When I started shooting with my 20D I was impressed with it’s low-light ability compared to 35mm film but after the novelty of changing ISO between shots wore off, I naturally started experimenting with ISO 1600, H (ISO 3200) and also H-2 (two stops under exposure, on the basis that shooting in RAW mostly allows up to 2 stops of recovery in post). The results weren’t pretty, although I did spend some time underexposing ISO 1600 to compare to H, the resulting banding noise patterns were very obvious, and very digital.

Fast forward to this year, and my love of trying to take candid pictures in dark places (eg: wedding receptions) hasn’t abated but DSLR’s are now sporting ISO 12,800 as a normal top range option, and the recent crop of compacts such as the Panasonic Lumix and micro 4/3 systems were also looking very attractive until I started playing with the data provided by DxOMark (NB: Flash required for a fair amount of the data display).

DxOMark have a standardised approach to testing cameras, sensors (and more recently lenses) to come up with a ‘magic’ number for the quality of a camera – I’m not about to dive off into a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance discussion on quality here, but one aspect of their testing is very interesting to me: what they term Sports shooting. Here’s an extract from their page on the Use Case Scores:

“When shooting a moving scene such as a sports event, action photographers’ primary objective is to freeze the motion, giving priority to short exposure time. To compensate for the lack of exposure, they have to increase the ISO setting, which means the SNR will decrease. How far can they go while keeping decent quality? Our metric, Low-Light ISO, will tell them.”

So how does my 20D stack up against the 5D and more interestingly, against recent cameras such as the 7D, 550D and the 5D Mk II (ok, not that recent, but at least it’s current) ? Go to the menu on the left, click on “Camera Sensor” and then “Compare Sensors” and you should get this page. Note that the 550D has a top ISO setting of 12,800, compared to the 20D’s 3200, but only a marginal increase in the Sports rating.

I should stop here and point out that the 550D has many more compelling features than the 20D, not least of which is the pixel count: to get that many pixels into the same area and still manage to edge out the 20D in terms of noise is a truly remarkable achievement, and yes, I have ignored the potential improvement in image quality if I pixel-binned in post the 17MP 550D down to an 8MP 20D equivalent. HD video, Live View and more are also 100% ignored…

What interested me most was the exposure (sorry) of the internal logic inside Canon: what appears to have been done is to design a sensor with as many MP as possible, but with performance that can be measurably and accurately shown to be not worse than previous generations. Yes, if they made an 8MP sensor today it would have a far, far better low-light ability (they could make it 16MP in reality and pixel-bin, for example) but I wanted to know which camera gives the best low-light performance and will still accept my collection of lenses.

Go to “Camera Sensor” and “Sensor Rankings” to get this information – I can’t offer a direct link this time, but choose “Canon” as the manufacturer, leave the sensor size set to “Sensor format” (ie: all sizes), leave “Mpix” and “Price” alone, and click on the “Sports” button.

Now you will have the year of release along the bottom, and the DxOMark scores up the side, with higher being better. If you follow the band of triangles along the graph from left to right just under the 800 line, you’ll notice that most of the xxD and xxxD cameras fall into that very specific quality range, with very little variance: it’s almost as if new cameras were brought out when the sensor tech advanced sufficiently to squeeze in another MP or two and keep the noise inline with past models. The two highest values are recorded for the 5D Mk II and the 1Ds Mk III, but go back to between 2005 and 2006 and there’s the original 5D: a camera whose low light ability is only bested by the flagship 1D series, or it’s own successor…

Factor in the price of the better cameras plus the fact that photography is not income generating for me (it’s not even income-neutral) and going for a 5 year old system seems a lot more logical.

Ffordes Photographic
Based in Scotland, and used multiple times by my Dad for 2nd hand Contax lenses and more recently by me for the Canon 5D body. Superb quality gear: I honestly couldn’t have said that the 5D was used until I spotted a small paint scuff on the flash hotshoe – and this wasn’t even the best quality level for 2nd hand goods.

MPB Photographic
This is where I got the used Canon 17-40mm F4 L to go with the 5D and again, even though it wasn’t the highest quality rating I simply cannot find any faults or markings. Excellent.

Camtech
Local 2nd hand camera dealer: was happy to let me go and visit them one lunchtime to buy a lens rather than insisting I had to have it posted (they are an internet shop who visit some camera fairs and not a retail establishment). The Sigma 10-20mm was in excellent condition, and has been in regular use ever since with no problems.

Warehouse Express
The largest purchase from WE was my Tamron 28-75 f2.8, which was at an unfortunate time when the quality control at Tamron was going through a bad patch. As a result I needed to send back two lenses before I got one that worked, and I was initially rather disturbed at the returns procedure (no need for an RMA !), but there was never a dispute in sending out a new lens, and I also received a follow-up call one evening from a manager there checking up that the 3rd lens was indeed ok. More recently they had the Lowepro Slingshot AW100 on sale, and that arrived very quickly indeed.

Park Cameras
Not used them myself, but my Dad did for his Sigma SD14 body, and they were very helpful on the phone and provided an excellent quality of service.

Morris Photographic
I bought my Tamrac Adventure 9, and also an Adventure 7 (a present: I don;t have that much of a bag fetish) from here, and the transaction was quick and painless. They even had no problems shipping to a different address after I’d faxed them a change note.

Mifsuds
Again, not a shop I’ve used myself, but they come highly recommended from many quarters: would not hesitate to use them if they had what I wanted.

7dayshop
A Channel Islands-based retailer, who can live up to their name if you choose the free delivery option (ie: it takes 7 working days to arrive…) – in the interests of fairness I haven’t chosen the extra charge P&P, which they claim cuts out the delays of the free shipping. Have used them extensively for small-ish items such as NiCD batteries, chargers, LensPens, ND filters, CompactFlash cards etc. The one time I’ve needed to return a faulty USB memory stick there was no fuss, and the replacement was provided quickly and accurately.

DigitalRev
A Hong Kong based camera shop, who also had an eBay store when I last used them. Not bought anything particularly expensive from there, as I was always wary about customs charges and warranties on grey imports, but they had the most outstanding prices on polarising filters (72mm for 30 UKP or so when shop in the UK were asking 120 UKP !), and the filters I have bought were all great, and delivered without any problems at all.

I have done a lot of 35mm photography (along with 110, 126 and some medium format), more years, infact, than I have been shooting digital, so I can’t say for sure if my DoF expectations have been coloured by my early shooting, or if it’s simply that the whole relationship between f-stop of DoF just feels more natural at 35mm. I’m leaning towards my own experience colouring my judgement, as medium format photographers probably regard 35mm DoF as hideously deep…

There’s no 20D vs 5D pictures here, just a selection of 5D images taken with a Canon 17-40mm f4 L and a 50mm f1.8 with some post-processing has been done in Aperture 2 (click for a larger set):

The vignetting is also a lot more pronounced, especially at the 17mm end of the 17-40. Again, nothing too surprising on paper, and the subject of many press-releases since the 5D came out from Canon and other manufacturers, carefully describing the latest improvement in micro-lenses or sensor pit depths. The 50mm example fares much better than the wide images, again, not surprisingly.

Does the darkening impact my photography ? Not that much, actually. I’ve not been shooting for that long with the camera, but I have to admit to an almost unhealthy addiction to the Vignette tool in Aperture when processing my 20D images so for the most part the edges are acceptable to me (I would very much like to upgrade to Aperture 3 so that I can de-vignette in post when the images calls for it, but so far the experience of the trial version has left me unable to do so).

European Court rejects Home Office appeal, Section 44 found illegal – British Journal of Photography.

Excellent news, and not a moment too soon considering the latest inane activities in Romford:

Young photojournalist detained for army cadet pics – British Journal of Photography.

I can only hope that the lack of a formal complaint to date is due to potentially deeper legal action based on the European Court ruling.

The problem (after I fixed the missing ptys) manifest itself as a series of entries in /var/adm/messages with varying IP addresses but all of the form:

sendto(1.2.3.4) (fd=53): Not owner

and a random delay (or packet drop) to the time responses that meant I was deemed to be unreliable.

I spent a long time with truss and Google and didn’t come up with anything useful, but narrowed the behaviour down to something peculiar with my routing – I have three NICs in my OpenSolaris box: one of them with a public IP and one with a NATed one, although both end up at the same router (no – best you don’t ask why). To prevent NTP requests arriving on my public IP and then departing by the default route (via the NAT) I have used an odd looking IPFilter rule for Transparent Routing, which enables packets matching a rule to be sent to a specific NIC – in this case, all packets with a From address matching my public IP were being forced back out of the public NIC regardless of the routing table entries. This had worked for months on 2009.06, and after a lot of poking, appeared to be doing the right thing on snv_129 as well.

Most of the Google comments suggested that it’s perfectly acceptable to ignore sendto errors in most cases, but I couldn’t figure out where they were being sent from until I started poking around with ndd (in a failed attempt to find source based routing for UDP packets), and tucked away in the /dev/udp collection was exactly the setting I needed, so after issuing:

pfexec ndd -set /dev/udp udp_sendto_ignerr 1

The time started to flow again, and so far over 12 monitoring periods the step has generally been under 0.005 – with a nice stable ADSL line overnight I should be back in the UK pool by morning I’m not sure what changed in the network as I haven’t gone back to my 2009.06 BE to take a look at the original ndd settings, but I was never as happy with my ntp score on OpenSolaris as I had been with my Qube 2 so this could have been the reason all along.

“You have failed the practice citizenship test.

Questions answered correctly: 13 out of 24 (54%)

Time taken: 02 minutes 46 seconds “

Life in the United Kingdom – The Official Practice Citizenship Test does say it should take up to 45 minutes, but it’s flawed in so many ways it’s a joke. There were about 5 questions that were on subjects that I would want applicants to know something about and the rest were culled from the reject pile of I Want To Be A Millionaire.

(via Scaryduck)

zoneadm -z zonename attach -F

Oh dear: that was a bad idea. The zone appeared to attach but zoneadm -z zonename boot failed and then I discovered it was impossible to delete, rename or reconfigure the zone.

After a few attempts to recover things, the correct answer turns out to be to manually edit /etc/zones/index to change the state of the zone to read configured, and then it’s trivial to reattach the zone with:

zoneadm -z zonename attach -u -d path/to/zonename/ROOT/zbe

at which point it automatically upgrades the zone to 2009.06.

Updater fails on beadm create, and manual attempts also fail: Boo !

After a lot of grumbling Googling down plenty of dead-ends it appears that beadm in 2008.11 gets very upset when there are Zones attached. A set of zoneadm detach commands later and the updater completed without any problems at all.

So first up, Cambridge Botanic Gardens. I should note that the only entrance I’ve ever known to be open is the one at the far end of Bateman Street near Trumpington Road (on their map).

The Fitzwilliam is the largest museum in Cambridge, but you will need to leave your bags at the desk when you arrive and I think they don’t allow photography. The Sedgewick is smaller and used to allow non-flash photography. Plenty of museum info all in one place.

If you walk along the river bank from Jesus Green (where they often have open-air Jazz in the Summer), past Midsummer Common (often full of cows, as it is Common Land and also where the November fireworks and various Fairs (and Fayres) are held) and up to Coldhams Common where you can cross the foot and cycle bridge to the Green Dragon which serves food and has a garden next to the footbridge, or you can carry on over the grass up to the High Street in Fen Ditton.

One note: in the UK if it really is an active Common then that means grazing is permitted (well, probably city residents: I’m not sure on the full bye-laws), so if you’re not on one of the paths don’t expect the grass to be mown, and do watch out for animal droppings (as it’s mainly cows grazing in Cambridge, they’re not that small…)

Fen Ditton has two pubs that I’ve been to, one is the Ancient Shepherds which is indeed in an old building (the original cottages date from around 1540 AD) but it’s not open all day, and the other – The Plough – has recently been turned into a Gastropub (more Restaurant than Pub); they will take you without a reservation if they have space, but might be worth calling ahead if you are certain you want to eat there.

If you just can’t stop walking, then you can go up the riverbank to Clayhithe (on the edge of Waterbeach) and stop off at The Bridge which is a Pub that concentrates on food. Can be busy at peak times, but more of a Pub vibe than The Plough. If you carry on up the road into Waterbeach then just as you get to the village (0.25 miles or so from the pub) you come to the railway station and can catch a train back to Cambridge (journey time 3 to 6 minutes – waiting for a train, well, urm, check an online guide for weekend train frequency !). They also have an instant ticket machine on the platform.

Also note that the footpath along the river switches sides using the footbridge by the Green Dragon, so if you want to go to Fen Ditton then that’s fine – you can say on the same side as you did on the way from Jesus Green, but if you decide to go for Clayhithe then you’ll need to cross the river before you get to Fen Ditton. After crossing the bridge by the Green Dragon turn right and keep walking past the end of the road, staying on the right. Rejoin the river a little further along.

If you’re staying in town, then although it’s a boring walk up a busy road (although you can get there from the far West edge of Midsummer Common on quiet backroads), then The Wrestlers on Newmarket Road does excellent Thai food (the Green Chicken Curry can be challengingly hot for a wimpy Brit like me, but I keep coming back for more !), and the last time I went The Hopbine (close to Midsummer Common and the Grafton Centre) also had nice Thai, although they do serve more English food than Thai.

Having said that, tweak the Info.plist if required in order to remove or reduce the CPU MHz limit, and then open up /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture file in 0xED and jump to the offset 0x6f7bfc and change the text in right hand pane from performRequirementsCheck to performLicenceCheck and then add five hex 0x00 to make the strings equal length.

Amazon blocks Phorm adverts scan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7999635.stm

I hadn’t previously bothered to do this, as it seemed to be too early to say how Phorm would turn out and the implementation of the opt-out is so braindead and full of marketing BS that it just made me angry. Yeah, I want to ban all search engines so Phorm doesn’t scan me – right… What about all the other User-Agent strings that robots.txt can handle so nicely ? Oh yes – that’s right: if it was trivial then no-one would let their content be abused in this way.

So email sent: multiple domains and all subdomains thereof requested blocked. See what happens next.

In case anyone else has been tripped up by this whilst using pkgsrc (complaints that .lai files can’t be found when it should be looking for a source lib ending in .la) you can fix this with the following diff:

--- /usr/pkg/bin/libtool.orig        2009-02-06 19:30:08.492465367 +0000
+++ /usr/pkg/bin/libtool     2009-02-06 19:30:15.072304479 +0000
@@ -6532,7 +6532,7 @@

        # Install the pseudo-library for information purposes.
        name=`$echo "X$file" | $Xsed -e 's%^.*/%%'`
-       instname="$dir/$name"i
+       instname="$dir/$name"
        $show "$install_prog $instname $destdir/$name"
        $run eval "$install_prog $instname $destdir/$name" || exit $?

E: You know that house on the TV where they have all those arguments ?
N: Big Brother ?
E: No, the Houses of Parliament

What is 20% off $35?

which is rather neat, and would make a mockery of most of what my Maths homework consisted of if I had a time machine (but I digress).

What would be really neat would be to add a voice interface to that and shove it on an iPhone – forget comparison shopping via taking pictures of barcodes, just pull out your phone and talk to it, and work out those pesky exchange rates (including credit card %age markup), or complicated discount scheme without having to peck around on a keyboard and try to remember how the % button is supposed to work.

Whilst something as drastic as a one-way inner ring road would certainly be bold, it’d also be expensive and the outcome might not be quite what was expected. One thing that hasn’t been done is try a very simple and fairly cheap experiment, which changes just one aspect of charging for parking: charge less the longer you stay.

All short stay parking in the UK that I’ve been in charges by a unit of time with increasing amounts for longer stays – a typical weekday tariff for Cambridge (Grafton East) currently is:

Up to 1 hour    £1.50
Up to 2 hours   £3.00
Up to 3 hours   £4.50
Up to 4 hours   £7.50
Up to 5 hours   £14.00
Over 5 hours    £19.00

To balance this out, the Park & Ride service is a flat £2.20 per adult (up to 3 kids per adult free), so based purely on up-front cost a trip to town for a family of four is cheaper by bus if they expect to stay for more than 2 hours.

So what is the purpose of parking charges ? It’s too expensive for residents to use instead of on-street parking, and it’s also not cost-effective for general shop workers to use so it must be intended for visitors to the city.

So what are these parking charges actually doing ? They’re creating a high number of short visits by multiple people, thereby increasing the number of cars on the road. The people who do drive in are also conscious of the cost per hour, and so are unlikely to linger but rather go to the shops they know they want to visit and then leave.

Right – now invert the charging structure:

Up to 1 hour    £19.00
Up to 2 hours   £14.00
Up to 3 hours   £7.50
Up to 4 hours   £4.50
Up to 5 hours   £3.00
Over 5 hours    £1.50

This has now given a huge incentive for shoppers to stay longer in the city, so coffee and food traders will see an increase in earnings. It encourages people to wander around the side streets and investigate small shops they might otherwise rush past, and supermarkets will tell you all about the money to be made from impulse purchases (look at the end-of-aisle promotions and stock next to the tills). Rather than rushing back to the car to get into a cheaper ticket rate, visitors would be encouraged to spend another 20 minutes instead.

It would also encourage shop workers to drive in – these people are essential to the centre of town as without them there would be no place for the money to be spent, so it makes no sense to exclude them, and yet given that living in Cambridge is so expensive most workers live outside and have to depend on public transport to get to work. There are many complaints about the lack of services at the times the workers need them, as there’s not the volume of people other than the workers wanting to catch the bus to make running early/late buses cost-effective.

But the most drastic effect would be on traffic volume – the morning and evening volume would be increased, but could easily be compensated for by having longer retail opening hours which would be made possible by the increased spend per person. Notice how in the current system a family needs to be in and out in 2 hours or less. Given a typical 9am to 5pm period of 8 hours that means that for each parking space there could be 4 cars in that time frame, but in the inverted model it would be likely just to be one car per space – 75% of the daytime traffic has been removed ! People just wanting to get one or two items would now be much better off using the Park & Ride, reducing congestion, increasing bus reliability and keeping the traffic on the surrounding dual carriageways and out-of-town car parks.

In order to ameliorate the morning and evening volumes, there would need to be encouragement given to retail outlets to open from 8am to 8pm and that specifically includes all food outlets. No-fee extensions to food/drink licences to match the new hours would be a good start, and other bureaucratic reductions should be enough to stimulate this move (eg: make business rates variable with opening hours, and make it cost more for retail premises to open from 9am to 5pm than from 8am to 8pm).

An 8am retail start would mean that shop workers would arrive before office workers, and with a 2pm shift change this should see a second traffic peak finish before the end of school traffic builds up. Having later opening in the evenings would make it far less important to get into the city at the weekend, and encourage families to meet up there, shop and eat into the early evening. Just as the idea of having a half-day on Wednesday and Saturday mornings has passed into the ‘quaint’ category, it’s time to question the sense of a single start and end time for everyone as it’s readily apparent that transport infrastructure can’t cope, but changing hours is far simpler than building roads.

Moving away from a single work day of 9am to 5pm and towards a split 8am-2pm/2pm-8pm working pattern would also make retail work more attractive for students able to fit in work around lectures as well as offering parents with families a chance to work around school hours without having to pay for expensive childcare or ask for special dispensation from business owners. This would then enable the start of a much bigger social change, and keep skilled and motivated employees able to work instead of being forced to choose between family or career.

It’s so simple and cheap (reprogram tickets machines in 6 or 7 car parks and reprint notice boards with new pricing for the same) that it could never possibly work, of course. Why ? The main looser is the council. Despite being a public body elected to serve the needs of residents and businesses the fact that the vast majority of the parking charges under this scheme would be very likely to fall into the £1.50 or £3.00 range would mean that it wouldn’t even be tabled as a serious motion. It’s a pity that the elected officials can’t see that some short term pain is required to actually create a solution rather than make it “Someone Else’s Problem”. I’d say it will cost more in real terms not to try this for 18 months and see what the results are: if it works well then the increased number of businesses in town generating income via rates should offset the parking losses.

(With many thanks to James for the retail hours/office hours split).

Other reasons for undertaking this admittedly time consuming task now are a combination of cheap storage, a decent quality video codec (ie: given a standard def. TV output the artefacts are negligible), a CPU that can manage a real-time encode of a DVD, and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Marketing Department.

Yup – DVD’s are now as annoying as VHS became: true, I don’t have to rewind the DVD each time I want to watch it, but with copyright warnings, country limited liability screens, trailers, language selection, flying company logos, sound codec splash screens and other trash, actually getting to the film itself is an arduous task. Especially as some DVD players allow skipping, and some don’t, others permit fast forwarding of warning but not skipping, and others are brutal enough to simply trudge on until the main menu appears (as an aside, using Apple’s DVD Player application was a joy, as it at least allowed a bookmark to be set anywhere on the movie, and for the default action on playing a disc to be a jump to that point. Why do home goods have to be so hidebound and unfriendly to the viewer ? Must be a trade agreement somewhere…).

So how much storage is enough ? Well, if you’re using H.264 to the AppleTV preset in Handbrake then allow around 1.6GB for an hour, so at today’s prices a 1TB drive is 75 UKP which will give me an estimated 900GB of storage, or 562 hours of film, or in more ‘iPod friendly’ headlines, 375 films (assuming 90 minutes per film) and that’s comfortably more than I have right now.

On a slightly related note, I did see a pre-loaded MP3 player being sold in a bargain shop yesterday: the audio was free with the player (I think: might have been the other way around) but it was under a tenner in any case, so thank you for the crap on my DVD’s, and the incessant paper flyers for Blu-ray, but I’ll wait for the HD movies to come on an SDHC card so I can skip this tedious ripping step and just ignore the marketing more quickly.

Update: Not 3 minutes after posting this I caught up with my RSS, and found that I am not alone…

It’s not.

Having reserved a bike for my eldest at Halfords one Sunday morning last month, we all went down to collect it with the idea of building it together. The actual reservation was pretty straightforward, and I was quite impressed with the SMS reservation code they texted me within 2 minutes – the bike was in stock and available that day and the next and all I had to do was turn up and pay.

It wasn’t a good sign when the member of staff I showed the SMS to (it was a long number, so thought it’d help him being able to read it) looked very confused and after a long pause wrote down 3 or 4 digits on the back of his hand, ignored the terminal next to him and went off into the back of the shop.

10 minutes later he came back to ask when I’d reserved it, and then tried to tell me it took 3 days to assemble the bike. Eventually he got over his shock that I felt able to build it all by myself, agreed that I didn’t need to wait three days for a flat-pack box and vanished again.

He came back 5 minutes later saying that there was nothing in stock, and I must have seen the display model on the web site.

WTF ? It’s a stock photo, unless they move all their bikes into a perfectly white room with no obvious lighting each time they build one… I cut my losses at this point and left, although perhaps I should have been a typical outraged parent and demanded to see The Manager but I don’t subscribe to the idea that poor service can be cured by shouting loudly at someone else, and more importantly I didn’t want them to have my money: if they can’t even count bikes then what, exactly, is the reservation service for ?

An email to their customer services resulted in a reply a week later – in which, quite incredibly, they acknowledge that their system simply doesn’t work. Of course, they don’t come out and say it’s broken – PR people have been on a course, dontchaknow, and it’s all my fault for trying to shop there (their odd formatting left in):

Dear Mr Spray

Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding our Reserve and Collect service.
Halfords prides itself on offering a range of high quality products and
services and any concerns expressed by customers are treated very

seriously.

Our Reserve and Collect system is set up to use live data which allows us
to advise our customers of our stock levels right down to the last item.
Our colleagues in store aim to remove the item from sale as soon as the

notification comes through, however there will be the odd occasion where
someone will be purchasing the item at the time of reservation or indeed
the item turns out to be damaged / have a fault. As the accuracy of each

individual stock file is the stores responsibility, we have advised our
store colleagues to contact customers at the earliest possible point if
they believe there could be an issue, and to do anything they can to
rectify the

problem. This may include a suitable alternative or locating another item
from a local store. These guidelines are ‘as a minimum’ in line with other
retailers offering similar schemes.

Please accept our apologies if you feel this hasn’t happened in this case
and be assured that we will make your e-mail available to the Area Manager
for his information.

Kind Regards
<Name Redacted>

Halfords Customer Services

If they can’t manage to subcontract a simple race-free reservation system properly then they obviously don’t need my custom.

Oh wait, maybe they do…

“As we are trying to have a carbon free Christmas this year…”

So, no Coal as a gift this year ?

Bah. Humbug.