The Author – Bart Busschots
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Dec
11
Night Time Photography – Another Reason to Go Fast Fixed Focus
Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment
When I recently purchased a 30mm F1.4 fixed focus lens I explained my reasons for doing so while reviewing the lens. Today I realised I left out yet another reason to add a fast fixed-focus lens to your collection. Because fast lenses gather insane amounts of light you can shoot hand-held at night and actually get good results. I did manage to get some night time images before using the standard 18-55mm zoom that comes as part of the Nikon D40 kit, but that was really working at the limit (see the results here). Because that lens is quite slow at F3.5-5.6 I had to crank the ISO up to 1600 and even then the exposure times were still very high. This resulted in images that were grainy and a lot had to be junked because they were blurred to a greater or lesser extent.
On my way home from work this evening I had a go at some night time photography with my new F1.4 lens. It was such a nice experience! With the ISO turned down to 800 I could easily take hand held shots that look pretty good.
You can see the results of my work in this gallery.
Dec
11
A Simple Solution to Climate Change – Stop Digging Up Fossil Fuels
Filed Under Science & Astronomy | Leave a Comment
While making my way through my RSS feeds this lunch time I came across a very well written but very disturbing article entitled Rigged by George Monbiot. It basically makes a mockery of the current attempts by governments to deal with climate change. On the one hand they talk about the need to cut carbon and tell us all to cut down and be more efficient but on the other hand they offer massive tax incentives to companies to encourage them to extract more fossil fuels. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that all fossil fuels that are extracted will be burned, hence the governments talk about reducing carbon but actually incentivise its increase! What really makes this article so damming is that the author backs up all his points with references. The way this article is referenced it could be published in an academic journal. Anyhow, as Fake Steve Jobs would put it, here’s the money quote:
The government’s climate change policy works like this: extract every last drop of fossil fuel then pray to God that no one uses it.
[tags]Climate Change, Fossil Fuels[/tags]
Dec
11
Sure, it may be the size of a fridge and have the computing power of a pocket calculator, but there are still things you can use DEC Alpha Server 2100’s for. For example, they make great Christmas Tree stands in systems departments 🙂
Dec
10
Leopard 10.5.1 Appears to have Broken My Epson Scanner
Filed Under Computers & Tech | Leave a Comment
In one of my early Leopard posts I was happy to report that my Epson scanner was working perfectly. However, yesterday when I went to scan it wouldn’t work. It kept telling me there was an error communicating with the scanner. I checked the connections and all seemed normal. The only real change there has been on the system since the last time the scanner was used was the update to 10.5.1. I can only conclude that that’s what broke it.
Regardless of who is to blame I did eventually find a solution. First, go to the Epson site and download and install the latest drivers for your scanner, the description should explicitly say that it supports Leopard. Then reboot. It doesn’t tell you to but I couldn’t get the scanner back into life without a reboot. At this stage I found that the Epson Scan utility wouldn’t even launch. However, the TWAIN drivers themselves do work so you can scan using Preview.app. I’d never used Preview to scan before and I have to say I’m impressed with the interface. You can scan from within Preview by going to File -> Import Image ....
I have to say I’m a little disappointed with Apple over this, 10.5.1 was supposed to fix things, not break them!
[tags]Hardware, Scanner, Apple, OS X, Leopard, Epson[/tags]
Dec
10
Amazingly comet 17/P Holmes is still visible to the naked eye under good conditions. When it flared up way back in October no one dared predict it would remain visible for more than a week or two. The comet has changed a lot in appearance over the last month and a half though. It started out looking like a star and is not a massive and very diffuse blob which appears as big as, if not bigger than, the Moon. This new defuse character means that the comet is rendered invisible by any Moon light, haze or high cloud. Having said that I did manage to glimpse it last night from my back garden in Maynooth so it can stand a little light pollution when it is very high up in the sky (it was nearly over head when I observed it last night). I can’t imagine this fascinating comet will still be visible one Moon cycle from now so make the most of the next few days to grab it before the Moon comes in to spoil the fun again, and probably for good this time!
[tags]Comet, 17/p Holmes[/tags]
Dec
9
Accessing Auto Increment Values from PostgreSQL with Java
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech | 7 Comments
It’s not uncommon that as part of a complex transaction you need to insert a row into a table with an auto-incrementing primary key and then use the key from the row you just generated as a foreign key in another insert within the same transaction. Java provides a mechanism to return the auto-generated keys from an insert query without the need to execute a second query by means of the function java.sql.Statement.getGeneratedKeys(). Unfortunately the PostgreSQL JDBC connector does not appear to support this feature (at least the version I am using does not). Given the fact that we do not have this functionality available to us when using a PostgreSQL database we need to use a separate query to retreive the value of the key we just generated. It goes without saying that we need to do this two-step process as part of a transaction but it may not go without saying that the correct way to extract the value for the key is by querying the sequence that the key is being generated from and not by querying the table directly. It is true that most of the time the highest value of the incrementing variable will be the value just inserted but that is not a guarantee.
Dec
8
Two New Toys
Filed Under Computers & Tech | 1 Comment
It’s been a while since that last time I got some new hardware, I think my iPod Touch was the last bit of new tech I’d gotten before this week. So, this week I made up for lost time and got myself new network printer and a new USB headset. I have to say I’m very happy with both, they just worked, no drivers, no messing. Actual, genuine, plug and play. Oh, and I was testing these on Leopard.
[tags]Apple, OS X, HP, Logitech[/tags]
Dec
8
Breaking News – Astronomers Have Sense of Humour (and can sing)
Filed Under Science & Astronomy | 2 Comments
Contrary to popular belief Astronomers do in fact have a sense of humour! I have below incontrovertible evidence! Oh … and they can also sing pretty bloody well!
Dec
6
Note: This articles was written for, and first published in, the NUI Maynooth student news paper The Maynooth Advocate.
With the recent Eircom controversy the security of our home networks has at last come to the attention of the press. That attention has focused mainly on one particular flaw in Eircom wireless routers but all broadband users could do with giving their broadband connection a quick security once-over.
Dec
5
More QuickLook Goodies
Filed Under Computers & Tech | Leave a Comment
I’ve already posted about two third party QuikLook generators (QLEnscript & Folder QuickLook Plugin) that I’ve come across and like. Today I have another one to add to that list, BetterZipQL. As its name suggests this generator is released by the people behind BetterZip. It’s completely free and doesn’t require BetterZip to be installed to work. The download and buy buttons on the top right of that page are NOT for the QuikLook generator but for the actual BetterZip program. The link to download it is in the text of the article just be low the screen shot. As you’ve probably guessed this generator allows you to see the contents of a wide variety of archive file formats using QuickLook.
On a related note, there is now a 1.0 version of QLEnscript available.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, QuickLook[/tags]