This past Saturday my friend Andy (aka Squep) DJ'd at Rohstofflager and I tagged along to take photographs of the event. A few are posted up on my Panoramio account and many more in a FaceBook photo album. This one below is one of my favorites--I like how Andy's hand is visible but his arm disappears. Spooky!

I really enjoy photographing in low light conditions and capturing motion. Frequently these shots don't work out, but maybe one in three does, and maybe one in twenty is great, and one in a hundred is amazing...like this one!

These photos were taken on my mid-level Canon 350D with a 1GB CF card, monopod and a EF 28-55mm IS f/3.5-5.6 lens. Images were saved as JPEGs. Photographing in such a low light environment brought out both expected and unexpected flaws. Motion blur: expected and even desired to an extent. Noise and color gradient artifacts: Unexpected.

After some web researching (Tips for Night and Low Light Photography by M. Kirschbaum and Low Light Digital Photography from Anthony Peyper), I'm now edumacated on what I can do to avoid these problems. The first is quick and cheap: Start shooting in RAW rather than JPEG. This will skip the on camera compression and I can process on my MBP. The downside is that RAW stuff use around four times more memory on the card per image. A new Kingston Elite Pro (133x) 16GB CF card (SFr. 66) is on order from Digitec and should arrive this week.

A second technique would be to use a tripod and remote clicker thingy. The monopod was great for mobility but still required concentration and bracing myself against walls, speakers, etc. Tripods that suite my needs run between SFr. 50 and 250.

The last, more expensive improvement is to buy a 'fast' lens. The two lenses that I am looking at are the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II (SFr. 133 at Digitec) and the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens (SFr. 439). The reviews of the less expensive lens are mixed--it's dirt cheap for such a fast lens, but the construction is cheap and image quality is a maybe. Another factor I am considering is the USM (Ultrasonic Motor) in the pricier lens, which I'd really like to have. I'm holding off on this purchase until I have a 'gig' like Saturday night.

While on my latest trip back to America to see Robyn, she presented me not with a gift...but something to take back for her (where she will soon be lodged for the summer.)  I am talking about some hardcore geek paraphernalia: Circuit Board Coasters! They are apparently made from waste circuit boards by company called TerraCycle. A pack of six retails for $12.99. Pretty groovy, eh?

(That is a bottle of Quöllfrisch, a Swiss beer from the Kanton of Appenzeller, where the men are brave and the sheep are scared.)

This past weekend I was in St. Augustine Beach, Florida to spend some time with Robyn. Lucky me, the Space Shuttle Discovery's launch had been repeatedly postponed until our arrival. I had been following the STS-119 Twitter feed for weeks and hoping for this timing!) After checking in to our ocean front room at The Hampton Inn and talking a nice walk along the beach, we caught the first part of the launch on SpaceVidcast.com's live feed which had this funny Mystery Science Theater 3000 feel to it. Once the count down hit 20 minutes we headed down to the beach for the actual launch.



Robyn took the clip (her voice in the background) on my Nokia N95 8GB which has decent motion camera characteristics while I took photographs on my Canon EOS 350D and EF-IS 28-135mm lens.

One of the initial capabilities I have built into my company's server application (a streaming media content management system) is RESTful content CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) access.  Our system's web-based administration interface is written in Flex, and unfortunately Adobe's Flash plug-in does not support HTTP PUT (among other RESTful actions), so all of our content CRUD actions occur either through our client side application or manually.

"Manually" means me, ssh and sftp. Over the past several months I have been increasingly micro-tasked by my colleagues with uploading special content file updates that we call "shared players".  This process, because of the Fort Knox-grade security Aspectra, our hosting company, is not particularly simple, and somewhat error prone because of all of the intermediate steps.

We need a better solution--something fast, secure, and (preferably) no Stu required!  So, I could either jump into the administrative UI code (b.o.r.i.n.g--UI coding is for mere mortals), or I could come up with something kinda interesting. 

To speed the process of late, I had been using curl at the command line to upload these files via HTTP.  The syntax is pretty simple:

   curl -T file.txt -u user:pass server.com/path/file.txt

My efforts to get my colleagues using the above failed miserably.  (Most people are scared of CLI, it seems.)  So, an OS X shell integrated right-click "Upload this file to the CMS" thingy seemed like a great idea.

A quick Google search of the Internets introduced me to the free OnMyCommand. Not only does OMC allow me to create right-click shell functionality, but also "Droplets", which are self contained applications that can be used without installing OMC. Setting up my own curl command was a piece of cake--I had it running inside an hour.  The documentation and examples are perfect for this.  OMC has a neat little feature where you can capture the output from a CLI command and use it to create a progress bar!  For file uploads that is a very useful feature--I spent the next four hours putting icing on the cake.  The documentation here is a bit more sparse (a newish OMC feature apparently), examples even fewer, and the OMCEdit GUI's "progress" setup a bit clunky.

The result rocks my geek soul.  Here is how the tool is used: Right-click the file one wants to upload, and...



(Yes, I too find the menus a bit too verbose.  I'll look into that later.) 

(OMC v2.1 (2008-11-28) was used here.  The software is under active development and YMMV substantially.)

Immediately afterward the progress bar pops up showing the progress, including percent uploaded, bytes uploaded and average upload speed.


Fracking groovy, no?  Here is how the progress bar was configured (after some blood, sweet and tears.)  The OMCEdit helps to start things out, and this is what works:



Figuring out what worked and what did not was painful, but are easily traced to two points:

1. my regular expressions knowledge is not what is could be
2. OMC's progress feature expects input from std in, and curl (somewhat unusually) sends status information to std err. 
   

The first issue was remedied thanks to my good friend Jorg and a tool he pointed me to, gskinner's RegExr Online Regular Expression Testing Tool.  After some trial and error I came up with the following:

   ^\s*([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)\s+([^ ]+)

This parses the curl output status line into the subgroups that we need for the status line:

  $1: percent finished
  $2: size uploaded so far
  $6: size to upload
  $8: average upload rate

UPDATE: A much shorter regular expression thanks to a stackoverflow.com user. Details in this post


The second issue is dealt with very easily: append &2>1 to the curl command line argument configured in OCM.  I think it would be better if the OMC progress bar configuration allowed one to specify as much, but it's not my awesome free software project. 

  And there we go, OMC progress bar for curl. I've most certainly skipped over details that seemed trivial at the time. So, if you have questions about anything please do comment with the blog system, or even email me (stu (aatt) dietpizza.ch) where you are sure to get a response.

Last week my latest toy purchase arrived in the post, a recently retired Swiss International Airlines  beverage trolley!  While it had been bathed in still stinky disinfectant, it needed a good washing down to get some grime off.  The internal trays are great for storage of those little household things that need a home: office supplies (tape, stapler, etc.), cables and cords, my camera gear, and the like.  ~CHF850 from www.aviatik-shop.ch