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

it finally happend we have our flat and making progress with cleaning it and moving stuff in.

we also did the main mistake when you got a new flat...

...we went to ikea and got the standard stuff

- fondue set
- wok
- chair
- thousands small things...

anway it starts to look nice and over short or long we want to replace the fouton with a nice couch. This should be arround january. 

the first servers are back up and running and working unexspected well under xen.

basicly we have on server with 2 cpu and 4 gb ram and running:

• oracle server
• mysql server
• mysql server and apache for monitoring using cacti of the network
  

the load is fine sofar and we are migrating now our other boxes to xen too to make the management and the backup of complete servers easier.

idea:

• pdc, ldap
• cvs
• devel oracle server
• production jboss
• devel jboss

it should take only 2 days as soon as i figure out where I store all the data from the pdc.

the bitch is dead,

the bitch in this case is a server called venus and decided 2 days ago to stop working. Sadly this is my database server containning our production database...

so it was time to find out if the backups are working. After 8h I finally had a temporaery database server up and running with a minimal loss of data ( arround 300 samples, are calculating right now again).


now I planned to create a new server using:

- gentoo as base system
- xen for virtualisation
- lvm for storage management
- redhat/centos enterprise linux as virtual machine for the oracle database
- minimal gentoo as virtual machine for the application server

the final plan is to migrate all my server to xen with an atttached nas to allow the migration of servers without any downtime.

whats up and running on my wizard

• bluetooth headset motorola HS820
• synchronisation over bluetooth
• synchronisation over usb
• skype - headset not working yet and its kinda slow
  
• email
• gmail synchronisation over pop3
• outlook synchronisation using active sync
• gprs works but took forever to disable it, cause trys all 5 minutes to connect to the internet
• wireless lan works fine, got it to work in a/b/g with a registery hack
• voice dial works over bluetooth and freehand also
  

impression sofar

• once you are able to kill all background tasks its fast, but slows down when you have more than 5 programms open
• never ever go into the windows folder and say sort by type, 20 minutes later it was finally done...
• phone works quite well
• active sync needed to be update to avoid that outlook crashed, version 4.2 is ok
  
• the bluetooth stack is a little big buggy, sometimes hard to get the synchronisation to work
• battery live is ok, 24h bluetooth on and still 50% left
  

one of my new toys. The cingular 8125 also known as t-mobile mda ( think the german model is mda III ) is quite nice and the speed is ok. Just the display is like always way to small. The size is ok sofar. Could be a little thinner. But in this case I would'nt have the keyboard, which is the nicest part.

The synchronisation works with the x60 and I'm working on the synchronisation over bluetooth right now. Suprisingly my headset connects with both of the toyes easily, but sofar I'm not able to get it running with the phone. 

the daily joke appeared again.

I finally received my new laptop and it's damn nice. Only that the order was wrong again.

- they delivered 2 more batteries than I ordered and they don't fit at all...
- they delivered only 1 GB of ram insted of the ordered 2 GB

why is it so difficult to get an order once right .

anywa sofar I'm really satisfied.

- very light
- display is very bright, the first time I actually work with a display where I reduce the intensity
- battery liftime is arround 4h with wifi and bluetooth on
- pretty fast, gotta test how it performs under java
- that you need the docking station for a second battery/hd or a cdrom kinda sucks, but when did I ever need a cdrom anyway
- it has a sd slot, so perfect for my camera

right now I look at smart phones and found one thats nearly perfect

the mda from t-mobile/cingular for 249$ before taxes. so in total with activation fee and so it should be arround 300$. The size is ok, little bit larger than a motorola razor.

the main question is do I need it or does it another phone too?

basicly any phone thats not a flip phone cost arround 100$ and you can call and play mp3's with it.

The mda can more and has nearly the same size.

- full pda
- plays mp3
- extension via mini sd card -> gotta sell my sd card and switch over to mini sd in case I buy it ( i think I go shopping soon)
- can use wifi to browse the internet ( and automatical receive my emails all 45 minutes)
- i can write programms for it what makes it really interessting to maintain my servers
- with its full sized keayboard i can work over ssh, what makes it really sweet

mhm I think about it, ist only 150$ difference to a normal phhone. (I also could spend this 125$ on a short trip with my girl...)

we will see... I have 600$ left for this month and the half is already gone.

I also came to the conclusion that I don't need a heart rate monitor and a cadence monitor. I could ride my bike quite well with out it at the weekend...

i hate computer/cellphones/programming/databases right now

since 30 days I got every damn day another problem:

- laptop dies
- wrong parts get delivered
- phone died
- all server died at work after a power failure
- database drives me crazy with the stupid 32bit limitations
- barley any storage space and figthing for every byte here
- eclipses crashes all 5 minutes for no special reason

at least I made a nice 60km bike tour on sunday and went to bed at 3 pm, cause i was so tired. It was supposed to be a nap, but i slept until 2 am ( maybe I should have slept from saturday to sunday more than one hour...) and now I'm sitting at work because there are samples what need to be calculated by this afternoon. So no rafting for me :( (ok I wasn't sure if I go anyway, but thats not the point)

so we will see what comes next. Now I'm in the hussle to find a new phone...

smartphone or normal phone. I want basicly

- mpg3 player
- wifi
- pda
- sd slot

for not more than 300$ and for a model not older than 6 Month.

the only thing that has the features are:

palm treo 700p except for wifi
mda except for sd slot ( what should I do with mini sd, I want one standard)

at least my laptop is supposed to come today...