left ED trying to catch, sadly I did not got the actual moment of the catch.

saturday afternoon,
4 pm,
martins 31st birthday party,
my first time playing football. (to the left matt),
my first time taking football pictures,

So this game looks pretty retarted in TV and I will never understand why they can't design a round ball instead of this uggly weirdshapped egg,
but it's acutally quite fun to play...

...if you can call what we did playing,
we were more running around like chickens and try to catch the ball,
specially in each team maybe two player knew how to play
and the rest played for their first time
and is not able to throw the ball in a straigth line...