Blog Archive: November 2017
Understanding focus stacking
I've been thinking for some time about how Olympus' focus stacking works. In principle it's simple: the camera takes multiple photos with the almost the same settings, only changing the focus distance between each image. But by how much? How many photos do I need to be able to assemble a final image? This page by Richard Turton gives a lot of insight. But I've read it twice now, and it doesn't really present things the way I want, and it's difficult to convert. In particular, I want to know how to set the focus differential and number of shots parameters in the camera menu.
Cornering YouTube breakage
We've been discussing the breakage of YouTube's live stream of Al Jazeera News for a while. Some people think it might be a codec issueand indeed it might bebut there are also considerations of video drivers. That would fit the problems with teevee, since I've just upgraded the video drivers. Then there was another loose end: Pale Moon, which is in the Ports Collection after all. It claims to support all the old addons that firefox no longer wants to know about. Installed it and got a particularly old-fashioned looking interface, and font sizes approximately twice the size of those of firefox.
Accelerate Machine Learning with Amazon SageMaker
Applications based on machine learning (ML) can provide tremendous business value. However, many developers find them difficult to build and deploy. As there are few individuals with this expertise, an easier process presents a significant opportunity for companies who want to accelerate their ML usage. Though the AWS Cloud gives you access to the storage and processing power required for ML, the process for building, training, and deploying ML models has unique challenges that often block successful use of this powerful new technology. The challenges begin with collecting, cleaning, and formatting training data. After the dataset is created, you must scale the processing to handle the data, which can often be a blocker.
Quick! Install that Mac printer now!
Does your friend or significant other have a Mac from work that is locked down so that changes can't be made? Any attempt to make a chance in System Preferences asks for the admin password, which you don't have. Maybe they are a teacher at a school with overly-zealous sysadmins? Maybe they work at an insurance company that... just kidding, no insurance company supports Macs. Someone Who Isn't Me knows someone that has a Mac laptop and can't print to the home printers for exactly this reason. To print at home, they generate a PDF, copy the file to a USB stick, and walk it over to another computer that can print.
Accelerate Machine Learning with Amazon SageMaker
Applications based on machine learning (ML) can provide tremendous business value. However, many developers find them difficult to build and deploy. As there are few individuals with this expertise, an easier process presents a significant opportunity for companies who want to accelerate their ML usage. Though the AWS Cloud gives you access to the storage and processing power required for ML, the process for building, training, and deploying ML models has unique challenges that often block successful use of this powerful new technology.
AGM with Skype: the pain
Nele Koemle along this afternoon with Ellie, a laptop and copious quantities of paper for the AGM of the Islandic Horse Association of Australia. Chris Bahlo was there too, of course. And that was all. The rest was done by Skype. Things didn't go well. Nele had problems getting her laptop on the network, something that should happen automatically. But her machine (Microsoft Windows 10) connected and said something about limited access. What does that mean? They started network debugging the way that I would never have done, and rather than have an argument, I left them to it. After a reboot and I don't know what else, the meeting started only a little late.
Timely message from eBay
Received this morning: From bounces+1434781-7b60-[email protected] Mon Nov 27 16:30:05 2017 From: eBay <[email protected]> To: dereelyauctions <[email protected]> Subject: Hip hip hoorah, Greg???you never know what you'll get on Cyber Monday! This is one of these silly messages they continually send to an auction address I registered a while back when they couldn't work out how to let me sell in Australia. The content matches the emetic commercials that they publish on YouTube. But look at the date! Cyber Monday was all but over when they sent it! Yes, clearly they're behind the times on apps, and would I like to secure them.
Feelworld Field Monitor
The field monitor that I ordered two weeks ago has arrived, so in to Napoleons to pick it up. What's it like? On the whole, very good, but with some unnecessary issues. To my surprise, the base package comes with no power supply whatsoever, something very stupid. I had already discovered that it can be run by battery or mains power, and that it comes without a battery or charger, so I bought a kit which included those components. But no mains power supply? That's tacky. The battery and charger have their issues too. There appears to be no way to clip the battery into the charger, and I needed to wedge it in with a bit of plastic.
Craig Weber/Klearview: partial refund
One of my nastiest experiences in recent times was my attempt to buy a disk on eBay from a seller called klearview or klearview_au, run by a certain Craig Weber. He first claimed that I had not paid, causing me to accidentally pay twice. Then he didn't deliver. eBay didn't want to know because it was a bank transfer, and to rub salt into the wound they removed my negative feedback with no explanation, although I demanded one, something that I find criminal on the part of eBay. At some time I received a refund, quite possibly from eBay, but only for one payment.
Hey, Kitchener-Waterloo, Im headed your way next Monday!
I was honoured to be invited to address the University of Waterloo on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Cheriton School of Computer Science; my father is a proud Waterloo grad (and I’m a proud Waterloo dropout!), and so this is indeed a very special opportunity for me. Moreover, the kind folks at... more
Communicating with Skype
The IHAA is having its Annual General Meeting tomorrowat our house! The 50 odd members are spread around Australia, so it's impractical to meet face to face. Amy Heldane is president, but she's in Yambuk, in the middle of nowhere. Chris Bahlo is vice president, and Nele Koemle is treasurer. Both of them will be in Dereel tomorrow, and they've co-opted Yvonne to be returning officer, so it makes sense to do it here. And the rest? Skype conference. I've used it in the past, during my MySQL days, and I still have the important people of those days in my contact list.
Al Jazeera breakage: YouTube, not me
The Al Jazeera Live Stream on YouTube is still broken, though eBay has replaced their moronic commercial with a marginally less stupid one. OK, I use FreeBSD and firefox, the latter of which is currently suspect. But Real Users use Microsoft. What happens there? Exactly the same thing as on teevee. In fact, the only system that will currently display it is eureka, running old versions of FreeBSD and firefox. Friends on IRC confirmed: for some it works, for others it crashes after the morons. Why isn't YouTube doing something about it? At the very least a warning with Some people have a problem displaying opening this stream.
Content-free email
Email from ALDI Mobile today. Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2017 11:31:17 +1100 From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: AldiMobile - Expiry Warning HTML only content. Pointed it at my browser and waited. It displayed a logo and nothing else. OK, what does the HTML markup say? <html><body><img alt="ALDImobile header" src="https://unite.aldimobile.com.au/images/540/Email_header_image.png"><p></p></body></html> Isn't it amazing how broken email can still be, after over 40 years? ACM only downloads articles once.
Unapocalyptic Software
The Atlantic published The Coming Software Apocalypse by James Somers, which is full of dire warnings and strong claims. Heres one: Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little. My first programming job was in 1979, I still construct software, and I can testify that that assertion is deeply wrong, as is much else in the piece. I would very much like to place an alternative view of my profession before the people who have consumed Mr Somers, but I wouldnt know how, so Ill just post it here; maybe an Atlantic reader or two will stumble across it.
Video player pain
So I got round to trying mpv, a fork of mplayer. And how about that, it displays the subtitles correctly. Or it did. Somehow, while playing around with the subtitle file, I managed to break it. There's nothing obvious, but mpv, mplayer and vlc now all refuse to have anything to do with it. Why? Who knows? They're all video players, so they all don't believe in no steenking error messages. Emacs still reports valid XML, and I can't see anything wrong with it. The character encoding is correct. I suspect permissions or modification timestamps, but no, that all works too. What a pain these programs are!
YouTube pain
I've continually had problems with watching Al Jazeera news. They stream via YouTube, but they keep changing the channel. Today, though, I had problems I haven't seen before. Firstly, I was presented with the most stupid commercial I have seen in a long time, from eBay. Clearly it's an indication of whom they think their customers are. But on other systems that didn't happen. After that, I got a fraction of a second of Al Jazeera, and then an error message ( something went wrong. Find out what , followed by a completely unrelated link). What caused that? YouTube might have an idea, but they're keeping very quiet.
Firefox pain
Some discussion on the FreeBSD mailing lists about the status of firefox today. I think that, basically, firefox 57 is broken. Yes, of course, the breakage is intentional, and there are good reasons for it, but some plugins aren't extensions, they're basic functionality. Once upon a time everything X had Emacs bindings, but that was too easy, so they broke it. And firefox has also tried to be a (very bad) editor in itself. I was able to work round this breakage with two addons, firemacs and It's all text. Both work acceptably, but not on the new firefox. I'm sure I'll find many others.
X pain
On Thursday I upgraded lagoon, Yvonne's machinealmost. I couldn't get X to work with the nvidia driver. I have to do that when she's not here, so today was the next opportunity. As planned, I copied the configuration from teevee, which has almost identical hardware. And I failed again! What went wrong? In each case, I ended up with a black display with only a cursor, and a resolution of 640x480. The cursor wouldn't move, and externally started clients didn't display. The same happened when I built a new configuration file using nvidia-xconfig. OK, that's what log files are for. [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (==) framebuffer bpp 32 [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): RGB weight 888 [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): Default visual is TrueColor [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) [167358.439] (**) NVIDIA(0): Option "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE" [167358.439] (**) NVIDIA(0): Option "DPI" "150x150" [167358.439] (**) NVIDIA(0): Option "ModeValidation" "NoMaxPClkCheck" [167358.439] ...
Automatic vacuum cleaner
ALDI had a Robot Vacuum Cleaner on offer yesterday. We've tried one before and not been impressedI don't even seem to have mentioned it in my diarybut there's a specific use I have for one, to pick up the dirt that the dogs bring in from outside and deposit in the hallway. So Yvonne bought one, and today I tried it out. It didn't work well. By far the biggest issue is that it doesn't seem to understand carpets: It also seems to have a very poor understanding of its surroundings.
Moving away from Dereel
I've commented a few months ago about the inaccuracy of web location services. On that occasion some anonymous location service decided I was in or near Traralgon, and there was nothing I could do to change it. Never mind, things changed on their own. Now I clearly live in Geraldton. While researching recipes (how terrible recipes are on the web!) , I was offered pricing at the local Coles supermarket: That's no longer 300 km away: now it's 12 times the distance, 3,611 km!
Multimedia interface, modern style
One of the questions I was left with after yesterday's subtitle investigation was whether vlc can be controlled by anything except a mouse. I had discovered, mainly by accident, that it does interpret f to toggle full screen. So I went looking and found this simple explanation of how to Remote Control VLC. TL;DR: enable HTTP interface, select unrecognizable button, set up passwords, reconfigure firewall, download mobile phone app, and after potential troubleshooting you can remote control vlc with your mobile phone. The functionality appears to be limited to what you can do with a mouse, but unlike with a mouse, you need to look at the device to be able to control it.
How to get a signed, personalized copy of any of my books, shipped anywhere in the world!
The kind folks at Dark Delicacies, my local specialist horror bookstore here in beautiful Burbank, California have volunteered to fill orders for my novels; since they’re walking distance from my front door, I’ll be popping in there a couple of times every week between now and Xmas to sign and inscribe any orders you place;... more
Subtitle mutilation
Yesterday's build of mplayer gave me the remote control again, but while watching TV ( Die Rosenheim Cops , in mild Bavarian dialect), I noticed significant problems with the subtitles. In particular, the German letters ä, ö, ü and ß were frequently dropped, replaced by ? or other characters, but also frequently displayed correctly. And on a couple of occasions they were really badly mutilated. Here three examples: In this case the text was correct up to the first ü.
Computers: end of an era
With the old lagoon, an era goes to end. I've had computers at home for a little over 40 years. I can divide them into roughly 3 periods: 1977-1987: Homebrew computers with proprietary and S-100 buses. 1987-1997: IBM PC clones, mainly with tower cases to hold the large disks, like these ones: 1997-2017: I increasingly replaced the tower cases with mini-tower cases like this: ...
Upgrading lagoon
Yesterday I received a new display card for Yvonne's machine, lagoon.lemis.com. Today she went shopping, so I had time to do the next step of my hardware upgrades: replace the current machine with another Lenovo ThinkCentre. It should be a piece of cake: it's exactly the same thing as the upgrade of teevee that I performed last week. Put the card in the new machine, confirmed that it worked. Removed the system disk from old lagoon and put it in the new machine. Boot. Normal problem with the Ethernet card not being recognized (do we really need a different interface name for every kind of interface?)
Firefox: POLA violation
firefox Quantum has been released. More performance. More security: lots of add-ons that used inappropriate interfaces have now been disabled. That's good for the product, but it also makes it useless for me. To quote the commit message: r454194 | jbeich | 2017-11-15 06:04:44 +1100 (Wed, 15 Nov 2017) | 9 lines www/firefox: update to 57.0 (marketed as "Firefox Quantum") Not a MFH candidate due to POLA violation per redesigned UI, broken legacy addons and auto-reviewed new addons. In particular, firemacs and It's All Text! no longer work with Quantum. One step forwards, at least two steps back.
Remote control woes
When upgrading mplayer I lost the remote control with lirc. Why? Time to investigate the port. First step was to notice that there's a build option for mplayer: OPTIONS_DEFINE= AALIB AMR_NB AMR_WB ASS BLURAY CACA CDIO DEBUG DV DVDNAV \ ENCA FONTCONFIG FRIBIDI GIF GNUTLS GSM GUI IPV6 JACK \ LADSPA LIBMNG LIRC LZO NAS OPENAL OPENGL \ ... OK, set that, and confirm that it gets set in the options file: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer-local 2 -> cat /var/db/ports/multimedia_mplayer-local/options # This file is auto-generated by 'make config'.
The Fight for a Free, Fair and Open Internet | Bioneers 2017
According to journalist, blogger, creative commons advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation Fellow, and award-winning science fiction author Cory Doctorow, the fight for a free, fair and open Internet isnt the most important fight on the planet, but you cant win any of the other major battles without it. Although the Net is the nervous system of... more
Scaling Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with Online Cluster Resizing
Amazon ElastiCache embodies much of what makes fast data a reality for customers looking to process high volume data at incredible rates, faster than traditional databases can manage. Developers love the performance, simplicity, and in-memory capabilities of Redis, making it among the most popular NoSQL key-value stores. Redis's microsecond latency has made it a de facto choice for caching. Its support for advanced data structures (for example, lists, sets, and sorted sets) also enables a variety of in-memory use cases such as leaderboards, in-memory analytics, messaging, and more. Four years ago, as part of our AWS fast data journey, we introduced Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, a fully managed, in-memory data store that operates at microsecond latency.
Scaling Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with Online Cluster Resizing
Amazon ElastiCache embodies much of what makes fast data a reality for customers looking to process high volume data at incredible rates, faster than traditional databases can manage. Developers love the performance, simplicity, and in-memory capabilities of Redis, making it among the most popular NoSQL key-value stores. Redis's microsecond latency has made it a de facto choice for caching.
Upgrading
One issue I still have with teevee is tearing of the displayed image on images that pan (horizontally). That's a common complaint, but in my case it started after my upgrade in June, where the software stayed the same and the hardware got faster. No obvious reason why it should start tearing. Went searching on the web and found the usual recommendations, including VDPAU. Looking at my wrapper scripts, I found that I didn't specify VDPAU anywhere. Try out with explicit -vo vdpau and got: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) /teevee/spool/Series/Deutschen 24 -> /home/local/bin/mplayered -vo vdpau Die-Deutschen-II-\(6_9\)-20171004-153000.mp4 MPlayer SVN-r37862-snapshot-3.4.1 (C) 2000-2016 MPlayer Team Playing Die-Deutschen-II-(6_9)-20171004-153000.mp4.
Wikimedia error messages
Some while back I linked to some images on Wikimedia. Today I discovered that one wasn't loading. My loading mechanism includes some JavaScript magic, so all I saw was a loading message that took too long. OK, follow the link manually. A remarkably vague error message taking up the entire height of a 2560×1440 screen: OK, page down... Wouldn't you think that they would have found a better way to report that particular error? The one they mention is Just Plain Wrong. ACM only downloads articles once.
Revisiting old focus stacks
I'm gradually getting to the stage where my Zerene results are sufficient for most purposes. What about my older attempts? Can it help there? My first attempts at manual focus stacking go back nearly 5 years, but on that occasion I had to give up because my software wasn't up to it. Today I got: That's not perfect by a long shot. It can't be: I only had two images, and there's an intermediate area that is out of focus in both shots.
Revisiting old focus stacks
I'm gradually getting to the stage where my Zerene results are sufficient for most purposes. What about my older attempts? Can it help there? My first attempts at manual focus stacking go back nearly 5 years, but on that occasion I had to give up because my software wasn't up to it. Today I got: That's not perfect by a long shot. It can't be: I only had two images, and there's an intermediate area that is out of focus in both shots.
Object schema-validation controller throttled?
Tim Bray wrote an article yesterday days ago about the image quality of his Pixel 2 as processed by various software. Interesting, but not spectacular. How would a real camera have handled it? Decided to leave a comment. But of course there was a form to fill out. Did that ( How many sides does a triangle have? Three, of course), and got an error message: Insertion Aborted Error: Object schema-validation controller throttled; exiting. Huh? Deliberately obfuscated error message ? It seems so. Subsequent attempts (including replacing three with 3 ) brought no joy, but interesting variants on the error message: Configuration Interrupted Error: Subsystem normalization controller failed health check; exiting.
Do You Love Any Dead People?
I think most of us do, so if youre in Vancouver around Halloween, you should go visit A Night For All Souls. Even if everyone you love is still alive, you should go anyhow because its full of extreme ethereal dark-hued beauty. All Souls is in Vancouvers Mountain View Cemetary, where Ive often taken pictures and played Ingress before; its central and, yes, has a terrific view of the mountains. The project is city-funded and I hope they go on funding it. The concept is simple: After dark there are soft lights everywhere, many of them in little shrines you can visit and write a message or light a candle.
Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual doesn't seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
An end to blogs ?
I've been keeping an online diary for over 17 years now, following on from a paper diary that I kept for nearly 8 years in the 1960s. In March 2009 I was informed that my blog had been added to the ACM Queue blog roll. Blog? I don't have no steenking blog. In fact, I created one to make my point. Where does the word blog come from? Weblog , of course. Even the Oxford English Dictionary describes the term in detail, including this reference (under weblog): 1997 J.
Dueling Camera Apps
I got a Pixel 2, largely because its said to have a really great camera, with software-driven magic machine learning at work. Here are two shot comparisons between the Google and Lightroom Android camera apps to see what that means in practice. Why Lightroom? Given a choice, I prefer the Lightroom app to Androids. It has better, more intuitive ergonomics, including a level; makes the phone feel more like a camera. Also, you can edit in the Android version of Lightroom, which has basically the same controls as the desktop version I live in. Also, it shoots and edits DNG RAW files.
How I Recovered my Firefox Tab Groups
When quit and restarted Firefox today I received an unwelcomed shock. All my tab groups, which I maintained using the Tab Groups by Quicksaver plugin, were gone! This happened because it upgraded to Firefox Quantum (57), whose API does not maintain backward compatibility with the one used by the plugin. Although I knew the plugin would one day stop working, I thought there would be some last-minute warning and chance to export the tab groups.
Boot problems?
Although I had no real problems setting up the new teevee, there was one strange issue. On boot I got an unexpected message: gptboot: Invalid backup GPT header That looks like some kind of data corruption on disk, and that's all that I found on the web. It's benign in the sense that it doesn't stop the machine from working, but it would be interesting to find out how to fix it. ACM only downloads articles once.
teevee: Finishing touches
Yesterday's work on tiwi.lemis.com (the new teevee) was successful but not complete. I still needed to move disks around and put the new box in the TV cabinet. teevee has had two disks for a remarkably short period of time. My last upgrade started on 1 June and took over 3 weeks to complete. By comparison, this time was a breeze. Last time round I added a new boot disk to teevee, leaving the old one untouched. That proved to be useful today: I was able to copy the entire root file system to it, greatly simplifying the transition. In fact, about the biggest problem was physically moving the machine from its provisional position to inside the cabinet: That also involved swapping names: ...
LinkDelight: revenge is sweet
I was really upset by the way, far from accepting my best offer on eBay, LinkDelight increased the Buy it now price of the FW760 monitor from $230 to $247. But they also had one on auction, initial bid $225. OK, wait until the end and then buy... for $225, the price they had rejected yesterday. That feels good. To be fair to LinkDelight, their price was probably really too low. But if you offer Buy it Now and Best Offer , you shouldn't increase the price when people make an offer, at least not for that one person. ACM only downloads articles once.
Completing tiwi
Yesterday's upgrade attempts for teevee were almost completely successful, except for the issues with the display. I established a procedure, and today I tried it out. First, connect the cables again, paying special attention to the seat of the HDMI cable. And it worked! Was it really just a badly sitting cable? After some consideration, I've decided yes . Next step is to move the physical disks around. My media are still on teevee, which is less than optimal. ACM only downloads articles once.
New display card for teevee
The package that Australia Post so lovingly matured was a display card for teevee, my multimedia box (or TV driver). Yes, of course it has a display card, but it's full height, and I wanted to migrate teevee to a Lenovo ThinkCentre: How do I migrate easily and with fallback? I can't even just take out the disks from teevee and put them in the new machine (provisionally called tiwi): if something goes wrong, I'll have to rebuild again, and I won't have the option of comparing how they behave.
Productivity When You Just Can't Even
Ryn Daniels has written an excellent piece about time management and productivity when you are burned out. The advice is spot on. I also do these things when I'm not feeling my best too. "It's one thing to talk about productivity when you're already feeling motivated and productive, but how do you get things done when it's hard to even make it through the day?" https://superyesmore.com/productivity-when-you-just-cant-even-0c73d6a1f086209af420c2ced442a2e8
ON1: No thanks
Recently I heard of a company called ON1, who have just released a new version of their photo software. OK, I can try that. Fought my way through their web site: I needed to provide my (one-off) email address before they would talk to me, and for that I needed to tell them about myself and what kind (only one) of photos I took. Finally I was registered, logged in and... had to tell them all over again. My guess is that this is a case of Hanlon's Razor. Finally installed the software, and got the message: And they didn't think of that before?
More viewfinder investigations
Spent quite a bit more time investigating viewfinder monitors today. There's an amazing choice. Some of the better ones seem to come from a company with the unlikely name Feelworld, which calls them on-camera monitors or HDMI Camera Field Monitors . But which? The current list (probably predestined to link rot) lists no fewer than 19 different models, in addition to 18 SDI Field Monitors . They differ at least in resolution and screen size. But even after limiting to 7" diagonal and 1920×1080 resolution, I'm left with 5 different monitors, with an actual resolution of 1920×1200. Why do they use this aspect ratio?
Hibiscus photos: finally!
It's been over 18 months since I started trying to take focus-stacked photos of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis flowers. So far technology has always got the better of me. Today I had another go, and finally I have a couple of photos which are almost acceptable: I need to look at it in more detail, but I don't see any artefacts. About the only issue is the depth of field. In each case, I took 20 shots, the first at f/4 (a little wide for this lens) and the second at f/5.6.
Reinstalling DxO
Time to run DxO PhotoLab on euroa again. The installation is still broken, and remained broken after uninstalling it. But when I fought my way the maze of twisty little directories folders after deinstallation, the files were still there. OK, rm -rf /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/Local/DxO/ and reinstall. It worked. What use are these deinstallers? OK, I had put stuff in there that hadn't been installed, but surely they can deal with that. At the very least they can report the fact. Microsoft! ACM only downloads articles once.
Focus stacking wildflowers
Spent some time today processing yesterday's focus stacks of the wildflowers. There were slim pickings: in most cases I had managed to miscalculate the beginning or end focus point, and I ended up with results that were just plain out of focus. I really need a better viewfinder. One possibility would be a small normal monitor connected to the HDMI output. There were only two photos worth looking at. Here's a Diuris sulphurea rendered by Zerene (first two images) and Helicon Focus variants A (weighted average) and C (pyramid). . I wasn't able to get any results for Helicon B (depth map): every time I moved the mouse towards the button, the application crashed.
Trip report: Fall ISO C++ standards meeting (Albuquerque)
A few minutes ago, the ISO C++ committee completed its fall meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, hosted with our thanks by Sandia National Laboratories. We had some 140 people at the meeting, representing 10 national bodies. As usual, we met for six days Monday through Saturday, including several evenings. The following are some highlights […]
Trip report: Fall ISO C++ standards meeting (Albuquerque)
A few minutes ago, the ISO C++ committee completed its fall meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, hosted with our thanks by Sandia National Laboratories. We had some 140 people at the meeting, representing 10 national bodies. As usual, we met for six days Monday through Saturday, including several evenings. The following are some highlights … Continue reading Trip report: Fall ISO C++ standards meeting (Albuquerque) →
Radiation Tower progress
The new Telstra radiation tower has now been erected, but they're still working on it: Still, it can't be long now before we finally get coverage. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Olympus goggles
Olympus has announced a new product, the EyeTrek Insight EI-10L That report, from Digital Photography Review, is the most informative. Their own page is much less so, but shows some truly horrendous prices: the unit itself costs $1,500. Even the battery charger costs $249, more than I paid for Yvonne's E-PM2 with lens. It's billed as developer's edition , which I translate as solution looking for a problem . I have a suitable problem: I need a remote viewfinder for my camera for use out in the open. With suitable imagination, this device could be adapted.
Getting photos off Android
Yesterday I took a couple of photos with my mobile phone: I hadn't expected to need to do so, and I had left my camera in the car. But how do I get them off the phone? I've grumbled about the opacity of the Android user interface in the past, but I've always managed to get them off there with a little bit of searching. But not today. WiFi File Transfer, a program that fills in for missing basic Android functionality, offered to find My Photos , My Pictures (what's the difference) and other Mys, but it couldn't find them. Neither could I.
Microsoft memory use
dischord.lemis.com, my Microsoft photo box, has 16 GB of memory, still a comparatively large amount. But after my photo experiments today, the task manager showed it using about 15 GB physical memory. After stopping the photo software, it dropped to 2.23 GB: This is Windows 7, though I'm not too sure it would be very different in older or newer releases. But why do programs that aren't currently in use use so much physical memory? Is their Virtual Memory model really that bad?
More focus stacking comparisons
Two weeks ago I took some focus-stacked photos that were less than optimal. The results with the out-of-camera stacking were surprisingly good, but limited in focus depth (only 8 component images). I took another series of 84 images of a Burchardia umbellata, of which FOCUS Projects Professional made results that I wouldn't want to use: Due to the stack size issues, I haven't been able to get Zerene or Helicon Focus to produce any results. But now I can normalize the sizes. What do I get?
eBay pain, yet again!
Mail from eBay today, coinciding with a routine access to my eBay : Unauthorized use of your account -- action required We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your permission. Weve reset your eBay password. If you had your PayPal account linked to your eBay account, we've disabled your PayPal link to protect your funds. Any unauthorised activity, such as buying or selling, has been cancelled and any associated fees have been credited to your account. Any listings that we removed are included toward the end of this email.
November NYC DevOps Meetup: Building a hybrid cloud
Taras Lipatov, Principal Engineer at Sailthru, will describe his experience building a hybrid cloud using docker/mesos/consul at the Tuesday, November 14, 2017 nycdevops meetup. More info and to RSVP on https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/241852995/. RSVP soon! See you there!
Zerene on FreeBSD
Another potential advantage of Zerene is that there's a Linux version. Will it run on FreeBSD? Spent some time checking, and came to the answer Yes . The main issue proved to be, once again, that eureka is so down-rev that I can't run modern Linux binaries on it. But it worked almost out of the box across the LAN on lagoon. Yet another reason to upgrade eureka. ACM only downloads articles once.
Normalizing image stack sizes
DxO PhotoLab creates output images that can vary in size by up to about 6 pixels on a side. That's not a big deal, much less than 1%, but it breaks various software that processes multiple images and expects them to be exactly the same size. What I need is a program that can take a stack and crop the larger images to the size of the smallest. Where can I find that? I looked, but couldn't find anything. Maybe I didn't have the right search terms. In any case, searching became more difficult than doing it myself, so I wrote a script myself.
eBay manipulation?
I'm still annoyed about the way I've been treated regarding the matter with Craig Weber (eBay seller klearview_au). When I get over my anger I'll follow up. But today I was curious as to whether he was still registered with eBay. Yes. Not only that, since then he has become a top-rated seller! And that with the feedback I left him! Went checking what feedback he had received since thenand mine was gone! So was another one of similar character. Working my way through the little twisty passages of eBay links brought me to https://feedback.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedbackLeft, where I could enter the item number (352142223044), which the page obligingly removed, and then displayed: Mutually withdrawn?
Operational Excellence in April Fools' Pranks
This issue's column in ACMQueue Magazine is titled, "Operational Excellence in April Fools' Pranks". You can read it on the Queue app: http://queue.acm.org/app/
Registration for NYC DOD 2018 is open!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/devopsdays-nyc-2018-tickets-39330760363
World's most widespread Unix
What is Unix? That depends on whom you ask. The lawyers have always had a different viewpoint from the techies. And while it's reasonable to say that Linux is Unix-like, can you say that about Android Yes, it has a Linux kernel, but the whole interface is foreign. In my book, not Unix. Similar considerations apply to Mac OSmacOS (barely fits my definition of Unix and iOS (doesn't). Given my definitions, it's clear that macOS is the most widespread version of Unix. Or so I thought. Then I read this article: Every Single Processor that Intel has made in the last 8 or 9 years contains a hidden processor running MINIX.
How I lifehacked my way into a corner
My latest Locus column is “How to Do Everything (Lifehacking Considered Harmful),” the story of how I was present at the birth of “lifehacking” and how, by diligently applying the precept that I should always actively choose how I prioritize my time, I have painted my way into a (generally pleasant) corner that I can’t... more
Apple touchpads: the expert speaks
Mail from Malcolm Caldwell today about my touchpad article a few days ago: Recent trackpads on macs allow various options for right button (or as they call it "secondary click"). I use "two finger" clicks for right mouse button. It has become so natural for me, so much a part of muscle memory, that I could not remember that without sitting at my mac and seeing what I do to activate right click. This is actually well "documented", but in a completely non-obvious place: its under settings->touchpad. There you can set how you want to activate clicks, secondary clicks etc.
More focus stacking
Taking the opal photos was only the first part. Now I also had a good subject for focus stacking. In this case, of course, in-camera stacking works well enough, as long as you don't forget the crop, which is significant: I didn't even bother to try with FOCUS projects 3 professional, but I downloaded a trial version of Zerene and compared it with Helicon Focus. The results were interesting. Helicon is much faster, round 5 times the speed, it feels. But the results aren't quite up to scratch.
Analyzing focus stacking Exif data
How does the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II focus stacking work? It provides you with two basic settings: step distance , a number between 1 and 9, and step count. This photo gives some details: Richard Turton has done some investigation of the meaning of focus step , and come up with a relationship to the aperture for one lens, not completely coincidentally the M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm f/2.8 Macro with which I took today's photos: it's the obvious choice for this kind of work. But in the process he introduced another parameter, focus count .
MicroReview: Usenix LISA 2017
I'm a bit too tired to write a full review of Usenix LISA 2017, so let me just say that the content was excellent and the audience was the most diverse that I've seen at a mainstream sysadmin conference. The best part about the content? If I could sum it up in one word, it would be "new". Tons of new stuff, new technology, new ideas, and new techniques. (Ironically the one training session I taught was my not-new Time Management class, but the room was packed with new attendees.) Best meta-issue? Usenix switched to the "Sched App" which was awesome.
Vintage Nauticals
We keep our boat at Horseshoe Bay, a pretty little place when approached by land. Boaters coming in from Howe Sound come face-to-face with a huge antique float/pier/breakwater kind of thing, whose ugliness Ive long found magnificent and which today I took the time to tour and photograph. Turns out this huge steel thing is afloat, actually; heres how its fastened to the land. Those are big chains and huge truck tires. What happened was, I was out winterizing the boat. Vancouver missed autumn this year, snapped over from 18°C Indian-summer to basically zero more or less overnight. Today a few snowflakes drifted down and I was wearing a nontraditional Canadian boating toque.
Debugging DxO PhotoLab
After playing around with DxO PhotoLab on euroa, it reliably hung in about three different ways. I couldn't get it to work. Deinstalling, both with Microsoft's standard tools and with a hastily downloaded Ashampoo Uninstaller 6, followed by subsequent reinstallation, didn't help. OK, time for a problem report. How do I describe it? A video clip sounds like a good idea. OK, let's try: What a catastrophe! It reminds me of what I tried to do with my camera 50 years ago, before good photocopiers were available to Mere Mortals.
Reinventing the button
Chris Bahlo has an ancient Apple MacBook which, she says, has a defective video display. The display is on the motherboard, and when she took it to the Apple people in Ballarat, they told her that it was nearly 5 years old, far too old for them to have spare parts. I don't use the display on computers that don't run X, so that was of no problem to me, so I asked her to give it to me. She did, but there's a problem: I can't find anything wrong with the hardware. Still, time to play around with it. But how do I communicate with it?
More focus stacking experiments
Despite everything I've been doing, my curry tree still has mites. Time for a few photos. They weren't good. The first, using in-camera focus stacking, was pretty fuzzy: These images are at approximately 1:1 magnification (in other words, the width is about 17 mm). And yes, the mites (about 0.5 mm across) are recognizable, but none of them at all are really sharp. What about the postprocessing alternatives? Putting the same images through FOCUS projects 3 professional and Helicon Focus (which, I discover from the tutorial videos, is pronounced H+licon ) gave me: Once again a completely garbled output from H+licon.
Information rot
I've been keeping this diary for over 17 years, and I link to a number of other places in the web. I'm amazed how many of them rot. Somehow xkcd summarizes it: I've taken to keeping copies of all the images I link to. ACM only downloads articles once.
Interview: On simplifying C++
I was also interviewed recently by Anastasia Kazakova for the CLion blog, and that interview is now live: Toward a more powerful and simpler C++ with Herb Sutter Topics include: Concepts and modules (and coroutines) as the true hot topics right now How my work on metaclasses was motivated and developed Obligatory aside on operator<=> […]
Interview: On simplifying C++
I was also interviewed recently by Anastasia Kazakova for the CLion blog, and that interview is now live: Toward a more powerful and simpler C++ with Herb Sutter Topics include: Concepts and modules (and coroutines) as the true hot topics right now How my work on metaclasses was motivated and developed Obligatory aside on operator<=> … Continue reading Interview: On simplifying C++ →
More bank scams?
Another mail message today, ostensibly from ANZ, my bank, and also potentially related to the fraud case: Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2017 06:10:42 +0000 From: ANZ Customer Enquiries <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Your Pay Anyone Disputes - Do Not Reply To This Email Message-ID: <5E045F2C4F1AEA4A9AA3177E0CAA1CC424CCFDF8@EXUAU020HWT151.oceania.corp.anz.com> Received: from mail1.bemta3.messagelabs.com (mail1.bemta3.messagelabs.com [195.245.230.161]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5EFE31B72806 for <[email protected]>; Wed, 1 Nov 2017 06:11:37 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [85.158.137.35] by server-1.bemta-3.messagelabs.com id A0/46-27020-89569F95; Wed, 01 Nov 2017 06:11:36+0000 X-Env-Sender: [email protected] X-Msg-Ref: server-8.tower-134.messagelabs.com!1509516664!23298582!18 X-Originating-IP: [203.110.235.80] Received: from unknown (HELO EXIAU002MELP003.ecorp.anz.com) (203.110.235.80) by server-8.tower-134.messagelabs.com with DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 encrypted SMTP; 1 Nov 2017 06:11:32-0000 Received-SPF: PermError (EXIAU002MELP003.ecorp.anz.com: domain of [email protected] used an invalid SPF mechanism) Received-SPF: PermError (EXIAU002MELA002.ecorp.anz.com: domain of [email protected] used an invalid SPF mechanism) Dear Gregory Please ...
Still no Police contact
It's now been 6 days since I received notice to contact the NSW Police. And despite all attempts, I failed. OK, email to to [email protected], explaining the situation and asking for help. And how about that, I got a call back from Senior Constable Adam Ginnane within an hour, saying that he couldn't get in contact with DSC Todd, who was apparently out of the office on another matter, but that he had spoken with a colleague, and I would get a call back later in the day. He also gave me details of how to contact him if needed. It seems that Joan's comments yesterday were wrong: [email protected] is in the same building as the help line I have called so many times, and they could have put me through.