I've had lots of issues
with NTP over the years,
and more and more I'm giving up on running the ntpd daemon: it seems too fussy. Poor
timekeeping hardware is a fact of life, and we've had issues with UNIX timekeeping
accuracy—without NTP—for as long as I can remember. Some months ago I stopped
using ntpd on my external machine, which is a virtual machine. Instead I
run ntpdate at regular intervals; it's not nearly as fussy.
Recently I have been seeing similar problems on cvr2.lemis.com, my computer video
recorder. I did the same thing there, except that, at least for the moment, I'm displaying
the output of ntpdate. It suggests that the clock gains about 2 ms per minute:
1 Aug 08:46:32 ntpdate[1815]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002139 sec
1 Aug 08:47:32 ntpdate[1817]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002128 sec
1 Aug 08:48:32 ntpdate[1819]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002131 sec
1 Aug 08:49:32 ntpdate[1821]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002129 sec
1 Aug 08:50:32 ntpdate[1823]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002129 sec
1 Aug 08:51:32 ntpdate[1825]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002130 sec
But sometimes that's not the case. This is getting the time from dereel.lemis.com,
on the same network, which is synchronized to four external servers. This example continued
this morning with:
1 Aug 08:52:32 ntpdate[1827]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 08:53:33 ntpdate[1829]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 08:54:33 ntpdate[1831]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 08:55:33 ntpdate[1949]: no server suitable for synchronization found
=== root@cvr2 (/dev/pts/1) /recordings 46 -> ntpdate dereel 1 Aug 08:56:10 ntpdate[1951]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.150021 sec
=== root@cvr2 (/dev/pts/1) /recordings 47 -> 1 Aug 08:56:33 ntpdate[1952]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.140502 sec
1 Aug 08:57:33 ntpdate[1954]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.115489 sec
1 Aug 08:58:33 ntpdate[1957]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.090361 sec
1 Aug 08:59:33 ntpdate[1959]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.065123 sec
1 Aug 09:00:33 ntpdate[1961]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.039789 sec
1 Aug 09:01:33 ntpdate[1963]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.014346 sec
1 Aug 09:02:33 ntpdate[1965]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset 0.002806 sec
1 Aug 09:03:34 ntpdate[1967]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.006571 sec
1 Aug 09:04:34 ntpdate[1969]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.001989 sec
1 Aug 09:05:34 ntpdate[2092]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.004155 sec
What was that all about? When I entered the same command manually, it worked. Looking
back, I see that the same thing happened in the middle of the night:
1 Aug 00:16:39 ntpdate[23671]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002305 sec
1 Aug 00:17:39 ntpdate[23790]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:18:39 ntpdate[23792]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:19:39 ntpdate[23794]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:20:39 ntpdate[23796]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:21:39 ntpdate[23798]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:22:39 ntpdate[23800]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:23:40 ntpdate[23802]: no server suitable for synchronization found
1 Aug 00:24:40 ntpdate[23804]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.165361 sec
1 Aug 00:25:40 ntpdate[23922]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.139640 sec
1 Aug 00:26:40 ntpdate[23924]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.114256 sec
1 Aug 00:27:40 ntpdate[23926]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.088778 sec
1 Aug 00:28:40 ntpdate[23928]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.063217 sec
1 Aug 00:29:40 ntpdate[23930]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.037558 sec
1 Aug 00:30:40 ntpdate[23945]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.011177 sec
1 Aug 00:31:40 ntpdate[23947]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset 0.003465 sec
1 Aug 00:32:40 ntpdate[23949]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.003604 sec
1 Aug 00:33:41 ntpdate[23951]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset 0.000072 sec
1 Aug 00:34:41 ntpdate[23953]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.001847 sec
1 Aug 00:35:41 ntpdate[24071]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.001476 sec
1 Aug 00:36:41 ntpdate[24073]: adjust time server 192.109.197.135 offset -0.002038 sec
Initially I thought that it might be related to the activity on cvr2, but there's no
clear correlation. On Peter Jeremy's suggestion, started logging information
from dereel's ntpd. We'll take another look tomorrow.
Today was the first of the month, involving a complete backup of my systems.
For dereel, that involves running dump and tar, piping the result
through pbzip2 and writing to a disk on another system. pbzip2 is a parallel
process that uses all available processors, and it manages to max out my 4 processor system.
Today, not for the first time, the UPS started screaming “overload”. I don't
think that's the case: I suspect it's not prepared to deliver the same power that it once
did.
Not really an issue: over a month ago I bought new
UPSs, including one for dereel, but “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”,
since it involved taking down the system. Today it was clearly broke, so I swapped the
“850 VA” 500 W UPS for the new “1850 VA” unit, which I think means
1000 W. The VA ratings are just plain lies: they assume a cos φ of 0.6, which implies
big electrical motors. But on the new machine I read “Not to be used with fluorescent
tubes or non-computer peripherals”. It's not clear what a “non-computer
peripheral” is, but it's equally clear that the UPS is designed for computer power
supplies, which are required to have a cos φ of above 0.95. So at best the 1 kW UPS can
supply about 1050 VA.
On reboot, noted a console message:
Aug 1 11:07:37 dereel kernel: WARNING: /dump was not properly dismounted
That's a disk that I use for dumps from other machines. Some time ago, when I was having
problems with the system, I disabled automatic fsck for the disk, which doesn't
really do any harm: soft updates were enabled, so I could still use the drive. But clearly
it was a good idea to run fsck, so I did.
I wasn't quite prepared for the result: it found what appeared to be over a million lost
files, overflowed lost+found and ran for over an hour. The contents
of lost+found showed files that must have come from an older incarnation
of /dump:
/dump/lost+found/#0762030/Minimalist-wide/buttons/.svn/text-base:
total 1
-r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 8438 Mar 10 2007 DVD_PLAY.png.svn-base
-r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 6086 Mar 10 2007 DVD_PLAY_off.png.svn-base
-r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 6409 Mar 10 2007 DVD_RIP.png.svn-base
Most of them
seemed svn-related. I wonder
where they came from. At the end of the hour, the file system looked pretty much the same:
the files were all relatively small, and the file system is 250 GB in size.
While waiting for that to happen, and in preparation for potential problems, connected up
the ALDI 1 TB disk that Yvonne bought on Thursday. It appears to be a Seagate drive:
Aug 1 15:22:56 teevee kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Aug 1 15:22:56 teevee kernel: da0: <ST310005 28AS > Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
Aug 1 15:22:56 teevee kernel: da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
Aug 1 15:22:56 teevee kernel: da0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121601C)
It also has an eSATA interface, which could
potentially be interesting, but currently I have nothing to drive it with. All in all a
good buy for $79—the drive I bought from MSYin June didn't have eSATA, and it cost $15 more
The days are getting longer, and there are indications that winter is coming to an end, but
not as quickly as I would like. Today the weather was noticeably cooler, and we got much
more rain than we're used to. So didn't do much outside apart from a bit of pruning,
planting some cuttings of Iceberg roses in the process. I really should finish the
greenhouse.
This camera has a clip-on light meter on top: the SV itself had no electronics whatsoever.
I've had a number of cameras since then, and I
still have a Pentax Spotmatic.
But one thing I don't have is a macro lens that works with bellows and other extensions. I
have a Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro, but it only extends to 1:2 magnification, and the
only way to extend it further is with the Olympus EX-25 extension tube,
which costs an arm and a leg and only extends to 1:1. I can't use it with anything else
because it doesn't have an aperture ring, and the only way to set the aperture is via the
camera electronics. I've discovered that you can set the aperture like that, power off the
camera, remove the lens, and the aperture will stay at that setting. But that's of little
practical utility, and it mars a lens that I find otherwise superb.
I've also tried taking extreme close-ups with the 50 mm f/1.4 Super-Takumar that belongs to my Spotmatic. Unfortunately, the results aren't very good. The lens is
designed for normal focal lengths, and there are a couple of trade-offs to get the wide
aperture. But the Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4 has a very good reputation, and the old ones extend to 1:1.
Interestingly, the newer ones don't: they had an “automatic” aperture (normally full open,
but stops down when the shutter is released and opens again afterwards). This seems to have
been difficult to achieve with a focusing system that extends the lens by fully 50 mm, so
they limited it to 35 mm, giving only 1:2 magnification. Since I can't use the automatic
diaphragm with my Olympus
E-30, it has no advantage for me.
But is this lens so good? The Olympus has 11 elements, including one with “extreme
dispersion” (dark green):
By contrast, the Macro-Takumar is basically
a Tessar design with only 4 elements:
So I didn't want to invest too much money in such a lens. But the few that come on the
market command surprisingly high prices, typically in the order of $150, about a third of
what I paid for my Olympus macro lens. I've been looking for some time, and finally I found
one on eBay—with a Pentax SV. Despite
that, I got it for $50, less than half the normal going price for the lens alone or for the
EX-25 extension tube. I suspect that was because the vendor got the details wrong: he wrote
55 mm f/4 instead of 50 mm f/4. Apart from the fact that there never was a 55 mm macro
lens, the photos make it very clear:
Amusingly, these photos (which included EXIF information) were taken on a day where I took photos of equipment for doing exactly the kind of macro photography I'm talking about. As I
wrote:
All I need now is a real macro lens.
So now I'll get the same camera again that I bought 45 years ago. I wonder if I should keep
it for sentimental value, or sell it again.
More investigation of
my NTP problems today. As
I suspected, NTP does not appear to be robust enough for my satellite IP environment, as the
following graph shows:
Both delay and offset increase until they go off the scale and ntpd performs a step
change. After the change, it answers any request with the error status
“unsynchronized”; it takes several minutes to recover. Thus the problem. I
don't suppose there's much I can do about it until I get a real Internet connection.
We're supposed to be in the middle of a decade-long drought, but I haven't seen that the
rainfall in recent years has been significantly lower than historical values. The
annual summary for 2009, the hottest year on record shows that Ballarat had 553 mm
rain instead of the normal 693 mm (elsewhere they claim it's 690 mm), but many other places in the area, notably south and west of
here, had much higher than usual
rainfall. Port Fairy had 868 mm
compared to the average of 664 mm, 30% more than usual. We don't have records
for Dereel, but until the end of July this yearBallarat has been closer the historical
average: 345 mm instead of 369. That was before the last weekend, where we had 42.2 mm in
Ballarat and 33.7 mm here. So no work in the garden. The pond even has water in it,
despite the porosity of the soil:
Somehow I'm not getting the big things in the garden finished. I need help from CJ to put
up the wind breaks, and I need to borrow his tin snips to make the glass clips for the
greenhouse. I could have worked on the pond, except there's still water in it. So did a
bit of weeding and pruning; the salvias
and osteospermums in the bed to the
south of the verandah have grown amazingly. In the meantime, Yvonne started preparing new pots for the spring.
We also have to prepare for the new vegetable garden: there were
two Lilly Pillys in the area, and I
transplanted one. I'm not sure it's going to survive: it had a long tap root which I
severed. Many Eucalyptus have a
similar root structure, and I know that they can't be transplanted. So I'll wait to see
what happens before I transplant the other.
The coming election is interesting because of the complete lack of interest that the
candidates for prime minster arouse.
As Laurie Oakes put it, they're
political pygmies.
And what about the Internet? Labor gives with
one hand—the National Broadband Network—and takes away with the
other—Stephen Conroy's
idiotic network filter. But we don't get the benefits of the NBN, which seems to think that
satellite communications are an appropriate technology for outlying regions. All we've
heard from the Liberals is that they would
scrap the NBN.
So, I idly thought, what does this say about the use of computers in the parties? I took a
look at the candidates and the technology behind their mail and web sites. The AEC has published a list of candidates for the electorate of
Corangamite, so I looked more carefully. Presumably they have an option of what
contact information they supply. Some provide addresses, phone numbers and email addresses,
others don't. It even differs between candidates for the same party. It's interesting that
the Australian Labor Party (alp.org.au)
have email addresses @australianlabor.com.au. Why? To make it more difficult to
write? This domain seems to exist only for email. There's
no www.australianlabor.com.au, and it doesn't even have an A record, only MX:
australianlabor.com.au mail exchanger = 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
australianlabor.com.au mail exchanger = 10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
australianlabor.com.au mail exchanger = 10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
australianlabor.com.au mail exchanger = 1 aspmx.l.google.com.
australianlabor.com.au mail exchanger = 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
So Labor uses Google Mail for their email communications. I'm amazed.
Looking at the web sites, the Democrats (who I
thought were dead), the Greens and the Australian Sex Party use
Linux (the Greens used to use FreeBSD; I
wonder why they changed. The Sex Party appears to be hosted in Houston, Texas; most of the
others are at least hosted in Australia. The Liberals and the
Citizens
Electoral Council (interesting only because the Greens put them below the Climate Sceptics on their
how-to-vote card) run Microsoft, as does the Australian Labor Party—now. Until a couple of months ago they were running Linux. From the change of IP
address, it looks like they have changed their hosting arrangements, and they're not
interested enough in the technology to want to determine the software. The Climate Sceptics
are interesting because they have recently changed their web site name from http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/ to http://landshape.org/news/. They, too, are running Linux, apparently in Seattle, USA.
So what does this all mean? It's interesting that, with the exception of the Climate
Sceptics, the smaller parties all use Linux. Maybe it's nothing more than a reflection of
what the web hosting companies are running nowadays. None of the candidates give me the
feeling that they use computers gainfully in their everyday life.
OK, I've had enough fun with Λκουλ. It might have been worth trying to get the wireless
card to work, though I fear it would have meant writing a driver, but basically a resolution
of 1024×600 is just not enough, especially when the web browser reduces the effective height
of the display to 376 pixels. So replaced the original software and packed it up. It'll go
back tomorrow.
The weather was cool and wet again today, so spent most of the day indoors. But we have
plants there too: this succulent I've been observing has disproved my theory that it's
following the light: it has now straightened out again, away from the light, and I suspect
it has grown a couple of centimetres since the last photos. Even the buds at the end are
getting further apart. Ended up propping up the stem on
our Hanukkiyah:
The next step was to attach the bamboo slat screening. I had intended to nail them to the
rails, but the things looked too flimsy, and the slats weren't even all the same length:
No help from the packaging: there's a photo of the screening standing up, but with no
visible means of support. Probably the manufacturer couldn't think of anything either, and
the photo was taken with people holding up the ends. CJ came up with the idea of nailing
them beneath the metal strips that we had used for the verandah, which looks like a good
idea. But we didn't have enough, so I'll have to go and buy some. Another half-finished
job. Then the weather got worse, so I didn't do anything else either.
One of the things that continually puzzles me is how to identify plants. Today it was the
mystery succulent with the long flower stem. Did some searching on the web and really came
up with an identification: it's a
Gasteria carinata var. verrucosa
“variegata”, to give it its full name. Found some reasonably plausible growing recommendations: looks like it shouldn't get any water at the moment, despite the fact that it's
flowering. Other
photos suggest that there's not much more to expect of the flowers: none of them show
the flowers opening. We'll see about that. At the moment the stem is growing over a
millimetre per hour. Put up a glass jar (all I could find) to mark the current position of
the tip:
Wendy McClelland has sent a letter to the editor of the Golden Plains Miner, the local newspaper, making
claims that she must know are untrue: we don't need a tower because the one
in Corindhap will cover us, and we
don't need it for networking anyway because we will soon get “nano-fiber optic
cabling” from the Government. Neither is correct: as the Optus project leader said,
and I mentioned last month, we can't expect much
coverage from that, and we've already confirmed that the National Broadband Network doesn't care
about Dereel.
So why does she make these claims? Is she lying, or just not checking even the most basic
facts? If she makes such claims about things that can easily be shown to be incorrect, why
should anybody believe her when she makes claims that are not so easy to disprove? Wrote my
own letter to the editor. I wonder what
will happen in the mid-term.
For some years now I've been toying with the idea of writing a cookbook for people with a
technical background, tentatively titled “Groggy's high-tech cookbook”. Beyond
thoughts about the material, it hasn't got very far. And now I've been scooped: Jeff Potter
has written “Cooking for
Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food” Took a look at it on Safari. It's certainly not the
book that I would have written, but it's close. Probably one to buy.
At the time we thought it was a possum, but the
droppings make it clear that it's a rat. Piccola is delighted and spends much time in the shed, but she hasn't caught it yet. Yesterday
Yvonne bought a rat trap—out of plastic, which I
thought might be a little too weak. But I wasn't prepared for what I saw this morning:
The rat had somehow tripped the trap without being hit. Not only that: it had eaten
the part of the trap that holds the bait. Here's a comparison with an intact mouse trap of
similar construction:
Last month I wrote letters to Darren Cheeseman and Sarah Henderson, the two main candidates for the
seat of Corangamite,
outlining the concerns that I have with the local infrastructure: network connectivity,
power reliability, bushfire protection, mobile phones and TV reception. Today I got a reply
containing an express prohibition of publishing the contents, so I can't. She only
addressed one of my five points, mobile phones.
Well, that's something, I suppose. But the other four issues were all more important to me
than mobile phone coverage. This response implies that she doesn't care about the others.
So: should I put her ahead of Labor because she replied, or
behind because she doesn't intend to do anything about the real issues?
The sun's shining again, and I forgot to go into town to buy the metal strips for the wind
break, so did some weeding and transplanting. At least one plant,
a Euphorbia “Diamond
Frost”, which we bought some months ago, is already looking very unhappy:
I've already complained about the ABC's
idiotic or politically motivated decision to stop broadcasting high definition TV. But it
seems that's not enough; the standard programme is now 576i, the same resolution as we've
had for 54 years. That would be bad enough, but it seems that some of their own productions
deliberately make it even worse. Today I watched an ABC production “The Making of
Modern Australia”, reasonably interesting, but with appalling picture quality. It's
not immediately apparent from the images, but the details of the flagstaff at the right
change from one frame to another, far more even than the low resolution would suggest. The
details below are from a stationary image, so motion isn't involved. At a
“normal” size it's almost acceptable:
The result is a very visible flickering. There are more artefacts of this nature in the
image, notably to the right of the tree. The image is new material, as far as I can tell,
so there's no reason why it shouldn't be recorded in 1080p.
This doesn't happen with other programmes, only with ABC. I've seen it on multiple
programmes, but only since they got rid of their HDTV broadcast. The kindest thing I can
think of is that they're deliberately mutilating their broadcasts so that people can't steal
it. But is that acceptable for a public broadcaster?
The weather was nicer today, so did more work in the garden, in particular some pruning. In
previous years I wasn't sure how to prune
the Aloysia triphylla
(Lemon Verbena). Last time I erred on the side of caution with one bush, and cut the other
back hard a bit too late in the spring. Both survived (until I pulled the second one out to
build the wind break currently under construction), so today I decided to prune the other
one hard:
More work in the garden, and again not much. I'm gradually getting the shape of the garden
pond sorted out, but it's heavy work, and I'm beginning to feel my age. Still, if I
continue like this it should be finished in a few days.
Also some more weeding. In the area to the south of the verandah, and only there, I've
discovered a new plant. It's almost certainly a weed, but which?
Chris Yeardley is learning a new programming language this semester—C++. I suppose
it's “modern”, but I've given my
reasons why I stopped using C++ years ago. Still, one of her assignments interested
me: solve a Sudoku puzzle. Their textbook
is Introduction to Programming with C++, by Y. Daniel Liang, and it includes downloadable source code for
this program, but only for the standard 9×9 puzzle. Chris has to modify it for a 16×16
version. That sounded like fun, so I took a look at it.
As I discovered years ago, there are really some advantages to C++, and in some ways I wish
I had stuck with it. But for the fun of it I converted it back to C. With my previous
experience of this sort of thing, I thought it would be easy, especially since the program
uses almost no specific C++ features. There's stuff like this, of course:
cout << "Enter a Sudoku puzzle:" << endl;
I have always found this << construct incredibly
ugly, but of course it's trivial to convert it into a (much shorter)
puts ("Enter a Sudoku puzzle: ");
But the real issue I had was with the parameter passing. Liang allocates an automatic 9×9
array in the main function and pass it as a parameter to the other functions, so
you have things like:
int getFreeCellList(const int grid[][9], int freeCellList[][2]);
void printGrid(const int grid[][9]);
bool isValid(int i, int j, const int grid[][9]);
bool isValid(const int grid[][9]);
Is this good practice? I don't know. In a purely functional programming language it would
be. The alternative, which I would have used, would be to declare the grid globally and
refer to it directly. But in general you don't want programs with side effects, and this
would be one. On the other hand, language restrictions require you to specify the bounds of
all except the first array dimension, and that makes it not only extremely ugly, but also
impossible to choose different array dimensions at run time. I suppose you could set them
to a maximum value and only use as many elements as you want, but that looks tacky too.
The other issue was the use of const. Sounds like a good idea, but, not for the
first time, I couldn't find a way to get C to accept it. I didn't try very hard, since the
whole issue is moot if I change it to a global array. Interestingly, the copy of the code
that I downloaded is
not quite the same as the version that Chris gave me, and it doesn't include
the const statements.
The whole thing took me a couple of hours, mainly wondering what the “correct”
way is. It's also interesting to consider to what extent sample code in books perpetuates
itself through the people who learn from the books.
Into town today for a number of things, including picking up my “new” Asahi Pentax SV and buying some
hardware and a rat trap with metal components. Also to RACV to get an insurance quote. I'm currently with
Elders, and they have significantly hiked
their prices since last year. RACV proved to be over 20% cheaper, so started signing up for
that, and then discovered that they wanted a payment of $40 per year to perform direct
debit. What kind of stupidity is that? It makes life easier for all concerned. Why should
I have to pay for it? Disgusted, cancelled the policy.
Back home, played around with my new toy. Despite careful checking, it proves that it
didn't have the lens I had expected. As I wrote last
week, I thought it was a Macro Takumar 50 mm f/4. In
fact, it proved to be an SMC Macro Takumar 50 mm f/4, with an “automatic” diaphragm, which I also
mentioned as having no advantage for me. I should have noticed that from the photos, but I
was misled by the age of the camera; in fact the lens is considerably newer. The optics are
identical, but I note that the newer lens is supposed to have a better coating, so I now
have the disadvantage of a shorter focus range and the advantage of better coating and a
better resale price. I can live with that (the intention was to use it with bellows or
extension tubes anyway), and it wouldn't have stopped me buying the camera, but I'm annoyed
with myself that I didn't recognize the difference.
Both camera and lens are in really good condition for their age, far better than my
Spotmatic. It's also interesting to note how small the SV (the black one) is, even smaller
than the Spotmatic (same depth and width, but about 5 mm less high):
That has to do with the electronics, of course. The SV is completely mechanical and has no
light meter. I can't see myself ever using it, but at the price (possibly negative), it's a
nice collector's piece.
Set to to do some comparative photos with my three 50 mm lenses (the others being the
50 mm f/1.4 Super
Takumar and the Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0
Macro), and chose the contacts of an old 2½" disk drive as the subject. That
proved to be quite good, particularly because of the sharp delineations and high contrast.
The results? Here corresponding ones with the Zuiko, Macro-Takumar and Super-Takumar at
approximately 1:2. At this level, they all look OK.
I still need to analyse them, but it seems that the Macro-Takumar is much
better than the Super-Takumar. None of the lenses really made me happy at very close range:
I'm wondering if this isn't a matter of diffraction effects. I'll analyse the photos
tomorrow and hopefully come to more understanding.
One of the problems I had were the EXIF data for the photos taken with the Takumars.
They're completely mechanical, of course, and the camera can't record any information, so I
had to modify my scripts to put it in manually. That shouldn't be a problem for exiftool, but how? The man
page exiftool gives some information, but not nearly enough, and refers to a man
page Image::ExifTool::TagNames, which I couldn't find.
I later discovered that this is because it's a perl module, and perl wants you to use
perldoc.
Found the documentation on the web, but I still wasn't out of the woods. The documentation
refers to only one lens parameter:
0xfdea Lens ExifIFD string/
But exiftool itself outputs information like:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttype) ~/Photos/20100809 482 -> exiftool orig/P8099432.ORF |grep -i lens Lens Type : None
Lens Serial Number :
Lens Firmware Version : 0
Lens Properties : 0x0
Lens ID : None
Which do I use? Images taken with the Olympus macro return:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttype) ~/Photos/20100809 485 -> exiftool orig/P8099394.ORF |grep -i lens Lens Type : Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro
Lens Serial Number : 010110933
Lens Firmware Version : 1.008
Lens Properties : 0x4003
Lens ID : Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro
By trial and error, I found that I can collapse these tag names by removing spaces and
downshifting, at least in the cases I was looking for. So I tried setting “Lens
Type” or “Lens ID”, but that didn't work:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttype) ~/Photos/20100809 487 -> exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -lensid="Ashai Optical Co SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4" P8099422.JPG Warning: Expected one or more integer values in XMP-aux:LensID (ValueConvInv)
Nothing to do.
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttype) ~/Photos/20100809 488 -> exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -lenstype="Ashai Optical Co SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4" P8099422.JPG 0 image files updated
1 image files unchanged
Finally found a tag “Lens Model”, which Olympus doesn't set. But it works:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttype) ~/Photos/20100809 489 -> exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -lensmodel="Ashai Optical Co SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4" P8099422.JPG 1 image files updated
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttype) ~/Photos/20100809 490 -> exiftool P8099422.JPG | grep Lens Lens Type : None
Lens Serial Number :
Lens Firmware Version : 0
Lens Properties : 0x0
Lens Model : Ashai Optical Co SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4
Lens ID : None
So I had to modify the PHP scripts to look in two different places. That works, but why is
it such a pain? Why does the documentation use two different forms of name and expect you
to guess the correlation? I suppose there are other things that I could try, so this is
probably not the end of my playing around.
I've slowed down almost to a standstill with my brewing efforts until I can get my
infrastructure woes sorted out. In the meantime I've been trying various commercial
offerings. Today to Dan Murphy's and
bought two relatively cheap beers: Cascade Premium Light and “Original” Oettinger Pils. Tried them
both, and wasn't very impressed by either. The Cascade has taken an approach to lighter
beers that I think is designed to make people choose full-strength beer instead: it seems to
include a significant quantity of malt (or maybe barley or wheat) roasted in a way that
reminds me of breakfast cereals. My own approach has been to use the same malts as for
full-strength beer and increase the hopping level. I think I'll be able to finish the
Cascade, but I doubt I'll buy any more of it.
The Oettinger is another matter. It tastes just plain boring. It, too, could do with more
hops (“Pils” indeed!). But possibly I'll get used to it. Despite the name, the
beer comes from Gotha, and not
from Oettingen.
CJ was going to come over today and help me with the myriad remaining jobs in the garden,
but just as he was planning to leave, we got a few drops of rain. It was also dark and
dreary, so we decided to put it off until Friday. That proved to be the correct choice: we
got some pretty heavy rain in the course of the day, a total of 10.2 mm for the 24 hour
period, and the top temperature only hit 8.7°. Still, during a lull in the rain I managed
to spread some fertilizer on the north part of the garden (up to the smaller succulent bed)
and also do all the roses and citrus plants.
More investigation of the missing documentation for ExifTool today. Somebody told me
about perldoc, apparently what you need to read perl documentation. And yes, the
documentation was there, in /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/man/man3/. But why
can't man do this? Why do I need another program?
Ah, that's because perl isn't a UNIX-only language, and the documentation is in a
different format. Or at least, that's what I was told. Took a look
at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/man/man3/Image::ExifTool::Olympus.3.gz and found that
it was groff source, so tried running it through the mandoc macros:
NAME
Image::ExifTool::Olympus - Olympus/Epson maker notes tags
So they are man pages. Why perldoc? Because they're in the wrong place?
Adding /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/man to the MANPATH environment variable
was all I needed to get man to display them.
Further investigation showed that the real issue was that my .bashrc predates
FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a
file /etc/manpath.config with details of which paths to set, and it includes:
# added by use.perl 2008-10-19 15:59:46
OPTIONAL_MANPATH /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/man
OPTIONAL_MANPATH /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/perl/man
But I set MANPATH in my .bashrc, so it didn't get set. Time to overhaul the
file.
As planned, started trying to analyse yesterday's macro photos of the pins on a 2½" disk
drive today. That was a non-starter. Despite being mounted on a sturdy tripod, most of
them had noticeable camera shake:
It's due to the image stabilizer in conjunction with a lens which doesn't report its focal
length. For some reason, my camera still had a manual setting for 800 mm, and the image
stabilizer compensated for movement which didn't exist. So I had to start all over again.
Even this image showed something, though: there's no detail. It looks like it's out of
focus, but it isn't. It doesn't seem to be diffraction either. So today I took fewer
photos and compared them.
The results? First the good news. The image quality of the SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4 was much better than that of the 50 mm f/1.4 Super-Takumar.
In particular, the Super-Takumar has considerable chromatic aberration and flare. Here
photos taken with bellows (about 3:1 magnification) with the Macro-Takumar (left) and the
Super-Takumar (right), first at the centre, then at the edge:
Image title: Disk Macro Takumar flash bellows NoIS 22 centre detail
I'm not sure about the difference in contrast. I suppose I should investigate that more.
The bad news: not a single photo was satisfactory. They all show the same kind of minimum
feature size that has irritated me before. The following three images were all taken with
the Macro-Takumar. The first two are taken at closest focusing distance (about 1:2 image
size), and the third is with extension tubes (about 1:1 image size). The first image is
taken at f/5.6, the other two at f/22:
As you'd expect, the depth of field of the image taken at f/5.6 is far less than that of the
other two; but the base of the pin is sharp. At f/22 the depth of field is considerably
better, but the overall sharpness isn't, maybe due to diffraction. And at 1:1, the
sharpness is better (since the image is bigger, which doesn't show here). But the outline
of the dust on the pin is still unsharp.
What about the Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro? The closest I can come with it is 1:2, since a
single extension tube would cost considerably more than I paid for the Macro-Takumar, the SV
and the postage combined. I do have a 10 dioptre close-up lens, though. With those, I can
get:
That's still not sharp enough, but there's not much in it, and arguably the last
photo is the best.
But wait, there's more: mount the Macro-Takumar on bellows and get an additional extension
of 184 mm. In conjunction with the extension tubes (61 mm) and the extension of the lens
itself, (26 mm), I would have a total extension of 271 mm, giving me a magnification of
about 5.4:1. But what image quality would I get at that magnification?
Another fondue de fromage in the evening, this timea
with my white sourdough bread. Not a resounding success for a number of reasons. The
bread's not right for the dish, and we ended up with more religieuse at the bottom of
the caquelon than I have seen in some time:
The weather yesterday may have been unpleasant enough, but today was worse: not just showers
but heavy rain, a total of 32 mm (of which the weather station only recorded 25.8 mm). Stayed in the house nearly all day.
My test photos weren't overly spectacular, but more “normal” macros can be fun.
Spent some time taking some photos of
the Gasteria carinata. I'm still
wondering whether the flowers will open; you'd think it would be a necessity, but all I've
ever seen is what I got today:
One of the results of the bad weather was that I didn't get round to looking for the rat
until the evening. When I did, yes, we had caught a rat. But I still wasn't prepared for
what I saw. The rat was so mutilated that I've put the photos on a different page. Follow the link if you dare. Part of the
head and a forelimb appear to have been gnawed off. At first I wondered whether the rat
could have done that itself while dying, but the best I can think of is that another rat
came along, stole the bait from the dying rat's mouth and then continued gnawing. It seems
that rats can be cannibals.
Yet another day of rain! Not as heavy as the previous two days, but it's still getting on
my nerves. We've had a total of 49.2 mm over the last three days, about 8% of a typical
year's rainfall. So, once again, spent the whole day inside.
We're seeing lots of kangaroos lately, and we're continually chasing them away. But it's
been some time since I've seen this many from my office window:
The name of the Australian National Broadband
Network contains a buzzword that no longer has much meaning. What is
“broadband”? I suspect it's the up-and-coming word for
“Networking”. It's not alone amongst the meaningless, sliding-scale terms.
There's ”super-fast“, “ultra-fast” and “high-speed”.
What do they mean? Which is the fastest? When I first heard of “broadband”, it
was in conjunction with ISDN, and it implied
what still earlier had been called
a primary channel, 1500 or 2000
kb/s. I suppose that's still “broadband”, but most certainly not cutting-edge.
The NBN is gradually coming on line with speeds of up to 100 Mb/s—in areas which, it
seems, are all catered for by ADSL. It's not surprising that the interest is only marginal.
Most people don't seem to be concerned about the difference between 20 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s.
But there's one word that hasn't entered the buzzword jungle: latency. And it's the most
important one of all. It's been a while since they stopped talking about long fat pipes,
but the problems haven't gone away. I'm told that some people on fast urban (fibre)
networks have a round trip time of 4 ms. Most ADSL I have seen is in the 10-20 ms range.
My typical RTTs with satellite connections are in the order of 1000 ms (one second). And
that seems the most obvious reason I can see that it can take me up to 2 minutes to load a
web page which others can load in a second or two. It's not the link speed: that's reliably
1 MB/s or more. But the latency kills, and it seems that nobody who is running the NBN
scheme understands that. So, while the people with fast connections get faster connections,
people in smaller towns get no benefit.
As Callum Gibson puts it:
What the NBN gives us is freeways to a lot of people with a 3 lane
driveway, joined together by some highways and some people still with
dirt tracks. And I won't be happy until grO0gle stops complaining
about his internet connection, dammit!
Amen.
The NBN is—marginally—an election issue. At least the Labor have recognized the need for a better network
infrastructure, though the way they have gone about it seems really bizarre. There must be
some good reason why they can't force Telstra to split their network infrastructure into a separate publicly held company, but nobody in
the media has even mentioned the trade-offs involved. It's still better than what the
Liberals appear to be offering—only
12 Mb/s, considerably less than many people can get now. I suspect the latter is simply an
indication that the politicians involved have no idea of the concepts.
In a democracy the majority rules! ...
The majority doesn't want a tower. ... The majority has spoken.
Clearly the editor of the Golden Plains Miner has spoken. I never thought much of the
newspaper, but if they can't even present both sides of a dispute, they're completely
useless.
Finally the rain has stopped, and CJ came over to help me put up the bamboo wind breaks. As
we had suspected, that was more complicated than we would have liked, not helped by the poor
quality of the screens themselves. As a result we discovered—too late—that the
wiring holding the slats together was asymmetric, and we had put one up upside-down. CJ
thought that we might be able to keep it a secret, but I told him that it would be all over
Google within a couple of days.
It didn't take long, but it wasn't as pretty as I had hoped, and it didn't change the
appearance as much as I had expected:
The next step is to hang some old fencing mesh over the “outside” (away from the
verandah) and plant it with creepers. We would have done it today, but I need to buy some
staples. After that we'll see how well it works against the wind—if, indeed,
it can withstand it.
Yvonne borrowed a real, commercial DVD from Chris yesterday,
“Where the wild things
are”, and today we tried to watch it. It says “region 4” on the package,
without specifying what that means; but after checking, it seems to include Australia, so it
should be OK. What happened? The thing started playing and got itself locked in a loop
explaining why DVD piracy is such a bad thing. We couldn't watch the DVD. I'll have to
copy it to disk so we can watch it, presumably exactly what the DVD industry doesn't want me
to do. Protecting intellectual property is a valid thing to do, but why does the industry
(in this case, Warner Brothers) have to
annoy their customers? I know this has all been said before, but it still annoys me.
Yvonne and Chris left today for Olivaylle, this time without me. They'll stay
overnight and return tomorrow with a couple of horses. That leaves me here by myself. In
principle, it doesn't change much, but it's been such a long time since I've been here by
myself that it felt strange.
The weather didn't help. The rain has let up (it would be too much to say that it has
stopped), and instead we had high winds, the second windiest day since I started keeping
records.
mysql> select date, max(wind_gust) from observations where wind_gust > 39 group by date; +------------+----------------+
| date | max(wind_gust) |
+------------+----------------+
| 2010-07-10 | 48.1 |
| 2010-08-14 | 39.7 |
+------------+----------------+
One result actually happened yesterday, but I didn't find out until today: another part of
the Cathedral has broken off:
