Year: 2004

Zivania Symposium in Nicosia

There is a rumor going around that there will be Zivania Symposium next Friday (22 October 2004) in Nicosia, Cyprus. If anyone knows anything, please let me know via comments or an email so that I could share it with the rest of the world.

I am particularly interested in how this symposium will be organized and what will be in there. Will it be just a set of top management talking about lega regulations? Or will there be a tasting session? Music and food? And stuff like this. Also some information on exact location would be much appreciated.

Updated (18 Oct 2004, 20:15): Place: Town Hall Gardens, Eleftheria Square, Nicosia, Cyprus. Time: 19:00. Thanks to Vips U.

Nicosia Municipality website

It is always nice to know that some government bodies are capable of doing something useful with the Internet. This time I was surprised with the website of Nicosia Municipality, which has a nice design and is functional in Firefox.

They have placed a whole bunch of information up there, including the history of Nicosia, Municipality plans, taxes, and civil marriage proceedings. What they lack (or hide really well) is the information about upcoming events organized by Municipality and/or other parties.

Picture of the day

Sunrise

Sunrise is about the only chance I have to think about the shot while having the camera in my hands at those days that I work until 7:00am in the NOC. Most sunrises are very atmospheric, but I still fail to bring the atmosphere into the image. But practice makes perfect they say.

Yet another sunrise picture here. I have also worked on it in Gimp for a bit. Mostly I did leveling, removal of dust particles (I do need to clean my sensor), and USMing the sun. Finally, it doesn’t look that much more different from the original, but there are less critique points non-the-less.

No processing vs. Postprocessing: Postprocessing wins

Ok, I’ve finally made my mind. I will postprocess images before posting them. I will not postprocess all of them, just those that I think that will benefit greatly from doing so. I have lots of pictures, and I don’t think that I will have time nor will to work at each and every one of them.

Just so that you know how much of it I will do, here is an example. On the left is the picture of the car from Troodos Rally 2004 before any processing, straight out of the camera (resized only for web). On the right is the picture of the car, which I think looks much better and was worth the effort.

Thought of the day

At 4:00am most of the Linux (and UNIX for that matter) machines start executing a bunch of scripts that clean up temporary files, update file databases, and all sorts of other maintainence work. For those, who know, I am talking about cron daemon. Obviously, such a heap of activity increases the power consumption of each individual computer and thus can be monitored by the electricity authority. And probably it is. The useful thing here is that this monitoring can be used for estimating the number of Linux/UNIX machines in the geographical area, such as a region, city, or, even, a country.