That is a detail of a photo taken on
10 May 2008. The two plastic soft drink bottles protect the
seedlings. But I omitted to mention what they were, or why we planted them
there—another justification for the level of detail I go to nowadays in describing
what I did in the garden. I still suspect that we brought them from Wantadilla, but why did we think they would fit in there?
Today, however, I didn't do anything spectacular: weeding, and got rid of quite a few of the
thousands of Calendula seedlings that
are popping up where we removed the Calendulas a year ago. It'll be fun to ensure that they don't come back.
I used to do a full level 0 dump of my system at the beginning of each month, but somehow
disk speed hasn't kept up with capacity, and 500 GB used to take forever. Restoring a
single file from a 500 GB dump isn't much fun either, so now I'm backing up individual
top-level file systems with tar. I write the backups to disk on another
system—tapes have proved far too unreliable—and so of course I compress.
Some months back I started using pbzip2, which sped things up a lot, but from
time to time it crashes, leaving an impressive core file behind:
-rw------- 1 root lemis 3071049728 Dec 1 17:28 pbzip2.core
That size (3 GB) gives the lie to why it died, of course: this is a 32 bit machine, and the
top 1 GB of address space is reserved for the kernel, so it just ran out of address space.
People have told me of other, better programs, but unless they use much less memory, they'll
suffer the same fate. The key is to be more selective, and for that I need to investigate
what software is available, rather than kludging my own. Today just ran the individual tars
through bzip2 instead of pbzip2, in the process keeping an eye on what I was
backing up.
That's interesting, because you tend to see the big files. And there were plenty of them,
files in a directory called ~/Desktop which must be created by web browsers: I had
about 20 GB of them. Also I'm backing up the photos on my web pages, which I also back up
(different link, different directory) on my photo disk. Time to move that.
And then there was a database table of behemoth proportions:
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 10438721248 Nov 27 2008 changedfiles.MYD
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 2100002816 Nov 27 2008 changedfiles.MYI
No idea what it was, so tried to take a look into it:
mysql> select * from changedfiles limit 1000; ERROR 144 (HY000): Table './household/changedfiles' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed
mysql> repair table changedfiles; +------------------------+--------+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| Table | Op | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+------------------------+--------+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| household.changedfiles | repair | warning | Number of rows changed from 0 to 204463224 |
| household.changedfiles | repair | status | OK |
+------------------------+--------+----------+--------------------------------------------+
2 rows in set (1 hour 5 min 43.23 sec)
While I was waiting for that, Peter Jeremy pointed at RFC 1882, yet another “12 days of
Christmas” parody:
On the first day of Christmas, technology gave to me:
A database with a broken b-tree (what the hell is a b-tree anyway?)
This goes on to confirm the size (“Rebuild WHAT? It's a 10GB database!)”, and
that the database software was written in Scandinavia. The RFC was in the year that
MySQL was founded, and he got the country wrong,
but the name of the contact, Lars, could have been my last boss at MySQL, Lars Thalmann.
Amusing coincidence.
The table proved to be something that—amusingly—I had been toying with a year
ago to automate my backups, so I could drop it. Also found a lot more music in a different
hierarchy, and that doesn't need to be in these dumps either.
The weather was warm, sunny and windless today, just the weather we need to spray weeds.
And that was necessary: the area to the east of the main garden used to have grass, and
we've sprayed it a couple of times, but it keeps coming back. That's quite a nuisance: we
want to mulch it and plant things before it gets really hot. Did some spraying, and was
greatly annoyed by the backpack leaking all over me; had to completely change my clothes.
More mysteries
We're gradually coming up with more mystery plants. This one looked like it could be a
weed, but there was something different about it, so I'm leaving it until it blooms before
pulling it out:
The individual stems attract birds, who bend them over so they lie flat on the ground.
Presumably this is the way the grass spreads. I suspect this is the Thing That Came Out Of
The Swamp. It's rather pretty, so we'll probably keep some of it, though in a different
place.
As planned, continued tidying up my file systems today. It's amazing how much stuff you
pick up over the course of time, and some of it is very large. The /var file system
was about 10 GB, in itself not overly surprising—but most of it was analogue record
(“LP”) data that I had copied round 16 June 2003, and
which included both the raw digital data and some extremely bad MP3 compressions (8 kbit/s, 8000
Hz mono). Relegated that to the multimedia directories for the time being; I can look at it
later (in another 6½ years?).
Also discovered a weakness in my photography processing: I've already established that I was
backing up my web site photos twice, once on the multimedia disk and once on the normal
backups. Most of the photo data on the web is in the “big” files, of course, but they're just links to the ~/Photos
directory, which is in the multimedia hierarchy. I solved that by moving that part of the
hierarchy to the multimedia hierarchy, but on running rsync discovered a number of files that either didn't exist in the multimedia
hierarchy (they appear to be related to debugging done when I
started this method), or they weren't the same files. This must happen when I add
files to the source directory and don't completely rebuild the destination directory. Maybe
I should use symlinks.
At the end of the exercise, had 10 GB more in my multimedia backup—that was to be
expected—and something like 40 GB (8%) of the disk freed up. And I'm sure there's
plenty more out there to be cleaned away.
What did Australia's roads look like 80 years ago? Went looking for old maps, but the
oldest I could find (undated) must have been about 1976. Found some old punch cards (I used
to use them instead of a notebook) in there with some details of a trip I did with my
then-wife Doris, showing locations and fuel consumption:
That enabled me to write a sketch diary of 32 years ago.
32 years ago today we had the last family reunion with my mother's side of the family. It's
also interesting to note the price of petrol in those days: on 4 January 1978 we paid $0.169 per litre. Nowadays we'd be happy to find it for $1 more per litre.
Planted the Pandorea
jasminoides on it; it'll be a while before we see much there.
Yvonne was inspired by the “succulent garden”
that we bought at the “Ballarat Gardens in Spring” event last
month. More by accident than design, we bought a couple of pots identical to the one
the “garden” came in, so she made her own. Here the original and the
improvement, which needs to grow a bit:
I'm not sure what the succulents all are, but we have at least
a Ledebouria socialis (left centre),
a Crassula perforata (left of
bottom), some kind of
reddish Sempervivum barely visible
behind it, and a Sedum “gold
mound” on the right.
I've had an uncomfortable relationship with web browsers for some years. They're full of
misfeatures, they're slow and badly configurable. They have no understanding of the
environment—for example, firefox looks for executables in the home directory rather than
following PATH. I hate tabs with a passion: they're just a way of working round
deficiencies in window managers. But today my main concern was the time it
takes firefox to render one of my “big” photos: click on a “small” photo and it can take up to
10 seconds to render the big version, and that on a relatively fast machine. It's not clear
that this is firefox's fault—I note that a lot of the CPU time is taken up by
the X server, though this could be the result of inappropriate interfacing. But Opera release 10 is out, and it promises all sorts of
improvements, such as integrated web server (isn't that a different program?).
Decided to download it and try it out. Installation was trivial, since Opera provide a
FreeBSD binary. Running it was a different
matter: enormous fonts on the window surroundings (menus, URL entry field) and tiny fonts
for the page display. Went into the Preferences menu and found a non-resizeable, too-small
window that didn't even display the complete font names:
And there seems to be no way to select the size of the non-page text. Decided that it might
be something left behind from the previous installation, so renamed my ~/.opera
directory and tried again. Success! Well, partially. Firstly, it's a workaround at best.
Configuration of any program should be transparent enough that you can recover from problems
of this nature. But it seems that web browsers typically don't document half their
configuration options, and many are not available via the configuration menus.
More importantly, though, my big photos didn't take nearly as long to render—they just
disappeared. After some investigation, that turned out to be a bug in my markup which the
W3 validator says is allowed but can cause
confusion. After fixing that, Opera displayed the images, but no faster
than firefox—which may indicate that it's really an X problem.
But other things irritate me. The thumbnail photo display can be glacially
slow—on one occasion, where firefox rendered in 3 seconds, Opera was
still going after 30. And the rendering is strange. Here's a portion of my photos for
today, where all the photos run into each other vertically, but not horizontally:
I suppose it's quite possible that this is correct rendering of my HTML, though it doesn't
make much sense (on the other hand, what web standards do make sense?), but it's irritating.
All in all, I can't see any reason to switch to Opera.
The last of my tomatoes have been gradually d(r)ying on the verandah. The question was,
where to plant them, and I finally decided on the old compost heap behind the garden shed.
We had some unhappy looking
potted Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis there. Yvonne had potted them in
Wantadilla years ago, but since moving here they haven't
bloomed. Took a look and found the most root-bound plants I have ever seen:
The root on the second one must be 2.5 metres long. The one on the first plant was also
coiled around multiple times and may have been as long. Repotted them in larger pots.
We'll see how they go. There's always the compost heap.
That wasn't the only thing I found there. There was also a pot with
five Buddleja globosa plants,
and it occurred to me that we could use them as a screen for the north-east part of the
garden, where we've been puzzling the layout for some time. Picked up the pot and tore a
root: it had grown down into the ground below, and I tore it about 50 cm from the bottom of
the pot.
Left it until the afternoon to plant them, by which time the one with the torn root was
looking decidedly unhappy, so braved the flies—summer is here—and planted them.
Getting them apart was quite a problem: the roots were all entangled in each other, and in
the end I had to wash out all the soil to disentangle them, in which activity I was helped
with great enthusiasm by Piccola:
Planted three of them and put the other (smallest) ones back in pots. The big one's not
looking very happy; hopefully it'll recover. The ones we planted last year are already 2.5
metres tall, so there's hope.
House photos today, and more cause for thought. Exposure is really still quite a problem;
it's high time for the camera industry to introduce sensors with a higher dynamic range, 16
bits deep or more. Today it was quite evident in the photos of the lagoon. The weather was
overcast and the sky wasn't particularly bright, but with “center-weighted”
metering the foreground looked underexposed (first image). Even spot metering didn't make
much difference.
But which is right? And why is such a motive such a problem? Somehow it should be easier
to manipulate this kind of photo.
I've been taking the panorama photos with flash fill-in to lighten up the shadows, and in
the case of the panorama from the south-east of the house I think I'm overdoing it. The
results are not really clear, but I suppose I should drop the flash for this panorama.
More garden work in the area behind
the Buddlejas, which are still not
looking very happy. Planted
the Salix melanostachys to the
right, and a Fuchsia closer to the shed.
I wonder if we should add a protective screen until the Buddlejas can give enough shade.
Also tidied up the verandah, which was looking more and more like a plant nursery, and put
in more dripper lines. We still have a row
of Cannas that need drippers, but
the flies really get on my nerves, so I'll put it off until tomorrow.
The kangaroos are back! I've seen mobs of 15 or so in the south paddock, and each time I've
chased them back into the lagoon. Hopefully they'll get tired of being chased away; I'm
certainly already tired of chasing them.
The blue cat isn't exactly “back”; he's been around all the time. But it seems
that any interest Piccola had for him is gone, so there's no particular issue.
Chris along for dinner, Paella valenciana, one of Yvonne's favourites. Yvonne normally eats like a
bird, but today it was more like a vulture: she ate more than we did.
Out riding today, for the first time, it would seem, in 9
months, along with Chris. I'm sure it can't have been that long, but I can't find any
more recent reference in my diary. Went down almost to Rokewood Junction, a total distance
there and back of 10 km, which is a bit of a record for us “recently”. Got back
completely exhausted—why should such a little ride take so much out of me?
They've clearly bloomed already, but they could be the same as the Chasmanthe floribunda that we found on
the side of the road opposite our house last year.
Back home, didn't do much in the garden, but found yet another mystery flower:
Taking photos of the Chasmanthe wasn't easy. I don't take my camera with me when I go
riding, and so I only had the Nikon and Kodak compact cameras. The viewfinders don't work
well in bright sunshine, and I gave up trying to take a close-up of the flowers.
There was a time when I came to the conclusion that the electronic display of the compact
cameras was superior to an optical viewfinder, particularly for people who wear glasses, and
when I bought my Olympus E-510, the “live view” functionality was an important decider. But now, two years
later, I'm not so sure. In the case of the Olympus, things are made even more difficult by
the clunky implementation, and I almost never use it except for close-ups. But even with
compact cameras it's difficult to see details, and in bright sunshine it's almost impossible
to see anything.
More work on the weather stations today. Working on the hypothesis that the USB problems
could be related to the USB stack (the FreeBSD stack in 7.x is derived from the NetBSD stack),
continued my Linux porting and got it finished. Sort of:
=== root@cvr2 (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog/dereel-weather 125 -> ./wh1080 Can't claim interface: could not claim interface 0: Device or resource busy (16)
After some discussion, it seems that Linux requires you to first detach the
kernel driver which (apparently) claims any new USB device. Tried that, again with
little success:
could not detach kernel driver from interface 0: No data available (61)
What does that message mean? More head-scratching needed, I suppose. Maybe I need to look
at the meaning of the interface parameter.
Also gave up on writing scripts to import data from Wunderground, and wrote a quick and dirty
program in C, which did the job, and which is flexible enough to handle changes in format.
I suppose I could have done the same in Perl or Python, but I've never found a compelling
reason to learn them.
Finally got around to laying dripper lines for
the Cannas today. What a pain it
is, literally. The 4 mm dripper line is so firm that it's almost impossible to insert the
barbed type of dripper, and I ran out of drippers with screw thread, skinning my knuckles in
the attempt to push a barbed dripper into the tube. But it's done. I wonder why the shops
here don't sell tubing to match the drippers they sell.
Also removed the rest of
the Carpobrotus in the south bed. I
had sprayed it with Glyphosate weeks
ago, but it looked completely unaffected. It was much easier to pull out than the last
time, however, so I suppose the Glyphosate had done its job.
Woke up to the sound of pouring rain—7.2 mm, quite a bit round here. But my weather
software reported much drier conditions, with rainfall as low as -0.6 mm. Found the bug
pretty quickly, but somehow the rain reporting is still a significant issue. The real
problem is that it has to be an interval, and my solution (keeping “last value”
and “current value” counters) doesn't really cater for reporting to multiple
locations (database, screen, Wunderground, web site). Put in separate “last
values” counters, but I still don't like the situation, and I'm pretty sure I'll
change it again.
Also looking at comparisons between different weather stations, something that, as far as I
know, no other weather software does. Importing the data is quite complicated; I had always
thought that CSV was pretty straightforward, but only if you have the same formats as the
supplier. I've already established that Wunderground has two different formats, but the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology has yet
another. Wrote another program, based on yesterday's Wunderground import program.
Fortunately that went pretty smoothly. I can see myself writing quite a few of these; maybe
I should combine them into one. Also reorganized the database daily observations table so
that it has the same format for local and remote observations.
One of the things that worries me about my weather station is the accuracy. I've already
established that the pressure gauge returns a value that, after correction to mean sea
level, is about 13.5 hPa lower than the official weather stations, and I've added a
correction factor. But is the error linear? And what do other stations report? Spent some
time working out a comparative display page for
a number of the weather stations in the area, in the process discovering a number of
deficiencies in yesterday's import programs, notably that this stupid 12 hour time causes
more problems than I expected: MySQL happily
imports 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM to both mean 09:00.
The comparison page shows a number of things:
My gnuplot scripts are still
pretty terrible. The legend in the small graphs overlays the right of the graphs, and
the colours are difficult to recognize.
My pressure error does indeed seem to be linear, at least for the current pressure
range.
As I've noticed before, other stations are wildly inaccurate about air pressure.
Bacchus Marsh airport shows values in the order of 35 hPa lower than the official
weather stations, and Delacombe is nearly 10 hPa higher:
The temperature here in Dereel seems
much higher than elsewhere. I've noticed this before too, but in this case I think it's
correct: I have three different outside thermometers, and they all agree. It is
warmer here than in Ballarat, and it's interesting to note that the night temperatures
are similar:
The wind speeds here seem lower. I'm not sure that this is correct, but it's difficult
to know how to determine whether they're accurate or not.
Samba is in season again, and Chris and Yvonne decided that
she should have a foal this year. The lucky sire is Changó, God of thunder, for whom it was the
first time:
It's enormous! It dwarfs the camera, and it's also a bit of a wobbly fit. As the
second photo shows, it's not quite vertical. Still, it stays roughly in place, and almost
immediately I got a number of photos that I wouldn't have been able to get with a
conventional flash:
“Almost” is the operative word, though: it seems that, in TTL mode at any rate,
I need to put in at least 2 EV exposure compensation. Here's the first attempt with
the Anigozanthos:
I already have an infrared remote control, but it doesn't seem as fast as the cable, so it's
worth it for studio close-up stuff. And the level cost almost nothing, so it may be worth
playing with.
The Anigozanthos in the previous
photo is the one that the possum landed on
a couple of weeks ago; it seems to have
recovered from the treatment. Another plant that had given us concern was
some Sedum cuttings that we had planted in
a pot. They had bloomed happily enough, but now they were turning a rust-brown colour. It
wasn't until I took a close-up that I found that the brown spots are fruit:
Rain again today, and noted with satisfaction that I'm recording it correctly. Or am I?
Looking at the Wunderground history, I saw no rain at all. Checking what I sent confirmed that the
bug was at my end (not a foregone conclusion). What a mess this code is! Did a bit of
investigation, but basically decided that I need to solve this problem differently. It
should be possible to start the “report” program as many times as I want, and
that breaks the current implementation.
Instead looked at the database approach: have a program pull the data out of the database
and send it to Wunderground. That way I can not only sum the rainfall, but also average
temperatures and pressures, which should potentially give more accurate results.
And accurate results are still an issue. According to the weather station, we had 12.9 mm
rain today; but the manual rain gauge that I still maintain tells me that it was only 8.2
mm. Which should I believe? It's difficult to believe that the manual rain gauge is that
inaccurate, though I have my concerns about evaporation on warmer days, but maybe the
different location makes that much difference. To be observed.
I'm not the only person concerned with the accuracy of weather readings. Currently the
København climate change conference is in full swing, and others also have their concerns
about data reliability. On IRC was given a link to an article claiming that the climate data
for Darwin had been
manipulated. Without this manipulation (black line below), the overall temperature would
seem to be dropping (blue), and with it it's rising (brown):
The article is quite interesting, but does that mean it's correct? Certainly I agree with
one aspect of the article: many people concerned with climate change are not prepared to
discuss the matter at all. They're almost religious in their conviction. A good friend of
mine who, I'm sure, wouldn't want his name mentioned, believes I'm a “Climate Change
Sceptic” because I dared to question the causes of climate change. I'm leaving
him believing that to see how long it'll be before he recognizes his misjudgement.
But this attitude is dangerous: if you don't discuss the causes of a problem, or, worse,
falsify the data for whatever intentions, you're not going to help solve the real problem.
It's like debugging a problem with a preconceived “knowledge” of what the
problem is, or finding evidence to convict a “murderer” who isn't (really the
same thing). In this case, I suppose I should go and test the claims of the author of the
article. He's clearly not using the same data as the data from the Bureau of Meteorology that I would use: he states that the
data dates back to 1897, but the Bureau of Meteorology has statistics for Darwin Post Office going back to 1869. I should try to get some data and put it though my graphs—after I
have the rest of the stuff working properly.
More scanning today. One of the things that really annoys me about my scanner is
that it saves scan data in a JPEG file, even
for 48 bit scans, thus negating any advantage. Today I had to install the software
again—as it turned out, because the documentation was incorrect—and once again
went looking for a way to change the file format, without success.
Finally went out to Google and found a link which
stated:
Do one of the following to open the File Save Settings window.
Full Auto Mode
In the standby window, click the Customize button, then click the File Save
Settings button. (If you started Epson Scan from a program like Adobe Photoshop
Elements, this button doesn’t appear.)
HomeorProfessional Mode Click the
File Save Settings button to the right of the Scan button. (If you
started Epson Scan from a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements, this button doesn’t
appear.)
The problem is, that looks nothing like what I have on my Apple:
There's a blue symbol there, but putting the mouse on it gives no clue: I have to click on
it to see anything. It's not documented in the documentation I got with the software, and
the configuration is elsewhere. How are people expected to know that? Still, now
(finally!) I can store my images in
TIFF format, though the software insists on
attaching a misspelt .tif to the file name.
The other issue was with what I'm scanning at the moment (which really needs
a GIF format): I've found my copy of Mike
Wrigglesworth's “The Japanese Invasion of Kelantan in 1941”, a description of
the first Japanese attack in the Pacific War. I've already found that I have character
recognition software, so used it with relative success to convert to normal text. But what
a pain all this software is! Decided to store in a directory ~/Documents/Wriggle:
What did I get? Nothing in ~/Documents/Wriggle, of course, but in ~/Documents
I had:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog grog 2905 Dec 10 16:23 Wriggle:P20-21
Yes, I know that this is the Apple Way, but I can't find any way to tell this
software to store the data in the directory I want. Maybe I should just shut up, but this
is the kind of pain, like a pebble in your shoe or an infected splinter in your finger, that
just gets more irritating as time goes on.
More playing around with my new ring flash. Taking photos of the other toys was
interesting. On the positive side, the shadows went away nicely. Here a photo with my
studio flashes, which normally produce relatively shadow-free photos, followed by the ring
flash:
On the other hand, getting there took 6 attempts. Five attempts with TTL metering all
produced photos that were too dark, so I did this with the good old-fashioned A (automatic)
setting and +2 EV compensation, and at f/8. The next photo was with +3 EV compensation and
f/11, and it came out considerably darker:
That should have been lighter, not darker. Potentially this means that I'm reaching the
limit of the guide number, which would mean it's about 6, or that the ring swallows 90% of
the light. I suppose that's possible, but I need to do more thinking first.
We're off to a housewarming party tomorrow, and we're bringing our old barbecue as a
present. Spent much of the afternoon cleaning the accumulated grime of the years. There
must be a way to keep the things cleaner.
What are the implicit tradeoffs in calculating flash exposure? I've been pondering this for
some time, and it's not helped by—wait for it—lack of documentation. Went
looking at photo books on Safari, who seem
to have changed their web site for the worse. Somehow they have overridden saved passwords,
and they have a silly Javascript login box that hides itself underneath some advertising and
first has to be moved aside so that I could even recognize it.
Once logged in, I couldn't find any way to just list titles; instead, I have to look at a
summary listing of all titles, 20 per page with images. In the case of digital photo books,
there were 154 titles, organized by reverse order of publication. Spent some time working through them, keeping my own
list—something that should never be necessary—and didn't find anything really
useful on how “TTL” flash works, though the description of Nikon's i-TTL flash system in The Nikon Creative Lighting System may be a reasonable start. Based on that, here are my hypotheses, and the assumptions:
Manual flash
In manual flash mode, the flash unit outputs a fixed amount of light. In some case, the
exact amount can be preset, but the illumination is determined before pressing the shutter.
Assumptions
It's up to the photographer to ensure that it's correct.
Automatic flash
The flash unit emits light and measure the amount of light reflected. When it has received
enough reflected light, it terminates the flash pulse.
Assumptions
The light reflected is in proportion to the desired exposure. There are many ways in
which this assumption could be incorrect. The most obvious one is that the flash unit
measures the illumination of the total area (and possibly even more), and it can be
greatly misled by reflections in the foreground, for example in this image, where the
right-hand side is included only to make for a better panorama. The illumination of this
area is much higher than the rest, because it's closer, and it would completely determine
the exposure in automatic mode.
In the case of the ring flash attachment, the opposite may occur. The attachment
partially covers the flash unit, so much of the reflected light may not get there. This
would cause overexposure.
TTL flash
The flash unit emits a number of pre-flashes which the camera exposure system uses to
estimate the exposure. This gives the advantage that you can use any of the camera's
exposure modes (spot, weighted or full frame). Unlike the automatic mode, it doesn't
monitor the light reflected during exposure.
Assumptions
The light reflected before the exposure is an accurate indication of the amount of light
that will fall on the subject during exposure. This seems reasonable, but there are a
number of pitfalls. In particular, the pre-flash could be done with another light emitter
than the main flash. My flash unit has two flash tubes and also an infrared focus
assistance, but it does use the main flash for the pre-flash, so there's no particular
concern in this case.
My experience with the ring flash adaptor has shown that I can have both overexposed and
underexposed photos with this mode, something that these considerations don't explain.
Yvonne has found a local hairdresser, Aileen, who comes along
to the house. She came today for the first time and gave me quite a reasonable haircut.
That's certainly an advantage: I can have it done
in Sebastopol, but for some
reason I keep putting it off.
Apart from the weather station for which I'm writing the software, we also have a simpler
unit from ALDI, really a digital
interior/exterior thermometer and hygrometer with wireless connection to the exterior unit,
combined with a barometer. It's battery operated, and I only changed the batteries a month
or so ago, but today it stopped being able to communicate with the external unit, and later
the display went dim: batteries had had it. I replaced them, and still the battery
indicator went on: it doesn't like NiMH batteries.
Nele Koemle had a housewarming barbecue for her new house near Camperdown this
evening, in a place that may be called Leslie or Gnarpurt—the road is Gnarpurt Road,
anyway. Off with the Yeardleys and our old barbecue, a house-warming present, and had a
pleasant evening in the stables:
There were a surprising number of German speakers there—apart from Chris, Yvonne and
myself, Nele comes from Graz, and there were
a couple of German girls there
from Stuttgart
and Hamburg
(Schnelsen, where I lived briefly in
early 1968). Also an Icelandic girl there, Karen (or is that Karin?) Barrysdottir. The
funny patronymic is because her father's English. Spoke a bit about pronunciation; I had
expected the patronymic to be Bærrysdottir, but it seems that æ is pronounced differently
(where's my IPA alphabet when I need it?) than in English (or Danish or Norwegian, for that
matter).
Back home with a couple of horses, so the Yeardleys didn't want to come down our road, and
dropped us with a torch at the end of the road. We didn't really need the torch: there was
no moon, but the stars were so bright that we could see where we were going. You seldom see
that in the town, nor anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
Our Arums are looking decidedly
unhappy—or they were. I suspect that they bloom in the early spring and then die
back, and that's what they were doing, so we cut them all down, a couple of cubic metres'
worth. I have no concerns that they'll reappear in due course. Looks like the overall
appearance of the garden is set to change.
The CFA is holding a “workshop”
on Sunday, and they want pre-registration:
You can register your attendance for this meeting by going to www.cfa.gov.au [no full
stop]
Clearly that's another case of “we'll give you a clue where to find it, all you have
to do is search”. So I searched. It wasn't that difficult to start: a subtitle
“Community Meetings Online” contains a link to the real site, https://www.communityprograms.cfa.vic.gov.au/, which works sometimes. At least
once I got a “logon failure”:
Once you're there, of course, the searching isn't over. You need to enter a
“Municipality”, a “Township” and a “Meeting Type”. The
Meeting Type is clear enough: it's on my invitation sheet:
The “Dereel Community Hall” must be the Soldiers' Memorial Hall, since that's
all we have. “Township” must
be Dereel. And
“Municipality“? No
idea, so took a look and discovered it's
the Shire. Selected
all the information from the emetic drop-down menus and found:
They truncated text “Search” at the top of the detail image and the popup window
with “Close” are par for the course, I suppose. But no meeting? After all
that, they didn't have it on the web site? Well, not quite. They couldn't decide what it
was, and they put it down as a “Community Meeting”:
That's not just sloppy web site maintenance—in itself not surprising: the meeting is
from 11:00 to 14:30 (according to the invitation) or 11:00 to 15:00 (according to the web
site), right across Sunday lunchtime (who thinks of these times?). I'd go there for a
workshop, but not for the kind of community meeting we had last autumn.
A couple of days ago Chris Yeardley complained that I hadn't accepted her friend request
on Facebook. That wasn't deliberate: I'm on
Facebook, but I find it overly painful to use, and only look in about every 2 months. And,
as seemed clear, Spamassassin had eaten it:
pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
3.5 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
[score: 1.0000]
0.5 FROM_LOCAL_NOVOWEL From: localpart has series of non-vowel letters
-0.0 DKIM_VERIFIED Domain Keys Identified Mail: signature passes
verification
0.0 DKIM_SIGNED Domain Keys Identified Mail: message has a signature
1.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
I'm becoming less and less happy with Spamassassin. The Bayesian evaluations seem to be
becoming very inaccurate; possibly the database has been poisoned. Anyway, off to look at
Facebook and found 12 friend requests, two from people I don't know, and accepted the rest.
In the process, ended up looking at LinkedIn as well, and to my surprise found a message from Monty Widenius. I haven't heard
from him for months, but this one was still fresh—fortunately: he's in a hurry. He's
very concerned that Oracle will close
down MySQL when (if) they take over
Sun Microsystems, and he's asking for help to
petition the European Commission to provide
appropriate safeguards before they approve the sale of Sun Microsystems.
Is he right? Who knows? Oracle's a strange company, and I haven't been able to understand
them. Four years ago they gave us (MySQL) a lot of
concern with the takeover of InnoBase. Those
concerns proved to be unfounded, at least in the short term. On the other hand, they have
given no assurances of any kind about the future of MySQL, and now's the time for
commitments. So I've written to the EC stating my concerns. Hopefully others will too.
To the CFA bushfire planning workshop at
the Memorial Hall today, and learnt some useful information about the way fires progress:
it's not the trees that are the biggest danger, but litter (“fuel”) in the
undergrowth. Even the conifers next to the house, which we had considered a danger, could
prove beneficial by not catching fire that easily. Also got confirmation that sitting in
the car in the middle of the (big, bare) paddock was a reasonable thing to do if we really
did get a fire.
Unfortunately, the information was somewhat one-sided. There's a lot of talk about leaving
on a “code red” day (and nothing about the very great likelihood of traffic
jams), but when it comes to firefighting equipment, we learnt nothing beyond the
recommendation to have a tank with at least 10,000 litres of water. Nothing about what to
do with it, no information on how much flow you need to be able to fight a fire effectively.
Not only that: the general opinion was “suck it and see”—and that in
a planning workshop. I wonder if they expect me to light a bushfire to try it out in
realistic conditions.
Disgusted, left early and back to inspect the property. Yes, we have a lot of
“fuel” that we should gather up and put on the compost. Also checked whether
our 2200 W ALDI generator would run our 550 W
bore pump. No: as soon as the pump cut in, the generator died. Yes, there will be a surge
when the pump cuts in, but it shouldn't be enough to stop the generator. I should have
checked earlier: we've had the generator for 3 months, and it'll be difficult to return it.
The toilet in our bathroom is right next to a window that reaches down to the floor, and
there are bushes just outside, so you have something to look at while sitting on the toilet:
mainly birds (Honeyeaters) and
butterflies. Today I saw a spider catch an unwary beetle, but by the time I had set up my
equipment, the beetle had been strung up and the spider had gone back into hiding:
Yeardleys along for dinner in the evening. It's Chris' birthday tomorrow, so we had one of
her favourite dishes, salmon in sorrel sauce, and plenty of it (no undercatering today).
Spent much of the day playing around with a revised version of the report program for
Wunderground, not in itself a
big problem. But it's so ugly! Maybe I need to find other ways of doing things, but the
canonical way with the MySQL C API delivers
everything in an array of char *, and any column can be NULL. In my case,
nearly all the information is floating point, so I end up with lots of stuff like:
Watching the most recent programme of Gardening Australia in the evening. More fuel for my rant on weights and measures. Here's a recipe for an
“oil-based preparation to suffocate insects”, which they used to call
white oil:
4 tbs
Dishwashing liquid
1 cup
vegetable oil
Dilute 1:20 and put it in your sprayer.
Straightforward enough, right? We've already established that an Australian cup is 250
ml, and an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml. But is that correct? Look at the image:
By the bye, this is the first jug I've seen that subdivides cups into thirds. Anyway, 1 cup
is 8 (something). Well, the US cup is about 8 fluid ounces, between 236.6 ml and 240
ml, depending on which reference you believe, so this must be a US measurement. But why
should we be using US measures in “metric” Australia? And if we're using US
cups, should we be using US tablespoons (14.79 ml) instead? About the only useful comment
in this regard is that the proportions aren't critical. But isn't it so much easier
to write this?
1 part
Dishwashing liquid
4 parts
vegetable oil
Yes, I know the proportions are slightly different, but they're easier to remember, and
they correspond both to the Wikipedia
article and Gardening Australia's previous recipe. The method is so much easier to scale: what
if you want to make 25 times the amount for the whole neighbourhood? Would you go and
count out 100 tablespoons and 25 cups? Or would you get a more appropriate measure and
use 1.5 litres of dishwashing liquid and 6 litres of oil?
Of course, I've picked a bad example. This Gardening Australia episode recommends to
dilute 1:20, the Wikipedia article
recommends 1:50, and Gardening Australia's previous recipe wanted “two dessert spoons per litre of
water”. It's not clear what volume a dessert spoon should have, since it's not in any country's list of measurements,
but based on my measurements, this would also be 1:50. They're probably right: the exact
proportions aren't important. But there's no reason to complicate the matter with vague,
ambiguous or just plain incorrect measurements.
The weather's warming up again, and spent a fair amount of time monitoring it. They had
predicted 29° for Ballarat, and I was
expecting closer to 35° here. In fact, we got 37.9°, while Ballarat really got only 29.3°.
Sometimes I wonder whether these differences are due to the measuring method or the
location. Certainly the temperatures round the outside of the house were in as good
agreement as you could expect from locations. It's also not the only place that deviated:
On the other hand, the stations at Mount
Helen (max 32.5°) and Buninyong (40.9°) are only 1.7 km apart. I suppose it's possible, but it seems
unlikely that there would be such a difference.
The weather was also an opportunity to check the DSE bushfire site. They changed
it again, in fact while I was reloading. And again they've made
it worse! Now there's a marginally better map, and you can resize it, but the
text is completely invisible:
If you look much further to the right, there's a scroll bar. WHY? There's no
earthly use for it. And once you scroll down, the last three columns (status, size
and number of vehicles involved) are irrevocably gone. Spent a little more time trying to
work out how they present the table, but they've gone to a lot of trouble to obfuscate not
only the page, but the HTML source.
This isn't just a problem with my system—I can just hear the DSE people saying
“You should use Microsoft if you want to be saved”—it occurs with
Microsoft and Apple too. My first attempt with Microsoft “Internet Explorer”
gave me a page with no map or status information, the next gave me a 504 error, and the
third brought a display that also omitted the last column:
In addition, the vertical scroll bar sometimes appears, and sometimes it doesn't. Looking
at that part of the HTML that I can see, I'm not filled with the warm fuzzy feeling that the
web programmers are very competent:
//REQUIRED SECTION. CHANGE "YOURSERVER" TO VALID LOCATION ON YOUR WEB SERVER (HTTPS IF FROM SECURE SERVER)
</script><script language="javascript1.1" src="http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/dse/hbx/hbx.js"></script>
I really should go to more trouble to work out a better presentation. That will certainly
silence a number of “but that's not possible”s.
Another small camera toy today: an LCD monitor protector for my Olympus E-30. I had had one
on my E-510, but it got very unsightly and difficult to see through. Possibly I attached it
incorrectly—the instructions were only in Chinese. But it did its job, and when I
sold the camera, I peeled off the protector, and the screen was as good as new.
Unfortunately I can't say that about the E-30: small scratches have become evident, and I
needed to do something. In the meantime, they've brought out a new kind of screen protector
made of laminated glass—I think. I ordered one, and it arrived today. Once again the
instructions are in Chinese, but the image in the middle suggests a 6-fold lamination:
I wish I knew what the rest says. I can read something about 0.5 mm (thickness) and 12
kg/cm², but that's about all. But the protector looks robust, and presumably it won't scuff
like the last one did. On the other hand, it's very shiny, and it's thick enough to stop
the screen from closing properly when folded inwards.
Both batteries for my Dell Inspirons (5100 and 1150) died some time ago, along with the disk
in the one in the kitchen, and I've been dragging my feet on bringing it up to date. My
intention was to install FreeBSD on a USB
stick. Now I have all the components, and I've also downloaded a USB image
of 8.0-RELEASE, so set to installing it.
Copying the data to the stick was more complicated than I expected: after copying a few MB,
I got a hard I/O error:
That was on dereel, the FreeBSD box that has already given me strange USB errors, so
tried it on kimchi, the NetBSD box;
there it worked, but at a snail's pace: 170 kB/s.
Booting the machine brought the next surprise: it was an installation image, an alternative
to the installation DVD, so I had to find another USB stick to install on. That, too, took
ages, and it wasn't finished before I left to go to town. It was finished when I got back,
and I could boot from it, but for some reason the device entries weren't created, and I
couldn't mount the root file system. Decided to give up and try a DVD install—I had
installed on the wrong USB stick, twice the size of the one I wanted to use, so it didn't
make sense to continue.
The weather's been very warm, and once again cvr2 crashed. I suspect there's a
connection, but it's still a pain.
More work on trying to get the DSE
bushfire info page to render correctly, and made some progress:
Under firefox I can view
the page with Page Style “no style”, which looks a real mess, but at least
displays all the information—or it did, once. On a repeat attempt, I ended up
with an even smaller scroll box that could at least be scrolled to show the end. But
what a mess!
It's not clear whether the change is a further obfuscation attempt on the part of DSE or
some other effect.
The real data comes from http://osom.dse.vic.gov.au/public/osom/osom_wrapper.html?caller=dse (the caller parameter is to feed to Google maps to display only the map of Victoria, and not the random bits of maps
of New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania that they have accidentally included in
the page). There's a second parameter rd, but I can't see what difference it
makes.
Downloading the data, all 86 kB of it, was interesting. It should be fairly simple to frob
it to create something more displayable:
Apart from the tabular information, this also includes the location of the fire (with a
resolution to about 1 nm, or 0.000001 mm), both the start and the last report date and time,
and the incident number.
In the last summer, people were asked not to refresh the page so often, because of the load
on the web server. At the time, they had an auto-refresh, though I don't see it in the
current HTML; but I'm sure they could greatly streamline this page, placing less network
load and speeding up transmission times. They certainly don't need the redundant
information here; I'd guess they could reduce it in size by about 80%. And that's not all
that gets loaded: the tcpdump that I ran to examine the transfer stored a total of
114 kB.
I've been dragging my heels about the results of my quarterly blood test, which I had done
over 4 months ago: it's really difficult to find time to
go to the Eureka Medical Centre and wait hours to see the doctor. But clearly I'm overdue
for the next blood test, so called up and discovered that my doctor was in in the afternoon,
from 12:00 to 17:00.
Accordingly into town and to the medical centre, where they told me he wasn't there at all
that day. It didn't even seem to worry them that I had come 35 km to see him. This is
completely impossible. The doctor's good, but if I don't see him because of their or my
fault, that doesn't make any difference. Time to look for a new doctor in a new clinic.
Chris and David over again for dinner. David's leaving again for 4 weeks tomorrow.
What an amazing change in the weather! Yesterday we had a maximum of 40.4°; today it was
22.1°, and that at 2:42, only because it was still cooling down. By the time I got up it
had dropped under 20°.
Ideal weather, then, to play around with my weather software, and did a lot of work on the
graphical representations, which really needed it. Included a graph of the temperature
differences between here and Ballarat.
That's not as simple as it seems: the readings take place at different times, so I have to
interpolate. Here are the results for the last three days:
My observations that it tends to be warmer here than in Ballarat are somewhat confirmed, but
today was an exception. I'll have to watch for a longer period of time.
That was the good news; the bad news is that gnuplot once again drove me to distraction. The following patch completely
broke things:
set xdata time
- set timefmt "%s"
set xrange ["MIDNIGHT":"ENDTIME"]
+ set timefmt "%s"
set xtics 10800
It seems that the range is dependent on the format; but the error messages were completely
unrelated, and it took me over an hour to find the cause. What a pain this stuff is!
That wasn't the only problem: we had 36 mm rain today, but looking at my Weather station history on Wunderground, it seemed that we had none. Further investigation showed that I had been reporting the rain incorrectly: instead of reporting the actual
rain that has fallen, you need to report the total rainfall for the previous hour. That
means that the totals you report depend on the frequency of reporting. Why would anybody
want to do that? Fixed it up, so the Wunderground page shows the greatest rainfall between
18:30 and 20:30, when in fact the rainfall was like this:
It also means that I have to do some head-scratching about how to report the comparative
rainfall for other stations; currently I have some that appear to have had over 100 mm rain:
A couple of weeks back, I held back
from pulling out what looked like a broadleaf weed: it didn't seem quite the kind I knew. A
good thing too: it was the sole survivor of the poppies that I had planted some time
earlier:
I've really got other things to do, but spent most of the day playing around yet again with
the web pages for the weather station. Currently I have the problem that the database is
only on my system at home, not on the external
web site, so I've been generating static PHP files with the data. Clearly that
doesn't scale, so I've just had yesterday and today. Today I addressed the issue at least
locally, and things went pretty quickly and smoothly. About the only issue is—how
could it not be?— gnuplot. So
now I can generate both data and plots for any day, and select them. But I'm still limited
in the static choice of plots. It would be nice to have a language to say something like
“show me comparative temperatures
between Ballarat,
Sheoaks
and Dereel for the period 3 to 8
December”. That would also make working with these horrible gnuplot scripts
easier. But I think it'll be a while before I manage that. The next step will probably be
multi-day views of the same information I'm currently displaying only for one day.
CJ along in the afternoon to chop down yet more timber; another branch has fallen off one of
the conifers along the road. Borrowed Chris' trailer to cart the stuff off, leaving on the
trailer some logs suitable for heating: the Yeardley's have a wood-fired “slow
combustion heater”.
One of the better programmes on ABC classic
FM is Graham Abbot's “Keys to Music”. He's just done a two-part series on JS Bach's sacred
cantatas, and it's available online. But it's this silly streaming audio stuff, and about
the only time I have time to listen to it is when I'm driving in my car. How do I get it in
MP3 form?
I did some investigation a while back, but didn't make much progress. The best-looking
invocation was something like:
That almost worked, but the resulting MP3 was full of jumps and squeaks. It sounded as if
there were gaps in the incoming stream, and I strongly suspected the pipe;
possibly lame was padding short reads. Tried it separately:
But when I tried to listen to the result, there was no sound. mplayer failure?
No, realplayer couldn't get anything out of it either. Looks like a mixup at the
ABC.
Still more playing around with the weather station software. I'm relatively happy with the
representation of the daily data, but it would be nice to have information over longer
periods of time. That's straightforward enough: I could just modify the daily graphs for
weeks, months and years, like wview does, but I wanted something more
flexible. Played around with my horrible plot script and got it to more or less work, but
now I have the issues with the number of markers on the y axis.
More flowers are coming up now: the first real Hibiscus from the cutting my uncle Max gave
me last spring, our first water lily, and some other aquatic flowers whose names I have
forgotten:
One of the reasons it's so difficult to recognize flowers as they grow is that photos are
almost invariably of fully-developed flowers, so it's difficult to know what they look like
before. Here's a snapdragon (with aphids, which I didn't see until I looked at the photo; I
thought we didn't have any), and what I think is going to be a Chasmanthe floribunda:
Chris over for dinner tonight, and this time we had plenty to eat. Yvonne had bought the biggest ossibuchi I had ever seen, and we couldn't finish them.
This time I was the one to under-cater: I had forgotten to chill the sherry. What do you do
under those circumstances? Forget the aperitive.
Tonight was also the last night
of Hanukkah, and as usual we watched the
Hanukkiya burn down. It's really difficult to predict the sequence in which the candles die
(tonight it was 512396487). We should place bets next year.
Message in the mail from David Peters, who has bought the same model of weather station as I
have, and wanted to know about Steve Woodford's patches to wview. He had started writing his own
software for Linux, but didn't want to replicate work already done. Sent him a tarball of
my current work—hopefully it won't cause him too many headaches. More interesting,
though, is that he managed to talk to the station at all under Linux. He's promised me a
copy of his code once he's tidied it up.
He also mentioned another pizza dough recipe that I'll look at in more detail next time we make pizza.
Apart from that, more work on the display stuff. I'm making some progress towards multi-day
displays. Part of the issue is that I'm not sure what I really want, so this is quite
experimental. But it's becoming clear that making all the possible plots for a specific
interval uses up a lot of time and disk space. I'll need to translate my plot script into
PHP and do it on demand and per plot.
$cmdaliases = array(
array("List Directory", "ls -al"),
array("Find all suid files", "find / -type f -perm -04000 -ls"),
array("Find suid files in current dir", "find . -type f -perm -04000 -ls"),
array("Find all sgid files", "find / -type f -perm -02000 -ls"),
array("Find sgid files in current dir", "find . -type f -perm -02000 -ls"),
array("Find config.inc.php files", "find / -type f -name config.inc.php"),
array("Find all .htpasswd files", "find / -type f -name .htpasswd"),
array("User Without Password","cut -d: -f1,2,3 /etc/passwd | grep ::"),
Even more interesting, for a Brazilian site, are some of the comments:
$sort_default = "0a"; #Pengurutan, 0 - nomor kolom. "a"scending atau "d"escending
$sort_save = TRUE; #Simpan posisi pengurutan menggunakan cookies.
$copy_unset = FALSE; #Hapus file yg telah di-copy setelah dipaste
$filestealth = TRUE; #TRUE, tidak merubah waktu modifikasi dan akses.
That's clearly not Portuguese; given the short text, I can't make up my mind whether it's
Malay or Indonesian, though I tend to Malay. More important, though, is: what are they
trying to do? Am I at risk? I hope not.
Weather station: the pain of getting it right
Still thinking about the weather station graphics today. It's (still) clear that my
decision was right to rewrite the plotting functions in PHP and perform them only if they're needed. I'll also need a cron job to
clean out old plots—I had something like 30 MB worth in there before I did so, and
about 20% of all non-photo files on my personal web site. And this is after only a month.
The real problem, though, is: how do I do it right? Somehow I'm always left with
this feeling with PHP; different tools do impose different ways of doing things, and
in this case I need to run a MySQL query and
then run gnuplot against the saved
results. Couldn't think of a clean way to do that, so took the coward's way out; with time
I'll think of a not completely unacceptable way of doing it.
A bit of garden work, not very much: once again the temperatures hit 30°. One of the plots
I should do is forecast maxima and minima in Ballarat and actual maxima and minima in
Dereel. Finally managed to put up the last wall pot on the middle post of the verandah, and
put a volunteer Nasturtium in it,
which to my surprise reacted immediately, violently and negatively to the transplantation.
We'll see if it makes it.
I'm also still thinking about wind screens for the eastern garden, and I don't want to plant
the Itea ilicifolia until it's done
(it'll be close to a part of the screen), so put it in a bigger pot.
Also some experimental macro photos of various flowers with the ring flash. I still can't
find a way to get it to do what I want. There's clearly a big difference in the shadows
between a shot with ring flash (left) and without (right):
But the second photo (taken with TTL auto flash) actually has a longer exposure than the
first one, and in particular a wider aperture (f/4 instead of f/5), which is obvious from
the short depth of field.
Visited 15 years later: This is incorrect. The second photo was taken at 1/640 s and
f/5, and the Exif data shows that
it was taken without flash. The first photo was taken at f/4 with flash. I'm not sure
what I was trying to claim there.
The flash is powerful enough to give me f/14, with significant increase in depth of field:
But how do I tell the camera to do that? Maybe there's a way, but the only way I can find
it is to set manual exposure. If I set aperture priority, the camera automatically drops
the shutter time to unacceptably (and unnecessarily) long values. And that means setting
manual flash too. There must be an easier way.
Fifteen years later I've come to the conclusion that yes, manual is the only way to do
it.
We still haven't got very far with our bushfire preparations, but today I did one small
step: over to Chris' place, where they have a diesel generator that would probably run the
bore pump. Problem: no battery, and an oil leak that appears to come from a completely
strange oil drain plug. Normally these plugs are screwed into the sump, but this one
appears to be screwed on, held with a bolt at one side. Maybe the bolt is just a
safety device, and the plug isn't screwed in properly. It'll take a bit of transport, so
left again, scratching my head.
The DSE has messed around with their
web siteagain. This time
they've managed to get the entire text in the table—not by allowing the table to fill
the width of the window, but by overlaying the texts:
More playing around with garden photography. I'm now having more fun with the ring flash,
though I still have problems: in general, I can get correct exposure with TTL flash (I still
don't know what the problem was earlier), but I have no control over the aperture. If I use
aperture priority mode, I can set the aperture, but the camera then sets a ridiculously low
shutter speed. In manual mode it works well enough, though I had to adjust every single
image I took, but this is even more primitive than it was 30 years ago, where I could use
automatic mode and set one of three apertures. What am I missing? Maybe I can still do
that, but my experiments suggest that it won't work.
A number of plants are now coming into bloom:
the Antirrhinum (snapdragons)
and Lathyrus odoratus (sweet
peas) that I grew from seed, as well as
the Buddleja globosa, which I
think are triggered by the solstice
(which occurred this morning at 4:47):
I'm having my doubts (again) about identifying some of the plants in the garden. If I'm
correct, the following three are a Chasmanthe floribunda, a Watsonia
and a Crocosmia “Lucifer
seedlings”, about the only thing we bought from Diggerslast year that has survived.
But are they? I'm pretty sure about the Crocosmia, because we planted it in a pot, and it
hasn't been out since we bought it. But the other two also look the same, and I noted that
the second ones were Watsonia, from Laurel Gordon. I think that the first were Chasmanthe,
but although I keep pretty detailed records, I didn't note at
the time where I had planted them. Hopefully things will be clearer when they bloom.
The arums that I chopped back 10 days ago are sprouting again. I had expected that, but not that they
would sprout out of the existing stems:
Not everything is looking happy, though;
the Camellia sinensis is
looking rather stressed, possibly from too much sun (already!). What do I do? Leave it
there and hope that it copes, give it some shade, or transplant it? I think the last is not
a good idea.
Christmas is coming, and we're having several guests, so it's time to bake some bread. I've
been baking my own for nearly 2 years now, but it's been a while since I updated the
recipe, so spent some time doing that today. In
particular, it's sourdough now, and the
quantities have changed considerably. Now to get some photos.
Another hot day today—we just didn't make 40°. Did little apart from food
preparation. Took a number of photos for my bread
recipe, not without mistakes: put the carefully cut baking paper in the wrong way
round. Still, it should be OK; I can fix that next time.
Somehow the flower stem had got itself wrapped in a leaf and bent off to one side. Cut the
leaf open and exposed the stem, which may or may not recover:
Looking for TV programmes today, came across another example of completely broken rendering
on SBS television, who have given me many
examples in the past:
But nobody else saw it, and on Callum Gibson's suggestion, tried refreshing. Gone! Well,
the rendering was acceptable. So clearly a download failure. It seems that firefox could do with better error
checking.
The weather's been really strange lately. Yesterday we had 40°; today we had a maximum of
27.1°, and that was in the middle of the night while yesterday was still cooling down:
From the time we got up, the temperatures were in the low 20s, and in the afternoon they
dropped sharply, finally dropping to only 11.5°. Spent most of the day inside as a result.
Spent a lot more time trying to understand flash exposure today, and after finding nothing
useful in the instruction manual, decided to read the documentation for Olympus' flagship flash unit, the FL-50R.
It wasn't encouraging: the document is only a fraction the size of the manual for the older
FL-50, which differs only in minor details, so I read that. The cover page announces
the “Olympus Electoronic Flash”:
Reading on, I found interesting details like (page 45):
Turn the electronic flash on. The batteries are recharged when the Charge lamp lights up.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother reading such inaccurate documentation. It said nothing
about the relationship between aperture and flash intensity, so in the end I tried it out.
In a darkened room, the default TTL exposure was 1/125 s, f/4 (full aperture, half the
maximum shutter speed for flash), which gave a decidedly blurred foreground. So I tried it
in aperture priority mode at f/8, f/16 (not shown here) and f/22:
That's a difference in exposure of 5 EV. The images (unretouched) are clearly slightly
darker, but not to that extent. Playing around with ufraw shows offsets of 0.18, 0.73, 0.96 and
1.24 EV for the four images. ufraw's not the most accurate of tools, but it does
seem plausible that the f/22 image is 1 EV less exposed than the f/4 automatic exposed
image.
What does this mean? Basically,
Olympus' documentation isn't worth the bits it's printed on, at least not for this
purpose.
The TTL exposure defaults seem completely inappropriate.
The TTL exposure does compensate for the aperture, but not completely.
I still can't get it to use the correct shutter speed. The only way I can do that is with
manual exposure, which I suppose I should try.
In summary, I am left with the feeling that this is a job half-done. Possibly Metz shares the blame, since the flash is a Mecablitz 58 AF-1 O digital—and of course, there's no indication of anything in
the documentation for that unit either.
Christmas is here, and this year we did a baked ham, the first time I've done
it—and we had guests. Usually I never try anything out with guests, but today
had to be an exception: we almost never have Christmas dinner by ourselves, and a 4 kg ham
needs more mouths to feed, so took the risk.
But how? I found a number of recipes, both in our cookbooks and on the web, and they didn't
diverge too much. Even the recipe thoughtfully printed in light gold on white on the
packaging for the ham seemed to be similar. First step: remove the skin (and the net around
it; I wonder why that was there) and the fat underneath:
To get the skin off, I found a trick useful that I've developed for getting under the skin
of a chicken: forget knives and use your fingers. They're not sharp, so they don't cut into
the meat. And the best way to get the subcutaneous fat off was to scrape with a knife
blade. How much do you take off? I left the end as it was, since it looked (and later
proved) to be edible.
Next was to score the meat with a criss-cross pattern and stud the cross points with cloves:
Next, the glaze. The packaging was very specific: it called for exactly 265 g (2/3 cup, for
some definition of cup) of honey, independent of the size of the ham. Did more
investigation, and finally came out with the quantities:
quantity
ingredient
step
150 g
honey
1
20 g
Dijon mustard
1
60 ml
orange juice
1
2 g
hot paprika
1
0.5 g
cinnamon powder
1
20 g
garlic
1
It just needs to be blended together, of course.
Ended up chickening out with the gravy—we weren't even sure we wanted any—and
used Green's Gravy Granules. How much? The
packaging says “2½ to 3 level tablespoons” of granules per “cup”. At least they clarified that this is an Australian “metric”
cup, so maybe the tablespoons were too. Tried to measure out tablespoons—somewhere my
inaccurate and contradictory measurement spoons have disappeared—and came to the
surprising discovery that the 5 “tablespoons” I measured came out to almost
exactly 100ml (or 50 g), 5 Australian “metric” tablespoons. Put it in the
water, and it turned to glue, and I had to dilute strongly. A better quantity might be 6%
by weight (i.e. 30 g for 500 ml). No points to Greens for omitting any reproducible
measurement.
The guests turned up in due course—Chris Yeardley, of course, and also Nele Koemle and
her mother Magda. Nele comes from Graz, but
her mother, who speaks with a typical Austrian accent, is Flemish. She was born
in Oostende and moved to Graz in 1977.
Had quite a lively conversation, with the result that I forgot to take photos of the
finished ham. It was very good, though I once again saw the dangers of leaving things in
the same position in the oven. The side of the joint facing forward looked nice and golden,
but the other side was considerably darker, presumably because our oven blows instead of
sucks when on fan oven. It wasn't burnt—in fact arguably it tasted better like
that—but I didn't find out until serving. I wonder if the fan in the oven is a DC fan
that I can wire the other way round.
It seems that both Magda and Nele are interested in music—Magda is very proud of the
music school in Graz, which I visited 20 years ago, and the music scene in Graz in general
(the word
“Harnoncourt”
sums it up), and rather disparaging about the music scene in West-Vlaanderen (no mention of
“Herreweghe”, who
admittedly is from Oost-Vlaanderen, all of 50 km away). And the wine in Steiermark is so good. At least she
admitted that the Flemish beer is much better.
Yesterday I mentioned the surprising temperature changes over the previous two days. Well,
I mentioned it in my diary for yesterday, which meant that I wrote it today. And for that I
produced a custom plot of overlaid temperatures. Not easily. In fact, it took me over 2
hours, much of it spent cursing gnuplot. And even when I got it done, it still showed the date of 23 December, although it was
both 23 and 24 December.
What's wrong here? This should be trivial stuff. But somehow gnuplot is just a heap
of primitives, none of which appear to be capable of combination to make something more
complex. It's not as simple as just a macro language; the concepts somehow seem wrong. I'm
still thinking about it, but I can't see any other explanation for the problem I have that
everything I try to do is so painful, unless it's the equally unstructured documentation.
gnuplot's only part of the problem of course, just the one that causes me most pain.
What I really want is a web-accessible interface for custom graphs. For this, I need:
Something that can express what I want succinctly and flexibly. In my book, this has to
be some kind of language, but I'm open to other approaches.
Something that will interface with the user to get the query (for want of a better word)
and pass it back, via HTTP, to other software that can interpret it (possibly PHP, but not necessarily). My current experiments using
shell scripts have the great advantage of proving that shell scripts aren't the answer.
This something must interpret this language and interface with the database to extract the
necessary data.
This something must interface with the graphics package (and I'm coming closer and closer
to investigating alternatives to gnuplot) and create the graphs.
All that sounds straightforward enough when I write it down, but the how is still not
that clear. In the meantime, I have more and more understanding for packages that only
supply very limited graphical views.
Our last hackers' barbecue was
two years ago, and I had expected it to be the last. But when I look at the first, we only had three guests.
And today Chris and Kelly Yeoh (also guests at earlier barbecues) came to visit, and Chris
Yeardley came along as well, so we had the same number of guests.
Hackers? We talked about computer stuff—Chris (Yeoh) is interested in weather
stations, as it turned out, and we spent some time discussing the software. As a Linux
person, he's in a good position to find out what I'm doing wrong in initializing the device.
Also photography and photo software; he has a Nikon D70 (so does Chris Yeardley; somehow
there's a parallel here, which also extends to cats). It's interesting that so many open
source hackers toe the party line and have either Canon or Nikon DSLRs.
The Ys had barely left when Essey Deayton came in to spend a couple of days on her way to
move to Tasmania; we haven't seen her for nearly 2 years,
and today was 6 years since we had a barbecue at her
house in Echunga. How time flies.
Today I became aware of a new TV programme in the Ebroadcast listings
today, 7TWO. That clearly took me a
while: they've been broadcasting for nearly 2 months, but only in the capital cities.
Decided it was probably time to re-scan my TV feeds, always a pain, and this time it found
7TWO. It also updated all sorts of things that I didn't expect to be changed. And for
what? Nothing. 7TWO doesn't seem to have any different content from the other 7 or Prime
feeds. It's not clear whether this is an issue with the TV programme guide or the channels.
One report claimed that they're not broadcasting it here yet, apparently because of
naming conflicts: outside the capital cities, the “channel” is called PRIME, not 7. But then there's another report saying that they started broadcasting on 23 December 2009. So maybe it's
just the programme guides that are out of date.
As if this uncertainty weren't enough, in the evening cvr2 (the MythTV box) died on me. When it came back—after a
considerable wait for it to cool down—much of the programme information was missing.
I can't make up my mind whether it was missing the whole time, or whether something happened
to remove it. In any case, two of my films were gone because the TV channel had decided at
the last minute to broadcast some sporting event instead. Sigh Once upon a time,
watching TV was easy. Now it's real work just trying to find out what's being broadcast.
There are still more plants coming up in the garden. There's every chance that some of them
are weeds, of course, but especially after the experience with the poppies, I'm more careful. Today we had a prostrate plant that
is expanding quite quickly (and thus probably a weed), some shrub that has what I think are
blossoms, and another that looks almost like a potato—but in an area where I'm sure
there were none:
Taking photos like the ones above poses a problem: how do you hold the plant still? I've
been looking for appropriate clamps or stands for a long time, without success. Today I
tried a simple solution: a bamboo stake with some soft gardening wire. Put the stake in the
ground, tie the wire round a part of the plant just outside the field of view, and you're
away:
From time to time, when I get spam, I bounce it to the provider (abuse@). I don't
know why, since it seems that they never look at it, and in many cases I've got an automated
rude reply asking me to stop spamming them. But today I got a message obnoxious enough that
I decided to bounce it anyway, and it clearly came from hotmail:
Received: from blu0-omc1-s14.blu0.hotmail.com (blu0-omc1-s14.blu0.hotmail.com [65.55.116.25])
by w3.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 56AE23BB23
for <me@lemis.com>; Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:08:43 +0000 (UTC)
I wasn't really expecting a reply, but I got one:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=iso-8859-1
Unfortunately, in order to process your request, Windows Live Hotmail Support needs additional information to validate and confirm the abuse.
The easiest way to report spam to Hotmail is to click on the \223Report Spam\224 or \223Junk\224 button provided by your ISP. Hotmail has systems set up with most major ISPs so that when their users click on \223Report Spam\224 or \223Junk\224 buttons, we automatically receive a notification.
UGH! Firstly, the bounced message has all the information I can provide, in a form that's
easily usable. Secondly, it seems that you can only report spam if you use a
point-and-click MUA. And finally, they're so professional that they put Microsoft
non-standard characters in a message they claim to be ISO 8859. What a load of amateurs!
To be fair, they point to a draft
RFC with standards for including spam, which I suppose make sense if you assume that
anybody's going to read it and that additional information is required to explain why it's
spam. But this all ignores one thing: Hotmail have allowed this spam out into the world,
whether deliberately or (almost certainly) due to insufficient measures to suppress it. I
shouldn't be required to jump through hoops to draw their attention to it.
More MythTV pain
Up this morning to look at my TV recordings. They were off by 11 hours! That happens to be
the offset of our time zone from UTC, so it was pretty clear where to look for the problem.
But why? Went around looking and managed to fix things, more by bumbling around than any
kind of documentation. It looks as if the problem was that I had run shepherd under my own user ID instead of
as mythtv. It still updated the database, but it wasn't able to access the server
information that told it the time zone. What a pain! It seems that there's a simple way to
avoid this particular pitfall: set the MythTV time zone to “none” instead of “auto”.
Also more investigation of 7TWO.
The web sites tell me that yes, indeed, they're now broadcasting in my area. Did a trial
recording and discovered yes, indeed, we're getting it on 655.5 MHz with the service ID
2402. So why does the programme information not agree? Further investigation shows that
the reconfiguration found the programme, but entered the wrong xmltvid
(prime.shepherd.au instead of 7twoonprime.free.au). That may be because
this service ID was already known, previously under the name Prime 2; but if it changes the
call sign, you'd expect it to check the xmltvid too. Changed that and
re-ran shepherd. It worked, but in the process it changed the xmltvids of
the other programmes to 7twoonprime.shepherd.au
and 7twoonprimehd.hd.shepherd.au. Why? Why didn't it put those IDs in in the
first place? This is such a mess, made no easier by lack of documentation.
Two factors to consider when selecting your optimum aperture are:
At of which aperture will neighboring sensor elements be affected by diffraction effects?
At of which aperture will diffraction efects be visible in my print (in the case of a
standard-sized 4 × 6 or 8 × 10 inch print)?
Value A is usually noticeably lower than value B.
It also contains information of dubious veracity, like the claim that the field of view of a
10 mm lens on a full frame 35 mm camera would be 245°. Did a bit of calculation, but I
still can't see how they came up with such a preposterous value.
That's a pity, because there's some good stuff in the book. But a little more care in
proofreading and the technical details would really help.
I'm still resolving plant mysteries and finding new mystery plants. We have a large number
of surprisingly similar succulents, one of which gave me cause for concern a few months
back. Today found a picture and a name (with abysmal pronunciation) on ABC TV:
So it's an Aeonium haworthii.
Under normal circumstances, they're very difficult to distinguish from
an Echeveria. Here Echeveria on the
left and Aeonium on the right:
All that changes when they flower. Echeveria produces a flower stem from under a side leaf,
but with Aeonium the central stem trumpets out. In addition, for the specimens I've seen,
Echeveria has yellowish-red flowers, while Aeonium has many, smaller and almost white
flowers:
Daniel O'Connor ran into a number of the kind of “modern” problem about which I
complain from time to time. I mentioned a rant, and went looking for one, but I didn't find
it. Why not? I thought I ranted on all such topics. Maybe it's hidden in the diary; I'm
sure I've complained dozens of times about spaces in file names and programs that tear path
names apart into three components (directory, file name and extension), not to mention a
myriad of other woes. But where's the rant? I should work on one.
Continued reading “Photographic Multishot Techniques: High Dynamic Range, Super-Resolution, Extended
Depth of Field, Stitching”, which has some interesting stuff. It at least led
me through a number of issues about panoramas, including projections. For the fun of it,
tried the various projections that Hugin offers on one of last
week's panoramas, which in the raw has an angle of 322°. Rectangular was useless (as
the book warned), but others were quite interesting. Some projections are limited to an
angle of 180°. There were a number of interesting possibilities, but also a few really
strange ones:
Another issue, which is probably biting me in the verandah panoramas, is parallax: it moves
the foreground relative to the background from one shot to the next. The solution is clear:
put the camera on a rail and adjust it so that the “optical centre” of the lens
is above the pivot point of the tripod.
The problem is, it wasn't. The rail doesn't go that far back. By default, it looks like
this, and the lower rail has a range of about 10 cm, centred over the pivot of the tripod:
Both the screw for the camera and the hole in the base are offset accordingly, giving a
range of about 5 cm in either direction (second and third photos). By reversing the rails
(fortunately that's easy enough) I was able to get a range of about -7 to -17 cm:
Aren't compact cameras nice? This one (my Nikon
“Coolpix” L1) told me that the foreground of the second photo was in
focus, when in fact it was the background. Only the large depth of field made the thing
roughly recognizable, while of course there's no hope for the background to be out of focus.
Maybe I do need a second real camera.
Still, this image and the third show the camera in the correct position for the Zuiko Digital
ED 50 mm f/2.0 Macro. I've decided to measure to the front of the two slits on the
rail holder (the back one is not always visible), showing that this lens needs to be offset
by 8.5 cm. For the Olympus lenses I have, the measurements are:
Lens
Offset (cm)
9-18 mm
7.0
12-60 mm (at 12 mm)
6.5
12-60 mm (at 60 mm)
10.0
50 mm
8.5
70-300 mm (at 70 mm)
4.0 (minimum)
The 9-18 mm doesn't seem to have any shift with changing focal length, and it's unlikely
that I'd need to worry about the 70-300 mm lens at all, let alone at longer focal lengths.
Now I need to wait until Saturday for the next panorama shots.
In passing, it's interesting to note that, while there's a nice scale on both sides of the
rail, there's no obvious point to measure things from. The top rail, the one holding the
camera plate, has two scales, each starting from the edge of the mount.
A couple of weeks ago Monty Widenius sent mail to
activate people to petition the European
Commission to provide appropriate safeguards for MySQL. They did indeed put in
some safeguards, but they were too soft for my liking. In particular, they're only
valid for five years, and there's no undertaking to do anything in particular after that.
MySQL owns defensive patents which they have never enforced; Oracle could do that in five
years after closing MySQL down.
This is all very much “what if”, but if it does happen, it'll be too late to do
anything about it. Now's the time, and Monty's continuing with petitions, this time an
open petition. Once again I've signed up. This
isn't just a matter for MySQL: it could happen to other open source projects too, though
possibly MySQL is a particularly complicated one because of their dual licensing and their
patents.
Brute force search
Did one other thing today that Monty wouldn't approve of. It's getting difficult to find
photos in my collection; I currently have a total of 59218 photos spread across 1518
directories. Admittedly, I have three copies of most photos in different resolutions, but
that's still nearly 20,000 photos, and the number is on the increase. The only way I had to
find things was by date, which doesn't always help. What I need is a full text search like
MySQL provides, but I currently don't have them stored in a database: it's all text-based.
Decided to throw elegance to the winds and modified my photo index page to accept keywords. That took surprisingly little time. At the
moment, I'm matching keywords with any corresponding text in a case-insensitive manner, so
bee will match “bee”,
“beer” and “Beethoven”. And each word is or'd, so even foo bar brings results. It's primitive but
surprisingly useful, and it'll help me procrastinate still longer before I set up
replication to my remote web site.
Taking photos of the focusing rail for yesterday's diary wasn't as straightforward as I
would expect. I'm still seeing lots of things I can't explain. I took the first photos
with my “standard” studio equipment: a bounce flash from each side and the
on-camera pop-up flash, all set to manual. But the exposures didn't match. The first of
the following three photos had 1 EV less exposure (12.3 EV) than the other two, which had
exactly the same exposure (11.3 EV). There's no reason to believe that the flash units
weren't fully charged: they do that in a matter of seconds.
Ended up using the ring flash attachment, which certainly gave more light, and more even
light. The following shot was taken at EV 16.6, over 4 stops less than the underexposed
ones above.
But why is there so much trouble taking flash shots?
The answer is: the pop-up flash (and any Olympus-system flash) fires low-intensity flashes
ahead of the main flash for things like exposure measurement and maybe focus assist. The
former seems to happen even in manual mode. These pre-flashes fire the studio flash, and
by the time the shutter opens, they have finished.
We have a number of strange flies in the garden. This one tends to hover in a single place
for a while before darting off to another place. It's on
a Crocosmia here, but it's clearly not
looking for nectar: it's not blooming yet, and it has settled on the least developed of the
buds. Maybe it was laying eggs, but I didn't see any.
Received a flyer recently offering me a free trial copy of “The Week” magazine. That sounded
like a good idea: my father used to read it when he was in England, and they have a more
concise format than most magazines, so I would stand a chance of actually reading it. But
they didn't have a web URL on the flyer, so went looking—and found an offer for six free issues. Following the link gave me this page
(duplicates since fixed):
So the issues aren't free at all. You have to subscribe, and then you can get a full refund
in the first 6 weeks. But if you keep the subscription, you end up paying for the
“free” issues. Sorry, people, that's not on. If your chosen audience is that
stupid, there's probably not much of interest in the magazine anyway.
Mail from Daniel Nebdal today, identifying yesterday's funny insect as
a Hoverfly. Went looking and found yes,
indeed, it's either a Simosyrphus grandicornis or a Melangyna viridiceps. But
which? The photos of the Simosyrphus grandicornis look quite like my insect, but the
Melangyna viridiceps is less recognizable. So I went looking for other photos, some
considerably worse than my own hand-held shot, and came up with an article showing the differences, with photos and references to the Wikipedia articles. The problem is, both photos are
used in the Simosyrphus grandicornis article. So I still don't know.
We've got other things of interest in the garden, though. I suppose this is a pretty common
caterpillar:
Finally our Crocosmia have started
blooming; it looks like the Watsonias
are also preparing. I wonder why plants of different species, planted in at different times
and in different places, all bloom together. Is it really just the weather? Or the change
in the length of the day?
The Cycad that we planted a year and a half ago hasn't been looking very happy—or at least,
I didn't think so, though Laurel Gordon did when she saw it a couple of months ago. But now
it's producing a number of new shoots, so I suppose it's getting happier with its position.
The leaves growing to the left in the background are one of the many
volunteer Silver birches that are
popping up all over the garden. We had intended to plant them elsewhere, but there are so
many that we'll probably throw a lot away.
The frog photo above shows another problem: the very shallow depth of field. That's very
frustrating, because you don't see it clearly until it's too late: say what people want, the
“depth of field preview” or the images in the viewfinder are just not accurate
enough. But why is the depth of field of this photo (and others I took at the same time) so
limited? I took it with flash, but the camera (“P” or program mode) decided to
give me an aperture of f/2.2, despite the close distance, with the result that the field is
limited to a couple of millimetres depth. It would have been easy enough to set it to f/11
or so, which would have given adequate depth of field, and the flash is clearly capable of
much more. It looks as if I'll have to use Aperture Priority mode, like I did for the
Crocosmia photo. But why should I have to?
New Year's Eve today, and Chris over for dinner. We're clearly getting old: I can't recall
the last time we waited for midnight before welcoming in the New Year. Instead we once
again celebrated the New Year as it arrived
in Kiritimati, and again
in New Zealand, and were in bed
before 11 pm.
The weather had been really hot all day. The temperatures once again were in the high 30s,
but in the evening we had a cool, wet change—and, as Chris predicted, the obligatory
power failure occurred, though this time it was very short.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
File Save Settings button to the right of the Scan button. (If you
started Epson Scan from a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements, this button doesn’t
appear.)
