Just sharing some of my inconsequential lunch conversations with you... RSS  

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Tips for your underwater holyday photos

I’m a newbie underwater photographer, so if you googled or binged for tips and landed on this page, I’d advise you to think again and try the next hit. Hopefully google and bing won’t rank me high on the search list so I can write some rubbish about a subject I know so little about.

But I digress. Here are my tips:

  • Use a flash. I didn’t, and I regret it.
  • Always shoot on raw format, you’ll surely end up correcting your photos, and JPEG just kills most of the latitude you have. As Canon RAW drivers doesn’t support 64 bits, I didn’t, and I regret it.
  • Always use goggles. I can’t focus and frame a picture under water without them.
  • Choose a wide lens. First because water is a natural teleconverter. And above all because it facilitates focusing and framing, and boy this is hard to do under water – at least if you have so little experience as your blogger friend.
  • On shallow waters avoid using high ISO. This pictures will need some post-processing, let’s us not make it unnecessary harder.
  • update: Use internal focusing lenses. I’ve tried it with my video camera, an external focusing system, and the bag often kept the camera from focusing
  • update: protect the flash hot shoe, it can damage the bag. I’m using my wife’s demakeup pads, but simple cotton will work just fine.

Here are some of these pictures (my laptop doesn’t have LightRoom installed, so the post-processing was… well… not too great…):

IMG_7827 - Copy IMG_7897 - Copy
IMG_7941 - Copy IMG_7953 - Copy
IMG_8040 - Copy IMG_8052 - Copy
IMG_8084 - Copy IMG_8111 - Copy
IMG_8154 - Copy IMG_8160 - Copy
IMG_8160 - Copy IMG_8161 - Copy
IMG_8174 - Copy IMG_8206 - Copy
IMG_8227 - Copy IMG_8228 - Copy
IMG_8234 - Copy IMG_8362 - Copy
IMG_7913 - Copy IMG_7912 - Copy

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Windows 7 RTM available for download

As announced, Windows 7 RTM was made available to msdn subscribers. I’m presently downloading an Enterprise version – my previous Vista version was a Business VLK but I couldn’t find such edition. Let’s only hope Microsoft will release VLK key tomorrow for this Enterprise edition.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

And now for something completely boring

We often use KB to represent kilo bytes. By doing this, we are making the following mistakes:

  1. If we want to represent it on a 10 base form, 103, we should use kB
  2. If we want to represent it on a 2 base form, 210, we should use KiB

Here are the 10 base prefixes we learned at school:

Factor Name Symbol
1024 yotta Y
1021 zetta Z
1018 exa E
1015 peta P
1012 tera T
109 giga G
106 mega M
103 kilo k
102 hecto h
101 deka da

And here’s what our children will learn:

Factor Name Symbol Origin Derivation
210 kibi Ki kilobinary: (210)1 kilo: (103)1
220 mebi Mi megabinary: (210)2 mega: (103)2
230 gibi Gi gigabinary: (210)3 giga: (103)3
240 tebi Ti terabinary: (210)4 tera: (103)4
250 pebi Pi petabinary: (210)5 peta: (103)5
260 exbi Ei exabinary: (210)6 exa: (103)6

 

<update>

Now that I think of it, we should use SI standards to end the English speaking vs. rest of the world billion ambiguity. We should start using SI nomenclature on the financial world, stop talking about 10 billion dollars, and start talking about 10 tera dollars. Or 10 giga dollars, see what I mean? :)

</update>

Jesus evaluated by academics

As we all know, the academic community is highly paper-oriented. And this is good, this is the guarantee that scientific knowledge flows on a global scientific network, but there is more than publishing quantity, and it poses problems to those that don’t publish so often. I was discussing this with a friend, a researcher in an area other than mine, and he referenced something he read on a magazine:

What can an academic say about Jesus work? Well, definitely a great teacher, but he doesn’t have anything published, does he?

Fun !

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Recursion definition.. again…

This definition is an old well known geek joke:

What's the correct dictionary definition for recursion? See: recursion.

I’ve already posted about it. But here’s something cooler: try and google recursion, and you’ll end up being corrected with:

image

Cool :)

Development Catharsis :: Copyright 2006 Mário Romano