o oracle I hate you...

currently I'm working on two major things in my favorite monster, called oracle.

1. create a script which automatical duplicates a given database each night on another server.

2. optimize the concurrency of the cluster to avoid row locks and table locks.


Problem number 1 took me only 8h of bash scripting and reading oracle books. I finally put it all together and tested it with a couple of backups.
You can find the result under: script

Basically it allows you to create a backup of your database using rman.

Problem number 2...

...working on it 

yeah I just found out how I can synchronize my blogspot account with my facebook account. Now I can annoy even more people with my stupid photo posts :)

picture on the left is a testshot from my flat too my neighbours (thanks kim for not cleaning you balcony) flat. To optimize my manual focus technique.
Only minor post processing involed to increase contrast and saturation.



me and natasha at her birthday party. Trying to look her in the eyes and serving her a cuba libre... The picture in the back is one of her awesome paintings!

today I discovered a website which finally explained a very nice feature in eclipse.

which saved me about 1 week to locate my current bug and to fix it. Ok I located it, to fix it is another question. At least I can do some math again and actually write some "smart" code instead of stupid gui programming or writing utilities.

i just wished I discovered this features years ago...
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t19825.html

the picture is a red devil and my favorite target for flash fotographie right now. As we can see I have this ugly shadow behind the fish, so I need something to lighten it up. I can't bounce the flash and I cant use a diffuser, because of the glas.
But I discovered If I use my bike light and put it with a diffuser on top of the tank and a direct flash I get some decent results. Another flash or light on the right would be helpfull to remove or at least lighten the shadow. 

its amaizing how much space we have in our flat after I sold my 2 boards and sail and mast...

...and to actually get it out of our flat we had to move it over the balcony. So it was the right way todo.

anyway from a part of the money I just ordered a filter and a flash and from the other part I put away in savings for a vacation.

so what did I got,

77mm circular polarizer and SB-600 flash to learn the basics of using a flash and which can be later used as a slave flash If I ever think I need more than one.

I also made some nice 15 x 10 Inch prints from two pictures and autsch, you see the mistakes I do...

basically I sharpen my pictures to much. 

it only took me 8 month to finally understand my camera. Today I discovered a new button ( you also could say I finally understand what todo with it ) The AE/AF lock button which basically does nothing than:

- lock the autofocus
- lock the autoexposure
- does one of both combined with the shutter









after playing with this for about 30 minutes I configured my cam so that:

AE/AF button - locks the focus
Shutter half pressed - locks the exposure in case you use P/A/S mode
Shutter pressed - takes the pictures

this allows me to move my focus point arround in a picture and to take n pictures with the same exposure and focus. Or if I don't press the AE/AF button the camera keeps focussing, but does not change the exposure. I never know why should I use this. But for action shots it's quite helpfull to always have the same exposure. Ok you can set this using the manual mode. But why should you make your live harder than it is anyway?

the nice thing about focus lock is that I don't need the one feature of the D80, the 11 Focus fields, you can simulate it/finetune it with the focus lock. It just won't refocus, which is a problem with moving objects. For example if you have 5 focus field (left,right,top,bottom,middle) and you want to have the object focussed in the top left corner. You can focuss it using the middle field, lock the focus and than move the camera so that your object of interesst is in focus at the part where you want to have it. Another way would to use manual focus in the first place, but I never can really see when the image is sharp and when it's not 100% sharp.

...the problems with glasses. I really should get some contacts, which reminds me to go to the eye doctor to test my health insurance...

the more I think about it the more I'm happy that I resisted and did not sold my D50 and upgraded to the D80. I also figured out how to simulate graduated neural density filters in gimp using several exposures of the same picture. Which saved me some more money. So I only will get a circular polarizer, once I can force me to pay 100$ for a stupid 77mm filter... 

good by surfstuff,

after I did'nt used it more than 4 times this year I finally bit the bullet and try to sell it for a good price. So it doesn't block the room anymore and stops collecting dust. It kinda hurts, cause it was a dream to have my own surfstuff, but it makes no sense to keep it and it looses from month to month more value...

so lets see what I can get for my rig and boards :(

after I used picassaweb for a couple of weeks now and I'm quite happy with them, they wanna start to charge me money, cause I have to many pictures on it. It is arround 25$ a year for 6 GB picture place and not that much. It's just for 25$ a year I also can get a pbase.com which is way nice and provides more features and a nice search function.

example I can search for pictures taken with a camera and a specific lens to compare my quality with the quality of other people. Means I can learn something how to improve my pictures and whats possible with my stuff. Which leads to not spending so much money on gear and improve my technique in the first place. ( it's amazing what kind of pictures some people shoot with stuff that has very bad rattings, like 2 of my lenses).


...i think I make the switch next month and get a trial account for testing... 

statistics, don't we love them all?

I finally decided to work a little bit with the statistic programm R again, and thought what could I analyse. So I decided to analyse which focal length I use the most with my D50 and was quite surprised by the result.

But first where to get the data from? In modern time like today your camera saves tons of informations in the jpeg files, so called EXIF informations.

what todo to get these data?

1. write a small script in python which reads the exif informations from all you files on the harddisk

2. stores this result in a txt file as matrix

3. start R import the data and do some statistics

After I saw this result it pointed me that my future plans to buy lenses are quite easy,

arround 300 mm prism lens -> not affordable
arround 100 mm prism lens for macro -> affordable from sigma with 2.8

and I'm still dreaming from a ultra wide angle for landscape fotographie, maybe in a year...

( proud of me that I refused the offer to sell my camera to a friend and get a D80! Just saved 500$...) 

after I did some more reading on several filtersystem I discovered that 2 out of 3 lenses have a great problem with filters. The lens barrel rotates and so the complete filter would rotate too and drop on the ground.
The second problem is that I need to use 4x4/4x6 filters instead of P size filter. I can mount the P size filter, but I can see the corner of the filters on the pictures.

This means, I tripple the money which I need to spend. At least I found out that a circular polarizer should be the highest priority and also the most expensive.

and later if money permits:

- graduated neural density 0.9 soft
- graduated neural density 0.9 hard
- graduated neural density 0.6 reverse
- neural density 4 stop
- graduated neural density 0.6 soft
- graduated neural density 0.6 hard

at least you can order sets of filter from adorama.com, which saves you some money and I don't need any warming/cooling filters. Cause I can do this in gimp.

also everybody recommends to stay away from cokin filter, cause they have a magenta color cast. So they recommend hitech, lee, singray.

further there is also the third possibility, you can simulate the effect in gimp and photoshop with multiple exposures. So I only need to buy a polarizer. I will try this for the beginning and save some money until I decide what todo with it.

what a nice saturday, after I got my car running in the morning ( prob. leak in the servo system, but after I fill it up its working quite well). I got an upgrade for my bbq, a 20 Gallon propan tank. Background for this is that I never can find the special cadrigdes need and after a year the bigger tank repays for it self. The initial cost was 75$ including needed connection hose and one filling is 10$. Compared to the small gas cadrigdes I used sofar, which contain one pound of gas and cost 4$ this is way cheaper.

Anyway later this day I fixed lindsay's bike and helped my new neighbour with her bike. The evening I finished with a mini bbq and reading some articles over filter systems.

Oh my new neighbours stopped by and provided me with some cake, because I borrowed them my plunger... 

after I payed last month 60$ for a Neural Density filter I figured out that this kind of filter system won't work for me. An example is in the left picture.
The picture itself is pretty nice, except for the shade arround the corners. This is due the screw one filter. The second problem is that the screw on filter are incredible expensive.
I want to have a couple of basic filters:

1. nd filters 4,6,8
2. graduated nd filter 4,6,8
3. circular polarizer
4. uv filter
5. haze filter

the reason for this filters is you barley can emulate this effect in photoshop. Cause the reduce the ammount/change polarisation of light. Once you took the image, you can't do anything about the light anymore.

The good thing of digital cameras is, you can simulate with photoshop. The best example are diffuser or changing color temperature.

The thread filter have all one big disadvantage, one filter cost 50 - 150$ depending on the type. I'm not going to pay so much money for some stupid filters. After I ask "dr google" I found a cheaper solution, cokin/quantary slide on filter. A set with 6 nd/graduated filter cost 100$ and I only have to buy 3 adapter rings to fit all my lenses. So in total it cost me 170$. For everything I want.

this means I will sell my thread filter collection and buy for the money I get a cokin system, once its in stock again.

another problem is my tripod I bought in january for 25$ with my camera. It's incredible instable and really difficult to adjust. So over short or long I will look at another tripod with a better head. I originally bought this to getting started, but never thougt I use it alot. Boy I was wrong.
As soon as I grab my 300mm zoom, I can't do anything without a tripod. ( the pictures are incredible unsharp). With the tripod there atleast sometimes sharp.

this are all 100% crops at maximum range of my 70 - 300mm 150$ zoom lens. The zoom is always very soft after 280mm, but I prefer to spend 1500$ on a nice trip to hawai next year instead of spending this kind of money on a 200 - 400 mm VR or 800$ on a 15 - 200 mm VR which I would love to have.

It's considered the best lens on the market, and covers more or less the range i have with my 3 lenses. The major disadvantage is it only works with DSLR's with a cropped sensor and not with full frame sensors, which will be affordable in the next 10 years for people like me. So I will stick with my current lenses for the next couple of years.

review of sharpness with a 25$ tripod and a 150$ zoom

somehow lucky shot with a tripod of a pair of ugly birds, somehow sharp
(300mm, f/5.6, 1/640s)






unlucky shot with a tripod of a joshua tree at sunset
(300mm, f/8, 1/13s)

sadly I did'nt see it on the preview, so I could try it again. Main problem in this case is the tripod, cause at 1/13s its just to shaky. It could be improved with the remote, but I lost my somewhere in the park and oredered already a new. Lucky me it's only a 10$ thing.





lucky shot without a tripod of a jackrabbit
(300mm, f/5.6, 1/1000s)

it was arround 1 pm and I had more than enough light to work with








so what next:

I would love todo something with flash, but I'm affraid to invest that kind of money.

1. 360$ for one flash (SB-800) to get started
2. 60$ for a SC-17 TTL flash cable to detach the flash from the camera
3. 200$ for a second flash(SB-600) for advanced lighting
4. 20$ for a color filter set for each flash

the main problem, I can only use nikon flashes with the D50 or risking frying the electronics of the cam. It's a common problem with the cheap sunpak flashes. And somehow this seems to be to expensive.

Another idea to work on landscape fotographie, my preffered pictures

1. 180$ for a Nikon DR6 Viewfinder, which allows me to actually use the viewfinder for pictures against the sky
2. 100$ for a set of graduated filters
3. 200$ for a flash(SB-600) to bring some light into the foreground and fill out shadows
4. 50$ for some lights to lightpaint

i think I will go for some filters and improve my technique before I invest so much money.

this morning I randomly discovered one of the coolest thing ever:

Lensbaby 3G - Bend • Lock • Fine Focus

and after a look of a couple of shots I really love the idea to play with this system a little bit. Ok before I have to learn a lot about fotographie, cause I have todo everything by myself, but it's never wrong to learn something...

a short review about this system (older version): review 

After I worked with java straight for 6 year, i finally could convince myself to learn another programming language. The background was that I had to write so many bash scripts in the last weeks, that I think bash scripting is not the best way.

so I was looking for a language which has following features:

1. plattform independent
2. interpreter based
3. fast
4. good community
5. good documentation
6. has support for objects

so I decided to try python and I love this. It's so much easier to use than bash, more powerfull than bash and can be integrated into java and other way arround.

to try some advanced features with python I decided to use it for a small project. Basically transforming the pubchem database (arround 7 Million xml documents/ 250GB) into a script to import it into a sql database.

this morning I decided to visit the historical airfield next too temecula. And they have a nice collection of aircrafts from WW-I until the desert storm. This is also the big drawback of this museum. Instead of covering one topic, they try to cover all and it just becomes to much and you can't enjoy it anymore.

The planes are mostly outside and wingless. What means they are dusty and sometimes not a very nice view.

pictures

after a long time waiting my new lens finally arrived with my first filter ( except for uv's). And like always they send me the wrong stuff...

so now I have a ND 4x instead of an ordered ND 6x so I will order another ND later.

anyway, my new lens is a tokina 19 - 35 mm ( on D50 equals 28.5 - 52.5 mm). I got it for 125$ so it was a good deal and I prob. will sell it as soon as I finally manage to find a reason to buy the tokina 12 - 24 mm. I just don't like the idea to spend 500$ on a stupid lens. Lucky me this lens is always out of stock and never available.

But why I bough the other tokina in the first place? Basically I just want to have the possibility to shot landscape pictures when I'm going into the mohave desert on sunday and monday.

testshots 

finally, google introduced web albums. This means I can upload all my pictures to websites to annoy innocent visitors with them.

album 

yeah "my cluster" is working again.

now its time to get the current bugfixes into my sourceforge project

bbcs

my second "private" project is to get xen on my workstation and laptop to create a small personal cluster in case all the other clusters are backed or down like last weekend. Now I just need to figure out how to install the sun grid engine under linux or write a new 'at' based implementation for my cluster project with a minimal scheduler.

currently I'm trying to figure out how to get nice shots at nigth time.

my main problems are just, its so dark, you barley see anything in the viewfinder and I always have to be on my knees because of this strange angle. I think I finally will get an adapter for this in january.

its just such an insane ammount of money for a simple adapter and there are no off brands available sofar

At least I hope my neural density filter and the step up adapter arrive in time for my trip downsouth.


...we fill see... 

after we bought a bike for my girlfriend we needed a place to store them somewhere and they are a little bit to expensive to keep them outside...

so we decided to buy a rack to hang the bikes next to the wall. As you can see in the picture.

I'm just still kinda unsure if this thing will hold the weigt of two bikes, specially with our super stable paper walls...

top: 2006 fuji roubaix pro (gert)
bootom: 2006 swinn fastback (Lindsay)

the best thing was that the shop, where we bought the rack and the bikes gave me 100$ extra reabate for my bike because they had it on sale this day. So I ended up paying 1099 instead of 1399 for my bike.

...but sofar I had to invest 500$ in compounds like shoes, pedals, helmet etc.

only thing missing now is a bike rack for the car to get the backs down south for some rides during our vacation in two weeks. 

who would belive it, the software which we are developing since a couple of years runs on smartphones, like my htc wizard.

setupx & binbase