James' World » Photography

Recent Nova Documentaries on WW2

Administrator — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:09:50 +0000

Nova recently aired 2 good WW2 documentaries.

A British scientist rediscovers the physics and engineering behind the bouncing bombs used to destroy 2 German dams in the Ruhr Valley, and tests his theories on a 1/4 scale dam in Canada. He used a consumer video camera on a tripod to substantially reduce the amount of experimentation needed.

I wasn’t aware of the scale of the original raid, with 33 bombers assigned.

wikipedia: Bouncing bomb

3D Spies of WWII

I wasn’t expecting much from this one, but I sat with my jaw on the floor as they showed original WW2 stereograms and scale models of V1 and V2 factories and launch facilities, as well as the Ruhr dam bomb damage.

The producers were able to interview the original Spitfire photo-recon pilots and photo interpreters.

One pilot said he was flying and saw a vertical contrail from a a V2 rocket, but was unable to photograph it.

Britain and the USA had photo interpreter facilities close to each other in London, and cooperated on advanced camera technology.

Happy New Year 2012 from Bali with Angry Birds and Beer

Administrator — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:01:37 +0000

Happy New Year 2012 from Bali, with Angry Birds and beer!

Traditionally, New Year’s in Bali is celebrated with a fireworks display near Kuta Beach. And lots of beer.

Bintang Beer comes in 2 bottle sizes, the 330 mL “Pint” shown above, and the 620 mL “Bremer” typically carried in each hand by Australian tourists – “Just in case, mate.” The brewer is advised by Heineken.

Bintang means “star” in Bahasa Indonesia.

Angry Birds is a cultural phenomenon in Southeast Asia, with t-shirts, backpacks and plush toys featured at many stores.

wikipedia: Pint

OSCON 2011, Portland

Administrator — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 06:03:21 +0000

Once again, the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) was held in Portland, Oregon.

It was held in parallel at the Oregon Convention Center with the O’Reilly OSdata and OSjava Conferences at the beginning of the week, and then later a knitting conference.

The conferences were well-managed, as usual. Great economy: lots of job notices and recruiting appeals. There was some chatter about Tim’s anti-harassment blog post.

Executive Summary:

HTML5/CSS3/AppCache are what should have been available 20 years ago, and are significant improvements that allow both desktop and mobile development in HTML. Although the HTML5 video tag gets a lot of press, HTML5 includes equally important forms improvements.
DNSSEC is complex and new signatures should be generated every 30 days or less (to reduce replay attacks by limiting the signature validity period), which is a burden on companies without a full-time DNS hostmaster. Third-party DNS hosting companies are salivating over DNSSEC.
MySQL long-term stewardship is still in question, with Oracle hemorrhaging MySQL developers and closing access to their bugs database, but MontyProgram and Percona maintaining strong forks.

Here’s my notes on some of the tutorials and talks I attended:

Monday

HTML5 & CSS3: The Good Enough Parts
Estelle Weyl, Standardista.com
Slides

- transform-origin is key to snowflake demo looking realistic, easy to use
- background resets everything, so use individual properties
- background-position – use all 4 values
- background-size auto contain cover, handy for iPhones
- text-overflow: ellipsis
- minimal HTML5 document:

(head and body are implied)
- or even send tags in server headers
- changed most elements
- useful to style
- small tag useful for legal smallprint, since there’s no copyright metatag yet
- html5shim
- Modernizr
- HTML5 Boilerplate – good way to learn HTML5 and CSS3
- tabindex=”-1″ allows JS to set focus and not bother user otherwise
- spellcheck=”true” | “false”
- itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Person”
- new input types
- placeholder, pattern, required, spellcheck, validate
- a@b is deliverable for internal email servers. hmm.
- meter, progress, output widgets
- HTML5Rocks
- button generator at css3button.net
- Voronoi diagram demo
- aquarium.js
- web workers

Monday Lunch

Benjamin, Ubuntu
- loves CloudFlare
- likes Linode
- nimbula

Talked to an open mapping data fellow about various projects. Google ToS is scary when it comes to that kind of data.

Monday Afternoon

Moose is Perl: A Guide to the New Revolution
Ricardo Signes, Pobox.com
Slides

- detailed talk about Moose features and syntax
- chatted with other folks at break time about topics like CSS::Inliner and Mojolicious web framework (with minimal dependencies) by Sebastian Riedel.

Tuesday Afternoon

Three For Five – Functional HTML5 & CSS3 for Designers & Developers
Jason VanLue, Envy Labs and CodeSchools.com

- good training session with fun sample – a beer menu created from 1 photo (CSS3 text scaling and rotation) and HTML5/CSS3 styled text
- training class is available online for $75 (also jQuery and 2 Rails classes)

Click to Enlarge

Tuesday Night

- went to Puppet Labs office for CloudCamp lightning talks, which started about 90 minutes late
- nice office, typical start-up look across from a small park. Comfy little meeting rooms with leather sofas a la Netflix.
- about 5 lightning talks total, 2 were sales pitches, 2 had 40 slides crammed into 5 minutes. ick.
- Puppet Labs CEO gave a good talk on optimizing Puppet for a client with 10,000+ nodes. Converted XML::RPC to REST, which doubled performance from 500 to 1,000 qps (I talked to Randy Ray about that, and he wasn’t surprised and that would be the case on simple requests), did some more work and maxed out at 2,500 qps. Enabling SSL did not slow down requests.
- got too crowded for me, and also fire department, who manned the exits and counted people as they entered and left.

Photo credit: Jacob Helwig

Wednesday

Creating a Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture
Nicholas Zakas, NCZConsulting
Slides

An AJAX client only cares about getting the data it wants, not response codes, etc.

Use layered JavaScript client architecture:

- sandbox
- application
- library (Dojo, YUI, MooTools, etc. )

www.nczonline.net
@slicknet
Author of “High Performance JavaScript”

Wednesday Lunch

I talked to Ben Golub, CEO of Gluster.

- 80% business, 20% scientific
- users include box.net, Pandora.com
- written in C
- minimum is 2 nodes for replication
- lots of people use it in EC2
- office located in Sunnyvale.

Wednesday Afternoon

HTML5: All about Web Forms
Estelle Weyl, standardista.com

- use label tag with forms to ease navigation for end-users
- use placeholder attribute, better for screenreaders than JS coding
- multiple autofocus defaults to last one in HTML5
- type=”text” is default, so tel, email, etc. degrades on all browsers back to text
- form element can disassociate parent form, useful for AJAX multiform pages
- input types good for mobile devices to show useful soft keyboard for url or email input types
- numeric step options
- test date and numeric input types for usability. Scrolling birthdays or zip codes is painful
- still need JS
- Opera is first with new UI features but last with artistic design, so currently has hideous tooltip appearance
- list and datalist like exploded select. Include select for IE backward compatibility
- meter, progress and output UI elements
- input type=text x-webkit-speech, now on Google homepage

HTML5 in Your Pocket: Application Cache and Local Storage
Scott Davis, ThirstyHead.com

- 4 million Macs, 32 million iDevices in last quarter
- Basecamp Mobile
- “Dive into HTML5″ by Mark Pilgrim online
- cookies should be called thimbles, only 4k
- HTML5 localstorage supported in IE8, FF 3.5, so practically all
- 5 MB, QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR, can’t increase now
- StatCounter browser stats
- gist 350433: Storage polyfill using window.name and cookies
- no version of IE or FF support web SQL and they probably won’t, FF for philosophical reasons
- cache manifest
- genManifest bookmarklet
- FF about:cache and Firebug are handy to see caches
- appcache has no expiry date
- date stamping manifest file causes re-download
- 404 causes none to be saved
- treat appcache as only slightly more secure than cookies, which are round-tripped
- webplication
- still sandboxed from local file access, could use node.js or signed app
- See W3C HTML5 offline

Profiling and Detecting Bottlenecks in Software
Bryan Call, Yahoo!/Apache Committer
PowerPoint .pptx

- usual savings (machines, moving parts, get smart)
- top, htop
- vmstat, dstat
- time cmd
- Boost logging does small writes, allocates memory when it gets behind, causing both IO and memory pressure
- profilers like oprofile and google profile cause 1% to 8% slowdown
- valgrind’s callgrind much more resources
- oprofile has script to convert output to kcachegrind
- opcontrol –deinit
- sysctl nmi_watchdog off
- opcontrol –no-vmlinux
- opcontrol –daemon
- google profiler userland, LD_PRELOAD
- env CPUPROFILE=/tmp/mybin.prof /usr/local/bin/my_binary_compiled_with_libprofiler_so
- caching: don’t do the same work twice
- choose the correct algorithms and data structures: dqueue vs. List, hash vs. trees, locks vs. r/w locks, bloom filter
- reuse memory, stack vs. heap, tcmalloc
- make fewer system calls (larger reads and writes)
- faster hardware, bonded NICs, SSDs, RAID, CPU, more cores
- read How to Profile Apache Traffic Server
- bootchart
- http_load now uses epoll
- he made ab multi-core

From kernel.txt: “nmi_watchdog: Enables/Disables the NMI watchdog on x86 systems. When the value is non-zero the NMI watchdog is enabled and will continuously test all online cpus to determine whether or not they are still functioning properly. Currently, passing “nmi_watchdog=” parameter at boot time is required for this function to work. If LAPIC NMI watchdog method is in use (nmi_watchdog=2 kernel parameter), the NMI watchdog shares registers with oprofile. By disabling the NMI watchdog, oprofile may have more registers to utilize.”

CoffeeScript: A New Hope for JavaScript
Scott Davis, ThirstyHead.com

- trainer, author, worked on Comcast/Time Warner TVs which mostly use WebKit
- little language that compiles into JS
- JS V8 headless, like node.js
- PhantomJS is headless HTML, handy for testing
- Google GWT compiles Java to JS
- “transpiler”
- install node.js
- install npm
- npm install -g coffeescript
- –tokens, –nodes like java p
- immediately invoked function expression IIFE
- coffeescript: string interpolation #{name}, “”"
- objects with left-hand spacing like python

Thursday

DNSSEC @ Mozilla
Shyam Mani, Mozilla Corporation
Slides

- BIND 9.7 is nice for DNSSEC
- Keys are everything, protect them. Have a backup plan.
- Cisco core routers by default don’t expect large DNS transfers:
policy-map global policy class inspection_default inspect dns maximum-length 4096
- DS was live, no signed zones
- watch log levels, can be chatty and quickly fill disk with logs
- DNSSEC has no immediate benefit to end-users, since resolvers don’t honor it
- their logs show 1000:1 dns vs dnssec queries for last 6 months, but growing
- IOS Firewall DNSSEC

Ask Google Engineers Anything
Chris DiBona, Google

- 55 Google employees attending OSCON this year
- mostly end-user questions about Google+ circles and API
- or running Go on android
- or why does my telco not do firmware releases for my smartphone
- or not happy with Google search results this month
- I asked about original reason for GFS. Originally, the hardware was really that flaky, and Google even actively bought bulk refurbed computers and RAM, sometimes off the back of a truck. Got a gopher plushie in return.
- also some good feedback complaints: google groups UI inadequate for managing 350 groups in an Education scenario
- inadequate data import tools for non-profit users of groups, mentioned by a religious charity.

How Not to Design Like a Developer: Open Source Can Look Good Too!
Chrissie Brodigan, Mozilla/Firefox

- KPI vs. git (different goals)
- @sirupsen
- story about the downloads map graphic for FF 4 – a developer silently removed social button graphics, limiting participation of wider audience. Marketing needs to explain why and how other staff fit into outreach programs.
- hang out on #projectdesign
- design contests are a good way to get them to come out of the woodwork
- designers hang out on twitter, not irc
- programmers should avoid big red buttons that scare users, and improve accessibility
- Inkscape, Blender, HTML and CSS are some Open Source tools for design mockups
- do AB testing or survey users
- designers want to be martyrs, so be careful they don’t offer more than you are willing to accept (start with 1 icon rather than the whole set)
- take a look at graphics libre for icons
- Quitestrong.com 5 girls who do design

Gearman BOF
Brian Aker

- Gearman polls, beanstalk busy waits
- nice to have feature to give up to another thread
- monitor projects handle launching of workers
- Gearman has durable and non-durable queues
- is a superset of the crap you handrolled. Most of the homegrown apps peak at 50% to 60% of Gearman’s features
- Gearman is production ready, but the postgresql driver less so because of fewer test cases and Brian’s lesser familiarity
- setup ntp and use Gearman coalescence for redundant cron servers
- can inspect queue
- agnostic to backend
- 99designs.com looking at this, same use case as original developer
- I still think that if you already have a database app, adding a status column gets you a lot of Gearman functionality without one more moving part.

MariaDB BOF
Monty Widenius, MontyProgram AB

- Monty mentioned that the latest release of MariaDB 5.3-beta has faster replication from group commit and performance improvements on the master, which also help the slave. Also subqueries and joins work much better.
- Monty talked about his Aria storage engine, which is a replacement for MyISAM that has both transaction and non-transaction modes. It’s intended for users who want the space savings of MyISAM. Over time it may compete with InnoDB.
- Monty’s responsibility is to convince Percona to merge into 1 source base sometime
- it’s estimated that although Oracle still has the InnoDB team, they may only have 1 general MySQL server programmer left.
- he explained that MontyProgram developers work 50% on feature requests from end-users, and 50% Open Source-related. So paid requests for 1 week of work really need to cover 2 weeks of developer time for that model to work. Typically a medium-sized change is roughly $12,000 and includes development, testing and documentation.
- Zmanda got FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK NO CHECKPOINT for a beer, though. Monty was able to find a code path that could be locked to prevent Aria and MyISAM from writing anything during the backup.
- I sponsored WL#232 for USD$100 to add a SHUTDOWN statement to MySQL
- Monty explained that MERGE tables may be a better choice than MySQL partitions for logging applications.
- attendees from MontyProgram, SkySQL, Percona, DeNA

AskMonty: MySQL “Wishlist” Session from an online travel agency
MySQL Manual 5.5: FLUSH Syntax

Perl Lightning Talks
Hosted by Geoff Avery

- a talk on why arrogant community members telling others that “they need a thick skin” is unhelpful
- a talk by a young Perl community member on getting commit access, and how others can get the spirit and contribute
- Larry did several talks, mostly encouraging backporting Perl6 features to Perl5 it seemed, perhaps as a replacement to going Moose
- nice song on the importance of public libraries, which face shutdown due to economic budgeting problems in Australia and USA
- nice comedy juggling act comparing programming languages. Perl6 was omitted as “nothing has been updated in 5 or 6 years”, prompting Larry to say that he was happy he has a thick skin. See above.
- afterward, I talked to a booking.com rep about why a European company needed to actively recruit in USA and world-wide. He said that European developers are happy working where they are now, and it’s easier to recruit in places with mobile workforces like the USA. He would like to hire a couple developers per week to meet their development schedule.

Not Really First Aid Kits

Administrator — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:51:50 +0000

I live in an earthquake-prone area and occasionally fly small airplanes, so I thought it be a good idea to pick up a first aid kit.

Easier said than done.

What drugstores and office supply stores call a “first aid kit” is just a box of 100 bandaids and 100 tylenols – totally inadequate for any kind of trauma.

It ends up that anything useful is called a “trauma bag” or “EMT first responder kit.”

Those have basic surgical tools, such as shears for removing clothing, bandage scissors and forceps, gloves, epi for allergic reactions, in addition to bandaids and tylenol.

Beyond that, your trauma kit needs to be customized for the expected environment.

Hikers need a light-weight kit than contains blister and snake-bite aids.

Airmen can carry a heavier kit that contains burn aids and splints.

Make sure your kit, like any luggage, is adequately secured in the aircraft. (In Cessnas I use a seatbelt instead of dumping items in the rear baggage compartment. Otherwise in a quick deceleration, such as a crash or noseover, heavy objects will strike the pilot and front seat passenger. Ask Martha King what a toolbox to the head feels like.)

And last but not least – don’t forget training on what to do with all that gear when the occasion arises.

Philippines Trip to Bohol and Cebu

Administrator — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:13:36 +0000

I went on vacation in the Philippines for a week.

After landing in Manila, I booked a domestic flight to the island of Bohol, a quiet farming and tourism island.

The whole island is beautiful.

The government is serious about sustainable tourism development on the island, and all the roads are new (better than downtown Manila!), and sites are partially or fully wheel-chair accessible for those who need that.

I stayed at the Bohol Tropics Hotel. Very nice hotel, pretty grounds with 3 swimming pools, wifi available, one free PC at reception, and restaurant open late at night. There is a free airport and port shuttle bus.

Just outside the hotel is a minimart and laundry. There’s a port tank farm next door to the hotel, but walled off from the hotel.

The hotel is building a conference and wedding center, so it might lose its charm once it gets busy.

We took a look at the Bohol Resort hotel. They normally charge admission to enter the grounds if you don’t already have a reservation (!), but we were allowed 20 minutes to take a look. It has nice grounds and a white sand beach … but $200 night.

Down the road is the new Eskaya hotel. Same deal as the Bohol Resort. We didn’t feel like paying to enter, so we just left.

After Bohol, I took a $10 90-minute OceanJet high-speed boat to Cebu for the afternoon.

The Cebu port area and downtown looked like a grimy toilet. There aren’t many tourist attractions in downtown Cebu aside from a handful of monuments and churches.

I tried to fly back to Manila for my return flight home, but 2 typhoons moved into Manila, so I ended up buying a last minute one-way ticket for $1688 back to SFO via HK. Expensive, but I would have needed a fair amount of luck, and a few days sitting around at the Manila airport to return on a free rebooking.

Cathay Pacific requires rebooking to be done with your travel agent or local office where the ticket was purchased, so they were of no help. I’ve never heard of an airline policy like that before, and I’ll certainly keep it in mind next time I book a flight to Asia.

Filipino gunmen kill 21 over political rivalry

Film Review: The Hurt Locker

Administrator — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:21:13 +0000

The Hurt Locker is a different kind of fictional action film: bomb technicians don’t run much, instead moving millimeters at a time.

The film did a good job of inserting the audience into a different world, the Iraqi urban battlefield. It was a real eye-opener to see what conditions are like over there, especially for EOD personnel.

I found myself questioning why the USA was still trying to help a people so misguided and confused as to continue planting 1,000 bombs per month in their own country, while their own government was asking for assistance in transitioning to a democracy.

The film is still au courant, as the war in Afghanistan continues to spiral out of control, and we have the same communication issues as in Iraq.

There are several gripping scenes throughout the film that make it an exciting ride.

I highly recommend seeing the film at least once.

imdb: The Hurt Locker

Useful Pro DSLR Camera Online Databases

Administrator — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:54:46 +0000

This is a placeholder page for useful pro DSLR camera online databases. Please send me a comment with other recommended links.

Memory Cards

Rob Galbraith’s CF/SD Performance Database

Sensors

DxO Labs DxOMark

Lenses

pbase Camera Databases
Nikon Lenses
Canon EOS Lens Notes
Photozone Lens Tests
Nikonians NIKON SLR CAMERA TO LENS COMPATIBILITY

Trip to Bali and Lombok

Administrator — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:33:19 +0000

I vacationed almost 2 weeks in Indonesia, arriving via Jakarta, but staying mainly in Bali with a day-long trip to Lombok.

Getting There

The flight there on Cathay Pacific from SFO was remarkable in that we head strong headwinds, so had to refuel in Taipei before the stopover in HK.

I imagine many of the passengers were annoyed since their final destination was actually Taipei, but were not allowed to actually disembark during the refueling. So they had to fly on to HK, then back to Taipei.

The refuelling stop meant that I was short on time for my transit in HK, so I requested a seat near an exit, and the stewardess was kind enough to move me to first class half an hour before landing. Thus I made the connecting flight to Jakarta.

Kuta

Arriving in Bali after a flight on Garuda from Jakarta ($110), the Kuta area was busier than I have ever seen it, with hotels sold out.

I was booked at the Bounty Hotel for 2 nights ($60/nite), then had to hit the pavement to find another hotel.

The Bounty is the wildest hotel I have ever stayed in, and deliberately so. There motto is, “For the young at heart.”

It caters to drunken Aussie partiers, male and female, who party day and night in and around the 2 swimming pools. Each Friday nite there is a rock concert on the hotel grounds. The holiday season lobby mascot is a life-size, hungover Santa Claus holding a beer bottle. Definitely recommended to those who want to have a good time.

On Jl. Legian, I found a hotel, the Sari Yasa Samudra Legian, where the front desk did not speak English, so I was able to get a bungalow there with my adequate Bahasa Indonesia. AC and breakfast (toast and coffee), but no hot water or cable, for $22/nite.

The hotel is about 50m to the center of Jl. Legian nightlife: Paddy’s, Maccaroni, and other nightspots.

To celebrate New Year’s Eve, I went to Maccaroni for their dinner party. At midnite 3 kecak fire dancers performed, which was breathtaking in the dark.

Some really good restaurants in the area are Cafe Havana on Jl. Popies 1, and Cafe Sendok on Jl. Legian. Cafe Havana has excellent Cuban/Latin American food, including burritos and tortillas, but not tacos. I’m not exactly sure why there’s about 100 photos of Che Guevara, though.

Cafe Sendok is very popular at nite. It has good food and also free wifi.

I brought an Acer Aspire One netbook on this trip – only 2 pounds. Generally you can find free wifi around Jl. Legian at all times, so I was able to keep up on my email.

One change worth mentioning is that Ade Rai’s Hammerhead Fitness Gym moved from the very convenient Jl. Legian to the somewhat remote Jl. Nakula about a year ago.

It is located on the 3rd floor, above a minimart. (If you can climb to the third floor without puffing, you’re already in shape. ) A staff member told me they used a crane to move the gym equipment.

The gym is now a little smaller and more crowded, and doesn’t have a separate floor area or crossover cable apparatus. It’s out in the countryside, but still the best gym in Bali, so people find it. Flagging down a taxi is possible, but they dislike destinations on Jl. Legian, fearing traffic jams.

There’s a big picture of Komang Arnawa in the lobby, who now trains in Australia. I met his brother, Ketut, who lives in Bali and also works out.

There is also a Wawan’s Gym in Tuban, but I haven’t visited there yet.

Lombok

I spent one nite and day on the island of Lombok, which was a 20 minute flight on Merpati ($78 return) from Denpasar, or 5 hour ferry. I chose to fly. You can see great views of the Bali and Lombok mountains on the right-hand side of the plane, including Mt. Rinjani, clouds permitting.

I stayed in the Hotel Holiday Beach Lombok, $62/nite, which is an outdoor beach resort with good facilities and dining on Sengigi Beach. It’s located 30 minutes from the airport. It must be a 4-star hotel, since it has an acre of marble in the lobby.

There is a small gym, which is usable if you pre-AC it for an hour and arrange the equipment with enough separation for safety.

During the daytime in Lombok, I took photos in Batu Bolong Hindu Temple, and a nearby village. There were 2 new cute housing developments, with dozens of colorful one-room buildings for sale.

According to the driver, Pak Haji, who has been a driver for the hotel for 15 years, Lombok is what Bali looked like 20 years ago. Indonesian people are not that excited about visiting Lombok because it “just looks like a typical village.”

Going Home

The flight back was tough. My connecting flight in HK was delayed over 2 hours because the plane was commandeered to replace one needed for an Indian leg apparently.

Because of the delay, my boarding pass was also good as a meal voucher for $75 – that’s HK$75, only enough for a burger combo. The restaurant employees helpfully run up your total until it hits $75, whether you ask or not.

Eventually my plane showed up, and we had a 80-100 mph tailwind – but with a very sick family onboard, crouping all 10 hours of the flight. The kind of souvenir you don’t want to take home, but unavoidable.

Note: prices listed above are in USD at an exchange rate of USD$1 = 11,000 Rp.

Mac Filmmakers: Joint Meeting with the Digital Cinema Society

Administrator — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:59:20 +0000

The Mac Filmmakers user group meeting this month was a joint meeting about digital cinematography with the Digital Cinema Society, resulting in about 100 attendees.

Sony reps did a presentation on the Sony EX3 Pro video camera, list price about $9,900, then there was a pizza break and raffle, followed by a presentation on the Sony F35 CineAlta digital cinematography camera.

Art and Adam demoed the F35, and showed their F35 PG&E conservation public service spot and talked about production. They did multiple takes with different cameras and showed the differences in ability to hold contrast. Quite an eye-opener.

There was a discussion of S-log and Hyper gammas for video camera contrast compression. Cinematographers agreed they can make a big difference in contrasty situations, for example an interior shot of a room with sunshine streaming in.

One audience member lamented that there was no discussion of camera pricing. Since these are industrial cameras, if you have to ask, likely you can’t afford it. Also, a complete setup would involve a combination of many items depending on the shot – body, lenses, curves, storage, sound capture, etc.

Some people mentioned that it makes more sense to rent when possible, as the technology is constantly evolving, and the rental company is more able to maintain the camera firmware and sensor upgrades. Fortunately, the Bay area does have a number of retailers willing to rent gear packages by the day.

Thanks to Apple for hosting the event.

Salinas Air Show

Administrator — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:51:57 +0000

The so-called “California International Air Show Salinas” was this weekend at Salinas airport. Canadians seemed to be the only other international participants though.

I was fortunate enough to get a ride there from San Jose with a friend who was from the area and had been to the airshow before a few times.

It was interesting to pass through Gilroy and surrounding areas and see the housing and mall developments springing up. At one point we drove by a eucalytus forest.

We parked at Northridge Mall and took the free shuttle bus to and from the event.

I bought a “box seat” ticket for a steep $33. By box seat they literally mean you sit in chair in a boxed-off area out front. Great view, easy to hear the announcer. No shade whatsoever though.

The weather was great, and luckily the fog didn’t roll in this year and cancel the jet performances.

There wasn’t much international about it, though there was a CF18 and a Canadian jump team. The CF18 had to break off early with some kind of technical problem.

One fellow had both a Nikon 600mm and what looked to be a 500mm for his D300.

The static display included several piston warbirds, a restored Cessna 150L, and a 1948 Ercoupe. I think there was a car rally this weekend too, since there were a bunch of classic cars on display also.

There were 2 C-130s that you could enter, as well as Army recruitment displays inside trailer-trucks.

There were a bunch of aerobatic performances, including Sean Tucker, Julie Clark and a power-off performance.

Some of the jets included a FA-18 and a F-15E. There was a formation flight with a P-38. I was surprised to see each of the jets do a slow-flight pass, since I don’t remember seeing that in previous airshows.

The Thunderbirds put on a good show. It was interesting to be up that close and see the coordination team working together during the show.

Overall a very well-organized event and worth the trip.