tuxcomputers's blog

The good news

My wife and I looked at a house to rent on Tuesday (17th June) afternoon and loved it.

The lounge room by itself is as big as the current lounge/dining room. The dining room is open space right off the kitchen and it is big enough to fit our 8 seat table that is currently in the garage.

There is a little nook that the computers will fit in quite nicely. The fourth bedroom will have the spare TV and the Nintendo Wii setup so that we can watch movies and the kids play games.

There is a decent back yard with a shed that we can put our mower in and lock. The garage has a remote and doesn't have a door to the house, so when I leave it open, like I do, people can't get into the house. It opens to the covered area out the back so even if it is raining we don't get wet.

We decided to put an application in on the Wednesday morning, we heard back from the real estate that we were approved just after lunch. We get the keys Monday (23rd) and move in the Friday (27th).

The bad news

A dear friend of ours, Casey, has cancer, he found out just before Christmas last year. He has been undergoing Chemo treatment but yesterday he went into hospital, his organs are shutting down and he is only expected to last 1-2 days.

His kids have come to say good bye from as far away as Perth. Every time the phone rings we are thinking, is this it? We got a call from friend that knows him this afternoon, my wife saw who was calling on her mobile, got tears in her eyes and couldn't answer it.

It looks like we will be attending a funeral while we are either packing or unpacking. I am just glad that I am home on holidays because Casey is a great bloke and a good friend, my wife has known him since the start of high school, he is the father of a school friend of hers. His daughter moved away but we kept in contact and are good friends.

There are heap of us that all gather every year on boxing day, one year it was very hot and Casey was stirring Chris, like normal, so she got a bucket of ice and tipped it over his head. He just sat there took another sip of his beer and said 'Ah that's better, I'm cooler now'.

She is going to be devastated and we will all miss his VERY loud laughter. The first thing anyone that knows him would say is that he laughs very loud and often... he will be sorely missed.

When I write a blog entry and it goes longer than the edit window can display that window keeps expanding and contracting.

I know that the Ipernity team are very clever and have written code make it so that the box only takes up so much room and then gets bigger when and if you need it but I am using Firefox 2.0.0.13 on the latest release of Ubuntu Linux and it is really distracting.

People are used to a static sized window and have developed techniques to deal with that. The window jumping all over the place makes me a little sick after a while. I have to write up my entry in a text editor first and then paste it into Ipernity.

Is anybody having the same problem? What OS are you using? Windows Linux? Which browser? IE or Firefox or something else?

EDIT Thursday 19th June 2008

It's back doing the same thing, please make it stop.

... from buying 3 cameras with lenses, keeping one, selling the other 2 as well as a lens I bought previously and the three camera bodies. I bought the three as a package for $100.

So the sums go like this:

1. Bought from ebay: 1 Pentax-A f2.0 lens = $62
2. Bought from camera fair: 3 x lenses + 3 x camera bodies $100

(2 x Pentax-A f1.7, Pentax-M f2.0, 2 x Pentax Super-A bodies, Pentax Program-A body)

Total: $162

Sold on ebay

1. Pentax-M f2.0 = $25
2. Pentax-A f2.0, (the one I just bought off ebay) = $51
3. Pentax-A f1.7 = $72
4. Program-A body = $10
5. Super-A body = $23.50
6. Super-A body = $23.50

Sub-Total: $205
Minus the ebay fees: $17.38
Total: $187.62

Profit: $25.62

It was not just the small change I made from this exercise that is exciting, it's the fact that I got to keep one of the fantastic Pentax-A f1.7 lenses and 25 bucks.

I am excited that I did so well.

... made my list of "You fuckers can suck my cock before I will even look in your direction", right beside insurance companies.

We have been looking to rent a new house because the current one is too small. We have found several and contacted the agency's.

They want us to fill out an application form before they will even let us inside to have a look!!! These arse wipe fuckers want the the last 4 payslips and some want our next of kin!!!! What the fuck for? Is the roof going to collapse during the 10 minutes we have a look at the rooms? Next thing they will want a urine sample and a DNA profile before you can look at the photos of the outside.

Pricks, they can all go to hell and be raped up the arse with a cock made of bard wire before I will give them the time of day.

My photography over the last few months has been in a bit of a slump. This is despite getting a beautiful new dSLR, a Pentax K10D.

I was not really happy with the 18-55mm kit lens, it didn't have enough reach sio I went to a second hand shop and bought a 35-200mm zoom lens. It's an ok lens but it is really slow, only f3.5 or so. It is also a manual focus which is a real pain when you are zoomed in.

I then hit upon an idea of buying a prime lens. Since 50mm was a really common focal length I decided that i should look into what was available and how much they were.

Well the new 50mm auto everything was WAY out of my price range so I looked into buying an older type lens. After some research I found that the Pentax-A f1.7 would be ideal, you could get the body to set the aperture, they had great optics and they were realtively cheap.

I tried several times to buy one on ebay but I kept being outbid, my wife had me on a strict budget of what i could 'waste' on buying camera stuff. Sick of not winning I bid on the Pentax-A f2.0, it's not as fast and the optics are not as good but it was good enough.

I should have waited because not long after I bought the lens there was an annual Photography Fair that is well attended by camera nuts from all over Brisbane and surrounding areas. At the fair I checked every single table for Pentax gear. A few bits here and there until the last table, the guy was selling 3 camera bodies with 3 lenses attached for $100.

2 of the lenses were the Pentax-A f.17's!!!! The other was a Pentax-M f2.0. The M series lens is totally manual, you set the aperture on the lens and then to meter you have to hit a green button on the camera. The camera stops down the aperture and takes a reading, anything changes and you have to meter again... or guess. That is a real show stopper in the type of photography I like taking.

I checked all of the lenses and they were all clean and clear so I bought the lot. Wifey was not happy until I explained that I could sell one of 1.7's, keep the other and sell everything else, including the lens I just bought off ebay. I have just listed all six items on ebay and hope to sell them all.

I have the 50mm 1.7 attached to the K10D all the time now, it is sharp and fast. Going back to the kit lens is a step backwards despite the 50mm being at LEAST 19 years old. It is bright and just a joy to use. I have never liked taking portaits of people, I call them 'grinning idiot' photos but with this lens being perfect for taking portaits I think I will start to give it ago.

If you use a Pentax, live in Australia and want a great lens then I suggest you jump on ebay and do a search for the items 'hazza96' has for sale. You will not regret buying the f1.7, if it gets to expensive then get the f2.0, it's still a great lens, just not quite as good as the 1.7.

I have just installed a program on my Linux laptop called Enfuse. It is an exposure blending program that blends differently exposed images into a nice output image. I didn't have any decent photos that I are worth showing but the results on the test images are fantastic.

To do it I did the following steps:

1. Took the photo in RAW.
2. Developed the RAW file several times using different exposure compensations, normally negative one, zero and positive one.
3. Saved each image as a bitmap.
4. Blended them using enfuse using an output of bitmap.
5. Edited the result using GIMP to crop and straighten etc.
6. Saved the final image as a JPG

Using the bitmap format as an intermediate format made the files really big but there was no data loss like there would have been if I used the JPG format.

I will go through my photos and look for an image that I can apply this too.

EDIT: I found a half decent photo that demonstrates what enfuse does. This was developed using the exposure settings of neg 1, zero, pos 1 and pos 2.

I have decided to write a book about GIMP to give me greater knowledge on:

1. The GIMP,
2. The typesetting program Lyx, and
3. Writing a book.

It will almost always be a work in progress because I am still learning stuff about the GIMP and it keeps getting updated. I have plenty of time on my hands both at work and at home.

While at work there is nothing to do at night time so I will be working on the book. During my 2 weeks off at home I am often just sitting around bored.

This book will be available for free on-line as a web book as well as a PDF. I am still ot sure if I want to publish it using a site like Lulu.

It will divided into 3 sections:

1. Information on GIMP, how to install it, how to configure it etc
2. The tools available in GIMP
3. Photo manipulation task orientated tutorials.

I was walking along the beach at Mooloolaba today taking photo of various things, rocks, sand patterns, a jogger, sea gulls etc. On the beach and in the surf were a group of some kids. They were obviously from a school or something learning to handle a surf board, a boogie board etc.

I was taking some photos of the kids on the surf boards riding the waves back in, the expression on their faces was great. One of the supervisors came over and I forgot what he said but I whacked out and totally over reacted. I know I have a right on a public beach to take photos of anything I want to, kids or not and there is no law against it.

I have no idea why but I was a mental case, I am ashamed of my actions. It was not violent or abusive but it was confrontational. They kept insisting there was a law against what I was doing but I know dam well that there isn't.

There was an a guy that claimed he was an off duty policeman there and I would not back down and did not play his game. The uniform cops were called and they were real nice, Sue the constable just asked what I was doing and if she could see the photos I had taken.

I gave her the camera and showed her how to scroll through them. She explained that the parents there had some concerns but after looking through my photos she said that she could tell that I was what I claimed to be, just a photog on a beach.

I certainly plan on doing better next time (in this day and age of paranoia there WILL be a next time) and not react the way I did. I still have no idea why I did wat I did but I don't want to do it again.

I have been thinking about getting a t-shirt printed that says "Photography is NOT a crime", it won't help but it would be so cool.

Don't get wrong I love my wife and she loves me but unlike the movies we don't spend every waking minute looking lovingly into each others eyes.

We do aot of things together but we also have our seperate interests. I have my photography and my wife does Reiki and that alternative stuff like Tarot cards etc.

I watched 'Knocked up' last night it was a good movie BUT it annoyed me for several reasons. First the main characters sister was so dam clingy her husband had to make stuff up to get some time to himself. I can't remember the other reason it annoyed me right now.

Chris (my wife) and I have things we do together (like watch movies at the cinema), things we do seperate (as explained above) and things we sometimes do together and sometimes not (like going for a walk). Other times we go somewhere and she does er thing while I do mine. Today we went up to Mooloolaba, she went shopping with her 3 friends while I went for a walk along the beach taking photos. We met up for lunch and then came home, great day all around.

In movies they appeal to the unrealistic romantic side to women and the logic is "If you don't want to be with me, then you must not love me", HOLY CRAP!!!! If my wife wanted to be like that then our relationship status would not remain 'married' for very long.

Back in January I wrote (or ranted) about places that require you to have a super secure! password but it just makes things less secure.

Well turns out the the User Friendly comic knows exactly what I meant, see it here.

Last night I went out taking some photos, I started out as I normaly do just shooting JPEG. It took a while for the sun to come out from behind the clouds but when it did I had some beautiful light. My camera has three file format modes:

1. JPEG
2. RAW
3. RAW+ (ie RAW + JPEG)

The K10D has a dedicated RAW button on the side, when I press that it will change to the RAW+ mode. This button can be customised so that it takes a single shot or continues to shoot in RAW+ until you hit the button again.

I was getting some overexposure in the clouds and losing details so I thought I would shoot some photos in RAW+. My RAW files are huge and I can only fit 22 on my 512M card, since I had also decided to shoot completely in Manual mode. I would take some JPEG's to get the exposure right, then shoot 1 or 2 in RAW.

I was quickly running out of room on my SD card when the sun lit up the sky, I took 1 shot in JPEG, looked at the histogram adjusted my exposure, then the next in RAW+, that shot filled the card and I had to go back.

Last night I compared the camera produced JPEG to the same photo using a conversion from RAW using an exposure setting of  negative 0.71. The colours and the details were magnitudes better than the camera produced JPEG.

I am going to need much bigger SD card's. Here is the shot that converted me to a RAW fan:

We went into the city today and I got a Pentax K10D, on the way home on the train the battery had some charge so I took some photos.

Here is one of the person I am privledged to call my wife.

The marketing industry is laughing all the way to the bank in our face at how stupid people are over SPF factors.

We have all heard the yada yada, don't use a birthday, mix upper and lower case, change your password often, longer is better etc etc.... well human nature makes all of that pure bull shit.

I worked in computer support at many and varied companies and govt organisations, no matter what the password policy was it was always defeated by the post-it note on the monitor. The more complex the system forced the password to be the greater number of post-it notes your saw hanging off monitors.

The greatest threat to security is not some hacker harnessing the processing power of 10,000 PC's across the world to brute force crack your password, it's anyone walking through the office area taking a peak at the post-it note.

I have 2 passwords I use, one is for my banking login the other is for everything else, forums, ipernity, e-mail, web site adnministration, Instant Messenger networks..... everything. Do you think I have either of these written down anywhere? No of course not, they are ingrained into the fibres of my brain. They are both 6 characters and both contain letters and numbers.

I hate it when you register at a site and they think they are supper duper secure because they are forcing you to pick a password that:

1. Is 16 characters long
2. Does not contain any letters of your name
3. Does not contain any letters of your cats name
4. When the letters are converted to numbers and added together it is a prime number.
5. When the password is hashed it does not have any letters in your name.

Guess what Aussie Mastercard because of your stupid password policy we can't use our normal password and we will have to write it down somewhere as soon as the account is unlocked and the password reset. Anyone that wants will be able to look at what we wrote down and get into our account but there is no other way except get them to reset the password every time we want to login.

That's the difference between being 'technically' a better password policy and 'pracitcally' being pathetic.

I took a break from photography for a while. mainly because both the battery's on my camera had crapped themselves and went flat after about 10 minutes.

I have bought a new replacement battery and have started to enjoy photograhy again.

I have been thinking about buying a dSLR that does not allow you to return it, I would be in the dog house with the wife for weeks but I would have a nice camera.

Yesterday I answered a knock on the door, only to be confronted by a well-dressed young man carrying a vacuum cleaner. 'Good morning,' said the young man. 'If I could take a couple of minutes of your time, I would like to demonstrate the very latest in high-powered vacuum cleaners.'

'Go away!' I said. 'I haven't got any money!', 'I'm broke!' and I proceeded to close the door. Quick as a flash, the young man wedged his foot in the door and pushed it wide open. 'Don't be too hasty!' he said. 'Not until you have at least seen my demonstration.' And with that, he emptied a bucket of horse manure on to my hallway carpet. 'If this vacuum cleaner does not remove all traces of this horse manure from your carpet, Sir, I will personally eat the remainder.'

I stepped back and said: 'Well I hope you've got a good appetite, because they cut off my electricity this morning. What part of broke didn't you understand!!??'

I have owned the domain tux.com.au for several years and it has provided many benefits. Most of them are e-mail related and I will describe them here:

1. Portable e-mail: I have changed ISP's about 6 times since owning my own domain but my e-mail has never changed. I know that you can get a Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail account but it is not very professional.
2. Protected e-mail: Everywhere you register these days wants your e-mail address, so I make up one on the spot based on the location (web site or business). How I manage this is to have 3 mailboxes:
   1. My "real" e-mail address that I only give to people I know personally.
   2. A "catchall" account, if the address does not match any other mailbox (or alias) then it drops into this mailbox.
   3. A "crap catcher", mail sent to this account disappears into the big bit bucket in the sky. It is not a mailbox and it does not get re-directed to anywhere, it just disappears, poof, gone.
3. I run my own mail server: I have my own mail server at home. The problem is that I don't know enough about mail servers to protect it from being exploited from spammers. The solution? Have a firewall rule on my Linux server that lets only my web host to connect to the mail server. When a message gets sent to one of the family mailboxes the web host is configured to forward it to my home server. When my wife and kids check their e-mail they are doing it on my home server. I have my mail server configured so that the mail stays on it. When (not if) I have to rebuild their computer they do not lose their mail.

I will give an example of how I use the "protected e-mail".

1. When I registered on this site it asked for my e-mail address, so I made up on the spot and used ipernity@tux.com.au.
2. The registration message did not match my real mail name and it was not on the list for my "crap catcher" so it fell into the "catchall" account.
3. It stays this way, if I want to recover my password I know the address will be ipernity@tux.com.au and then I just check my "catchall" account.
4. I always check my catchall account as well as my real mailbox.
5. If all of a sudden a spammer got hold of that address I would start getting millions of messages sent to it.
6. I would then add that address as an alias to the "crap catcher" account.
7. The next spam (or password recovery) message addressed to that will never been seen, ever, by anyone.
8. If I do need to use the password recovery facility I would delete the alias from the "crap catcher" account and let it drop into the "catchall" account.
9. Once the password message was received I would add the alias back to the crap catcher account.

I think everyone should buy their own domain.

I bought land near Blackbutt.