Year: 2004

Jersey Girl

After celebrating SysAdmin’s Day with Olga in “Cleopatra” restaurant, we decided to go see a movie. Nothing hot is going on in the cinema recently so we settled for “Jersey Girl” which was poorly advertised, had an average rating, and Ben Affleck in it.

The film turned out to be much better than I expected. It has a rather usual story line with widow guy – a succeding businessman, who has suddenly found himself in a situation where he has to raise a child. The story is not the strong part of the film. All the acting is. First of all, the 10 year old (7 year old in film) Raquel Castro is really amazing. She is by far the most talented child I have seen in the movie. She’s even better than the Sixth Sense boy. Much better. And she is very natural. And she even looks like her movie-mother Jennifer Lopez. They are like a perfect match.

Oh, and yes, there are more stars that just Ben Affleck. There is a short scene with Matt Damon and Will Smith is talked about the whole film. He even shows up breifly in the end.

Overall it is a really nice film (nice as in 7 out of 10) with a bit mild swearing (a$$, sh!t, and stuff… no “f” word).

Happy System Administrator Day!

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Hooray! Today is the last Friday of July, which means it’s the SysAdmin day again. Congratulations go to all the system, network, database, mail, web, etc administrators. May you get all the appreciation from the users. Go on, get drunk and celebrate well today – we all deserved it!

If you have been living in the cave for the last few years and don’t have a slightest idea, then get youself properly informed here.

Comment control owns

One of the greatest things about Nucleus CMS is the number of available plugins. And one of the best plugins available is Comment Control. With a simple interface I as an administrator of the site can either Allow or Deny each and every comment made by unregistered users. Usually, I of course Allow them. Today though I’ve been under SPAM attack. Some script added lots of comments to different posts in here with links to pornish sites and other crap. All of these comments ended up in the approval interface and, of course, were thrown away. Regular users didn’t even have to start swearing. Viva la Comment Control! :)

Interior shooting

Because I have the coolest camera around, I have been asked to make few pictures for the office. The pictures were supposed to show some advanced technological achievements in our boss’s house. This came to as an excellent photo opprotunity, so I agreed immidiately.

The first thing to do, I thought, was to talk to someone who will be using the resulting images. That happened to be our designer. He explained to me that there are few ideas floating in the air about some kind of booklet, which should show all the advanced technology Thunderworx can deliver, install, configure and maintain in the comfortable house. After talking to him some more, I arrived to the following conclusions:

  • Images will be used for printed media. That means I should finally test that RAW format to save what is savable.
  • It is pretty dark inside (he showed me few pictures taken before by someone else). Easy, I thought, I’ll go for the tripod and will see.
  • Pictures should have a point and hopefully a mood, not just a factual representations of the systems installed.

And so I went to the place. I was thinking that I have everything I need with me (Canon 300D, 18-55mm kit lens, tripod, a couple of charged batteries and all the storage I needed). 5 minutes after I arrived I realised that things are not exactly as easy as I was imagining them.

The first problem was light. All the technology is installed in few large rooms with a whole lot of windows. Some of these windows could be shuttered and curtained and some not. Open windows were giving a lot of reflections and unhealthy blueish colors. Trying to overlap it with electrical light turned out to be impossible, since their were many many small bulbs which were not producing any light at all. It was pretty dark. Not to worry I said and set up the tripod. 25 and 30 seconds shutter speeds while having all the lights on and bright daylight coming from the windows were a bit surprising. Trying to add some more light I tried to use an on-camera built-in flash diffusing it with Pringles white cover. Inventive, but didn’t help too much.

The second problem was mobility. I thought that if I cannot bring the light to the subjects, I will bring the subjects to light. Boom. Wrong. None of the subjects were movable. I had to shoot nicely done racks built into the walls and a couple of digital pads, which were pretty much wired to the place where they were installed. To add insult to injury, smaller subjects didn’t have enough space around them to properly install a tripod. So I played crouching tiger a bit to get used to it. When I started to get a hang of it, I discovered…

…the third problem – subjects. :) The purpose of the shooting was to demonstrate how nicely technology is incorporated into the house. And the strongest point of that particular technology is to be present everywhere and to be invisible in the same time. Racks are hidden in the walls, numerous remotes are replaced with a single digital pad, etc. Trying to photograph something that is supposed to be invisible is a bit, well, tricky.

After few hours I was pretty sure that I did everything I could and there is nothing else to be done. So I headed to the office, where I was about to find yet another problem. Software CDs that came with my Digital Rebel are hidden somewhere in the darkest part of house and nothing else is capable of reading and displaying RAW files. Internet should save they say, so I went for a search for some tool. Googling for few minutes showed that there are half a million options for a Windows RAW software but it is all commercial or very limited shareware. So much for the designer doing the adjustment work. Search for Linux tools immidiately turned out with a free and open source program called dcraw. It is very well documented and compiles nicely. It also converts RAW files into PPM. PPMs are then easily converted to TIFFs which were given to the designer.

The result is that there isn’t actually much to use. We will go over them tomorrow once again and we will see if there is anything worth shooting. If there is, we will go back and reshoot properly composed and lighted subjects. Until then…

P.S.: Unfortunately (or fortunately should I say) I cannot upload these images for your viewing pleasure (digust?) since they are pretty much company confidential. :)