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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 24 December 2007
Latest
Update: Sunday, 30 December 2007 11:15 -0500 |
08:41
-
I start the final week of 2007 with much remaining to be done. I've
already blocked out this coming weekend for administrative tasks,
including year-end tax-related stuff, making a new set of archive
discs, etc. During the week, I'll be doing setups in the lab and
shooting images. I probably won't finish shooting images this week, but
I'll make a large dent in the list of remaining images to be shot.
I
also need to get quite a few things done before the book hits the
bookstores in April, including creating a PDF book with the answers to
the questions in the main book, bringing up a web site and forums for
the book, and shooting some promotional videos to post on YouTube. All
that stuff is planned and outlined, so it's just a matter of getting it
done. As Pournelle often says, it's a great life if you don't weaken.
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
11:30
-
Curses, foiled again. This year, I decided to return to basics, so I
put a large reindeer trap baited with reindeernip up on the roof.
Think a mousetrap with a 10-foot snapper. I had to set the jaws with a
winch. I heard a loud snap in the wee small hours. When I rushed out to
check, the trap was sprung and the reindeernip was gone, but there was no
reindeer in the jaws of the trap.
Despite my efforts to grab all his loot, Saturnalia
Claus left some good stuff for me under the Saturnalia tree. Among my
presents was a 22" Viewsonic LCD display to replace the 20" Viewsonic
VG2021m display that's currently on my main system. Today I'll
connect that, move the 20" Viewsonic to my den system, and move the 19"
Samsung LCD that's currently on my den system back to Barbara's office.
After
about 90 minutes of swapping around displays, I ended up with the three
displays situated as described. When I started shutting down systems to
move displays around, I decided to move the 20" Viewsonic back to
Barbara's office and keep the 19" Samsung in the den. That didn't work
out very well. The 20" Viewsonic is a wide-screen model, and the
integrated nVIDIA video chipset in Barbara's Athlon X2 Kubuntu 6.10
system lacks support for the 1400X1050 native resolution of the
20" Viewsonic. I hacked around on that for a while, installing a
utility that patches the video BIOS on-the-fly, but I finally decided
just to move the 19" Samsung to her office. Its native resolution is
1280X1024, which is what Barbara had been running on her 19" Hitachi
CRT. The Samsung came up fine and works properly.
I then moved
the 20" Viewsonic to my den system, which runs Ubuntu 7.10. It
recognized the monitor and configured it properly automatically. Then I
connected the new Viewsonic VX2255wmb to my primary office system,
which also runs Ubuntu/Kubuntu 7.10. Once again, the system
automatically detected and configured the display properly, so now I'm
running 1680X1050 on a 22" display.
The new display is big,
bright, and beautiful. In fact, it's so big that at the distance I
normally work I can't take it all in without scanning horizontally or
moving my head. The line of text as I write this is about 18" long,
which is far too long to parse comfortably. I can see that I'll be
working with multiple windows a lot more, which is a good thing. With a
19" display, and even with the 20" widescreen, I usually worked
full-screen. Now I'll have room to have multiple windows visible at the
same time.
Wednesday, 26 December 2007
08:52
-
Barbara is off to the doctor's office to get a form signed that says
it's okay for her to return to work. This will be a short week for her,
and with so many people on vacation her workload is likely to be very
light. I'll be doing lab setups and shooting images the rest of this
week.
I'm still getting used to the 22" Viewsonic VX2255wmb
display. This is my first 16X9 display, so it does take a bit of
getting used to. The pixels are a bit smaller than those of the 4X3 20"
Viewsonic VG2021m. The difference in aspect ratio means that this
display has 20% more pixels in an overall screen area that's only about
7.7% larger. Still, by last night, I'd gotten used to the wider screen
ratio enough that it felt a bit strange to use the square 20" display
in the den. The wider ratio makes it a lot easier to work with two
documents side-by-side, which is nice.
Barbara is happy with the
19" Samsung 930bf display that's in her office now. She had been using
my old Hitachi SuperScan Elite 751 19" tube monitor, which turned
eight years old in November. She immediately noticed how much brighter
and sharper the Samsung is. I retired the Hitachi to the tech room,
where it'll serve as a test-bed monitor.
I guess this is the
passing of an era. We now have zero of our primary systems running
CRTs. Things have come a long way in the two years since I bought my
first LCD display, the Samsung 930bf. Up until then, I'd gotten loaner
eval units from the manufacturers to review for the books, but I still
preferred the image quality on a good CRT display. Back then, LCD
displays cost a lot more than CRTs of similar size and quality, and
Newegg listed many more CRTs than LCDs. Newegg now lists only six CRT
models for sale--one 15" and two 17" models from AOC, a 19" Viewsonic,
and 19" and 21" models from NEC--versus 323 LCD models.
And I
just noticed how far down our machine count is. Several years ago, I
worked surrounded by nine running systems connected to four monitors
via two Belkin KVM switches. Now we have only three running PCs in
the house, one each in Barbara's and my offices, and my system in the
den. My former primary system is sitting under a table in my office,
mainly because it's still a competent system (dual-core processor, 2 GB
of RAM, nVIDIA 6800 Ultra video adapter, 2 TB of disk space) that in an
emergency I could have up and running in about 30 seconds flat.
There
are probably half a dozen more working systems in my work room, or at
least systems that could be working with minimum effort, including a
dual-core SFF system and a fully-functional DVR system with dual SDTV
tuners and an HDTV tuner. If I can get a spare day or two, I should
give some of those systems a once-over, format the drives and install
Linux on them, and donate them to local non-profits. But I'm afraid it
may be a while before I have a day or two to spare.
Thursday, 27 December
2007
10:10
-
Barbara did well her first day back at work. The only real restriction
the doctor put on her is that she's not permitted to lift anything that
weighs more than 10 pounds. She's also not permitted to play golf or do
any exercises at the gym that involve using her legs. Otherwise, she's
cleared for duty.
I'll be shooting more images today.
12:30
-
I'm shooting images of some outdoor experiments today, including
reacting sulfur and iron to form iron sulfide and reducing copper
carbonate (copper ore) to copper metal.
I'd been shooting most
of the images in auto mode, which works pretty well, but many of the
images are macro shots and the typical f/5.6 aperture in auto mode
gives little depth of field. Yesterday, I set the camera to
aperture-priority mode for some macros, and shot at f/22 and smaller.
Alas,
when examining those images I noticed a few blobs that shouldn't have
been there. To make a long story short, I have dust on the sensor. It's
not apparent when shooting at larger apertures, but it shows up
distinctly at f/22 and smaller. Eventually, I'll need to clean the
sensor, but I'll defer that for now and simply shoot at larger
apertures.
Saturday, 29 December
2007
10:45
- I'm taking a day off from shooting images to get some administrative stuff done.
This
morning, I'm organizing and archiving data. Shooting images in RAW
format is all well and good, but they're large. At about 10 MB each,
one gigabyte holds only about 100 images. I often shoot four or five
(or ten) images for every one I end up using. That means I
sometimes shoot 100+ images in one day, so the amount of storage
space needed mounts up quickly. Being a packrat (not a pack rat or a packrat), I keep all the extra images.
I
try to keep my working data directories as small as possible for quick
daily backups, and certainly smaller than the 4.4 GB that fits on a
DVD. Yesterday, my working data directories were up to 3.9 GB, and this
morning up to 5.3 GB. I archived all of the extra images and some other
stuff to my holding directories, and cut the working directories down
by 3.9 GB to 1.4 GB.
Speaking of packrats, although Barbara
thinks of herself as a thrower-away rather than a keeper, she's
currently taking down all the Christmas stuff and carefully packing it in boxes.
11:15
-
Today and tomorrow I'm archiving data and burning a new year-end backup
set to DVD. I estimate the new backup set will require roughly a dozen
DVDs.
Unfortunately, I'll have to create those manually,
deciding which directories and files go on which DVDs. There apparently
is no Linux application to do that for me. There are bits and pieces,
including command-line utilities like split, but no complete solution I
can find.
What I want is a GUI-based application that will
examine the 50 GB or so of files in my archive directories, decide how
to split them to minimize the number of DVDs needed, and write out ISOs
of a specified size, automatically numbering them. The application
should store in a database all of the particulars about which files are
on which discs, so restoring a file should be simply a matter of
locating it in the database, inserting the correct disc, and pulling it
back up to my hard drive.
Furthermore, the files should be
directly readable on the discs, and no file should be split across
discs. It's okay if the application compresses individual files with
gzip or whatever, as long as the individual files remain visible and
manipulable on any Linux system, without requiring that the original
backup/archiving application be installed.
That point is
important given what happened to KDar, which is a KDE front-end for dar
(disk archiver). KDar is no longer being developed, no longer
supported, and no longer available in the Ubuntu repositories. Two
years ago, I installed it and seriously considered using it for my 2005
year-end backup. I ended up not doing that, because I was concerned
about what would happen if the application ended up being abandoned,
which it apparently now has.
KDar wrote .dar files, which are
still readable by the command-line dar application, but attempting to
retrieve files that are on random discs in a set of a dozen or so would
be a nightmare. What I'd end up doing, no doubt, is restoring all 50 GB
or so to a hard drive and locating the file I needed from the hard
drive.
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