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