Colin Charles Agenda

Tonight, One Buck Short, will be on Channel V, AMP. Its a 30 minute show, on the 24th of June 2008, at 8pm. ASTRO carries Channel V (and if you’re not in Malaysia, its on various networks). Watch them!

I’m excited about One Buck Short. Its a band I tend to track, and photograph when the opportunity arises. I have sets, from 2005 when there were at Celcom/8TV Homegrown, and in 2007 when they were at JamAsia’s re-opening. I have photos from their launch that still require processing, so expect them to arrive online soon enough.

I’ve been on what I consider, a blogging break. In reality, I’ve been working, and then having a modicum of a social life, finding less and less time to write blog entries. I have morsels of half-baked ramblings saved, so expect a load of posts to show up soon…

luna:toblog ccharles$ ls |wc -l
29

For a comeback…

I have been checking in my photographic equipment. I already carry a backpack with 2 laptops and various other tech gear (it probably weighs in at around 10KG, which airlines can frown at). Of late, I’ve also started carrying a briefcase. Where does my camera gear fit? In checked-in luggage of course!

This can be anywhere in the reigns of 3 Canon bodies, a 30/1.4, 50/1.4, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 17-40/4, and a couple of flash units. Not exactly the cheapest of equipment, as I’m into good glass (read: L).

However, the one place I don’t tend to check equipment in, is when I fly to and from the US. The TSA have a silly rule that says your bags must be unlocked, or else they will break the lock for you. This has naturally led the paranoid me, not want to carry any professional camera gear into the US.

And today, my paranoia proves right. I found out that Matt (Wordpress fame) lost his camera gear, as did another blogger.

Yes, this is on a certain particular American airline, but I wonder if its just baggage handlers that are dishonest with them, or baggage handlers that are dishonest in general? Also note that insurance tends not to pay (afaik, anyway) if your camera equipment or laptop gear is checked-in.

What are options for the technophiles in us, that fly a lot?

I haven’t written much BASH of late, so was a bit rusty. The goal? A script that would go through a directory of JPGs, find those that are portrait shots, and place them in an appropriate folder. Do so similarly for landscapes.

Use cases? Those new digital photo frames. Buy two, and have many images scroll by, eh?

What’s been done?
Making use of ImageMagick’s identify is what needs to be done. You’ll be using the -format option, which normally takes a type or string. A full list of what options are available for -format are available.

The choice is to use -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘. The output of identify -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘ is either:

• 1 - portrait
• 6 - landscape
• 8 - portrait (the way I normally shoot, with the battery grip)

I’ve not seen much documentation about the above, so it seems like these values come from trial and error… They apply for Canon cameras that have EXIF orientation details. I’d be interested to hear from others what values they’re getting (or getting pointed to some documentation).

The shell script?

#!/bin/sh

mkdir portrait
mkdir landscape

for i in *.jpg;
	do
	type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format '%[exif:orientation]' $i)
case $type in
	1)
	mv $i portrait;;
	6)
	mv $i landscape;;
	8)
	mv $i portrait;;
esac
done

Other bits of BASH?
If you do: type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘ $i) , you can grab the value from the command (1, 6, 8) and manipulate it. Check by doing echo $type.

If you’re after getting the return value from a command (i.e. 0 for success, 127 for error, and so on), you can do echo rv: $?.

All in all, remember to read the BashFAQ. Tests and Conditionals was also essential to my reading.

ImageMagick rocks nonetheless. I’ve used it before to resize, append and much more… I’m thinking that maybe its time to read The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick, written by Mikal.

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