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...

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"