Patriot Memory - Convoy XL

I've recently picked up a Patriot Memory Convoy XL for my own personal use; partly to for myself and partly to test for use in the company I work for.  For a slight premium, we can fit 2 2.5" drives with hardware raid, in the same form factor as a 3.5" drive with a SATA connection.  Secondly it can be used via USB.

I personally have been using at via USB for a number of weeks and love it.  Having slightly higher redundancy on a USB working drive brings a sense of comfort to me.  I like it enough that I haven't been using my firewire drives, I can accept the performance hit of the USB vs firewire.

At the office we are contemplating replacing the single hard drive in a couple of critical work stations with a RAID solution. There are always a handful of workstations that downtime is only nominally acceptable; data loss due to hardware failure is marginally tolerated, and regardless lectures about best practices, and storing stuff on the network file servers... well we know the storey.  This doesn't prevent file deletion, but keeps the machine hobbling through a single drive failure.

I haven't ran the disks in degraded mode yet but I will and provided an addenda to this note.

Patriot also has a model that puts 4 2.5" drives in the for factor of a 5.25" drive (about the size of a cdrom drive), that looks interesting, but currently I don't have a pressing need for such an animal.  I could foresee using it in some small form factor applications though.


More Later....
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ACQUINE: Automatic Photo Rating - Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine

As I've been trying to decide on my final portfolio, I needed some criteria other than my personal preference. I have some friends with good eyes, but sometimes they are sympathetic to my plite.  I've already stripped what I have down, and what is left can subjected to others preferences. I'm always looking for more feedback of my photos because I have moments of brilliance, and sometimes not so much. Everything I've uploaded to my flickr account has been reviewed a few times before I think it's "reasonable", not all of it is perfect, but I liked it.  

Introducing ACQUINE, one of the most useful, and most frustrating things to happen to my photography. ACQUINE is a software based aesthetic engine;  in effect a software based photo critic.  The software scores an image out of 100, 50 is considered a portrait by a typical quality professional photog, but anything over 40 is considered an above average image.

I've uploaded a number of images and while my average is in the 40s, my highs are in the 90s and my lows are actually in the single digits!! I know it's not the final word on what is a good photo, and the designers have challenges with the engine; it is a work in progress after all.  They mention limitations of the system, but it still is frustrating.  It shows me some gems, and then totally disses some of mine and some others favourites.

If your curious about your own work give it a whirl....



More Later....
G.

SpinRite 6 -- The Magic Tool -- A Tale of Drive Recovery

Over the weekend I had 4 hard drives fail , 3 different models, 2 different vendors, 4 different lots.  'Twas a very bad day!! I was doing my weekend mirror, in preparation for migrating my laptop to a new hybrid drive.  Every other weekend, I clone my working drive to a target drive.  I swap the working drive with the target, and finally do a backup to a third drive. I then carry on working with the knowledge that my laptop is very recoverable.

I fire-up my clonezilla live cd, add check my target drive, and then start my disk-to-disk clone. I go to bed, because it normally takes a few hours, and dream about my new Momentus XT.  I wake up, and HORROR!!!! it's stuck, on a couple of bad blocks!! WTF!!! I told clonezilla to continue on bad blocks, but it didn't.  SIGH!!!

Day of Photographic Adventure...

I had to get out and see if I could capture photos of a thunderstorm.  Instead, I ended up playing with some HDRs of clouds.  There were a number of lightning strikes, and I got a couple of photos of the Lamont County Firecrew putting out a fire from one of the lightning strikes.  I will be uploading these to my flickr account over the next week or so.

On my Blackberry 8830, I've been using a piece of software GPSed which acts as a GPS data logger.  I've been having very mixed results with it.  At times, it looses GPS connectivity, and I don't know if it is the a problem in the blackberry GPS or the way in which GPSed is interacting with the 8830.  So a number of my tracks on GPSed.com, aren't complete.  If I catch it in time I can reset my blackberry and start a new track but, I think I will just have to get a Garmin to do my GPS data logging.

More Later ....
G.

Programming Methodologies -- Time for me to join the modern age.

Before I became a BOFH System Admin / Network Admin, I started walking down the path of a software developer.  If you look at my bookshelf Software Development books out number my SA/NA books 3 to 1.  In the previous shop, I was going to do 50-50 SA work - Software Development.  There was enough interesting SA work that I decided to leave Software Development behind, at least as my primary means of earning my paycheck.  That didn't keep me from dabbling in my spare time.

After a lot of reading, contemplating, and searching I came across the Extreme Programming  Explained by Kent Beck.  I saw the light, a programming methodology that I could get behind.  I became an XP (Extreme Programming) convert.  I preached XP to whomever would listen.  The main stumbling block that I had in getting people to buy into XP was the concept of pairs programming.  While the documentation from most XP based projects should that 2 people working together overtime were more productive, it was often view by management as an excuse for the programmers to slack off and goof around.

Lazy Saturday

I spent a day messing around with a number of Firefox plug-ins, YSlow and Page Speed.  They analyze your webpage and give you suggestions of how to tweak things to make you site faster.  In the process I watched two very interesting movies

• August Rush
• Amal

Amal is about a rickshaw driver that has a heart of gold.  He gave a ride to an eccentric millionaire, who without Amal's knowledge write Amal into his will.  A well done movie.

August Rush, is the story of an untrained musical protege that ran away from foster-care.  Everywhere this amazing kid sees and hears music, he discovers his gifts while he is on a quest to find his parents.

More Later ....
G.

Reviewing Old Photos..

I've been going through my old pics because I'm contemplating retiring my self-hosted gallery.  Now I'm hosting most of my stuff currently on flickr.  I've definitely grown as a photographer since 2003, when I got my digital rebel.  I don't shoot as many frames, nor do  I like as many of the frames I've shot.  I've become more critical, and my goals as a photographer have changed.

When I started, I was on my high-horse about don't edit,  don't adjust, don't enhance blah blah blah. What a prat, I've gotten over myself.  I now think of my RAWs as a digital negative (as they are intended), and an unrefined image. Now, my job is to take the raw image and create the best photograph possible from that image.  If I need to do some colour correction, or enhancements, so be it. Crop it, rotate it, I don't care, just get the best quality final piece of art possible. Find the photograph that is hiding in the picture. 


More Later ....
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NB: 2010/06/21, I have retired my self-hosted stuff, but not by choice.

Finally!!

I finally got my Canon 1D Mark III.  What a difference it makes over my 20D and 30D.  WOW! What a difference in performance.  I now have to decide should I do a 40D as my backup, or hold out for a second Mark III. I may have to contemplate a 5D or it's replacement as a full frame back up instead of the 40D, but that is a little ways out.

I also need to contemplate a couple of long primes 200f/2, 400f/2.8, 600f/4, 800f/5.6.  The 200 and 400 being my prime candidates.

Happy New Year!!

Well it has been far too long since I graced the pages of my blog, or updated my photo gallery.  Well that is about to change (at least I hope).

On the photo front, I've broken down and have a new laptop (a Dell XPS), and most importantly Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Ligthroom.  Let me start off with saying Lightroom rocks. No knock to gimp and dcraw, but I never quite got the juju for messing with RAW files on my FreeBSD boxes. Additionally not have any real colour management has been an issue.  Now that I've been shooting RAW and comparing to the JPEG output, it's making me kick my ass that I didn't shoot RAW all the time.  To use a photographer pun

Now I've seen the light!!

Useful Postgres Queries

Getting a list of dbnames

/usr/local/bin/psql -q -t -A -h -d template1 -c "SELECT datname FROM pg_database WHERE datname not in ('template0','template1')"

Getting a list of name spaces for a given DB

/usr/local/bin/psql -q -t -A -h -d < DB > -c " select schemaname from pg_tables where schemaname not in ('pg_catalog','information_schema') group by schemaname"

Getting a list of tables (including name spaces)

/usr/local/bin/psql -q -t -A -h -d < DB > --field-separator "." -c "select schemaname,tablename from pg_tables where schemaname not in ('pg_catalog','information_schema')"

Getting a list of locks on the DB server (from within a psql prompt)

SELECT procpid, usename ,datname, (now() - query_start) as age, c.relname , l.mode, l.granted FROM pg_stat_activity a LEFT OUTER JOIN pg_locks l ON (a.procpid = l.pid) LEFT OUTER JOIN pg_class c ON (l.relation = c.oid);

Looking at what is connected to a given Database name (from within a psql prompt)

select * from pg_stat_activity where datname='< DB >';

DSLR Sensor Cleaning

I picked up an Arctic Butterfly from Visible Dust. Works like a charm and is kind of fun to use. A friend of my also sent me this link on cleaning a dslr Cleaning Digital Cameras

Low Cost Image Processing Software

While I don't see the fuss about noise reduction in images. (Come on people did you ever use high ISO film... I have shot a couple rolls of 1200 iso and it looks like the image was on a stucco wall). There are a couple of interesting, low cost, high performance pieces of software.

• Picture Cooler
• GREYCstoration

GREYCStoration I've been playing with in gimp and does a pretty decent of many things. One large images it takes quite a while to process though. Yes I need faster machines at home my lil' ol' pIII isn't cutting the mustard any more.

Haven't played with Picture Cooler yet, (it's windows and I normally don't have a box running any M$ OS). I will soon though and will see what it's all about.