Hehe. I wish I had heard this story before the election on Friday! Royston likes to scrawl his name on wooden desks! Very impressive trait in a political candidate! He, and many in Fianna Fail didn’t do too well in the election so it’s just as well I think.
Pity the referendum passed. Now that the government can control who gets Irish citizenship it’s only a matter of time before extremists come into power and decide a citizen has to be white, fluent in Irish and can recite the names of the 1916 leaders…
Author Archives: Donncha
Watch your Histogram
I didn’t know how to use them a few weeks ago, now the web seems to be overflowing with tutorials like this on histograms. I link to this one because it shows the multi-colour histograms available on some Canon cameras.
I noticed in the GIMP 2 that the Curves tool has a nice histogram in the background of it! Must figure out how to assign accelerator keys. It’s a Gnome FAQ so fire up Google later.
Press Record – document your life
Mark links to lots of useful tools and gizmos but I see a lot of trouble ahead for this camcorder. Record your life? Who’d ever relax or be themselves around you if they knew that a camera was recording them all the time? No doubt I’ll be completely wrong and it’ll change society like mobile phones have changed the way people keep in touch.
And, speaking of which, this Yahoo story about camera phones is interesting. I’ve seen phones with fairly good quality cameras (all things considered), they even had a digital zoom (ok, useless!) but will they replace the extensive control a dedicated camera brings you? For point and shoot purposes, of course!
It’s only been 18 months since camera phones hit the market in a big way and gyms banned them. Plenty of growth left in that market!
The hidden camera story above brought back memories for some members of the Street Photography list! Here’s a great story from John Brownlow:
In my previous incarnation as a documentary film maker, I actually used a hidden (button) camcorder to film covertly on several occasions. It is a very strange experience. To be aware that YOU are the camera is odd. Moreover, you find yourself trying to do all the ‘moves’ smoothly… pan, tilt, rise and fall, crab, dolly in and out… I can only imagine how strange this looks.
This film was made using extensive footage from hidden cameras…
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185715/combined
Everybody has forgotten it now but it’s one of my favorites. We sent ‘undercover chefs’ into the kitchens of three of Britain’s top restaurants to film the mistreatment of underlings. It was terrific stuff. There is my favorite ‘doorstep interview’ sequence of all time where we corner one of the bastards in his kitchen, but he manages to lock us INSIDE the kitchen (with the other chefs and a lot of sharp knives…!), then goes and hides in the scullery and refuses to come out. Later we spot him trying to escape by a back door and so pursue him across a ploughed field with the camera crew yelling “we just want you to answer some questions”. The last shot of the film is a guy in a chef’s uniform running away across the mud with the commentary line “So and so declined our request for an interview”.
There was also a good bit where we managed to surprise one of the chefs on the street and interview him. We kept asking him ‘Do you hit your staff’ to which he replied “no…. no… of course not”, and after each ‘no’ we cut in a bit of secret footage we had shot where he smacked one of them upside the head. Great.
The whole thing was probably the most surreal and funny film I ever worked on. We had some great dinners, too. I don’t think it did the restaurants involved any harm at all.
As part of the whole thing I interviewed chef Gordon Ramsay who is now everywhere on British TV. I was astonished to discover that he wore make up in the kitchen while cooking. And that was BEFORE he was on TV.
On 11-Jun-04, at 8:24 AM, ed.nixon@LynnParkPlace.org wrote:
> If you subscribe to the Photo Blog, you’ll already have seen this short item — http://tinyurl.com/2yysr — about the wearable camcorder. In addition to its baseball cap or sunglasses clip-on ergonomics, the company says, “the Model 100 differs from other camcorders because of a recording approach Deja View promises will eliminate missed shots.” How can it fail with the aspiring street photographer? I wonder if it has a Leica-like head’s up display? The company’s website is http://tinyurl.com/2l3s5; the banner graphic reminds me a bit of Nicole Kidman in her current, wifely promotional incarnation. While I’m being deliberately facetious with this post, the technology raises some interesting SP related questions in my mind.
>
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John Brownlow
Deep Fried Films, Inchttp://www.johnbrownlow.com
http://www.pinkheadedbug.com
Today In Alternate History
Humour? Is it funny? Today In Alternate History explores things that might have happened.
in 1944, the desperate push by the Allies to invade Europe and end Hitler’s control of the continent is begun at Calais, France, under the command of General George Patton. Despite Patton’s brilliant leadership, the Allies are defeated, and Nazi control of the continent is solidified.
in 1997, a condom manufacturer delivers a small case of its product to the White House. The rest of Bill Clinton’s second term is quietly uneventful.
in 2001, Former President John F. Kennedy passes away quietly, in his sleep. The 2-term president was 84 years old.
Setting up a fast, stable and tweaked PC
This guide may be useful to some. I don’t use Windows very often but some of the apps mentioned are cross-platform, and occasionally I do switch it on to play the odd game or two!
And while we’re on the issue of setting up a PC, configuring a Linux install to boot off a software RAID partition is simplicity itself in Red Hat 9! I setup a friend’s PC last night and it worked like a charm.
I should do the same at home with my ever-expanding photo archive!
Venus and the Chromosphere
Today’s APOD photo is a stunning close-up of the Venus transit of the sun. Click on the image for a larger version, amazing!
I, Cringely, a weblog?
In his latest column, Cringely discusses weblogs, and points out what many of us know already, that “most web logs are so boring.” Can’t argue there! zzzz, oh sorry, nodded off there.
His name dropping at the end of this column is cleverly done, he met a then governor for dinner way back in 1978. Who? Well, this is what he has to say about him:
Ronnie Reagan was a very funny guy.
Heard that joke before too. heh.
Someone posted photos from the funeral on STF. Good shots, pity about the narrow iframes.
Action Replay? Coding demos the hard way..
It looks like Justin and myself have something in common. I coded all my C64 assembly stuff – demos, games and tools, using the Datel Action Replay. Actually, I still have it at home. It survived the binning of my C64 last year!
I still remember when I wanted to move a chunk of code from one area of memory to another I’d display the code on-screen, type the new address over the first line and hit RETURN over each of the following lines to renumber them.
Ah, them were the days!
Fianna Fail – From the Horse's Mouth
Justin MacCarthy’s email to the ILUG this afternoon is worth repeating for wider distribution if only because it reflects the attitudes of not only the ruling party in Ireland but also hold the EU presidency. Worrying.
I had a FF councillor on my doorstep on t night who wanted to know why I wasn’t going to vote for FF. So I told him.
One of the many outrageous things he said:
“software patents are NOT a NATIONAL issue”,
” that I’m an intellectual snob for thinking the referendum was rushed”
” …”most” of those in the antiwar march WERE anti-american. “
“of course we’ll call another referendum if this one goes the wrong way – we can do what we like , we’re the government”
“but india used e-voting”
“the current e-voting machine WILL be used – its just a matter of time”
” of course I don’t trust computers that banks use”
Who will you be voting for tomorrow?
PHP Accelerator – Cache Size Issues
In this email to the ILUG Webdev list I pondered the effect of deleting the cache used by PHP Accelerator on our Apache webserver.
In my ramblings on my blog I (very?) occasionally post something useful.
We use PHP Accelerator( http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/index.php ) at work and last week I played around with tuning our webserver: linkWe saw a dramatic increase in traffic but I wasn’t sure which of the ideas I tried had affected our server so much!
Yesterday I deleted the PHP Accelerator cached files, and lo and behold, we hit another spike in traffic!“Remember I did some tuning of our server at work? Well, traffic has returned to normal again, but I was told this is a quiet time in the futures market right now. As an exercise I deleted the php Accelerator cached files again and I am seeing another big jump in requests served!
It might pay to remove those files on a daily basis!”I setup a cron job to remove the phpa files in the morning and if I see the same level of traffic today I may set it up to delete the cached files on an hourly basis tomorrow. I expect the traffic to the site to be slightly less today than yesterday simply because the cached files were deleted much earlier on in the day (4am) so by the time our server gets busy there’ll be a larger cache.
And, shock, horror, I might even try it without the cache at all!
Donncha.
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ILUG Web Development
http://mail.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/webdev/
Well, I can confidently say that deleting the cache does improve performance. In further discussion with Kae on the issue I guessed that:
- All php files are being cached, probably using the URL of the request as a key to the cached file. This isn’t useful in a very dynamic site.
- The cache directories can become very large with many thousands of files in one directory. That makes it much harder for the operating system to scan through the file list. Different filesystems handle this better than others.
- Once the cache is deleted, filename traversal of the cache is faster and
core
include files are quickly cached again.
It’s worth using the cache despite the obvious cache problems as it makes Smarty templates much faster and we have a lot of shared code that benefits from the caching.
I’m deleting the cache every hour now and expect to see a marked improvement in the web server logs and adviews!