Posted on 12/8/2007, 8:37 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Last night was Camille’s 25th Birthday Party and I only went out with my new Sigma 30mm/f1.4 lens. A pretty bold move, not carrying any backup lenses (I usually am with the 50/1.4 and 17-40/4L). Results, were fantastic. I can heartily recommend the Sigma lens. And on a 1.6x crop camera, you’re getting sweet results for not just facial portraits, but more life-sized/body-sized portraits.
Camille, the birthday girl
Surprisingly, most of the time, cranking up to ISO800 or ISO1600 wasn’t required. Above was shot at ISO400, not as sharp as I’d have expected, but the light was poor, and as with non-still-life objects, there’s always movement. Check out the rest of the set.
Next task, visit the Eureka Tower. Shot it in the dark last night (the view from Transport’s 2nd floor chilled-out-couches-area balcony was amazing), with not enough gear ;-)
Technorati Tags: photography, sigma, 30mmf14, 30/1.4
Posted on 12/8/2007, 2:56 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Not having played a game since Prince of Persia (and we’re talking the original game, with block-like graphics, on some ancient hardware, back in 1990), I decided to try out Second Life today. Surprisingly, the getdeb folk have this for Ubuntu, even in its 64-bit variety. Installation was simple:
- sudo dpkg -i secondlife-install_1.18.1.2-1~getdeb1_amd64.deb
- Realise that I’m missing a dependency, so install lib32asound2
- Attempt to start secondlife
And fail, of course. I got a Window Creation Error. Not content with this, I started it up from a terminal, and looked at the error messages pass by. Finally found the rather telling line: WARNING: createContext: window creation failure. SDL: Couldn’t find matching GLX visual. It seems that its all got to do with the bit-depth of colour, so a quick replace of the DefaultDepth in xorg.conf was in lieu (it originally was DefaultDepth 16 but its now DefaultDepth 24).
Restart X, and I launched Second Life with success! Now signing up was a bit of a chore as I had to find a new name and so on. A lot of ideal names are taken up, so I settled with Colin Pichot. One of the things I quickly changed was how much bandwidth SL was allowed to use – quick reduction to 50kbps from its usual default (of like 700kbps+). I joined the Linux Australia group, I’ve not developed anything in SL, and I haven’t given them my credit card details (yet). It seems to create a group, you need to fork out $100 Linden Dollars.
I’ll play with this after midnight I guess, when we’ve got more “off-peak” quota to utilise, but initial impressions are its a pretty impressive environment in 800×600. I’ve not met anyone, I’ve added a friend (I think), can’t for the life of me figure out how to put a photo in my profile, and here’s hoping that eventually, I understand what all the fuss about SL is.
Technorati Tags: second life, secondlife, sl, ubuntu, window creation error, glx visual, colin pichot, alter ego
