Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek Stuff, General, Politics

Blog Attack on Steele Decried

Blog Attack on Steele Decried

A part of this article grabbed my attention:

Other liberal bloggers defended Gilliard and took after Kaine for pulling his ad. Markos Moulitsas, editor of the blog Daily Kos, said that advertisers should expect edgy content and that Kaine’s actions could threaten their editorial independence.

“I don’t want bloggers to be afraid to say things because they don’t want to offend an advertisers,” Moulitsas said.

If bloggers accept advertisers then their content should always be suspect. Not only for what they don’t say to avoid offending their financial base but, also, for what they do say to impress their financial base.

Will the fierce, independent blogger moderate their comments to keep their audience sending them money? who knows? Who cares? It is just appearances.

Geek Stuff, Photography

Why the full size (35mm) solid-state imaging sensor will be a pipe dream.

Erwins Home

I found this site while looking for info on 35mm sized sensors. (See the post below). I don’t know if I agree with his argument. The SLR lenses if have for my camera are designed to project an in-focus image onto the film plane of my camera, whether analog or digital. if the silver halide crystals or digital pixels capture that information with the desired detail then I have captured my image.

I know that analog film can capture a much denser amount of light than a digital sensor. The example used inthe article is that a 35mm neagtive is equivalent to 22Mpixels, which is equivalent to 25.5K P/sq mm.

Hmm. That’s pretty close to the 20D and XT densities. Of course those chips have much less area than a 35 mm frame.

I found it an interesting article to read. Beware of people who warn of pipe dreams.

Geek Stuff, General, Photography

Canon EOS 5D Hands-on Preview: Digital Photography Review

Canon EOS 5D Hands-on Preview: Digital Photography Review

Oh, they are making this so difficult for me. I really want to upgrade to a digital SLR. I already have a Canon EOS film camera with lenses, so I want to get a Canon D-SLR. They are generally reviewed as the best ones out there. Nikon can match some Picture Quality measures, but when you have the excellent lenses that both companies produce, that should be expected.

So, I started by looking at the Canon 10D which has been replaced by the 20D, with even better features. The 20D runs about $1500.

The Canon Rebel XT is running less than $1000. It has a lot of the features of the 20D, but, it has a plastic case. I am leery of plastic cases since I know how rough I can be on cameras while scrambling around looking for the perfect shot.

The one problem with the 20D and the XT is that their sensors are smaller than a 35mm film frame. This means that the sensor will only capture the inner two-thirds of the image seen in the view finder. The outer portions of the image, when the shutter opens, won’t be on the sensor and won’t be captured. I am sure that is something I can adjust to and, with the lenses I have, I can compensate to ensure that the portion of the image I want will be in the area that the sensor will capture. But, it is a waste.

The 5D has an image sensor that is the same size as a 35mm frame, so that 1.6 FOV (field of view) crop isn’t a factor. This is what I want. Unfortunately, the 5D runs about $3300

What to do? what to do? Starting with the 20D, costing $500-$600 more than the XT, seems like a bad starting move, especially if I want to go to the 5D as soon as possible.

Christmas is coming soon, I have to decide.

The 20D and XT have 8.2 and 8.0 M pixel chips, respectively, and the 5D has a 12.8 M Pixel chip. (Although I haven’t really seen anything on the effect of pixel density on the quality since:

the 5D has 14.8K Pixels/sq mm
the 20D has 24K Pixels/sq mm
the XT has 24K Pixels/sq mm

which implies, to me, that the 5D will be more lossy and lesser quality than the other two, especially if you were blowing up the middle of the image.) But I don’t know how many Pixels/sq mm are considered good enough to blow up a digital image into a wall poster, or 16×11 print. Maybe I should start with the XT and wait until the 5D gets its P/sq mm number up to the 25K range.

I just checked the ultimate, top of the line, Canon EOS, the 1Ds Mark II, and see that its P/sq mm number is 19.2K. The 1Ds is a 16Mpixel camera, with a 35mm equivalent sensor, in the $8K range. It is for the pros.

So maybe 24K P/sq mm is overkill, or maybe the 1Ds is obsolete. It’s over a year old now.

Geek Stuff

Lessons Learned

I think I am in the process of learning a lesson with Web Gallery. Rather than putting the entire trip into one gallery, I should have divided it up into St Andrews-tourist, St Andrews-Golf, London, Worldcon, and Scotland-non-Worldcon. The time it takes to update the entire Gallery when I make changes to just a bit is very long. I think it is examining every single page whether it has new content or not.

I think the next lesson I learn will be that I can’t split an existing gallery in 5-6 smaller ones. I will look into that when the latest changes have finished publishing.

Geek Stuff

Hackers Attack Via Chinese Web Sites

Hackers Attack Via Chinese Web Sites

I really have to wonder who is in charge. Why is the DoD internet access accepting any traffic from a Chinese site, hacker or legit, or a Russian site or a German site or a Nigerian site. It is public knowledge where the adddresses are registered and assigned. .

We know, from the IP address and the address registry, where the message is coming. If there is any sort of question about the access request, it should be denied or ignored.

There is nothing that says a server has to respond to every query it receives and it is perfectly fine for the server to reject requests that are problematic. They could even set up a white list of legitimate servers that won’t be rejected.

There are a lot of options other than letting the hackers in the front door.

Geek Stuff, General, Reviews, travel

Web Gallery

As some may have seen, I have put photos from my recent Scottish Trip on the web using Web Gallery Mate. I have been exploring the various features for creating the Gallery, organizing channels of common subject matter, and trying to provide cryptic descriptive commentary on the individual pictures.

I came back with almost 1000 photos in 3 1/2 weeks. I really need to get a digital camera.

Suffice it to say, I have not finished scanning in all the pictures I took and I am not likely to enter them all into the Gallery and am even less likely to comment on all that are entered. But I hope that a bunch of pictures of the flowers in a Garden don’t need individual commentary, especially since I don’t know what they all are.

One feature I have found is that if you click on a photo in a channel (Like the St Andrews Gardens) the picture opens up in a web page and there are buttons for advancing to the next or previous picture. There is also an up button and if you click on that, it starts a slide show of all the pictures in that channel. Neat. And you can set the time that each picture is displayed.

I still need to work on arranging pictures within a channel to have a flow.

Now I need to go back to my previous travel commentary and link bits to pictures as reference.

fandom, Geek Stuff, General, golf, science fiction, travel

The Scottish Trip

I have created a Web Gallery of some of the pictures I took on my recent trip to Scotland. You can find it here.

I am still experimenting with what I can do with Web Gallery Mate and I haven’t scanned in all the photos yet. So, if you find a link that has no pictures, just go back and try another. I tried to keep the ‘big’ pictures to less than 100 kB i.e they aren’t as big as I could have made them. If you would like a bigger copy of a particular photo, let me know and I can scan in the negative at 2400 dpi. (That’s big, ~ 1 MB per photo.)