Lolrus.org

I need to learn to count

January 11, 2007 at 07:20 AM | categories: Photography | Comment

So, I was visiting my friend in NYC over break and I decided to bring my 4x5.  So I thought I had shot 8 sheets of color print film.  Then when I emptied out the holders I counted 7.  When I got my negs back from the lab they told me that I only had 6.

I had some interesting results too.  One sheet of film was exposed twice.  It looks pretty cool, but the white balance in the two scenes is completely different, but that might be a good thing?  Also, one of the sheets I had processed was some Velvia 100 that I guess I had in one of the holders.  It got cross-processed.  The exposure seems pretty good, but I have a feeling it will take a very long time trying to get the white balance correct.  It's somewhat of an abstract scene with no people, so it's not a huge deal whether or not I get it perfect.  If not, I will just scan it when I get time.  I'm curious.  I never cross-processed before. I also need to make sure I tighten my movements on my 4x5.  The rear tilt always seems to end up moving when I use my 90mm lens and I realize it after the fact.  It adds an interesting aesthetic by making the bottom of the exposure a little softer, but it's not like I am going for it.

Downtime

January 07, 2007 at 01:40 PM | categories: About Site | Comment

Well, skank was acting a bit funny Friday evening so I restarted it.  It didn't start back up.  Also, I was on vacation and nobody was in the dorms and had physical access to the server room.  So that's why there was some downtime.  Fortunately it started up right away when I finally got around to resetting it manually today.  All is well :)

I am updating gallery right now.  It's probably been 3 or 6 months since I've updated it last.  I just hope it doesn't break because I run SVN versions of it.

Grinding Aspheric Lenses

December 15, 2006 at 12:36 PM | categories: Photography | Comment

For those of you that don't know, I've been employed part-time at an optics company (well, they do more than just make lenses.  They actually make machines for making lenses as well as sell software.  That's where I come in.  I've been working on software for the manufacturing of Aspheric lenses.

The Aspheric lenses I am referring to are not the kind you get in your Nikon kit lens, or even the large format Rodenstock or Schneider lenses, but the kind that go into aircraft, or the ones that are several inches in diameter that are used in some of the best "amateur" telescopes that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Anyways, it's a really cool process how they're cut and polished.  Each lens taking lots of time to rough, polish, and finish the edges.

I have my camera so I will take pictures of the process and post them.

Deutchland

December 15, 2006 at 01:42 AM | categories: Uncategorized | Comment

Well, it looks like I am (hopefully) going to Germany for five months next year in Osnabrück. It also looks like I will finish my RIT education there  if I take classes this spring as well.  Gonna be great.  I wonder how I will get all my photo gear to Germany... and the stuff I actually need.

I think I have decided which area of computer science I would like to concentrate in finally.  Vision and AI.  Mmm.. Functional Languages.  I'm not sure if I want to do the human side or the computer side of it.  I think they complement each other which ever path I choose.  Ooh, I need to get my GPA up so I can apply to grad school for Color Science.   Yeah, color science is great.

The school at University of Osnabrück I will be studying at is Cognitive Science, not Computer Science, so that will be a nice change of things.  I'm getting all the low level stuff out of my system this quarter :D.

Oh, I struck out with Microsoft :(  They want me to interview in the spring again for the same position because I was really close apparently.

Wee so much work.  I have to finish all my prints for the Southwest trip relatively soon, else I am fucked.

I'm really disgusted with a lot of people I know.  Everybody is so afraid to do anything remotely adventurous.  All these people I know are co-oping at RIT when they could be getting a job across the country, or just settling for a job in Rochester when they graduate.  I can't believe people would stay in the dorms after their first or even second year.  I mean maybe I don't have ambition as far as getting a 4.0 goes, but I certainly don't want to stay.  Grrr... people.  I need some more adventurous friends.  </rant>  I need to get an internship on the West Coast so I have an excuse to drive cross country by myself.

Oh, and I'm also annoyed that my posts have digressed into non-technical crap.  Sorry, I hate myself for it too :)

It's Been a While

November 27, 2006 at 02:12 AM | categories: Uncategorized | Comment

Wow, I've been busy lately.   At least I'd like to think so.  Last week I had my finals and I passed all my classes :).  I even pulled a few surprises with my grades.  I've had some less than great luck with getting a co-op for this winter.  Here's my story:

Well, there are 3 main companies involved.  Since I don't want to burn any bridges, lets call them really-big-search-engine, consumer-end-printer, and web-based-collaboration.

It all started at the career fair in the fall... I first talked with web-based-collaboration, a company where my friend has co-oped and still works there part time.  Everything went well, and I ended up having an interview with them a week later.  They promptly sent me a job offer in the mail.  The pay wasn't all that good (it was actually less than what I had been making for the past few summers), and it would have meant that I had to stay in Rochester, but it was also an interesting opportunity to learn some new things, and not be a testing monkey.  I called them up and asked them if I could wait until a specific date to give them a decision and they said OK.

At the career fair I also spoke with consumer-end-printer company.  It seemed to go pretty good--until they brought up their minimum GPA.  I explained to them that my GPA did not reflect my capabilities and performance and that I have proven myself at various companies in the past.  I didn't expect to hear from them again because they seemed to be pretty strict on their policies, but I actually did about a week after I got the offer from web-based-collaboration.  They wanted to interview me.  And they did.  Funny thing is is that I wrote down the time wrong and was actually woken up by their phone call.  It went over well though.  Even when they brought up the GPA thing and asked me what mine was and mentioned that they had a minimum GPA that was higher than mine.  They actually called me back later that day saying that they were filling out the paperwork to hire me.   I was pretty excited.

During this time, I received an email from an engineer really-big-search-engine saying that he came across my resume and wanted to interview me.  I thought it was a joke at first because it was a pretty informal email, but from one of the companies that many people I know would give their left arm to work at, including myself at the time.  I had the interview with him, wrote him a bit of code, had an interview with somebody else, wrote some code.  He told me he was filling out the paperwork for the offer, but nothing was official yet.  I couldn't believe I was actually going to work for this company.  A day or two later I received an email from the recruiter at the company saying that I needed a second interview.  I was befuddled because I already had a second interview.  Apparently, my second interview didn't actually count.  The second second interview was scheduled a week later.  It was approaching the deadline that I had for giving web-based-collaboration an answer.  I was also a nervous wreck because I thought I would mess something up.  I didn't and a few days after the interview I heard from the recruiter that they were filling out an offer for real this time.  She explained to me the training process and all the benefits and asked me when I would want to start and such.  I was pretty sure this was going to happen.  At least that's how it came across.  She said she just needed to clear everything with the VP and would get back to me.  She called me a couple minutes later, asking me for my GPA.  I told her, and she said it might be a problem.  My heart sunk.  She then asked me to email her my unofficial transcript.  I did.  About 10 minutes later, I heard back from her, "I'm sorry..."  I was absolutely devastated for about three days.  Rejection is okay, but how this company went about things just wasn't right.  As a kicker, I have two friends working there as engineers right now.  One graduated from the same school as me with the same degree with a lesser GPA than mine.  Another friend of mine was a drop-out here.  He didn't make it to graduation (albeit, he is also a FreeBSD contributor and that might have helped).

Devastated I was, but I contacted consumer-end-printer a few days later seeing why I hadn't heard anything from them yet.  They said, "We thought we gave you a job offer already," and I said, "No, I haven't received anything."  After a little looking up they realized they gave an offer to another Lewis, but that wasn't a problem.  The recruiter explained to me all the benefits of working there, how they would house me in a really nice apartment by myself, how my transportation would be reimbursed, and all of that good stuff.  This was sounding great.  He then asked for an unofficial transcript.  I said something to the extent of, "My GPA won't be a problem, right?"  And that's where it began.  He said that he'd have to see, and that they were very strict about their policy of a minimum GPA.  He got back to me a day later saying that this wasn't going to fly, even though I told them my GPA during my interview and at the career fair.  There was nothing he could do, even though I was by far the best candidate for the position.  My heart sunk even further.

I called web-based-collaboration right away to accept the offer, but request if I could only co-op for a three month term instead of a six month term because I really wanted to get out of Rochester, at least this spring.  I mentioned that I would still work there either way.  She said she'd get back to me Wednesday.  Thursday I get a call from her, "Sorry, but we're going to have to withdraw our offer..."  Yep! They did it.  They withdrew it because they didn't feel I was interested in the position.  I can't really blame them though, I probably came off that way.  It was just the cherry on the sundae.  Wait, no, it isn't.  I was called by HP a few days before that saying they wanted to interview me for winter quarter, but I had to turn it down the opportunity because I thought I had already accepted the position at web-based-collaboration.  Funny how things work out.

The thing is is that I don't need to co-op.  I have at least 4 quarters worth of previous experience to count as my co-op requirements to graduate.  I want to co-op and therefore since I have a choice I refuse to be just another "code monkey" or do testing because I find that stuff really boring and that's what most of the companies what their co-ops for.  Even though I have a lot of experience, it's only at two different companies (although very similar work) and I need experience in other places so I am more well-rounded, and can figure out what I really like to do (aside from photography).  Also, this winter is going to murder me.  I am taking Operating Systems, Systems Programming, Data Communications and Networking, and Intro. to Computer Vision.  Well, I am actually psyched.  I love programming project classes.

I also have this really great idea for a new type of Web 2.0 site that I am going to start implementing with my friend, Karl this winter if I have enough time.  We decided to use Ruby and ActiveRecord, but no Rails, because I find Rails overrated and a bit superfluous.  But yes, it will be great, even if it doesn't work.

More RAM.

October 18, 2006 at 09:53 AM | categories: Uncategorized | Comment

Sunday I placed an order 2 gigs of DDR 500 RAM.

It will increase my total RAM to 2.5 GB. Unfortunately, I have to remove 2 x 256mb DIMMs because all my slots are full. The nForce2 chipset only has room for 3 DIMMs. I purchased the RAM to make my desktop more usable until I can afford a new PC. Maybe by that time I'll even be able to afford quad core CPU(s) :)

It's not a waste even when I do replace this box. It will become my server and replace skank* which is my CSH user rack server. Skank is an Athlon T-bird 900 with a whopping 512 megs of pc133. I don't know how, but it's stable, and before I added new hard drives it had a 384 day uptime. This box will still be a huge improvement over skank, especially when upload tons of 6.1 megapixel images for it to resize in gallery.

Anyways, it will save a ton of time processing those Flextight scans and sorting out those miscellaneous RAWs.

* My server, skank, is named because "skank" is the verb form of "skanking" which is a type of dancing (to ska music). It is not named after the noun, "skank", used to describe a promiscuous female.

A Test for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4

October 11, 2006 at 01:55 AM | categories: Photography, Computer | Comment

Well, I had hard drive issues a while ago and I had to recover all the data off of it, and I got a bunch of randomly named files (with the proper extension at least).  Forty gigs of those files are 6 megapixel NEF files (Nikon's RAW format).  Twenty out of the forty gigabytes of RAWs are from the classes I took this summer which I need to finish filtering out and editing by the end of this quarter.

For a while I have fiddled around a bit with Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 and liked the results and the flashy graphics.  It's simple to use and does a pretty good job for what I used it for.

The other day I put Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4 (I think they are going to push the Photoshop part to entice people).   I imported the 40gb of pictures into Lightroom and let it move them to where it wanted and sort them by date (I figured this way at least I would be able to get a general idea what I was looking at by date).  I assumed that it would take a while so I wasn't too concerned about performance so I let it run over night.

Today I finally decided I wanted to start editing some things, or at least sorting the stuff out so I could have stuff to show tomorrow.

I am completely disappointed.

Let me start off by saying this does not reflect how the final product will behave because I am using beta software.

Heres's a brief description of the box I am running it on: Athlon M 2500+ (running at 2200 mhz) 1GB of RAM Vista RC2*

I load up Lightroom, I click on a "shoot" that has about 300 RAWs in it, and my system locks up for a good five minutes.  When I finally get my task manager open I can see it is sucking up about 500 or 600mb of memory.  Finally, I can use the system again.  Everything seems to be going smoothly.  I check my Task Manager.  Lightroom is only using 170mb of RAM.  Lookin' good.  I scroll through some images.  Perhaps that was just a glitch or it just needed to cache some things...

Nope.  It locks up again.  This time I have task manager open and I see the memory jump back up to it's peak before.  Obviously, Lightroom is eating up all my memory and caching all my images into swap space.  Efficient?  Heck no.  It takes longer for it to read the data cached off of swap space: A. because it is not in it's compressed form. B. even though caching the manipulation that lightroom aplys to the RAW file may be fast when the cache is in memory, it's probably faster to recalculate it for the freshly loaded RAW file.

It went through a few cycles like that.  By this point I had only been running it for about 30 or so minutes and it racked up a good 6 million page faults.  Why can't Adobe manage it's memory responsibly.  Relying on the OS for this when dealing with data of this magnitude is silly.  Do you think SQL servers that have gigabytes of data store it all in memory and rely on the OS to manage it? I hope (and know) not.  It makes me cringe to think of how this software would run on a default MacBook configuration with a mere 512mb of memory.  I hope they're not just targeting professionals with large budgets that can afford fancy Mac Pros (or in my case, more RAM) and such.  Most students don't get much of a choice when it comes to computers, if a choice at all... and if they even do use Adobe Lightroom, are they going to really want to use that piece of software that they perceive to be slow when they get out into the photography industry?

Conclusion:

Lightroom is a great product, with great features, a great interface and everything like that.  If only it worked well for me on large scales like what I am doing I would fall for it.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  I think I'll let it stay on my hard drive and use it for correcting pictures from parties and such.  One gigabyte of RAM should be sufficient enough and not cause this much of an issue.

*I'd like to address that due to the lack of my knowledge Lightroom works that there is very slim chance that it could be Vista's fault for all this, but Adobe should have taken this into consideration, and I highly doubt this to be the case.  Had I more time, I would put XP on another hard drive and do the same tests.

Scans of Zion Pictures

October 10, 2006 at 03:17 PM | categories: Photography | Comment

I finally got around to posting these pictures in my gallery, which can be found here.  They are still pretty rough, and unedited, except for some contrast stretching. Here are a couple of my more favorite ones.  Click for slightly larger image :).

I hope you enjoy them.

I really need to get around to processing them.  I have only a gig of RAM on my desktop and it doesn't like dealing with 400MB 16bit tiffs.

RAID 5s and Flextight 848

October 02, 2006 at 11:15 AM | categories: Uncategorized | Comment

I apologize if anybody tried accessing my site, or Jeremy's this weekend.  After 385 days of uptime, I decided that I needed to take "Skank", my server, down for maintenance.  It's 60gb hard drive had a whine of death and I had 3 80gb drives to put in it.  And that I did.

Basically, in Linux (or BSD I believe), you don't need a RAID controller to have a RAID.  And I wanted to take full advantage of all 3 drives, so I set up a RAID 5 with them.  To migrate the data from the 60gb reiserfs partition, I used dd to copy the bits to the new 160gb partition.  After that which took an hour or two I used the command resize_reiserfs to resize the 60gb partition on what was actually a 160gb partition to 160gb, and bam!, a couple more seconds and I was migrated.  I also set up a RAID 1 for my boot partition and and a RAID 0 for swap. Then I just had to tweak my fstab and grub config and grub the new drives, restart, and yup it worked.  Okay, I embellished a bit.  It didn't go all that smooth, but the outcome is what matters, right?

So right now I am scanning tons of 4x5s on a Flextight 848 and damn, they are sexy.  So very much faster than the Flextight II's and that makes me happy.  Honestly, they scan at 2040dpi, about 4 times faster (just an estimate) than the Flextight II's do at 1800dpi.  Heh, and I am on the same network as my server so I can just scp all my 16bit tiffs to it instead of storing them.

Yeah, I am stressed... my portable hard drive got destroyed and it had a lot of stuff on it.

EDIT - Ruby and OpenGL Seminars at CSH

September 07, 2006 at 08:07 AM | categories: Uncategorized | Comment

EDIT: Seminars will be held now on SUNDAY instead of Saturday

If anybody who reads this is in the Rochester area or goes to RIT, I will be doing two seminars this Saturday.  One on OpenGL, and one on Ruby.

For those of you that don't know, I am part of Computer Science House, and CSH does seminars which are pretty much crash courses/tutorials on specific topics.  They're free of course, and everybody is welcome to attend.

They are both going to be in the software room on CSH as of now.  If you need instructions on where to go, just drop me a line.

My OpenGL seminar will start at 2:00 pm.  Ruby at 3:00 pm, or whenever my OpenGL seminar ends.

Here's a tentative list of topics:

OpenGL:

• GLUT
• Basic Geometry Creation
• Transformations
• Perspectives
• Matrix Transformations (maybe)
• And more

Ruby:

• Interactive Ruby Shell (IRB)
• Gems
• Features (such as yields)
• HTTP stuff
• REXML (Ruby XML API)
• More...

These are both designed for people with little or no experience on the subjects.  For the OpenGL one I recommend a bit of previous experience with C++.  For the Ruby one, no previous experience is needed except for a bit of programming experience (preferably OO).  To clarify, there will be no overlapping between the two topics :).

I hope I see a good turnout.  Like I said, everybody is invited.