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…):

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.

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 !

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:

Cool :)

These days, people outsource just about anything!

Here’s a cool example that just popped out on google ad on devcatharsis: ScienceOps. What do they do:

ScienceOps creates, validates, and optimizes algorithms.

Our team of Ph.D. level scientists provides algorithm solutions for your business needs.
Enable your business critical code to produce required results faster, allowing better decisions and opening up new opportunities for your business.

• Algorithm Development as Firm Fixed Price Contracts
• 3^rd Party Algorithm Validation
• Algorithm Optimization
• Statistical Data Analysis
• Data Mining
• Complex Algorithms
• Scientific Algorithms
• Custom Algorithms
• Rapid Algorithm development
• Algorithm Design

Customized Algorithms can read, search, analyze large amounts of information, make predictions, are able to make real time split second decisions and adapt and adjust instantly to changes in new input information.

Hey, pretty much a dream work :)

RFID Operations Guide Live

Here it is: the first “BizTalk Server 2009 RFID Operations Guide”.

I haven’t read it yet, but according to Ewan Fairweather, the key sections of the guide are:

· Planning the Environment for BizTalk Server RFID: Explains the planning required for various components such as RFID devices, servers deployment, performance, HA, etc. to ensure that your BizTalk Server RFID infrastructure and applications become operationally ready.

· Operations Checklist: Provides a set of daily, weekly and monthly tasks that will empower the IT Pro to assess and evaluate the operational readiness state of a BizTalk Server RFID deployment.

· Managing Deployment: Covers best practices, key concepts, and procedures specific to BizTalk Server RFID and its dependencies for maintaining, managing and monitoring the various components.

· BizTalk RFID Useful links: Compiles all the BizTalk Server RFID relevant links that will be useful post deployment to production.

ASP.NET MVC V2 Preview 1

Damned, these goodies just doesn’t stop dropping, when will we ever get stable environments? Eh, eh, eh, just kidding, stopping is dying, and lately we are walking a desert of cool technological stuff. Thanks Scott.

Photo tips

Here are a set of photography learning sites I just got from my friend Pita:

http://digital-photography-school.com/

http://www.webphotoschool.com/

http://www.beyondmegapixels.com/

http://www.diyphotography.net/

http://photodoto.com/

http://www.shortcourses.com/

http://strobist.blogspot.com

 

Here’s a preciosity found on one of these:

Microsoft / Yahoo agreement

Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

Finally something well done. It isn’t a buyout, but an agreement of two companies with great cultural differences that strive to remain competitive on a world where Google rules. At last!

Here are the key terms of the agreement:

•The term of the agreement is 10 years;

•Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;

•Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

•Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

•Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.

•Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.

•Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.

•Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.

•Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

•Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.

•At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.

•The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

And finally:

The agreement does not cover each company’s web properties and products, email, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses. In those areas, the companies will continue to compete vigorously.

So bing’s market share will surely grow. At least for now :)

.NET 4 Beta 1 supports Software Transactional Memory

Software Transactional Memory (STM.NET) is a mechanism for efficient isolation of shared state.  The programmer demarcates a region of code as operating within a transaction that is “atomic” and “isolated” from other transacted code running concurrently.

Transactional memory is considered a promising technology by the academic community and is repeatedly brought up as a welcome technology for the upcoming wave of applications which scale on modern multi-core hardware. The goal is to be able to exploit concurrency by using components written by experts and consumed by application programmers who can then compose together these components using STM. Transactional memory provides an easy-to-use mechanism to do this safely.

STM is not a 1:1 lock replacement and provides more functionality than critical sections, reader-writer locks, and other traditional synchronization methods. This functionality has overhead; the hope is that the scalability, productivity, and deadlock freedom gained by this mechanism outweigh the degradation in serial performance.

This is an experimental release of the .NET Framework that allows C# programmers to try out this technology, specifically a particular implementation of STM. We are interested in your feedback on your experience using this programming model. Is it valuable and easy-to-use? Does it provide enough functionality? Are you willing to pay with serial performance losses to gain greater scalability? Our implementation is integrated with the framework and tools, it has been extended to provide coexistence with locks, interoperate with traditional transactional technologies, and safely work with existing code.

 

Getting Started

1. Download and Install the .NET Framework enabled for Software Transactional Memory (STM.NET).
2. Download and Install the samples, documentation, and configuration files necessary to use Visual Studio 2008 with the .NET Framework installed in the previous step.
3. Read the STM Programming Guide to get started with STM.NET.

This are great news. The bad new is that the setup fails to install on my x64 machines. Arghh!!! I want to play with STM!….

Taking photos on the water

Water, salt and sand are not the friends your reflex can get. Though I often take the camera with me to the beach, I ended up taking pictures from the beach, not from the water. Like the next one:

Even a shot like this can be hazardous for your camera. A while after this shot, a wave bigger than I expected got me while lying on the sand and the camera nearly took a dip.

Every now and then I jumped into the water, but only on low tide with calm waters, like this:

A hard case costs more than my camera, so I decided to get a cheaper bag case. The case choice itself wasn’t simple, as we can buy a cheap underwater camera for about the same price, but the performance and flexibility of an SLR is something I wasn’t willing to give up.

I chose Aquapac Waterproof SLR case (code 455), a 80£ (92.5€) bag. I wanted to buy an ewa-marine big enough to carry a flash, but it costs over 250€.

Aquapac didn’t guarantee that if could be fitted on either my Canon 10D and 50D, but I still ordered to check. Naturally I’m trying it on my old 10D, with an old Canon 28-105 USM, a lens I seldom use. And it fits. Not that it is easy to slip it in, you have to get the hand of it, but it fits. Here it is:

The operation is, well, clumsy. As expected. But I can still (slowly) use all of the buttons. I can even use the lens zoom.

I haven’t yet used it under water – well, to be honest I’ve dipped it underwater and took a shot, but the water was so rough that I couldn’t see anything. I have to try it out on a pool :)

Here are some shots above water:

 

And there is it, I can now get my camera to the beach, to the river, to canoeing, to sailing, and so on.

  Let me finish with two important advises:

• avoid contact with sunscreens: I wasn’t careful and here’s a shot of what happened
• be sure to carry a bottle of water and some cleaning cloth – salty water is definitely not a good filter for your shots