Monthly Archives: April 2004

Macro Digital Photography

In the last few weeks I’ve taken to macro photography in a big way. It’s a whole different world out there in the microcosm of flowers, insects and strange textures, where depth of field is measured in inches rather than feet and your subject is likely to have 6 legs rather than 2!
For the budding macro photographer, here are links to tips on the subject. I’ll be looking at some of this over the weekend!

Linux: Tuning Swappiness, eh?

Via slashdot, I thought this thread on how swappy Linux should be would be informative but it appears to be very subjective.
I tested with swappiness set high and low, along with Mozilla FF, Thunderbird, xchat and mgt, I opened 3 2560×1920 images in the GIMP and performed a few operations on each. Neither setting affected performance much, except that with swappiness set high it may have been a little slower. That said, the GIMP maintains it’s own cache, and I have that set at 256MB.
I have swappyness set to 10 now. Not sure if that’s good or bad, or whatever.. *shrug*

May Day Celebrations in Cork!

There’s lots happening in Cork tomorrow!
On May 1st, the EU expands from 15 to 25 members with the addition of many East European states. Ireland holds the rotating presidency of the European Union and as such, we’re hosting delegations from the incoming states in various cities and areas around the country!
Cork is hosting the Slovak group, and it looks like tomorrow’s going to be a busy day in the city! Even better, Fred are playing on a stage in Patrick’s Street just after 5pm! (Thanks Donnchadh for that link!)

Commission advises against use of e-voting

Woo! E-voting (as it is in Ireland) has been turned down by the commission that investigated the issue. There were many concerns about security, secrecy and privacy but in the last few weeks nothing was heard from opponents of the system.
The Government has been running a campaign advocating e-voting, and it has over-simplified the issues (“Press a button”, “We’ve had plenty of practise”, etc..)
Hopefully the Government will clean up their act and implement a good system, and maybe it won’t cost €40m next time..
More on RTÉ and Labour Party website.
Later… Cullen rules out use of e-voting in June! Yay!
later Still… slashdot picked up on the story, along with OT posts as well, lol.

Teleconverters – should you use them?

I have to agree with the conclusion of this photo.net article. Teleconverters are handy but it’s very difficult to get usable, good quality images from them.
I use a third party 2x TC on my Sony F717 from time to time, and there’s visible degradation of image quality. The article above recommends using a powerful lens and at most a 1.4x TC so I’m seeing the most dramatic distortion. It does help if I set the EV down one stop but that’s not always an option, especially in cloudy and overcast Ireland!

Open source 'too costly' for Irish e-gov

According to this report the Irish Government has found that using “only open source software could, in the long run, be more expensive.”
The announcement came from “Mary Hanafin, Ireland’s Minister for State with responsibility for the Information Society, who was speaking at the Irish Software Association’s 16th annual conference, sponsored by Microsoft, O’Donnell Sweeney and ACT Venture Capital.”
Draw your own conclusions about who’s influencing government policy these days..
Padraig Brady has started a thread on the ILUG about this so no doubt we’ll get plenty of opinions as the day draws on.