The horse clinic is over, my book review has been finally submitted, and suddenly there's
nothing left to do except to process the photos that Yvonne took. Despite our expectations, she didn't quite make 2,000 of them—only 1,816:
I don't
think I have ever taken that many in such a short space of time. In addition, many were
videos, so the total space was considerably more than 50 GB:
The new disk for lagoon arrived today. I suppose it's a sign of the times that a 1
TB disk is now pretty much the lower size limit, and this one was only half the thickness of
the one it replaced.
What partitions? I've been recommending a two file system approach since the first edition
of “Installing and Running FreeBSD” in nearly 20
years ago. In 2003, I changed from / and /usr to / and /home,
implicitly leaving /usr in the root file system. That makes a lot of sense: despite
the name, /usr now contains mainly system files, while user files are
in /home. That makes it easier to upgrade: the /home file system stays the
same, and when you upgrade there's little you need to carry over to the new root file
system.
But how big? In 2003 I recommended a root file system of 4 to 6 GB. Over the years I've
increased that size considerably. Soon it was 10 GB, and on eureka and teevee
it was 20 GB. On stable I raised it to 40 GB, and I did the same for the latest
iteration of lagoon.
Strangely, things still fill up. Here a comparison of the machines, basically df
output:
System
Installed
Filesystem
1048576-blocks
Used
Avail
Capacity
Mounted on
eureka
7 October 2008
/dev/ada0s1a
19,832
17,017
1,228
93%
/
teevee
17 May 2013
/dev/ada0p4
19,832
9,591
8,654
53%
/
stable
2013
/dev/ada0p2
39,662
32,215
4,274
88%
/
Where did all the space go? /usr/local can get enormous. eureka has over 9
GB, more than half the total file system. stable has over 10 GB. The reason that
its root file system is so much bigger than on eureka is because of system
builds: /usr/obj is now also nearly 10 GB in size.
So what do I do on lagoon? It was also 40 GB in size, and 30 GB of that was in use.
But we have so much space—Yvonne only uses about 20
GB. So for the fun of it I created a 100 GB root file system. I now have:
/destdir is a second root file system for upgrades. The intention is to install a
new version in that partition, then swap the partitions /dev/ada0p2
and /dev/ada0p4. That's why it's currently empty. And the usage in /home is
mainly a backup of the Microsoft disk /dev/ada1 (dischord).
In passing, it's interesting to note how dependent the M.Zuiko digital
ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 EZ is on postprocessing. At 14 mm it has
impressive chromatic
aberration and distortion. Here left the original image, right as processed by
DxO Optics “Pro” with the standard conversion palette. Run the cursor over either
image to compare with the partner:
Clearly the new lens cap is useless. Time to initiate a return. To make it easier, it
makes sense to send a couple of photos, roughly like the ones above. Fought my way through
this emetic eBay form, climbed down the directory
trees, and tried to upload the first image. No go:
Well, a change of language helps, doesn't it? Additional retries alternated between English
and German, and there was no way to break out of the loop. In the end I shut the tab and
started again, this time with a smaller image (the original was full size). That worked.
So it seems that eBay's way of saying “file too large” is to ask you, alternating between
two languages, to retry for ever.
It's a known problem with this unit that you need to tilt the head down for close-up shots,
but I had already done that. Sometimes I wonder what on-camera flash is good for.
Yesterday's image comparisons showed that image conversion software has a lot to do with
modern lenses. DxO
Optics “Pro” does a good job, but it's not the only game in town. There's also
Olympus' own Viewer 3, and once upon a time I had used UFraw. But there's other free stuff out there too.
Went looking for Bibble, but
that has gone away. There is, however, RawTherapee. Tried each of them, but didn't come to a conclusion. In the meantime I
have:
UFRaw still doesn't have ICC
profiles, and I don't know where to get them for my current cameras. Without them,
the images look terrible.
RawTherapee behaves strangely. On starting it, I get:
=== grog@stable (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports/graphics 17 -> rawtherapee (rawtherapee:46054): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: The property GtkWindow:allow-shrink is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
cannot create directory monitor: Unable to find default local directory monitor type
(many times) rawtherapee: Fatal IO error 35 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server eureka:0.1.
Unable to find default local directory monitor type
What's a local directory monitor type?
After some time it produces a screen with lots of buttons and things, but they don't
behave quite the way I expect. I'm not sure whether it's just extremely slow (though
I am used to DxO), or whether my intuition is defective. The home page gives the
impression that there is only a Wiki as documentation, but it seems that there's a
format-on-demand book, which I've downloaded and will look at. In any case, it
looks good enough to warrant further investigation, so for today there are no tangible
results.
One of the side effects of Yvonne's photo spree of the last
few days is that my contact print scripts can't handle the sheer number of images. They're
written as PHP web pages, and we were
getting:
Request-URI Too Large
The requested URL's length exceeds the capacity limit for this server.
Took a look at the code, and discovered:
function docontacts ($desc, $dirdate, $imagelist)
{
$method = "get"; /* transfer method. Set to get for debugging */
global $me; /* name of this script */
...
OK, that's easy enough. But there were a number of other annoying buglets, and I spent a
lot of time trying to fix them, but didn't manage them all. It looks like I might need a
restructure.
While unpacking cartons, found a couple
more S-100 memory boards. One is the
fourth Econoram board, similar to the ones I had already photographed, but I'm surprised
that I hadn't missed the other one last time round, in particular because of the modifications on it:
What's that for? Do I still have the circuit diagrams somewhere? This is a 64 kB memory
board, so it covers the entire address space of
the Z80. My best bet is that I have carved a
hole in the address space to allow inserting
a PROM board.
A few weeks back ALDI had a “quadcopter” (a
camera drone) on special offer. I bought one and had intended to test it, but either I'm
incapable or it is. According to the packaging (an important part of the documentation;
it's the only place where they mention the resolution of the camera) it comes with propeller
guards:
The buttons to the left and right of the screen are just fakes. The main switches are
really old-fashioned slide switches between and below the joysticks.
I tried several times to use the thing. It's almost impossible, and it almost invariably
landed on one of the propellers. The guards are really needed. It'll go back, but it makes
me wonder if the more expensive devices are worth the trouble.
More playing around with my PHP processing
scripts today, and I think I have fixed all the bugs. Yvonne is still backed up to 26 September, and it looks like it will take her the rest of the week
to process her thousands of photos and videos.
And of course she's complaining about DxO Optics “Pro” “Pushing
the limits of your patience camera”. In the past I have noticed big differences
in processing speed, and sure enough, it was slow today too. It looked as if there were
lots of “hard” page faults (which I presume means causing disk I/O). That's not so
surprising given the relatively small memory of the machine.
I was “logged in” too, if that's what you call sequential access to the machine. I had my
own instance of DxO running, also Olympus Viewer 3 and
a couple of other things. Since the login is frozen, they shouldn't make any difference:
swap out to disk and wait for the next login.
But where did the memory usage come from? Logged out, and the 3.8 GB memory usage dropped
to 2 GB. So although I wasn't active, and hadn't been for hours, “Windows” clogged up 1.5 GB of memory with the processes.
Why? I don't know of any operating system that handles virtual memory that inefficiently.
Things still weren't good, though. So I tried the normal Microsoft trick: reboot. And how
about that, after rebooting the system “only” used about 800 MB, and with DxO it was still
only about 2 GB. It's hard to say how much the difference was due to Microsoft and how much
due to memory leaks in DxO, but the result was a very significant increase in
responsiveness.
As it says, it's from ARP Networks. The
offer doesn't look bad, though nothing to entice me away from RootBSD, but it's nice to see other companies offering
FreeBSD VPS.
Olympus has announced release
4.0 of the firmware for the OM-D E-M1, to be delivered in
late November. It's by no means just cosmetic: it provides focus bracketing (multiple shots
with slightly different focus settings), so that you can process them to a blended image,
and focus stacking, which clearly means that the whole processing is done in-camera.
What a good idea! But the details look less exciting. In focus bracketing mode you can
take up to 999 (clearly a round number) of shots in steps of “1” to “9”. What does that
mean? 1 is the smallest step, 9 is the largest. This article gives some examples, but also
shows that the steps are not directly related to the depth of field. Halfway down, near an
image of a frog on a particularly green background, the author writes:
With the camera stabilised on a tripod, and the aperture set to f/5.6, I took 50 shots
each at focus steps 1 and 2. Although 50 shots were not enough on focus step 1, 50 shots
on step 2 proved sufficient for a beautiful composite photo.
The camera knows the focal length of the lens, and it can calculate the depth of field if it
knows the exact distance. Does it? Even if it didn't, it could step until the image focus
changes. Putting the settings in the hands of the user suggests that they don't quite have
their act together yet.
In focus stacking mode, you take exactly 8 shots, merging them into a single image. What
focus step? They don't say. At first it sounds like a very good idea, since the memory
card will become the bottleneck. Unfortunately, you're limited to 8 images, and if you read
the fine print you discover that 7% is cut off each corner for some reason, and it only
works with three lenses. Fortunately, one is the m.Zuiko 12-40 mm
f/2.8 “Pro” that I also have, which also looks like the best of the three for the
purpose.
But are 8 images enough? In general, almost certainly “no”. One of the images on the page
was put together from 150 shots. How long does it take to write all that to disk? A raw
image is round 15 MB in size, so this is 2.25 GB of data. I don't know exact figures for
the write speed of the E-M1, and I don't even have the fastest
available SD Card (that will have to
change), but I'd guess that you wouldn't get more than about 3 images per second, so a 150
image sequence would take about a minute. Why the limit of 8 images for focus stacking? My
guess is the amount of memory available in the camera, so we won't see an improvement here
until a new camera is released.
That's not all the new firmware offers, just the most exciting. Others of interest are
“silent mode” using an electronic shutter (up to 1/16000 s). There are also a whole lot of
other features, many for video, and some of which I don't really understand (“MF Clutch and
Snapshot Focus Disable”, for example). Hopefully it will make more sense when it's
installed.
And why the vapourware announcement? I suppose it's to make the cameras more attractive for
the Christmas season. It also suggests that it'll be a while before we see a successor to
the E-M1.
While walking the dogs this afternoon, came across no less than three plants that I can't
identify. This one is the plant from which we took cuttings the other day:
Took a cutting of that one; we'll see how it progresses.
The two Grevillea
rosmarinifolia bushes that I've commented about before are still flowering noticeably
differently. Clearly it's not a question of season:
So I tried again, looking through and out of my office. My light meter tells me that the
exposure at the bottom, behind the desk, is EV 3.1. Outside the house, through the window,
it's 13.0—a range of 10 EV. Not surprisingly, a normal photo shows almost no detail behind
the desk, and outside is burnt out (first image). Putting it through DxO Optics “Pro”'s
“Artistic HDR” profile improves things significantly (second image)
The in-camera HDR functionality shows a little improvement over an untweaked image, but HDR1
(first image) does not compensate as well as DxO's processing. HDR2 does marginally better,
but the outside is only barely recognizable:
So why not process the HDR1 image with DxO? Because all you get is
a JPEG image, and DxO wants raw images.
On the other hand, manually processing a 5 exposure bracket with 3 EV between the images
does much better. The first photo was made from only the 0 EV, -3 EV and +3 EV images,
while the second was made with all 5 (-6 EV, -3 EV, 0 EV, +3 EV, +6 EV). Now we have both
detail in the shadows and also outside:
I'm still not happy with these last two. I suspect that I could get the outside to look
better. But I can play with these images, and I might be able to improve it. With the
in-camera HDR, what you get is all you have.
But Martin's images look good. What am I doing wrong? It looks as if the HDR functionality
is deliberately very limited. But in that case, why does it need 4 images? I can get much
better results with 3 images.
We've established that putting a Microsoft login session on ice isn't enough to free up the
memory, so I'm currently logging off. Microsoft doesn't make it easy:
On one of my rare excursions into Facebook-land I was asked to participate in a survey.
Opinionated as I am, I accepted. But all I got was a collection of postings, most as
unrelated as these two:
One's in Malay, though I can't
understand enough to be sure of the topic: the Malays use a jargon that I can't decipher;
neither can Google Translate. The other is in German about the cost
of data retention. Do you prefer
a fish or a bicycle?
It's been over 4 years since
I last compared raw image converters. I've learnt a lot since then, and on the whole I'm
happy with DxO Optics
“Pro”. But 3 days
ago I had reason to examine things, and it took a while.
I have now read the documentation for RawTherapee. The first discovery was that it doesn't use lensfun, but instead profiles from
Adobe Camera Raw, and you have to install them manually. In addition, the Adobe page
states that only preliminary support is available for the Olympus OM-D E-M1, and newer
models aren't mentioned at all. In general, the list looks about 2 years out of date. I
didn't bother with this step. I was, however, able to use RawTherapee to convert images.
I now have output from DxO, both with my standard settings and without any correction at
all, and also UFRaw, RawTherappe and
Olympus
Viewer 3, and unlike 4 years ago, I can now compare the output directly.
But how do you do a good comparison? I can compare each with its neighbour, or each with
the uncorrected version, but that doesn't necessarily help. I've decided to go each with
the uncorrected version first. Here goes. In sequence, they're converted by Viewer 3, DxO,
UFRaw and RawTherapee. Run the cursor over an image to compare it with the uncorrected
version, and click to enlarge.
It's interesting to see how differently Olympus and DxO handle distortion, and it's also
difficult to compare. Here's an alternation between the two, Viewer on the left and DxO on
the right:
The difference in field of view is particularly noticeable.
UFRaw uses lensfun, but the results aren't very convincing (despite the pincushion
framing of the resultant image). And RawTherapee manages to do some distortion correction
although it says it can't. Here RawTherapee on the left, DxO on the right:
Surprise, surprise: Olympus doesn't
correct chromatic aberration
correctly! Neither does UFRaw, though it's still better than Olympus. RawTherapee does.
Here an excessively enlarged view of the up pipe:
I'm particularly impressed by the results from RawTherapee. Yes, they're not as good as
from DxO, but without lens profiles, that's not surprising. And I really can't understand
why Olympus can't do better. Looking at the controls, it seems that it doesn't do automatic
aberration correction:
Why not? I'm sure it happens in-camera. This makes Viewer even less desirable than I had
thought it to be.
Apart from the chromatic aberration, most of the converters seem to misinterpret the shape
of the tank: it looks like this (two more tanks of the same kind):
But there's a step in all the conversions except for RawTherapee. It's most obvious with
Viewer, but it's there with UFRaw and even DxO.
The most interesting conclusion here is that RawTherapee is definitely worth a look. The
results weren't as good as with DxO, but this was out of the box, and I really don't
understand how it managed any lens correction at all, since I didn't download the modules.
One of the results of Yvonne photo orgy is an incredible
amount of processing. I store the photos on disk on eureka, and Yvonne accesses them
by NFS. That's not ideal:
some things, like making contact prints of video clips, require a lot of I/O, and over the
net it's particularly slow.
So why not log in oneureka? The simple answer is because my X configuration doesn't
do it right. The fvwm2 menus look like
this:
That's an ssh started from the window manager, so it needs an ssh key to be
loaded. Otherwise a particularly emetic bug in X causes the entire X session to
hang.
OK, do what I do and load your ssh key before starting X. A quick change in the
config files and all is well. In the process found this gem in .bashrc:
# Not sure what good this is any more, but it can't harm, and it'll
# help not to forget it.
PATH=$PATH:/src/Samba/tivo/vplay/i386
How long has that been there? It clearly refers to hacks
that tridge made round 15 years
ago. It would have been on my TiVo, to which I
last referred 11 years ago. blame tells me it came in in revision 1.26
on 23 May 2008, but I suspect that is just when I incorporated it
from another file. One way or another, it's clearly long past its use-by date.
Somehow everything went wrong. After over an hour of frantic hacking of .bashrc
and .xinitrc, got to the stage where xterm and some other programs could no
longer open the X server. In the end gave up and installed eureka's config files
on lagoon (they're supposed to be the same, and have conditional code dependent on
the system) and rebooted. And it Just Worked. What did I do wrong?
The return of my automatic lens cap has been agreed, though they want me to send it back (at their
cost, admittedly). That cost is about 60% of what I paid for it. But what is the problem?
One option would be dust. OK, how about an experiment: wash it. It's all plastic, so a bit
of kitchen detergent shouldn't harm. Tried that and—it worked! Not only did it open
completely, it did it with a click that had never been there before. That's good to know
for two reasons: first, that the thing works after all, and secondly that if it gets dirty
again, we can clean it.
It's only a little over a month
since Ballarat's coldest September night
on record, but temperatures are now unseasonally high. We measured 31.8° today before a
sudden cool change in the middle of the afternoon. And there were high winds—ideal bushfire
weather. Time to look at the bushfire web
site.
It would be wrong to say “no reaction”. The site redirected
from http://osom.dse.vic.gov.au/ to a different URL on the same site, at least
once. But then nothing for a long while, and then:
The connection to osom.dse.vic.gov.au was interrupted.
Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): The connection was reset.
What's wrong with the site? Going to the CFA web
site gave me the chance to search a busy page for the map, which proved to be at
http://warnings.cfa.vic.gov.au/#map. A new map, still hard to use,
still needing multiple pages to display the information you're looking for. So of course
there's no need for the old site any more. Nobody would have saved a link to it. It's not
even worth removing the DNS entry: just leave it there to do nothing and time out.
And sure enough, we did have a bushfire, once again in the Ferrers Road area (or Ferrars Road, as
the report put it). I'm glad we live on this side of the main road.
We really need to get the garden sorted out. But for that we need to get the sprinkler
system installed, and for that we need to repair the underground piping that Brett Chiltern
damaged months ago. I've
given up trying to contact Brett, so Warrick Pitcher will have to come and do it, and I'll
try to find Brett to serve the bill.
In the meantime, Gage from round the corner in Progress Road came along and did a bit of
weeding and mulching. We really need to spray the weeds, but it's been far too windy lately.
Yvonne has been working on her photo processing all week.
Today she finished the work on the photos for 28 September, all 618 of them. Then she threw them away.
Why? Not deliberately, of course. It's a misfeature in one of my scripts. I use two
scripts to make life more bearable with DxO Optics “Pro” and
Microsoft. The first, fordxo, links the images I want to process into a static
directory, /Photos/00-grog or /Photos/00-yvonne. When processing is done, I
use another script to move those images back that haven't already been processed.
Why 00-<name>? It gets displayed at the top of the directory tree, so it's
easier to find.
But on this occasion I had already processed all images for Yvonne so that she only needed
to process the ones that required special treatment. Normally fordxo checks if the
image has already been processed, and if so doesn't link the source image to the 00
directory. And fromdxo doesn't copy any images that have already been processed. To
override it, I added an -f option to the scripts,
All that works well. And as it happened, Yvonne reprocessed almost every image. Then she
ran fromdxo without the -f flag, copied no images, and then moved on to the
next day, overwriting the contents of 00-yvonne. What a pain! Fortunately, it looks
as if a backup I did during the processing might have saved the day. And clearly I need to
get fromdxo to count the images and complain if nothing gets copied.
Yvonne spent most of another day processing her photos from
last week. In the process she managed to trip over many misfeatures of my processing system
that I had never seen before. Some of it has to do with the change of user, but mainly with
the change of approach. It brings home how important it is to get other people to test the
software that you write. I blame it all on her German-layout keyboard, which I can barely
use.
Our cleaning lady is looking for information about
an ancestor called John Doyle—not exactly an uncommon name. She thought he had lived
in Dereel in the 19th century, so I went
off looking for web sites about Dereel. There's history.dereel.com.au, of course, but the Dereel
Historical Society doesn't update it, and I could no longer find the other site that I had
seen on Facebook. Is it gone, or is it just
my “Facebook syndrome”? I can almost never find what I'm looking for.
But then I came back to Trove, the National Library of Australia's online database. It has
grown since I last visited it, and now it has over 9,000 articles about Dereel. The
oldest dates to 11 March 1804, long before the area round Dereel had been explored. It's also a
false positive; the text doesn't occur there. Still, the article is interesting because
it's the most recent document I have seen in English that still uses the long S (not Castle,
but Caſtle).
Government Ihntse, Sydney, Saturday, Gth April, 111 15 IS EXCELLENCY the GOVERNOR having
deemed it expedient to erect SLAUGHTER HOUSE in COCKLE BAY, near to Dawes's Point, as well
for the Convenience and Accommoda- tion of the Public as for the necessary Purposes of
Government itself, He is pleased to order and di- rect, lliat in futuie all Animals, of
whatever De- scription, ulrich may be intended fur the Go-ein ment Stores, shall be
slaughtered at this Place; an«! the Storekeepers whose particular Duty it n:.tv he to
receive Fiesh Meat on the Account of Go veinmeut, a;e ¡>l rielly 01 dereel and direct eel
not to
What's that? Poor optical character recognition. Trove is full of it
But finally, on 19 January 1849, there's a report of a
land lease, describing the boundaries entirely with text:
George and David Aitcheson
Name of run—Kuruck Kuruck
Estimated area—34,140 acres
Estimated
grazing capability — 5,000 head of cattle or 15,000 sheep
Commencing at a point on the river Wardy Yallock 1 mile 72 chains north from crossing
place over said river at the Frenchman's Inn ; and bounded on the south by a line bearing
285 ° 10 chains 90 links ; thence by a line bearing 273 ° 40 chains, thence by a line
bearing 279 ° 2 miles 2 chains ; these last three lines dividing said run from that
occupied by Messrs Williamson and Blow ; thence on the west by a line bearing 347 ° 52
chains dividing said run from that occupied by Messrs Williamson and Blow, thence by a
line bearing 43 ° 1 mile 66 chains to the Wardy Yallock river, thence by a back water of
the said river 21 chains 50 links, thence by a line bearing 47 ° 2 miles 51 chains, thence
by a line bearing 1° 1 mile 36 chains ; these last three lines and back-water dividing
said run from that of Glenfine occupied by Thos. Downie ; thence by a line bearing 96 ° 1
mile 47 chains to Kuruck Kuruck creek, thence by the said creek bearing from point to
point 24 ° 30' 3 miles to the confluence of the Corindap Creek, thence by the said
Corindap Creek, bearing 354 ° 4 miles 13 chains 50 links, the said Corindap Creek and
Kuruck Kuruck Creek and last line dividing said run from that of Commeralghip occupied by
Messrs M'Millan and Wilson ; thence on the north by a line bearing 91 ° 1 mile 60 chains
to the White Hill gully, dividing said run from that of Dereel occupied by Messrs
M'Millan and Wil- son ; thence on the west by the said White Hill gully, bearing 135 ° 30'
34 chains 50 links, thence by a gully bear- ing 227 ° 29 chains, thence by a line bearing
200 ° 70 chains, thence by a line bearing 132 ° 1 mile 39 chains to White Hill gully,
thence by a line bear- ing 155 ° 30' 1 mile 1 chain to Kuruck Kuruck Creek, thence by a
continuation of the same line 45 chains to the point of the stony rises, thence by a line
bearing 195 ° 5 miles 19 chains, thence by a line bearing 145 ° 57 chains; these last six
lines and gully dividing said run from that occupied by Compton Ferrars, thence by a
continuation of the last line 39 chains, thence by a line bearing 236 ° 1 mile 60 chains,
thence by a line bearing 216 ° 2 miles 60 chains ; these last three lines dividing said
run from that occupied by Mr. James Austin, and thence on the south by a line bearing 282
° 2 miles 42 chains, and thence by the river Wardy Yallock, bearing 2S2 ° 16 chains to the
commencing point,
That's a genuine reference; names like Corindap
(now Corindhap) and Wardy Yallock
(now Woady Yaloak) clearly refer to
the area. And it's much earlier than any other reference I have found (starting more like
1860). But how difficult it is to guess the boundaries of this run! Surprisingly,
references like the Frenchman's Inn can still be followed: it was
in Cressy, and only
closed in 2008. And it seems that at the time of the document, the inn had been there
for over 10 years.
There's much more there, including reports on the amount of gold dug in Dereel.
Spent quite some time today looking through the National Library of Australia archive sites, and came up with more information
about Dereel. I had already established that Dereel was
already mentioned on 19 January 1849, but what was it at the time? A sheep run? It wasn't
until a quarter of a century later that a publication in the State Library of VictoriaState Government Gazette, whose web site appears
to have been infiltrated by people who know better than the style guides. On “Friday,
July 02nd 1875” the Town of Dereel was proclaimed. God save the Queen!
And back at the NLA there are 7
maps relating to Dereel. Only two are online, and one, dated 1925, is only available at minuscule scale. The other, however, is much more interesting. It
was prepared by Ferdinand M. Krausé, and dates from 1889. It is guarded by a JavaScript
application that gives you zoom and display sizes between 400×400 and 1200×1200.
Fortunately, however, the map is out of copyright, and the Javascript communicates via the
GET method, so it
was relatively trivial to ask for http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview/?pi=nla.map-rm2337-5-sd&rgn=&width=5120 and
get an image 5120×5120:
This map is amazing for a number of reasons. Firstly, the number of properties, which far
exceeds the number there are today. And they bear little relationship to today's
properties. About the only one I recognize is our old house at 47 Kleins Road. Here the
map excerpt and a copy from the title:
The numbers along the edges show the compass direction and length in links (7.92").
Both are difficult to read, but I interpret:
Side
Length (Map)
Length (Title)
Direction (Map)
Direction (Title)
N
1197
1197
S 89° 51 E
90° 09'
E
951
951
S 0° 12 E
179° 48'
SW (1)
622
621
(?) N 29° 53 E
209° 53'
SW (2)
833
833
N 44° 49 E
224° 49'
S
299
299
S 88° 49 E
268° 49'
W
2091
2090
S 0° 8 E
359° 52'
The dimensions aren't quite the same, but it took some analysis to understand the
difference. The compass directions in the title only make sense if you start at top left
and go round clockwise. Clearly 179° 48' in one direction is 0° 12' in the other
direction. But the map uses a different convention: east or west of north or south, and
starting from the north or west. Thus the northern and southern boundaries, which are
almost parallel, are S 88° 51 E and S 88° 49 E on the map—clearly showing that they're
off by 2'—but on the title they're 90° 09' and 359° 52'.
So in the end the only difference is 1 link (roughly 20 cm) in two dimensions. How did they
arrive at this difference? It's unlikely they would have re-surveyed it; if they had, they
would have taken account of magnetic deviation. As Google Maps show, and as I have
discovered in the past, Kleins Road does not run 359° 52' to the south; it's more like
20°/200°, as I estimated nearly 4
years ago.
Looking at the names, J.J. Klein also owned the other side of the road, now subdivided into
4 blocks, and also the one down the end. No wonder it was called Kleins Road.
But things are missing here too: Dereel-Rokewood Junction Road now joins the two roads at
the top of this extract. How did people get through in those days? There are a number of
missing roads. And there are an amazing number of roads on the map for which there is now
no evidence that they ever existed. Further north, where we now live, there was almost
nothing—quite contrary to what we had been told:
The road to the east is now the
main Ballarat—Colac
road, but that's about the only one that's easy to recognize. Here's what Google Maps makes of the same area today:
Almost none of the roads correspond. About the only one is the section of road running
north/south, now part of Harrisons Road. On the other hand, there are roads which have now
completely disappeared, like the one coming from the south-east corner. Looking at the
satellite image there's still some evidence of that road to the east of the bend in
Harrisons Road.
Why did people change the roads so much? A road isn't an easy thing to build, and we're
talking about a time frame of only 126 years. It's really puzzling.
Coming closer to home, this is the area round Stones Road:
The road north/south in the centre is Harrisons Road again; the east-west one is then Bliss
Road (note that a J Bliss lived down Harrisons Road, in what is now a paddock), and the road
on the east side of the school is Stones Road. Our house would be roughly south of the
second i in Diggings.
Other things of interest is E Speary, in what is now Speary's Road, and the post office in
J. Smith's property (now a sheep paddock). Somehow it's surprising to find a school and a
post office in such a sparsely populated area. Possibly the area marked “Diggings” was
really something like a shanty town.
Then there are the diggings. The crosses represent mine shafts, and as far as I can tell,
they correspond well with the shafts we find today.
Looking further afield, to the west of Dereel it looked like this:
It's also interesting that the names of the property owners are included in the map, but not
the names of the roads. And there are surprisingly few surnames, including ones that we
know from road names today, like Cahill, Judge and Farley. Somehow the map asks more
questions than it answers.
Yvonne wanted to go to a garage sale this morning,
conveniently set for the first day of
the Dereel Spring Fair. I went with her
with the intention of visiting the fair on the way home.
Surprisingly, we found a number of interesting things: an ironing board, a bedside lamp, a
couple of Pastis glasses and a couple of
apparently brand-new cookbooks—all for a total of $10! My guess is that the prices for all
the items together wouldn't have been more than $300. And for that four people stay at home
all weekend.
The fair was much as the Dereel fairs always are, a combination of sales stall, exhibition
and random stuff:
She prefers it to the other. My understanding is that it'll come home soon to be attacked
by the animals.
After taking photos, one of the people watching me pointed out that I wasn't supposed to
take photos without the artist's permission. So we asked Julie, and she gave the
permission.
While our new garden struggles, the one in Kleins Road is getting by well without us. We
dropped in on the way back to get
some Clematis shoots which I hope to
propagate. There's lots of stuff going on there, notably
the Paulownia kawakamii and
the Echium candicans:
We have planted a sucker of the Paulownia in Stones Road, but the dogs (we think) bit off
most of the stem, and until a week or so ago we weren't sure that it had survived. But it
seems it did, though it hardly looks comparable to the parent tree:
The cookbooks that we bought at the garage sale were both sort of Indian, and both, it
proved, by the same author, Mridula Baljekar: The
Food & Cooking of India and “150 Curries”, apparently too old to be worthy
of mention on the web site. They're particularly English in outlook, and some of the
recipes look downright strange, more Chinese than Indian, such as numerous applications
of five spice powder.
It's almost as if I have discovered a parallel universe, but then a closer examination
reveals that the five spices are panch
phoron—not the only case where I've been confused by her terminology. In a completely
unrelated part of the book (the general introduction), she confirms this, but spells the
word “panchforon”. Other strange spellings include kariveppila karuvepillai
(curry leaf; note that doubled letters
are pronounced doubled).
Other details are also interesting. This map shows Madras
(called Chennai since 1996) in the middle
of Andhra Pradesh state. That's a
strange place for the capital of Tamil
Nadu:
In any case, the books are nicely presented, well photographed, and for $1 each you can
hardly go wrong.
Interestingly, one of the photos in the first book shows (from afar) the Vishvanatha temple
at Khajuraho. But
clearly close-ups like this one aren't appropriate in a cookbook:
Isn't that a good idea? I suppose it is if you like your recipes standing up. But with a
normal bench height that means you have to bend down to read it, whereas if it's flat on the
surface you don't. In addition, the ring binding makes it particularly difficult to turn
the pages:
Spring is here, and I'm still discovering new plants. Within 300 metres of the house I've
found three different plants that I have only just identified. This one is almost certainly
a Bossiaea prostrata:
Decided to try out one of our new cookbooks this evening, and we settled on a prawn pillau (or is that pilau? that's how it's spelt in
the book) from The
Food & Cooking of India. In retrospect not a good idea; it's too similar
to the paella that we cooked yesterday.
On the whole, not a bad dish, but once again I get the feeling that the dishes that the
photographers get are not cooked to the same recipe. Here the photo from the book and our
version:
I have connections with people round the world, and I've had the same email address for 18
years (before that my domain name was lemis.de, which didn't export well). So it's
not surprising that I'm bombarded with spam. It probably doesn't help that I keep telling
Facebook different things about my past.
Currently I claim to have been born
in Kandahar, studied at Новосибирский государственный университет (Novosibirsk State
University), and to live in Харків
(Kharkiv). So it's not that surprising that a lot of my spam is in Russian and Ukrainian.
But that's only part of it:
Click on the image to make it readable. Apart from
Russian (I don't recognize any Ukrainian), I have Portuguese, Spanish, French, Greek,
German, Chinese, Japanese, and at least one language written in Arabic script. And the
German subject lines are either deliberately or accidentally written in broken German.
Yesterday's prawn pillau was quite a
success, and though we were supposed to be eating the rest of the paella today, I decided to try another recipe from
the new cookbooks. This time I tried the other, “150 curries”.
One thing is clear: the title is wrong. My guess is that not more than half of the recipes
could be called curries. There are noodle dishes, nasi goreng, sambals and all sorts of other dishes. They don't look bad, but they're
not curries.
The big issue is the ingredients, of course. In the end we drummed up 8 chicken drumsticks
and made a murgh dopiaza, chicken with lots
of onions:
Once again, Yvonne was happy with the dish, though the timing
in the recipe was clearly intended for chicken breast and not drumsticks.
After the meal, I went looking for other mentions of the dish—a good time to do so. And in
Wikipedia I found:
As many other Hyderabadi dishes, the addition of a sour agent is a key part of
dopiaza. Most often, raw mangoes are used; however, lemon juice or cranberries can be used
as well.
There's nothing sour in the recipe, nor in any other recipe I found on a quick trawl through
the web. Who's wrong?
CJ Ellis has trouble with his phone again! Once again he can make calls out, but calls in get automatically diverted to
voice mail. He asked me for help. I confirmed the behaviour, and suggested that he got
MyNetFone to contact me for problem
resolution, since he has difficulty understanding the people. Sometimes I do too: they
asked him what kind of modem he had. Modem? What's that in a National Broadband Network system? All he has is
an ATA.
Sure enough, within minutes I got a call from Akbar of MyNetFone support, asking what the
problem was with my phone (to which he referred as “landline”). I explained the situation,
but it didn't seem to sink in. Round the second or third time it did, though. He checked
CJ's configuration and found nothing wrong. That, at least, was different from last time,
where their system claimed he wasn't registered, though he could make calls out.
So he tried another call, and said everything was OK: after a few rings it diverted to voice
mail. What kind of confirmation is that? It all depends on what “a few rings” is. Tried
it myself. Sure enough, it diverted after exactly 20 seconds, as configured. So the
problem was no longer there. But how difficult it is to establish these things. They still
haven't got the ring tones right, probably because they don't understand the problem.
After Saturday's garage sale, Yvonne decided that she would like to buy some dining
chairs there. They were still there, three of them for $1 apiece, so she went off and
picked them up. On the way she was given a dog toy, which Sasha really loved. So does Nikolai, who normally doesn't play with stuffed toys:
Why this one? It's much bigger than most stuffed toys, and maybe that's the attraction.
We're trying to decide whether it's supposed to represent a bear or a monkey.
We made the conscious decision not to move the greenhouse here. It was more pain than it
was worth. And we've now discovered that we have sufficient space in the dining room for a
kind of winter garden:
That has an additional aspect: when insects attack the plants, we find out about it, though
not necessarily as fast as I would like. Today I found these insects on the hibiscus buds,
though they looked more active before I gave them a dose
of pyrethrum:
Taking the photos of the hibiscus buds was difficult. I really wanted to come closer, but
past experience with the Zuiko Digital ED 50 mm
F2.0 Macro suggests that it focuses too slowly for handheld shots with extension
tubes. So what about the M.Zuiko 12-40 mm
f/2.8 “Pro”? Put it on with the 11 mm extension tube and... I couldn't focus At All.
In the end I had to take the photos without the tube.
Later I tried it under more controlled conditions. Yes, I could focus manually, but
autofocus failed completely. It worked with the 50 mm lens, though. Is there something
about the autofocus system that causes the problem? Do the original Olympus tubes do it
better?
20 years ago today I had a visit from Jack Velte and
friends of Walnut Creek CDROM. After dinner we did a bit of quick hacking and came up with
what was to become “The Complete FreeBSD”.
The book went through 5 editions, but it's completely out of date now. How times have
changed! And how many things haven't!
Warrick and Mari are coming on Friday to fix the damage that Brett Chiltern caused,
involving trenches in the garden. The garden is a mess! And we're not really motivated to
do anything about it until we have the water. But I could at least mow the lawn—I thought.
Despite my misgivings, I had left the layout to Yvonne, and
getting the ride-on mower between the plants is really difficult. A good thing we have a
push mower and people prepared to push it.
Today I had to do something with despair, my Microsoft “Windows” 7 box. A popup: software updates installed, rebooting
in 3 minutes.
Why that? I had explicitly told it not to install anything by itself. But now I had a
problem. Yes, “remind me later” buys me time, but it seems not much. And currently I
didn't have a display on despair, nor even a cable to connect it to
the KVM.
Out into the shed to look for a cable. I really needed a second one for swamp, one
of my test boxes. For some reason, I have hundreds of Ethernet cables,
even AUI, but after
much searching and reshuffling moving cartons, I only found
one VGA cable.
Back into the office to hear the
local UPS quietly
buzzing to itself. Clearly it was running. Back into the shed to find that my box
reshuffling had disconnected the output cable for the main UPS. Plugged it back in
again... it went on battery. Into the garage. Yes, the input circuit breaker had tripped
yet again. Thanks Jim. So far, since we've lived here, the UPS has been behind more
problems than it has solved.
Back into the house to tidy up the resultant mess. Having eureka, my main box, on
the second UPS has shown itself to be a good idea. But lagoon came up without
network connectivity. So did stable. So did cvr2. So did
even despair.
Clearly there was something wrong with eureka. But what? Switch? The switch
wouldn't explain why stable, on the same switch, could access other machines.
Restarted dhclient, which was definitely not doing its job, and natd for good
measure. Nothing. Firewall config? A good choice. Re-initialized the firewall. Still
nothing. Started a tcpdump to see if that could give me any insight. Yes, clearly
an ICMP echo
request from stable to eureka, and an ICMP echo reply from eureka
to stable...
Wait a minute. It wasn't doing that 5 minutes earlier. Sure enough, everything was working
normally again. What went wrong? It came good too much later than the firewall
reinitialization for it to be that, but I still have no idea what it was. Looking at the
firewall stats later, the only rejections I saw were:
00040 3678 204152 unreach filter-prohib tcp from not 192.109.197.0/24 to any setup
Gradually I'm running out of excuses not to upgrade eureka to the latest and greatest
FreeBSD. But there's still
one: kgames, some card games
that Keith Packard wrote decades
ago. The code seems to have rotted, and I can't find any version that will build in a
modern environment.
OK, that's a question of porting, and when it comes to porting, I wrote the book. But the kind of porting described there is
almost as old as the code. Still, got off to a start.
First I need a Makefile. That's easy: run imake:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /home/ports/x11/kgames/kgames-1.0 264 -> imake Imakefile.c:16: error: Imake.tmpl: No such file or directory
imake: Exit code 1.
Where's my Imake.tmpl? locate tells me that it's
in /usr/local/lib/X11/config. OK, imake -I/usr/local/lib/X11/config did it.
But why didn't the imake in /usr/local/bin know that?
Next: varargs is dead and gone, long live stdarg. How do you convert them? I
haven't found a good set of instructions, but here are the diffs which I ended up with:
--- Xkw/Message.c 1996/03/13 15:46:31 1.1
+++ Xkw/Message.c 2015/10/15 02:25:26
@@ -30,7 +30,8 @@
# include <X11/Xaw/Cardinals.h>
# include "Cards.h"
# include <X11/Xutil.h>
-# include <varargs.h>
+# include <stdarg.h>
+# include <stdio.h>
Then there were a number of minor gripes, like using NULL for 0, or not casting
function arguments. The next serious one was in kklondike/kklondike.c:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /home/ports/x11/kgames/kgames-1.0/kklondike 272 -> make cc -O2 -pipe -ansi -pedantic -Wno-system-headers -Dasm=__asm -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wundef -I.. -I. -I./exports/include -DCSRG_BASED -DFUNCPROTO=15 -DNARROWPROTO -c klondike.c
klondike.c:26:28: error: X11/Intrinsic.h: No such file or directory
klondike.c:27:29: error: X11/StringDefs.h: No such file or directory
(etc)
Why doesn't the Makefile include /usr/local/X11/include?
Round about here I have a decision to make: do I just fix it without the help
of imake, or do I fix it so that imake still works? Does anybody
use imake any more? I wanted to quote from Software Portability with imake,
but I can no longer find the book. Maybe I did the right thing and threw it out. It's now
20 years old, and times have changed since then. I have a recollection of a biography
including the statement that the authors had been so brain-damaged by contact
with imake that they were only fit for travelling carnivals, but that doesn't sound
like Paul DuBois for a couple of
reasons. Maybe I was confusing it with a different book.
A couple of weeks ago I made a mistake measuring the amount of flour for baking bread (too
much), and ended up having to bake two partial loaves. That didn't work out as badly as I
had feared, so when I started a new batch yesterday, I planned for two full-sized loaves:
one in the newest pan, and one in the second-newest pan, which is only half the size.
The starter handled the 50% more flour well—too well, in fact: it overflowed the container.
A considerable mess, a lot of calculation, but in the end things worked out well. Next time
I'm going to have to create less intermediate starter and see if things still work out.
Mari Hendriks and Warrick Pitcher along today to repair some of the damage that Brett
Chiltern and mate did months back: the punctured underwater irrigation line.
But how was the stuff laid originally? At the time, nearly a year
ago, I took lots of photos. Except, of course, the ones I needed. Still, Mari found it.
They started in the corner near the dog run, and looking in that direction we found the
white stormwater pipe on the left, the red control cable close to it, and the green-striped
black irrigation line off to the right:
While they were there, got them to put some pipes under the driveway. This one is a drain
for the ground water and also some low-density poly irrigation hose in a rural poly sleeve:
Letting Mari on to the property didn't go as smoothly as hoped. Nikolai and Leonid were in the front garden, and when I opened the gate, they shot off down
Grassy Gully Road. Niko didn't have a collar, so I went inside to get one, and then headed
off looking for them. It didn't take long before they came running back, Niko with
something in his mouth:
Things have changed since then, and today there was only one other dog there, about the size
of Sasha's head. I didn't take any photos, only videos, and I've left it to Yvonne to process them.
What do I need that for? I already have a Zuiko Digital
ED 50 mm F2.0 Macro, a better lens. But its focal length is frequently a problem, and
it has a maximum magnification of 1:2 (area 37.6×26.0 mm), while the 35 mm macro has a
maximum magnification of 1:1 (area 17.3×13.0 mm). Even with both extension tubes, I can't
get that ratio with the 50 mm lens. Both make it convenient for a number of applications,
including taking photos while walking the dogs.
Conveniently, the lens was located
in Ballarat, so I was able to pick it
up. The seller has an amazing amount of equipment. I thought I was a hoarder, but he has
me beat. I counted at least 2 OM-D E-M1s, 2 OM-D E-M5s (I think), a
E-PL7, and he also
had two E-330s and
an E-300, admittedly the latter
four all for sale. He also had a Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 lens for sale, against which I had decided because it's not
supported by DxO
Optics “Pro”, but I took a look at it anyway. Yvonne's
camera (the E-PM2)
could hardly focus with it at all. Mine would have, but why buy something like that when
there are lenses like the Leica DG Summilux 25
mm f/1.4 available?
Chris also had a M.Zuiko Digital
ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 EZ with an original Olympus automatic lens cap. He's not happy
with it: it's smaller, and it doesn't keep dust out of the mechanism. I'm not sure ours
does either, but here's the comparison. The lens on (Yvonne's) camera has the aftermarket
cap, and the other has the Olympus cap:
It's the middle of spring, but looking at the garden you wouldn't know it. The recent hot
spell and the relative lack of water mean that things aren't growing the way they should.
As a result, there aren't many flowers.
One exception are the wildflowers that I had noticed last year, and which I have mainly been
able to identify. This is without doubt
a Burchardia umbellata:
