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