Month: October 2004

A Time to Kill

I stood in the DVD club and looked at the cover of “A Time to Kill“. It sounded awfully familiar. It looked even more familiar with Matthew McConaughey, Samuel Jackson, and Sandra Bullock on the cover. It even had a description, but I couldn’t remember it. So I rented the film.

Within a few first shots I recognized it. It is one of my favourite films on two subjects: court and rasism. It is kind of linear and one-sided, but it does deliver the point in a thought provoking manner. It has one of the best casts ever too. Basically, just about every face on the foreground you see in the film is familiar.

This is a good choice of a family movie for educating kids and adults about how all people are born equal, but some are more equal than the others. 10 out of 10 goes to the rating tables from me for the outstanding job.

Picture of the day

Hitachi

I’ve almost paniced when I remembered that I haven’t made a picture today. It was just a few minutes into the new day, and I was all relaxed and resting while watching a movie. I had to find something fast and photograph it without loosing too much time over it.

My quick look around got stuck on the Hitachi label of my fridge. That turned out to be much more fun than I originally expected it to. Firstly, I don’t have any studio lights to play with, so all there is available are one tungsten ugly yellow light from the ceiling of the kitchen and my on-camera flash. With sparkling grey fridge shot set as a measure for camera white balancing and a flash over it, I got an interesting blue light effect. This is totally not how it appears in the kitchen, but it does look pretty cool. The 3D shape of the label and letters on top of it provided for a nice macro subject.

I wanted to postprocess it a bit, but I was so in love with this image that my hands didn’t dare to touch the editor. There are just a couple of things to improve though and maybe I will do it one day. There is an edge of the fridge visible in the upper right corner and there are few dust and reflection particles on the label. I also wanted to slightly sharp the ‘HIT’ part of the brand and slightly blur the ‘ACHI’ letters.

Preview thumbnails in KDE

One of the excellent programs that comes with KDE is Konqueror. Konqueror is a file manager and a web browser. One of the nicest features of Konqueror is autogeneration of preview thumbnails. This helps a lot when dealing with image repositories and photo albums.

When working with a lot of images, one can notice that Konqueror does not generate preview thumbnails for all of them. This is because it hits the limit on the file size set by default. That is easy to correct though. To fix this, start kcontrol, go to KDE Components where you need to select File Manager in which choose the tab marked as Previews & Meta-Data, where you will find a bar marked Maximum file size. For the images coming out of my Digital Rebel I set a 6.5 MBytes limit and it seems to work nicely.

On instant messaging

Pretty often I get complains from certain people that it is impossible to chat with me online in real-time. The thing is, I do use only two protocols for instant messaging: ICQ and IRC.

IRC is by far my favourite one. I like joining a channel or two for a topical discussion. Lately though I’ve been pretty busy and that changed. All I do now is get on the channel with some specific subject, like #perl or #fedora, ask my question, get a set of answers, and leave. Quick help so to speak. IRC is best for real-time discussions, but it needs an agreement on time and place beforehand. If you want to talk, I’ll be all ears.

ICQ is different. ICQ is good for passing a couple of messages back and forward. Also it is pretty indicative about the status of the person – if he or she is open for talk, or busy right now, or totally disconnected from the web. Keeping a serious and time consuing discussion with several people via ICQ is a headache. Also my personal problem with ICQ is that I always forget to switch it on or to switch it off. Popup messages are annoying and distructing, so I switch them off. Taksbar notifications are useless, since my taskbar is a hiding thing. This all makes it pretty difficult to notice when new messages are coming.

Anyway, since I was begged to get online so many times, I ‘ve slightly reconfigured my desktop and I am trying to get used to ICQ. I am using it now for three days in a row. If you don’t want me to quit it once again, now is a good time to message me. My Unique Identification Number (UIN) is 14956994.