Colin Charles Agenda

Today, I was playing around with Linux, and RAW management. Not wanting to carry a laptop just for photo editing (i.e. I plan on travel without my MacBook Pro, and beautiful Lightroom, Aperture, iView Media Pro [okay, Microsoft Expression Media now], and Photoshop CS2), I figured I should make Linux up to scratch.

My favourite photo browser, is GQview. Its not standard software any longer, but its pretty old, and it works fairly well. It however, doesn’t support RAW. Today I discovered f-spot (ok, I discovered it ages ago, but I didn’t like its iPhoto-ness, where it wants to import stuff for you). Never fear, that’s what

    f-spot –view <path>

is for. Shortcut wise, its a little different, so I just use the up/down arrow keys to browse.

Now to convert the RAW files to JPGs, with preservation of EXIF data. I played around with the commands manually after reading the man page for dcraw, and figured there must be a better way. So I hopped on over to Yahoo!, did a little search, and came up with Jamie Zawinski’s mvpix. After changing the script a tad bit to suit my environment, I have images! RAW, JPEG, and copies of the JPEGs in an EDIT folder. mvpix also works on OS X.

The options being passed to dcraw seem to be simple: -w for using camera supplied white balance, -t 0 for no tilting, and -c for writing decoded images to stdout. Its passed to cjpeg, and run at 95% quality. However, the images seem to be a tad different, and I have no idea why.

On left, is when the camera was shooting in RAW+JPEG, and on right is the JPEG generated from the RAW file (click for larger image). These are 100% zooms.

The colour differences befuddles me. Why does the camera come out with “brighter” RAW, and dcraw come up with paler tones?

On left, is what the in-camera JPEG gives, when you’re shooting in RAW+JPEG, in the middle is what UFRaw sees from the RAW file, and on the right is what the converted JPEG looks like, after being parsed through dcraw+cjpeg (click for larger image).

What gives? Are there better options in dcraw to give me an as-close-to-in-camera JPEG experience? Are the converted images better/more true coloured? I’m not sure which to pick, and I’m not sure what’s the correct setting, to be honest.

Now about the photos. Apologies to the girl pictured here, all I know is that she’s probably a student at the Caulfield Campus of Monash University (so no, I don’t know her name). She was randomly picked for some quick studio photos, which was really just a bunch of us playing with a few studio strobes, and having the power of wireless triggers. These photos all rolled off an EOS 350D digital back, with a 50mm/1.4 lens attached to it, shot at f/1.6, at 1/25s. Sure, this should have really been made at f8, but there was no time to coax the girl.

Technorati Tags: linux, raw, cr2, gqview, f-spot, jpg, dcraw, mvpix, cjpeg, colour correction

One of the many reasons to come to a MySQL Meetup, is because you’ll learn something new.

We cater for beginners - Minh Van Nguyen

We cater for the more intermediate - advanced users - Arjen Lentz

You’ll start hacking stuff up, while you’re there!

You also get demonstrations, with live human beings, showing a man-in-the-middle-attack

More photos are at Flickr. Where are your meetup photos?

Technorati Tags: mysql, meetup

I’m reminded of an old painting, where there’s a meeting of minds. Since Heidelberg was largely informal (very few stand-up presentations with the audience sitting) with discussions, equally useful conversation and work were done over dinner, in hotel lobbies, and in-between sessions.

Meeting of the Minds: Kaj and Jeremy (large)

I particularly like this photo, as there’s lots of community contributors in the photo. Clockwise from Jeremy, we have Paul (Mr. PBXT, and now MyBS), Pascal (Mr. Yahoo!) and David (co-Founder).

I’m now uploading photos of birds, from our visit to Burg Guttenberg. The heidelberg tag is definitely growing.

Technorati Tags: mysql, heidelberg, devmeeting, developer meeting, dinner, photo

Taking photos is easy. Processing them is hard. By processing I mean, going through them, ditching ones that didn’t quite make the cut, and then uploading them. Note processing does not even mean editing them in The Gimp.

View from the Miraikan, looking towards Daiba, at the UC-J reception
(view the other 31 photos from that night)

The reception was amazing, heaps of people won gifts, and kudos again to the organisers. Drinking black vodka, aka Salmiakki that Monty brought, was definitely a treat for those who rocked up to the reception.

Dinner at Kyotatsu (best viewed large)

We went to Kyotatsu twice. Once with the extended MySQL Japanese Community. And once with just mostly MySQLers. We were introduced to crab bowels, something I really like (and might be Kaj’s new favourite dish too) - if only I find it easily in Melbourne. Note that the community dinner was amazing - I think spread amongst three folk, there were no less than ten MySQL books written in Japanese by them. The collective intelligence on that table, was just astounding. Hacking while there, was not a big deal for Tomita-san, famous for the MySQL/Ruby connector.

Pouring sake (view it large)

A truly different experience, as you pour more than required in the glass, and then drink from the square bottomed bit, like a coaster.

I’m pretty much done with my Japanese photo-set, so look at the MySQL Users Conference Japan (UC-J) 2007 set. To see what you missed. To be there next year. To be at a similar event, in Santa Clara, notably the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

Technorati Tags: mysql, tokyo, japan, uc-j, uc-j2007, photos, miraikan, sake, community

Its been a while since I last blogged. I’ve shifted through many countries now, since my post on UC-J Day 1. Since then, I’ve updated the set, and there are way more photos, even from Day 2. Day 2 photos are more interesting, because I bothered to take my 70-200/2.8 lens with me (no monopod though, so I bumped up the ISO for stability).

Basically, day 2 went on well, with a little less attendees in comparison to day 1, thanks to the horrendous weather. Most of us took cabs, but some brave souls got an umbrella and walked. Heh. Pictures from many sushi dinners should also make their way online soon. There was a very nice reception later on in the evening, with lots of people winning prizes and so on.

The general consensus from all the attendees is that they found the MySQL User Conference Japan, very useful, and from what I gather this will be a yearly affair, so there’s no one else to thank, besides MySQL KK for organising this great event. Big shouts out to Yoko-san, Daniel, and Larry.

Lachlan, talking to a new support guy and visitor to the booth

Marten, on the panel

Brian, on the panel

Kaj, with a hSenid doll

Technorati Tags: mysql tokyo japan uc-j uc-j2007 photos lachlan marten brian kaj

In this modern Web-based world, I figure I should try and keep things, well, really, up-to-date as quickly as possible. For those of you not in Japan, I do hope the pictures of the UC-J interest (and tempt) you… The master set: MySQL Users Conference Japan (UC-J) 2007.

Some quick snippets follow. I’ve tagged them uc-j (flickr should treat it as “ucj”) as well as uc-j2007 (because, this may be the first, but it’s definitely not the last!).

Mats, Mr. Ruby

Big, big, crowd. Room holds 600. 1,200 registered. Standing room!

Jimmy, Mr. Carrier Grade Cluster

Marten, Disruptor Extraordinaire, giving the State of the Nation

Technorati Tags: mysql tokyo japan uc-j uc-j2007 photos mats ruby jimmy marten

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.

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

Here are some random thoughts, notes, observations, etc.

Jay Pipes - he made the conference possible

• Friendster uses Bugzilla internally. Yes they’re still alive, even though MySpace and so forth are around and kicking. Had to Google them (I wanted to find their old talk about their storage engine), and found MySQL Customers - Friendster, instead. From 2005, Dathan’s (now at Flickr) presentation. Never did find the storage engine stuff, beyond random bits in the press.
• Probably the best blog post that hit Planet MySQL, as opposed to the session summaries and so on, comes from Alexy Kovyrin. I quote: “P.S. Just remembered - I saw some women-DBAs today! Really smart girls! I never thought that pretty girl can become such great IT prefessional and now I know - I was really wrong.” Maybe we’ll have the MySQL-Women group, following on the LinuxChix.
• While Adam Donnison from the web team at MySQL gave his talk, I noticed Planet MySQL go down. Looks like the rest of the folk in his talk did too, and Jan Lehnardt says it best in Oh Irony!
• DorsalSource. Congratulations Jeremy Cole, and Solid. I am highly impressed with all the available binaries, from a trusted source. We’ve got the RHEL vs. Fedora vs. CentOS split now :-) (sure, building MySQL isn’t rocket science, as opposed to rebuilding an entire distribution, but consider DorsalSource+patches to be like the kbs-CentOS-Extras repository)
• Microsoft is also wanting to sleep with MySQL, these days. Must be a promiscious world we’re living in (they probably got jealous with IBM/DB2 already being in bed with MySQL). Read The Beautiful Game, and of course MySQL on Windows: A Beautiful Game. I expect this isn’t one off (Port25, Microsoft’s open source effort, has had a lot of open source database articles in recent times).

Some of my photos from the MySQL Conference & Expo - 26 April, 27 April. I wish I had more time & energy (& inspiration) to take more photos. Lenz Grimmer took some of the photos at dinner, as he was taken away by the 50/f1.4 lens and no usage of the magic flash (in fact, I didn’t even bring my external flash unit for the trip).

Mr. Eventum - at the hotel, while we all wound down

Dinner with some of the community members was fun, as always. Next year, more community members should stick around and we should all eat, meet and greet. The Fish Market has got good seafood (save for their lobster, which comes from… Australia. Not something I’d want!)

I was afraid, I thought he’d eat the power squid!