Just a quick one!

Life is strange. One week you’re all like zomg bored, next everythings happening and you have to fit an ass load of stuff into an hour.

- I’ve started my own studio! XD More details on this to come when I have more time to write it up.
- The ‘m’ word has been coming up in conversation more and more… nuff said about that.
- The F65 is the bolix, but the D700 is WAY FREAKING BETTER. DX/VR for the win.
- GETTY IMAGES CONTRIBUTOR! YAY! I’m a good little photomatographer.
- I’m having to look for a job, again. In a recession. Methinks, this could be quite difficult. *sigh* But still I’m going to try my best ^_^
- I have a facebook addiction. OH NOES. (Add me, or die.)

That is all for now :3 but I’mma be posting again in the next few days to elaborate on the above. But right now, I’m in a rush…

lol kthxbai, love and snuggles.
C

Life, Death, and the Battle of the Cameras

Weyy! WordPress FINALLY lets me into my account! About time.

This blogpost will be in 3 parts, as evidenced by the title…

life:

been k, I guess. Me and the other half are seeing each other more and more, and it’s great. Apart from that, things have been pretty uneventful. Apart from…

death:

People keep dying around me! and it tends to be peoples’ mums as well, which is even more depressing.

battle of the cameras:

I’ve started to see a fair few faults in the old S1000, which is still *GASP* working as well as the day I got it. But…

• it’s SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Very, very slow. As in: press shutter release, make a coffee, come back, wait for it to take the f**king picture slow. Well, OK, thats a bit of an exaggeration. But omg, it can be frustrating.
• That lens. IF this camera was an SLR, this wouldnt be an issue. But it’s a fixed lens bridge camera. Yes, it has 12x optical zoom. But at the nearer end of the zoom range (~40/50mm), it suffers from horrendous barrel distortion, and ZOMFG CROMAB. This has been a pox on my S1000 pictures for a while now, which I usually get past by turning them into duotones. But this annoys the crap out of me…
  

  This is why I'm never, ever buying Fujinon lenses. Ever.

• …and let’s not forget the lack of any… well, useful features, like a hotshoe, or RAW format images, or any of that shizz.

However… this doesn’t mean the S1000fd can’t take some bloody fantastic pictures… click on any of them for the full size.

View over the lake in Central Park, Chelmsford. (1/50s, f/6.4, ISO64, Shade WB)

The new Kings Tower development at 53 Marconi Plaza in Chelmsford. (1/240s, f/8, ISO64, Shade WB)

And last, but definitely not least, my favourite from the above shoot…

My very first attempt at a panoramic sunset pic, and it came out beautifully. (1/400, f/6.4, ISO64, Shade WB, about 120mm. equiv)

With all this said, next week I’ll be taking ownership of a 2nd-hand Nikon F65 with 28-80mm lens (:D), I have an assload of 100, 200, 400 and 800HIE film ready to rock and roll as soon as I get it. I also have a wishlist of accessories I want to get, including:

• film scanner (well of course… 15Mpx crystal-clear TIFFs from negatives? yes please!)
• more freaking lenses — I have my eye on a 50mm prime next… and this takes Nikkor F-mount lenses which are a dime a dozen (uhm, try several grand a dozen, but you get what I mean…)
• Speedlight. This is a no-brainer.
• Cokin P mount. I already own a massive set of assorted Cokin P system filters, just need the mount for them

and the best bit is? these are all (just) in my price range.

I think I just found a hobby to replace computing, to be quite honest. This is fun s**t! lolol. BTW, going to Harwich in early April for a photowalk if anyone’s interested… xD

This was a triumph

Just a little post to let y’all know I’m still alive…

Um, not much has happened though relative to the subject matter of this blog, to be quite honest. My TX1000 got destroyed in a… uh, freak accident so I’m not going to be updating as much for a while, nevermind the fact a tiff with the most assholish landlord in the whole world got me kicked out and I no longer have ADSL. (This can be considered a good thing though, given that I was with BT before…)

I still have a laptop available, it’s a Packard Bell Pentium III 733 “beast”, without internet though, but I may restart development on a game project I started a while ago. It’s just (barely) well-specced enough to run Visual Studio ‘05 and the debug build of the existing code. So yeeah…

I’m now on Xbox Live from time to time, see the About page for my gamertag, reaper has kindly given us access to XBL on his 360, most of what we play online is either Halo 3 or COD4. Also look out for coming mention of |3wG| from time to time xD

Also, I have a big, big event planned for the start of November of which a few people who need to know are well aware… let’s just say I have much, much saving up to do @_@

Me and Em are still very much head over heels in love… we just celebrated our 5 months yesterday. xD I just hope that 5 months turns into 5 years… or decades… or more <3 heheh.

Anyway that’s all for now folks, stay tuned!

Hackers are people too!

Go up to a random person in the street. Ask them what a “hacker” is, and 9.9 times out of 10, they will say “someone who hacks into computers/steals your personal data/gives you viruses”.

The popular press has done nothing to help this, every other week in some red-topped tabloid there’s a story claiming “Hackers break into x”, but the thing is –

We aren’t the ones breaking into your bank account and siphoning off money for their own personal gain. The names for the people who do that kind of stuff are “computer criminals”, “Nigerian 419ers” and many other terms, but not hackers. For this we have only mass media to blame, people believe what they see on TV and, unfortunately, take it as gospel.

A hacker is someone who hacks things. Hackers wrote Apache, the software this blog is running on, because many people added “hacks” to make Apache better. Hackers wrote ModSSL/OpenSSL as a “hack” to Apache, without which you wouldn’t be able to conduct secure purchases online.

So for those of you still unconvinced, I urge you to watch a documentary called “Hackers are People Too”, by Ashley Schwartau, a Def/Toorcon regular and somewhat talented film-maker. It portrays us in a light that the general public usually don’t see us in, which is a welcome change.

Remember guys: Hug a hacker today! =3

A Rant About PowerISO

Anyone heard of PowerISO? (Yes, that includes you, reaper)

Of course you have.

If you’ve ever come across DAA images, you’ll have run into the same brick wall I have many a time. The only program that’ll easily mount these is PowerISO. I had the displeasure of having to install this shitware a couple of days ago. BAM! Instant problems.

Where do I start?

• It’s slow. Like, REALLY SLOW. Every right-click is now accompanied by a ~10sec delay as PowerISO’s context menu integration kicks into life. Even on the system tray icon.
• Constant bluescreens. I’m under the impression that it’s because PISO is chewing through kernel memory like it’s going out of fashion.

So, I have these precious few nuggets of advice to share with the world.

1. DON’T buy it! You’re throwing your money away.
2. If you download .daa images via BitTorrent, don’t seed them (or I will personally find where you live and smite you down).
3. Finally, if you do end up with a .daa image, use daa2iso to convert it to an ISO, which you can then mount using something far superior like WinCDEmu. daa2iso is an open source utility that will convert .daa images (which are really just renamed .iso.Z files, compressed using zlib, no more) to ISO’s. Windows version here, unix users can simply (iirc) zcat whatever.daa > whatever.iso for the same effect.

Remember folks, open standards are the future! Badly written crapware most definitely isn’t.

A new year, a new pastime!

That was madness =3

I kicked off the new year with some friends in Central London, watching the new year countdown & fireworks, preserved for posterity on Youtube…

I’ve also taken up photography, a pastime I’m starting afresh after an 8-year hiatus… I’ve grabbed myself a Fujifilm Finepix S1000fd, a good camera if a little on the limited side. Although I’ll manage :p Specs as follows:

• Fixed Fujinon 12x zoom lens, with normal (DOF=66mm-iinfinity) macro (DOF=20-66mm) & supermacro (DOF=1-20mm) modes
• Aperture: f/2.8 – f/5.8 (… see what I mean by limited? T_T)
• Shutter: 1/1000 – 80/10 (… a little better, but you’re screwed for night sky photography)

I’ll be uploading pics to my [edit: screw deviantart, Flickr ownz it for photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmn_ownz_j00/]

The best of which I’ll be posting on here and I’ll also be doing tutes on Youtube for certain techniques, such as HDRI, depth of field, and suchlike.

[Squid] Auto-redirect to *.nyud.net on error

So I’ve been messing around with Squid recently. One of the features I had planned to add was the ability to fall back to Coral Cache if the web site that Squid is trying to cache goes down.

So I wrote this little redirector script in PHP:

Stuff this in /etc/squid/coralcache.redirect and make it executable (chmod a+rwx /etc/squid/coralcache.redirect):

#!/usr/bin/php
<?
        /* Coral Cache on 404/No Server */

        $t=array();
        while($input=fgets(STDIN)){
                ob_start();
                $t=split(' ',$input);
                $url = $t[0];
                $ch = curl_init($url);
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,false);
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_VERBOSE,false);
                $ci = @curl_exec($ch);
                $status = @curl_getinfo($ch);
                ob_end_clean();
                if($status["http_code"] > 400){
                        $uriparts = explode('/',$url);
                        $uriparts[2] = rtrim($uriparts[2]) . ".nyud.net";
                        echo "302:" . implode('/',$uriparts) . "\n";
                }
        }

Then, at the top of your squid.conf;

redirect_program /etc/squid/coralcache.redirect

Restart squid, and all unavailable pages should now redirect to Coral Cache. =)

SPOILERS: Microsoft did 9/11

Well, this is an interesting discovery.

At first I was like O.o

Then I lol’d

A lot.

For readers who have been to Beacon Hill Ft CO12…

…otherwise known as “The Dubs”…

It looks like Sealand as a principality is no more, seeing as HavenCo, which owns the place, seems to have rolled up operations, and their servers have come back to UK terra firma.

Which means, Harwich (and by extension, my favourite rave spot) and Felixstowe now belong to the UK again.

(I see lots of “Huh?” in the crowd — Sealand, an oil rig off the coast of Suffolk/Essex, claims 12NM surrounding itself as its territory. Within 12NM falls approx 60% of Clacton-on-Sea, and the entirety of Tendring, Walton on the Naze, Harwich and Felixstowe. Essentially this means that these towns are contested territory. Since Sealand has rolled up, by default they are now exclusively UK territory again. I mention Beacon Hill because it is one of the few places in the mainland UK that with a decent pair of binoculars you can see Sealand (just).)

Egh, enough randomness.

Rant Number Two… feckin’ idiots.

This made me laugh. Hysterically.

From http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/20/1411213:

“Leading Hollywood film studios Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Disney Enterprises are suing Australia’s second largest ISP, iiNet, saying it’s complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material. According to a statement of claim, “the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology.”

*blink*

*blink*

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You might as well sue every ISP in the world while you’re at it!

Wake up and smell the roses, bitches:

• BitTorrent is decentralised. It can be tracked, but not stopped. What part of that don’t these mugs get!?
• Even if ISPs were to block it (many do), that doesn’t account for the use of encryption and IPsec VPNs to hide the traffic.
• If you’re going to go suing ISP’s who allow the transmission of “copyrighted material”, good luck, you will have to sue every transit provider on the way, too. Many of which are much better equipped financially and legally than these studios.
• BitTorrent has (and was intended to be used for) perfectly legitimate uses! Large ISOs… game updates… streaming TV, just to name but a few. Outlaw BitTorrent, and I guarantee the Internet will grind to a halt overnight.

The moral of this story: Media organisations in this day and age have an outdated business model that is being superseded by a far more efficient and most importantly fair one. If, instead of suing every man, woman, dog, schoolkid and corpse like they do now, they were to embrace the Internet as a distribution model this stupid s**t would stop happening.

Seriously – whoever runs these companies cannot possibly be qualified to run a business if they can’t see that…