Today my 1.4 TC arrived + monopod and some other goodies. So I happily went outside and started snapping away to see how good it is. Well from 100 pictures not a single picture was usefull and the AF basically does not work anymore (only if you have extreme amount's of light). This seems to be a camera issue + tc + lens issue. And I'm not sure if it's related that the lens and TC are incompatible. Who sponsors me a D300 so I can compare it against another camera?

Anyway so I setup a small bunny with a SB600 to the left and to the right, use iTTL to save work and put the camera in aperature mode. This are the results of the 100% crops, and as we can see this combination is pretty sharp wide open a F/2.8 + 1 Stop and get's much better a F/8 + 1. At F/11 + 1 it get's worth again.

All pictures were shot with a D80, on a tripod at 200mm x 1.4, iso 100

results

F/2.8 + 1

F/4 + 1

F/5.6 + 1

F/8 + 1

F/11 + 1

So guess I have to try to figure out how to get some nice pictures now in nature. If I got enough time, than there is no problem to manual focus on the oject on my choice.

Well I'm saving for the 300mm F/4 anyway and that's why I bought the TC originally.

Well these are basically my favorite pictures from today. I just love how the 70-200mm renders the colors and how well it handles. The color pictures are shot with one of two flashes and the black and white are natural light mostly wide open.

I start to get the hang of the lens and surprisingly it's not getting heavy at all.

strobist meeting in davis,

to say short it was a lot of fun, I shot close to 800 pictures, and was happy to have the laptop with me. Since my 3 x 1GB SD cards are really not enough anymore and I have to buy 1 or 2 4 - 8 GB SD cards.

well more comes later, since I have to sort pictures.

the same cat after removing the noise and playing a bit with the colors and crop.

so far I really like the new Tamron 70-200 F/2.8 lens.

And only 2 More days till the TC 1.4 and mono pod arrives so watch out you evil chipmunks!

Pictures are both taken handheld at 1/60s and 1/100s, iso800, boosted 1 stop in post processing to 1600 and slight contrast enhancements.

The first picture was taken at F/3.5 and the second at F/2.8

ok this first images are taken and things too notice

• chipmunks are to fast for me, I can't get close(tc comes on friday I hope, so i can get closer)
  
• !/250 are way to low for this lens, you need at least 1/500 or some kind of support (monopod comes on friday I hope)
• focus works extremely well, I think as good as it gets for my D80. As a reference the chipmunk was the size of the main focus point in the viewfinder

around 9 am this morning I heard a big clunk, and tap tap tap outside my door. So I start to investigate and see, the ups driver dropped... my package in front of my door and left again. Without even knocking. Normally I don't mind if they do this, but in case of a 700$ pacakge, well I expected more.

Anyway my tamron 70-200mm F/2.8 arrived and my first impression are:

• boy this thing is huge
• damn it's heavy
• darn I need a new bag for this thing
• i like it

So it seems all to be good and I went to work.

more comes as soon as I got some pictures done and got used to this lens.

well since exactly 2 minutes I'm a so called professional photographer.

what is the meaning of this?

the definition of an amateur:

An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without formal training or pay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur


The definition on the other hand is much longer and can be found on the same wikipedia site, but basically it means that you get paid for what you do.

Now how do I get paid as photographer?

It's pretty simple, on average 80 people visit my zenfolio page each month and several print pictures of my work. Now there is nothing wrong with it in principle and I'm happy if people look at my work online, but if somebody hangs a picture of me in his living room...

Well I want a cut, for this reason I started a little experiment. I upgraded my zenfolio account to a professional level and pay for this service a certain fee every year. This gives me the possibility to automatically get amount X of each printed picture depending on size and price.

So lets see how long it takes till the membership is paid for. It also means that family members get a coupon from me and can get any picture for free.

My current pricing formula is:

price = baseprice (set by print provider) * 1.6

which should be pretty fair.

examples:

5x7 print cost 99 cents from mpix + 52 cent my cut + 7 cent zenfolio cut = 1.58 total price, which is more or less the same ritz camera charges for printouts togo in davis.

and hey you can even order mugs and T-Shirts with my pictures...

grails still hates me,

the last couple of hours I tried to figure out why my multipartform did not work with g:actionsubmit as they were supposed to be. They always used "get" instead of "post" and so they failed.

solution:

You need to define this in your interceptor of the controller. It is ugly, but it works.

// temporary hack since g.actionSubmit does not work with multipart forms
if (params["_action_save"]) {
save()
}
else if (params["_action_update"]) {
update()
}
else if (params["_action_delete"]) {
delete()
}
else if (params["_action_Save"]) {
save()
}
else if (params["_action_Update"]) {
update()
}
else if (params["_action_Delete"]) {
delete()
}


you can read more about this issue here:

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS-2774

well it seems that my little photo set is more or less complete after 2.5 years and I'm only missing a 300mm prime, like the nikon 300mm F/4 to take wildlife pictures (which won't happen this year)

after my trading frenzy last month I ended with the nearly perfect set which is more or less future proof, since there will be a FX camera for under 1000$ in the next 4 years.

• 1 x Nikon D80
  
• 2 x SB-600 flashes
• 1 x Nikon 50mm F/1.8
  
• 1 x Nikon 35mm F/2
  
• 1 x Tamron 90mm F/2.8
• 1 x Tamron 80-200mm F/2.8
• 1 x Tamron 1.4 TC
  
• 1 x Sigma 10-20
• 2 x lighstand + umbrella + swivel
• 1 x Bogen Tripod with head
• 1 x Bogen Monopod with head

several bags, filters and other stuff

Stuff which I had, sold, traded

• Nikon 80-200mm F/2.8 push pull
• Nikon 17-55mm F/2.8
• Nikon 70-300mm VR
• Nikon D50
• Nikon 70-300mm NON VR
• Nikon 28-80mm
• Tamron 200-400
• Tokina 19-35mm (still for sale)
• 1 x Nikon MB-D80 battery grip (still up for sale, just barley use it)

Money spend after all this trading and shifting of stuff, 900$ which was 300$ more than I planned too. Yes I really wanted to have the 35m F/2 for my upcoming berlin trip...

Another interesting thing is how many pictures I took with all this stuff and actualy kept

• Nikon D50, 15000 pictures taken
• Nikon D80, 9000 pictures taken

Of these 24000 pictures I kept 2000 pictures on my harddrive, without a backup which I really have to change and uploaded 360 pictures.

If I would have taken these pictures with classical analog film and had it developed (no prints!) it would had been 11000$ developement cost for the negatives.

Now my photo equipment cost roughly 3000$ and has a resale value of ca 2500$ (better than my car!), which translates into 16c per picture, which is not to bad.

why do I do this calculation? To convince myself to stop spending money on camera gear and actually travel more. I'm also really bored right now and sleep deprived.

...but hey I spend 1800$ on beds so far, which have a resale value of maybe 100 - 200$...

oh grails why do you hate me...

ok the last couple of days I was trying to get grails + a webservice server + a webservice client running. So my first choice was the xfire plugin which worked great.

Now I wanted to create a client in grails to access one of my services. So lets use groovy ws for this. Well nice thinking, but like always you get fancy exception and reading onlien just tells you that they are not compatible.

Basically thats the exception you get:

org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.InvokerInvocationException: java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraints violated when linking javax/xml/namespace/QName class

with some pages of stack trace. Now I was tracing down all the jars and try to resolve this conflict which worked out somehow.

It turned out you need to delete some jars, if you use groovyws and the xfire plugin in the same grails application.

so go ahead and remove these two jars from the plugins/xfire***/lib directory

• stax-api-1.0.1.jar
• jsr173_api-1.0.jar

Now you can restart your grails application and it should work.

And least it did for me.

yay I just won my first game of chess against the computer in a long long time

[Event "Casual Game"]
[Site "San Francisco, U.S.A."]
[Date "2008.08.01"]
[Round "-"]
[White ", wohlgemuth"]
[Black "Apple Chess 2.3"]
[Result "1-0"]
[Time "00:29:20"]
[BlackType: "program"]

1. e4 e5
2. Nc3 Nf6
3. Nf3 Nc6
4. d4 exd4
5. Nxd4 Nxd4
6. Qxd4 d6
7. Nd5 c5
8. Qa4 b5
9. Qxb5 Bd7
10. Qb7 Nxe4
11. Nc7 Ke7
12. Nxa8 Qa5
13. c3 f5
14. b4 cxb4
15. cxb4 Qe5
16. Be2 Qxa1
17. O-O Qxa2
18. f3 Qxe2
19. fxe4 fxe4
20. Bg5 Ke8
21. Nc7


thanks to the power of long island ice teas...

Well sometimes people ask me to take a picture of a coworker. This time it was Kirsten who needed a simple picture for a poster.

Well it's nothing to sing about since it's extremely simple and effective. But I noticed something terrible, my little SB-600 had not enough power :(

I had to shoot at ISO200 (and under exposed a stop, by accident) to get this picture done and my flash was already at 1/1 power.

And I'm still not really comfortable to shoot at ISO 400 with my D80, it's getting to noisy.

I also keep noticing that my fast lenses have a problem with precise focusing since the AF fields of my camera are pretty big, compared to the modern models from Nikon, which can analyze a much smaller field.

yes I setup an umbrella in the lab and I'm official a geek, but hey the pictures look so much nicer and it's so much easier and faster to get the right exposure (mostly...) and effect in manual mode.

Sure you could shoot in A mode, but why if you can do so much more in M mode?

Example:

• aperture= effects flash and ambient
  
• shutter speed = effects only ambient light
• iso = effects only ambient light

So the increase in shutter speed equals less ambient light and the decrease means more ambient light.

Someday I will understand how the whole ratio thing works...

...ok I am proud of zero reflection's in the glasses, but some shadow's are off and could have used a second flash or a reflector in front of her.

well currently I'm playing a little bit with manual focus since my macro does beautiful pictures (ok it's the photographer, but well the lens helps a lot) and my eyes can't be to bad, it's just that i have to learn the technique, but so far I have a hit or miss ratio of 50% which is not to bad.

Are I'm going to invest in a manual focus lens? Well I'm not that sure about it yet. But hey used classics are much cheaper than new lenses.

on the other hand since I sold my 70-300mm. Mhm I found out that I like my current collection very much and just miss something in the 35mm range.

anyway the best candid of the night to the left, in B&W since it was shot at iso 1600. Yes the Nikon D80 sucks for low iso compared to modern cameras like the Nikon D3 or D700. But hey in two years you can get them most likley for very nice prices. And I just took 8k pictures so far with my D80 and I'm totally happy with it, except that it's a bit small in my hands.

now the comparison between the 17-55 and the 19-35mm is a little bit different. Here we can clearly see differences between these two lenses.

The Nikon is definitely superior at F/3.5 and F/4.5 since the Tokina is very soft at this apertures. But since the focal length are used for landscape pictures anyway, well it doesn't really matter. And you also don't really use this for potraits. Well you use 35mm for potraits, but for this I would just order a Nikon 35mm F/2 or Sigma F/1.4 which cost less than 300$ these days.

But once you hit F/8 the lenses are pretty much equal again and the tokina holds it's stand very well and even seems to have better CA values. Once you hit F/11 both lenses start to get soft again, thanks to difraction, but the Tokina seems to be a touch faster.

Well the message is clear. Return the 17-55mm, buy a 35mm F/2, which can be used on full frame in the future and put the rest of the money towards your saving account for a nice trip.

I could test my sigma 10-20 now against it, but this is getting pretty pointless after I already know that I return it.

The pictures of the 17-55mm vs the 50mm speak for them self. The 50mm looks much better at F/2.8 than the 17-55mm F/2.8 at the same aperture.

How are the pictures prepared?

• tripod
• same exposure settings
• two flash setup
• taking pictures at F/2.8, F/4,F/8

The prime is at this point already stopped down, but to make clear. I do not want to proof that a prime is better than a zoom. This is obvious.
I want to make clear for my self, if I can justify to keep the zoom or if the prime is good enough.

Well the pictures make clear, I'm more happy with the 50 and can live with the inconvenience of swapping lenses for my goal. It's also so much lighter to carry several primes with you than this zoom.

conclusion

• the prime is much sharper
  
• the zoom has a nicer out of focus rendering, but the prime is pretty close, but not as smooth
  
• the prime has much better CA values (at F/8) and the CA is the same at F/1.8
  
• the zoom has better contrast

There is no reason to use the zoom at 50mm instead of the prime. So the prime wins.

well after taking about 400 pictures in the last 48h and also some more bunny shots...

...I know they are stupid, but hey they provide nice results and are a good lesson to learn how to keep the lighting constant between several shots. (More or less, my exposure was mostly 0.1 stop off between shots)

Now what did I actually compare and does it make sense todo this?

• 1 x Nikon 17-55mm F/2.8, for 1200$
• 1 x Nikon 50mm F/1.8, for 110$
• 1 x Tokina 19-35mm F/3.5 - F/4.5 for 149$

The result of the test should show how much better the Nikon 17-55 is wide open and stopped down compared to the other lenses.
One thing is sure the build quality and focus speed is far superior to the other lenses, but how much better is it optical? It is also very convenient to have one lens instead of two.

The next post is about the 17-55 F/2.8 vs the 50mm F/1.8 and the post after wards compares the 17-55 F/2.8 against the Tokina at 19mm and 35mm

...let the games begin...

maybe I have to high exspectations, but after playing with the 17-55mm F/2.8 3 hours straight, I'm still not satisfied with the quality.

At least not for the amount of money I paid for it. It is razor sharp at F/4 but at F/2.8 it seems kinda soft or has slight front focus. I think I give it a rundown over the next week and if i'm not 100% happy at Sunday I send it back and get a refund.

Which translates into the original combo of two primes, which are less convinient, but much cheaper and smaller.

In the worst case I loose 30$ shipping, which is a fraction of what it would cost to rent.

experience so far:

• + excellent build quality
• + wonderful CA handling, nearly perfect
• - not possible to shoot into the sun with it
• + razor sharp at F/4
• - kinda soft at F/2.8
• + very precise focus and very fast
• - a touch large and heavy
• + beautiful out of focus rendering

bunny on the left is 2.8 on the right is F/4

well sometimes things are going well and sometimes everything just goes wrong...

Originally I found a very nice deal on a 80-200 F/2.8 and promptly ordered it. At the same time I sold my 70-300mm VR to pay for this new lens.

so far it's simple. Now it turned out that they send me the wrong order and my original order was send to another customer. Which is very annoying, since it causes me all kinds of trouble. Now a smart person would had said, ok shit happens now wait it out...

...well I'm not smart and do stupid things when I frustrated. Basically I start shopping to make me happy again, which in this turn resulted in a 17-55mm F/2.8 lens from nikon which will force me to save the next two month. At least parts of the lens are covered by the money I got for the 70-300mm VR and If I need money I can always sell it for like 90 - 95% of it's value.

But it was defiantly not the smartest thing todo, speciall since I got now lenses to cover:

• 10 - 20 mm
• 17 - 55 mm
• 50 mm
• 90 mm
• 19-35 mm

which means the 19-35mm has togo and I have no lens over 90mm anymore. Well maybe I get me something nice for my birthday and use the time to recover my finances.

But hey my new banking software tells me I live well in my limits and related to the expenses I had this year, well it suprises me quite alot

(ikea, more ikea, apple toys, tv, dentist, car trouble)


...at least I did not spend that on shoes! (you know who I'm talking too....)

Mhm now the big question is why did I not buy the sigma or tamron version? Basically I love my sigma 10-20 and hate it since it's so god damn unsharp and the reports for the 18-50mm Sigma are pretty bad (very soft till F/4, so defeats the purpose of F/2.8). If I ever have the possibilty to sell my 10-20, I'm most likley going todo this in an instant, if the price is right.

Now the tamron is supposed to be as good as the Nikon 17-55 F/2.8, If you get a copy which is able to focus. Everybody reports that they have issues to lock the focus, which makes it also useless.

And last but not least I can use the nikon in dust/rain since it's weather sealed. (Ok my camera is not, but it's easier to wrap a plastic bag around a camera than around a lens...)

Guess I will be busy at the weekend taking lots of pictures.

...ah and I also keep fighting with grails and I'm not winning here, which is another reason I'm frustrated...

well after 1 hour of fighting with the apple tv, it finally accepted that it has now a 250 gb harddrive and is useful now.

...at least until we got more than 150 dvd's...

how todo it?

http://img.engadget.com/2007/03/23/how-to-upgrade-the-drive-in-your-apple-tv/3

it was really fairly simple, once I got the right screwdrivers

well today my picture arrived and I have to say it looks wonderful and I'm really amazed at the resolution of the camera, specially since I took this picture with a 100$ lens (was the only 35mm lens I had...)

The only problem is, it needs a frame to be mounted to the wall. So another 70$ are gone for a frame.

the other problem is now I want to print 2 or 3 other pictures in this size, but I guess this has to wait till next month and the month afterward...

the more I look at current high end compact cameras the less I understand why people actually buy them.

I mean

• Canon G9 - I don't like the handling and too noisy
  
• Nikon P5100 - no raw function, noisy over iso 400, high CA
  
• Ricoh GDR2 - noisy and too expensive, for 400 - 500 it would be a buy, but 600$+ are to high since I can get the DP-1 which has much better picture quality for 100$ more
  
• Ricoh GX200 - pretty noisy

So the only compact camera which does really nice pictures and which you actually can take with you instead of a D-SLR is the Sigma DP-1

except:

• to slow

This is the only thing which really bugs me. I can live with the awful menu. I mean I want to use it for street photography, so I put it in aperture or shutter priority mode and to iso 100 or 400 dependings on my goal.

Done nothing else todo.

That the lens has F/4 which is sad, but I don't know how to put a faster lens into such a compact camera. And again for street photographie it should be fast enough. But to wait 7 seconds between pictures is a damn long time. Specially at this price tag.

But it looks at iso 800 better than my D80...

I mean these pictures look nice

But one thing is sure If I'm going to buy a compact camera it's going to be soon.

well,

today I wanted to print and frame on off my pictures in a decent size and was shocked about the cost.

Appr. Outside Dimensions:	22 5/16" x 29 11/16"
	DSC747_1	15 1/4" x 22 5/8"
	Giclee print on Premium Semimatte Photo Paper	$28.80
	BM7 Black Magic - Beaded Profile 21" x 28 3/8"	$57.00
	Arctic White w/Black Core Mat 21" x 28 3/8" Window 15" x 22 3/8" - Delete	$21.00
	Framing Kit: Premium Clear Acrylic & Foamcore Backing	$43.00
	Professional Assembly Fee	$29.95
	Total:	$179.75

179$ for a frame and print is just a little bit steep for my taste. Sure the preview looks beautiful, but still...

it seems like I need to look at some frames from ikea and cut my own mat boards. To save some money on this process.

I did order a print of this picture to see how large I can print with my camera, after post processing and how good of a job mpix does. There print costs are defiantly way lower and if I'm happy with the quality I can order the prints there and the frame somewhere else.

So much about saving this month...

cloth: 200$
hd for mac: 110$
print: 50$

enjoying live, priceless

	Mpix Lab
	Products		Quantity	Item Total
	20" x 30" Very Large Print (True Digital B&W Paper)		1	31.99
	Water-Based Lustre Coating		1	3.04
	Double Weight Matboard		1	13.25

well spontaneous decisions of the night,

I just ordered a 250GB hard drive to upgrade my apple tv from the 40GB HD to 250GB to store all my stuff on it.

if it doesn't work out, I use it as a backup drive for my laptop.

...every month another mac project...

well sexy toyes...

http://www.adorama.com/SGDP1.html

i really considering to get this to have a small portable camera for trips and just daily picture taking. I see so often beautiful landscapes or nice street scenes and never have a camera with me. Now you could argue you could just buy a cheap compact camera for like 150 - 200$ (cheap is relative), but there sensors are just so small and noisy and this camera is supposed to have a very nice large sensor.

well I think about it and wont buy it before adobe releases a lightroom plugin to handle the raw data of this camera.

...yes I know it got raving reviews for the picture and awfully reviews for the menu handling. And you need to go for everything into the menu. Well I guess I wait for a nikon or canon model with the same nice chip and just buy a small 35mm/f2 lens for the trips and maybe take the 90mm with me...

but the 35mm F/2 cost 300$ and the camera cost 700 - 300 == effective 400...

what do I want?

• aps sized sensor - sigma got it
  
• compact format - sigma got it
  
• manual control with dedicated wheels, buttons - sigma lacks this
  
• F/2.8 if possible since F/4 is kinda slow - sigma lacks in this
  
• 28 or 35mm, both is fine, interchangeable would be perfect, sigma got parts of it
  
• around 500$ - sigma cost 300$ more
• fast write speed - sigma really lacks in this
  

basically a digital rangefinder like a leica M8, just affordable and not 8k$.

drink of the day,

http://www.drinksmixer.com/drink10428.html

bermuda mai tai recipe. Just weird to drink mai tai without amaretto...

pycuda and me,

well the last two weeks I'm sitting here and learning python and C again to utilize the calculation power of cuda and current nvidia gpus for calculations. I don't have any real use for this yet, but it's an interesting idea and maybe we can work it into something.

So far I rewrote the complete python math module to allow the execution of the standard math functions on a gpu instead of the gpu and the results are pretty impressive.

For example to calculate the acos function on 524k floats is 1000x faster than to calculate it on the gpu. Now I have no idea were I could use this, but hey it's nice to have.

I also created my own fork of pycuda under:

http://github.com/berlinguyinca/pycuda/tree/master

to speed up the development, since the original developer won't have time to merge my changes with the main repository, at least not all the time.
Benefit is I learn another source code management system. And git is defnitly the nices system I used sofar, but svn with still much simpler and has the benefit of more available tools. Specially I miss a git fisheye integration.

Now I just have to figure out why my ohloh ranking keeps dropping and does not increase over the time...

I also was not able to get an iphone yet, but atleast it will get cheaper once the demand settles and hopefully they improve it even more. I also don't know If I really need it...

well spending 4th of july in Berryessa and taking pictures of random people.

I particularly like the kayak picture and we are actually considering to rent one the next time or maybe buy one in the distant future.

...and yes the little girl is also nice...

well after I got my second flash a couple of weeks ago, I thougth it's time to throw everything I know about lighting overboard, like use softlight, umbrellas, indirect light yadda yadda yadda...

And just used hard light and try to limit my self to a perspective of 35mm and 50mm. Main reason for this I want to figure out if I'm going to buy the nikon 35mm f/2. I'm only thinking about this particular lens since 2 years.
Nachdem mein zweites Blitzgeraet vor einieger zeit geliefert wurde, dachte ich es ist doch mal wieder zeit ein bissel mit meiner kamera herumzuspielen. Gesagt getan und um das ganze etwas interressanter zu machen benutzte ich nur ein 35 und 50mm objektiv und 'hartes' licht statt weiches licht.

In den meisten faellen ist es ganz gut geworden, ausser das hartes licht nunmal die eigentschafft hat alles zu enthuellen.




Ah yes all the pictures are roughly 1 - 2 stops underexposed which works fine for the black & white, but in case of the color pictures they are a little bit to dark. After all it was just an experiment which needs to be refined now.

Lesson learned:

• get a 35mm F/2 or 30mm F/1.4
• control your shadows better, some a off
• needs a lot of post processing, so far I did none
  
• hard light does not work well, if angled on skin
• nikon's CLS communication is not always up to the speed of shooting
  

fixing a macbook pro,

well after my screen died a couple of weeks ago and I was felling hopeless without a second laptop, well I ordered a new screen and followed these instructions. And I don't want todo it again, its and absolutly night mare and shame on apple for gluing the display in. it was a major piece of work to get the display off without bending the frame.

well 220$ and 2 hours later its working again and I can say I'm able to replace every part of a mac book pro now...

mai taih de nase

• 1 shot 10 Cane rum
• 1 shot barcadi select - brown rum
  
• 1/2 shot amaretto
• 1 shot triple sec
• 2 shots creme de cassis
  
• some ice
• fill up with orange juice

ridiculous sweet, but Lindsay likes it

yay homemade pizza is the best pizza and it's so simle...

I finally managed to get the cuda program together to compile under windows and osx, generate the libraries and provide a working linking for windows and osx.

Well, I also got accepted at source forge and so another project is registered and running, which should be developed over the next couple of month.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jacuda/

Well we also got a new 42" tv for the living room and a new bedroom. Ok the bed and we still need to get some bookshelf's, but at least the first room in the apartment starts to show that I start to settle here.

another day with C, C++,cuda and Makefiles.

slowly it starts to come back to me, the whole ideas about pointers, memory allocation and the whole stuff.

And I have to admit it's fun to program in a procedural style and not object oriented. But boy it's a weird way to think...

also I'm only able to use the nvcc compiler, windows keeps complaining if I use gcc/g++/cl/cc for the weirdest reasons.

well time to write some C+ functions, move them to cuda and write java and python wrappers.

yay

live is certainly interesting, it was the year 2001 and I told my self I never use c++ again, since java is so much nicer and c++/c is so error prone.

Now it happened that I found a paper about cuda, which basically allows you me to run calculations on the nvidia 8800 GPU's. Drawback, you have to write in a mixed style of C/C++.

Well, atleast I learn a lot, but why should I use the GPU in the first place? Now I use a mac pro with 2x2 cpus or a ibm X60 with 1x2 cpu for my daily work and both have quite some memory (8GB Ram and 2GB Ram) so I should be set with this for my daily live. Now a GT8800 has one GPU which has 128 Suprocessing units, basically meaning that you got 128 CPU's todo work with you. Now you could combine several of these cards together, in my case i could use up to 4 of these cards in my mac, which would give me 512 CPU's.

Now I'm sitting here und starting to learn good old C again and already registered a new project on sourceforge, you need to get references somehow...

the name, jacuda.

What do I want todo? Provide a java/python/groovy/C API to run scientific calculations on cuda enable graphic cards. And hope to speed up some calculations with this at work. Like comparing 2k vs 2k bins, my java programm only needs 5h todo this and maybe this makes it much much faster. The final goal is to write a cuda implementation of some CDK algorythm, since I got the feeling that many people actually need this feature. Some algorythms of the CDK are just to slow compared to other programs.

i got the distinct feeling that my oracle server does not like me

ok we got a box with 4CPU's and a load of 332, it should had not been higher than 4 - 8 maximum...

top - 11:45:56 up 61 days, 1:14, 1 user, load average: 332.86, 332.35, 330.72
Tasks: 453 total, 334 running, 119 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 8.7% us, 11.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 78.2% id, 1.4% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.1% si
Cpu1 : 8.0% us, 11.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 80.3% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu2 : 7.9% us, 11.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 80.4% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu3 : 8.0% us, 11.4% sy, 0.0% ni, 80.4% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 2355340k total, 2344524k used, 10816k free, 201168k buffers
Swap: 1048568k total, 19612k used, 1028956k free, 607180k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
9666 oracle 25 0 23044 7704 4096 R 8.8 0.3 183:34.83 perl
9143 oracle 25 0 23044 7704 4096 R 8.8 0.3 165:01.08 perl
14558 oracle 25 0 23044 7704 4096 R 8.8 0.3 162:30.51 perl
24927 oracle 25 0 23044 7708 4096 R 8.8 0.3 152:36.97 perl
13659 oracle 25 0 592m 58m 57m R 8.5 2.6 302:04.46 oracle
13997 oracle 25 0 601m 46g 46g R 8.5 2064.9 340:51.62 oracle
22099 oracle 25 0 92160 6600 5736 R 8.5 0.3 300:50.44 oracle
25858 oracle 25 0 23044 7704 4096 R 8.5 0.3 287:52.72 perl
28081 oracle 25 0 23040 7704 4096 R 8.5 0.3 278:28.88 perl
9844 oracle 25 0 23044 7704 4096 R 8.5 0.3 245:16.83 perl
10397 oracle 25 0 23040 7704 4096 R 8.5 0.3 244:08.57 perl
10962 oracle 25 0 23040 7704 4096 R 8.5 0.3 243:00.47 perl
12069 oracle 25 0 23044 7708 4096 R 8.5 0.3 240:51.97 perl
4691 oracle 25 0 23040 7704 4096 R 8.5 0.3 186:51.45 perl

wounder full gas is getting more and more expensive (4.35 right now) and I seriously started to consider selling it.

well after checking around I got a quote for around 1600 - 2000$ for my truck and so it's just not worth to sell it anymore.

seems like I'm driving it till it falls apart.

putting grails and maven together so we can use our dependencies and all are happy?

it took some time to figure it out, but thanks to this plugin, it actually works.

Here is a complete working pom

a couple of days later, I discovered some serious drawbacks with the oh so great groovy language

1. it's slow as hell, and I mean slow
   
2. no strong typing, i get so many class cast exceptions because I have no idea what kind of object is returned, so if you junit test what you write before you run it you are good, could be a good thing
   
3. the eclipse plugin for groovy plain sucks and is to slow, time to join the project and optimize it
4. hard to get the principle of closures, but can only blame my self for this, give it time

about the junits tests, normally you know you have todo them, but it just takes so much time to write that code. Now if you use groovy to write your tests and your java tests, you are having a lot of fun, since it's a matter of minutes to write a complete test to validate the parsing of an xml file.

and we all want to have well tested software...

groovy on rails = grails = cool

finally a webframework which just works. Not like appfuse, which turned out to be a nightmare or spring + spring mvc which was very nice, but the development was just to much xml configuration and so slowed me down a lot.

grail on the other hand, not one single line of configuration yet. It just worked...

Now that work calmed a little bit down and I'm now under wedding stress (actually it's pretty relaxed for me, i just need to decide which people we are going to invite and where are we putting all the people)

Anyway back to what I wanted to write about, a new day and a new idea. Last night I was sitting in the office till 4 am and trying to fix a problem. Of the spend hours the most time I was just sitting there and waiting for stuff to compile, deploy, start application server, install clusters, short I spend most of the time waiting.

Now who want's to wait, because he just changed some variables and has to redeploy everything to see if it works?

Not me for this reason I'm learning now yet another programming language. This time it's groovy.

Why?

because you can include into java or java into groovy, since they both generate the same byte code which will be executed.

And I don't really like to mess around with python ==> jython ==> java. It's well to much of a mess.

The next thing is, I have to write a website. Which I will no do with the hype product rails. Now rails is written in ruby, which I have zero intention to learn. Ruby is just to slow and I'm missing the point of ruby.

But well there is groovy on rails, which seems to be a very cool package.

this week one of my coworkers approached me the question:

can you please take a nice picture for my poster with wine bottles and so?

So I sat down and starting shooting away. Firstly I wanted to do some low key pictures since they did not tell me how the color scheme of the poster is. But after I saw the poster it was clear, we need a high key picture, so that it matches the background.

Anyway here are the two best shots of this experiment and I just love the high key pictures.

Collections can be found here

• low key
• high key
  

just playing around with two flashes, which overheated after 20 minutes or so since we got like 90F in our apartment.
And lets say so the AC is not keeping up...

as promised here is the M&M picture.


sadly they were already kinda melted and the font is pretty ugly.

But hey it worked!

-correction they worked for 3 month than she ended it -

all pictures provided by the blog belong to Gert Wohlgemuth. For reproduction and publication please ask me before you use them. If the pictures do not belong to me they will have a caption or a link to the owner.

thank you very much

BinBase,

the project i'm working on since years is finally at a stage were people start to ask me questions about it and I had today the opportunity's to give a small talk about the basic idea of the system.

• white shirt + dress shirt at 40 degree Celsius bad idea
• to breath during a talk is a good idea

I also discovered the eclipse zest api and promptly integrated it into the BinBase system. The first idea I got for it was actually to visualize dependencies of compounds to species and other way around.

bbq season started and so a small post to make the perfect medium rare tri-tip steak.

The thing about tri tips is that they are so big that you can have all kinds of rareness in the steak at the same time. So there is a part which is perfect for everybody. Normally the ends are well done and the more you get to the middle the more rare the steak becomes.

Anyway here is a recipe how to cook it on a gas bbq.

1. get a 1.5 - 1.8 lbs tri-tip steak
2. marinate it for 12 - 24h in a marinade of your choice
3. preheat the bbq as high as possible
4. drop the steak on the bbq on very high temperature and let the lid open
5. wait 5 minutes
6. turn the steak and let the lid open for another 5 minutes
7. reduce the heat to medium low and turn the steak
8. close the lid for the next 10 minutes
9. flip the steak
10. close the lid and wait another 10 minutes
11. now its done.
    

afterwards place the steak in a wooden board and let it rest for 5 - 10 minutes before you cut it. Since we don't want that it drys out.

enjoy.

the lack of code quality in open source software, particular maven.

• why is it that you can't download a program, follow the installation procedure and it just works?
• why is it that a program version is marked at stable and released to the public and does not do what it's supposed todo?
• i don't expect it to be flawless, but it should provide some working results
• why is it that maven 2.0.6 is not compatible to the plugins of 2.0.5?
• there are standards to version software
• a 1.0.2 version has to be able to work on the data of a 1.0.1 version without errors
  
• a 2.0.0 version does not have to be compatible to a 1.9.9 version.
• a 1.2.* version should be compatible to a 1.1.9 but it doesn't have to be
  
• why does maven fail to install particular packages in a multi module project
• i use the software and build software it, it makes me look bad if I have to work around bugs in very unprofessional ways
• a user should not be expected to get a documentation for compiling a software like this
  

short why is there not a certain amount of code quality in maven, every time I use a new plugin I spend at least 2 hours to work around it bugs and get it started.

For example eclipse does not have these problems, they have a stable system to release projects and to make sure that they are stable. Why can't be maven like this?


What is the result of these issues? I consider to download the latest maven sourcecode and start to develop my own maven2 fork. just to get to a working standard which works like it's expected.


...yes I hate to waste my time on things I shouldn't have to, specially if it's my weekend.

Now that my mac book is dead an I'm frustrated for other reason I decided there is only one thing todo,

time to buy toys!

In this case I finally bought a second flash for my camera and start learning to use it.

My first idea to shoot throw a glass plate did not really work that well. Basically there was barley any difference to using only one flash.

Now using it as a rim light, is another story, I actually really like the effect of a rim light in this case.

time todo dishes.

oh noes my little mac book died, to be precise the display cracked after a drop of maybe 2 inches onto the corner of my chair.

...live truly sucks right now...

Since one of my server disk died a couple of days ago, I thought I use this opportunity and take it apart and snap some pictures.


And i actually really like them, just wish they had a little bit more depth of field.

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...