Web-idiots aside, the tour was fascinating anyway: it’s something that should be experienced rather than watched as the range of smells, sounds and temperatures as you are taken through the various stages of the process was quite unexpected. The staff were friendly and knowledgeable and there was no pressure to buy any of their goods. Just what monkey made their website so hard to use ?

Ok, so you don’t have to put in time to beat the scripters: staying on top of security updates is often sufficient, but in the early days of WordPress I found that could loose my outbound bandwidth for half an hour or more as a stream of dumb proxy attacks came in.

The electrical cost of running a home server also varies from the super fast might-as-well-rent-dedicated-server end of the market, down to low power devices that can spend the best part of two days building MySQL.

Now, though, there’s an interesting new twist to the cost/speed spreadsheets from CloudFlare, a start-up from 2010 which is making the idea of low power home serving a much faster and more reliable option. They offer (for free) a distributed CDN (Content Delivery Network) together with a very Borg like security consolidation system, where any recognised attack on any site utilising CloudFlare is instantly blacklisted for every site in the collective.

The basic service is free, supported by a commercial offering with better stats and security offerings. So far it appears to do exactly what they suggest for static content, with one graphics laden WordPress page dropping in load time from 34s to 4.05s – this is for a US site analyser looking at a UK site.

Uptime isn’t perhaps as good as a reliable as the best home host, as they have a very aggressive anti-DoS stance on their website which does attract a lot of DoS attention, but given that they will serve the last known content when your site is entirely off-line and the fact that they do actively monitor and work to mitigate attacks, it’s certainly worth a try.

And no, this domain is currently using them: far too many horrid squirly technicalities with machines right now, but I hope to get there soon.

Ok, so silly openings aside, what makes this fascinating to me is that it’s all about the Fuji X100, possibly the most talked about pre-announced digital camera I’ve seen so far, and a camera which I dismissed and ignored mainly due to the huge volume of hype and excitement. Once the camera arrived, it’s awkward operation was nearly as painful as something that Olympus or Sony would produce, so again I ignored it.

Yeah, I know: everything has upgradeable firmware these days, but when was the last time any equipment you owned that could be upgraded actually was, and improved every aspect of operation? In my experience there isn’t an upgrade path (“Just buy the new model”) or the improvement makes things worse in four or five other areas, or worst of all, it removes functionality which has now been moved into a separate product line.

Of course, Fuji confounded me by actually releasing a firmware update. A useful update.

So what is so attractive about an (arguably) hideously expensive pocket camera with a fixed focal length lens ? Its handling. I’ve come from a film background so this may not apply to teenagers who have grown up wielding smartphones (actually, demographic breakdown of purchasers would be interesting, or if you are one of the aforementioned pure digital-era photogs please do leave a comment). After the initial confusion of trying to get anything useful out of the printed manual (get a PDF onto an iPad or something similar) with its useless guide and terrible (lack of) index, things start to make sense with the discovery that there are generally 3 ways of doing pretty much everything.

Don’t buy this camera in duty free on your way to a once-in-a-lifetime holiday – you will need a couple of days to experiment with all the ways of operating various functions in order to find a way for it to suit your shooting style. Yup, you read that right: the camera will adapt to you, rather than insisting on training you. For example, I’m a great lover of * button AF on Canon DSLRs, and this little pocket camera has a mode that matches that operation. Stunning.

Yes, the startup time is stupidly long, but given the shorter than average battery life it’s obvious that the camera really does turn off fully rather than being in low power sleep mode like most devices, but I did find that it does become part of a rhythm: see a photo, flick the power switch whilst leisurely bringing the camera up to your eye and it’s pretty much ready to go.

The standout features? They’re personal, but the top three for me are the amazing high ISO performance, practically silent shutter, and stunning lens. Yes, there are cameras out there with numbers that go higher in their ISO menus, but the results from the X100 at ISO3200 are perfectly usable, albeit better in black and white.

No, the shutter isn’t a digital implementation and so isn’t 100% silent, but turn off the stupid synthetic sound (or long press one button to mute all sounds and disable the AF light: genius) and it has the gentlest of ‘snick’ noises. It also has frustrating drawbacks such as a rather low top shutter speed of 1/1000 at f2, but that is actually an advantage: rather than the more common focal plane shutters with high top speeds and fairly pedestrian flash sync speeds, this is a bladed leaf shutter which means that there is no top flash sync speed.

The lens is, quite simply, excellent. As a personal guide I’ve always found that if you’re spending less on a DSLR lens than you did on the body you will find flaws in the output; the cheaper the lens, the sooner the flaws become apparent. An f2 lens is fairly fast, but it’s important to note that wide open, the X100 is not pixel peeping sharp: there is a glow and ‘feel’ to images shot wide, especially closeup or in macro mode. Stop down to f4 and things change dramatically, and f11 is brilliantly usable.

The balance between digital and retro is very well implemented, and having a detailed ‘heads-up’ display superimposed on an optical viewfinder is everything I’ve always wanted in a digital camera. Live histogram, superb depth of field guide, focus indicator, level guide and grid all make for an informative and above all assistive rather than directive shooting experience. For the first time this digital camera actively improves upon the totally film-era technology in my Canon DSLRs in a way that enhances the photographic process rather than impeding it.

Auto ISO. This is not the first body to offer it, but the implementation and low noise of high ISO settings combine to create a brilliantly useable option. I have set it, and only run into issues when in very, very dim conditions when it doesn’t get up to 6400. In all other circumstances it keeps the shutter speed above your chosen minimum without any fuss, and drops down to the lowest possible ISO at all times. Hint to Fuji: one improvement would be to automatically use the built-in ND filter if the image would be overexposed at ISO200, but that’s about all I can think of to change.

For me, this is the ideal street or party camera. Unless I’m on an assignment to cover a party I want to be able to blend in and get properly candid images: this camera is as stealthy as it’s possible to get without using a spy camera. Having had people stop me to talk about my DSLR (the 5D and 70-200 are an imposing pair), literally no-one cares when I start to use the X100. I’ve used it in numerous restaurants and cafés with no comments from staff or other diners, and both on the street and in shopping centres by simply pressing the shutter with it hanging at chest height.

So have I sold my DSLRs? Absolutely not. What camera will I reach for first ? Tricky. Would I unreservedly recommend the X100 ? Probably not. If you have not used a rangefinder camera, then you really need to try the camera out before purchase. If you enjoy telephoto lens work, then don’t get one. For black and white low-light work, I can’t think of much better for the money.

In short, switch the SD card write protect switch to the Lock position before inserting it in a USB card reader or iPad adaptor and nothing can interfere with the camera formatting, preserving the normal operating speed.


#ifdef HAVE_FP_EXCEPT // Fix type conflict
//typedef fp_except fp_except_t;
#endif


What I hadn’t realised until I needed to do it is that whilst you set an explicit time on your pick of the selection group, the adjustment is applied to each image, not the exact timestamp you’ve just entered. Phew: job done.

Of course, the first USB2<>SATA enclosure I used would mount but not boot (grr…) and it took a while to figure out how to get the FreeBSD 8.2 Kirkwood image onto a bigger than 2GB drive (hint: use an existing FreeBSD system and vnconfig), but once I’d used sysinstall on an existing x86 FreeBSD system and also discovered the joys of tunefs -L I had a nice shiny 320GB FreeBSD 1.2GHZ ARM system.

Now for pkgsrc: using the 2011Q2 stable tarball, it was still a bit of a PITA as perl kept dying on me with a SIGABRT, but the key for perl is to put CFLAGS+= -fno-stack-protector into the hacks.mk file inside lang/perl5 and then miniperl won’t keep dying.

I’ve not had any luck with mysql55-server at all, but to get mysql55-client to stop sulking you will need to add two symlinks into the lib directory within work/.dist when it complains. After that, the bmake package command runs to completion.

Not yet got a full setup running with enough features to properly thrash the system, but it’s been happily building multiple packages simultaneously with a load over over 4 without any hiccups, and write speed to the USB2 doesn’t appear to be as much of a gating issue as I had worried it might be, so hopefully my websites will be much lower power in a couple of weeks time.

So now, instead of a screen with some small smudges on it my neighbour has a darkened screen with very subdued AF point illuminations. Despite not being an officially replaceable part on the Canon EOS 550D, it does appear to be fairly easily available, so hopefully I’ll be able to rectify my mistake properly later this week.

Although I disliked History and failed to remember more than a handful of dates, reading Neal Stevenson’s Baroque Cycle linked together previously unrelated events that I half recalled from school.

But that’s a separate rant. The poor state of computer literacy is described well in this BBC News article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9503255.stm

¹ NB: The metering flash is a short burst from the main flash tube, and so is a very noticeable white light (indistinguishable from a proper flash firing if in front of the camera) and not a pulse from the red AF unit. Note that fast reacting subjects, especially if close to the camera may start to reflexively blink as soon as the pre-flash burst begins.

Setting CFn.07=1 (disable flash) on the 5D is helpful when combined with 430EX CFn.04=0 (emit AF assist) as the flashgun now functions as a low-light focus assist unit for ambient light photography in low-light conditions.

From experiments with a 720nm filter, I am not convinced that the AF-beam from the 430EX is infra-red as stated in the manual, but simply a dark red visible LED.

As all I wanted was a simple ARM box, I decided it was time for something less complex: Linux from Scratch, but to avoid having to pull the hard drive each time I made a boot config error, I though it would be useful to add a serial port using another nas-central guide and a Nokia 7250i DKU-5 USB data cable from eBay, for a whopping £1.49 (inc. P&P).

My cable was a five wire that required power from the box, so it was a little worrying having to solder things in place without fully testing the data transmission, but for anyone wanting wire colour confirmation:

Orange: not used

Green: +ve

White: Rx

Blue: Tx

Black: GND

It also required the insulation shaving carefully on two sides before it would fit through the Kensington lock hole, but after that and with the addition of a cable tie it fits quite neatly.

Some bodged soldering later, it was in, but refusing to work on OS X even though there was a /dev/ttys000 entry created as soon as the cable was plugged in. Some Googleing later and this page provided the driver I needed – after that it was a simple screen /dev/tty.usbserial 115200 and everything was in place.

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.