Insult quota

definitely fulfilled for the week over at the photoSoc forum thanks to the wonders of Linus. I feel better, at least.

EBG-13

Uzz. V jbaqre jung gur jbaqreshy Vagrearg cynpr jbhyq or yvxr vs gur Ratyvfu nycunorg whfg unccrarq gb unir bar zber (be bar yrff) punenpgre.

Gjragl-fvk yrggref va gur nycunorg vf cerggl pbairavrag nf sne nf gur irel fvzcyr flzzrgevp EBG-13 nytbevguz tbrf. Ohg jbhyqa'g vg or jrveq vs jr qvqa'g unir EBG-13? V thrff vg jbhyq or fbzr neoevgnel ahzore, znlor EBG-17 be EBG-10, qrcraqvat ba gur jrngure, lbhe pheerag zbbq be gur qnl bs gur jrrx.

Nintendo Wii

I don't know about anybody else but I keep reading about this Nintendo Wii and how great the games are. At £150 it may very well be the first games console I ever buy!

Gallery2 geniuses

After yesterday's phpBB developer bashing I'll change things around today and say how utterly amazed I am by the Gallery2 guys. I run gallery at www.fajita.org to show off my photos. I was seriously impressed with it when I installed it but after a super friendly, helpful and efficient upgrade to the latest version the new features are equally impressive.

phpBB developers take note: this is how it should be done!

The Face of Another

I first spotted The Face of Another on DVDBeaver.com a while ago and have been looking forward to watchiung it for quite a while. While out in Manchester yesterday I popped into Fopp to wait out the rain and just happened to spot it going for £10 (a bargain when Amazon wanted £17 and HMV probably £20). Fopp are a pretty great store in general... they have a good selection of foreign stuff and a range of prices, unlike HMV (which admittedly has an even better range) where everything is flat £20.

I've just finished watching it and I'm not too sure about it yet... I've rated it 7/10 on IMDb, but sometimes I change my mind about films like this when I start thinking about them a little more. The story I found a little off... the predictions of the psychiatrist seemed out of proportion and I didn't get his mass mask production ideas at all. What made the film really great was the music... in a way this was pretty bizarre... it seemed a bit of a cross between something that might be heard in a Kurosawa movie, alonged with some Parisian music and German singing. It's pretty odd that when I'm watching a film from Asia I sometimes don't immediately recognise that a certain character is a Westerner... sometimes I even think about it before coming to a conclusion. A few years ago seeing somebody (in film or real life) from Asia was actually a fairly infrequent occurence, but now it's totally normal... maybe that's why?

Anyway, as well as the music the cinematography was amazing. The use of spotlights to almost make other people in a bar vanish was great... the flicking of a switch to turn from night to night with a bulb was also good, as were the still frames that cropped up from time to time. Thinking about it we see a lot of still frames in films today... I can't think of any hard examples to back this up but I think Sin City might have used stills when introducing characters. It's certainly the first time I've seen it in an older film.

As ever... give it a try ;)

phpBB idiots

photoSoc runs phpBB as the forum. I'm sort of the photoSoc webmaster now (at least the forum master ;), so I have to deal with it.

What's phpBB known for? Well... being full of holes is my initial thought. However, after upgrading photoSoc from one version to the very latest I can conclusively say that about as much thought went into the initial design as goes into the average formula chick flick.

From what I have gathered recently phpBB does very little more than provide non-threaded topics within forums. Levels of access are provided and a "fancy" admin interface is available. There is a user registration stage and the code supports styles (although these are pretty poor, in my opinion). It does little else. All those security warnings are pretty impressive for something that does so little.

phpBB does not support plugins, but it does support MODs. Unfortunately for anybody maintaining a phpBB forum MODs are otherwise known as "patches that don't even come as a diff". What this means is that the average "MOD" comes with a little text file telling you which phpBB files to open and where and how to make changes.

Want to upgrade your lovely little phpBB install to the latest version? Well forget doing it quickly and easily as with almost all other software because you'll be spending the next couple of hours either: upgrading your phpBB much the same way as applying a MOD; or overwriting all of the existing files in such a way that you'll need to track down all of the MODs you previously had applied... to re-apply them again.

Now I'm not suggesting that everything can be achieved without making changes to a given system... but how is it that almost all of the other tools manage to provide flexible hooks into their code to make these changes easier? Drupal, for example, allows all sorts of crazy things to be applied in such a way that doesn't require hand-editing files.

That's my main rant but as I'm in the mood I'll go a little further and comment on the phpBB idea of anti-spam: there isn't one.

The photoSoc forum has recently been receiving plenty of spam account signups with links to porn, gambling and other sites. These are useful to owners because they fool Google (and other search engines) into believing that photoSoc members are genuinely interested in such things. A very quick and dirty solution would be to provide a rel="nofollow" (or whatever it is) option in the forum admin... this way search engines don't weight the link.

However, this isn't an option and I haven't yet found a MOD that does just this... they are all too broad and apply the change to *all* site links. Admittedly, such a change would be very easy to do, but it will create havoc for future admin. My solution was to switch on admin activation for accounts -- it's a bit of a pain but we've not had a single genuine user sign up in the last few months, compared to what must be close to 30 or 40 spambots. This method will allow the webmaster to vet accounts before they are displayed on the website. Unfortunately phpBB is braindead enough to allow accounts that have been registered, but not vetted by an admin, to be displayed on the website. I would argue that an account doesn't exist until confirmed by an admin, but obviously the phpBB team think otherwise. Regardless of technicality, it doesn't help at all with reducing spam.

Want to attach a file to your post? Well, you can't, at least by default. You'll need the attachment MOD. And yes, you'll need to re-apply that with each security fix or upgrade (or at least apply updates by hand).

How about a nice RSS feed for the site? Sorry, no. phpBB doesn't seem to have RSS support out of the box. There's probably a nice MOD that will do it for you though...

Do they know?

As I was browsing through some of the utterly bizarre signs and slogans at engrish.com a thought occurred to me: do they know?

Everybody at some point must have laughed at the crazy signs or Engrish slogans and phrases you see from time to time... but the person that came up with them obviously didn't expect the reaction so it makes me wonder if the Japanese (and Chinese, and Koreans, and Thais... but mostly Japanese) know everybody rips the piss out of them for their bizarre Engrish?

Nikon F3 immortolization

My Nikon F3 turned up yesterday and I have to say I'm seriously impressed with it (so far). It wasn't all super-smooth though... I was out and about for all of about ten minutes before I spotted that the exposure lock button had simply fallen off! I forced Vlad and Xiao to spend about 20 minutes looking for it with me, but it's pretty small and I had no idea exactly when it went missing. This was obviously broken when it arrived with me so I've contacted the Jessops eBay user about the issue... I really hope I can get something sorted, as (oddly enough) there were a number of times I could have done with it today (I had to resort to manual). The power also went a bit wonky at one point, but has been fine since then... my guess is that there was some residue on the battery or contacts, which has now been cleaned off properly. Either way, I'm not worried about this problem at all as the camera has a one-year warranty from Jessops, so I can have this repaired.

I headed out into town with a camera today for the first time in a good month. I don't know why it's been so long... the weather has been crap and I've not really been interested in getting out. After the rain today everything looked amazing... I'm really hoping that one or two shots will be absolutely great, but I suspect I might have technically cocked things up a bit -- I'm still not too nifty with the old exposure compensation (not to mention that I still can't quite get my head around this expose for shadows business).

I was hanging around outside the Arndale centre though and grabbed a photo of girl leaning on a wall waiting (I guess)... she knew what I was doing but made no reaction, so I figured I'd get another before moving on somewhere else. At this point some guy comes along and starts a conversation with her... so I get a photo of this (and I hope that will be pretty good too) but stay behind to get one more photo of just this girl. A minute later and the guy comes up to me and asks if I just took a photo of him, to which I replied: "sort of, you were in the photo but it was of the girl you were talking to." This seems to piss him off and he starts to tell me I have no right, why didn't I ask?, isn't it rude, what are you taking photos for? I can't actually answer any of these questions before he starts asking the next one until he finally demands that I "delete" it. This would be a fairly impressive task as I was shooting film, and tell him so. About now he tells me he is Muslim and that "nobody may immortalise him", which I wasn't expecting. I explain as nicely as I can that there is no way I can delete the photo because it is a roll of film. This time he demands I remove the whole film or he'll smash it (my camera, I guess) up (which I'd love to see him try... it takes me a good few seconds to figure out how to open the film back and these F3s are famous for not breaking... they just sort of dent ;). After some more of this immortalization stuff (and a lot of swearing, which I'm sure a good Muslim shouldn't be doing) I promise that I will get rid of the photo once it's been developed. Unfortunately this isn't good enough (he said so himself) and he threatens me and my camera some more before finally telling me his friends will sort it out for him. Well, I was fed up by this point, after trying to be as nice as I could about it so I told him I'd keep the photo as getting rid of it wasn't doing anything for him, and walked off.

It didn't (quite) finish there as he decided to walk by me and tell me I'm walking towards "the Lions' den" (his friends) before suggesting that I give him "a few pounds to settle the matter" (which eventually changed to a pack of chips because he was homeless (and wearing a fairly expensive looking pair of trainers, hat and new Addidas tracksuit))... so much for that.

So everybody... yep, this photo will be appearing here once I get the roll of film finished, developed and scanned. That is, if it is any good ;)

Oh dear, oh dear

The da Vinci Code, eh? I can't speak about the book but the film is quite possibly the most boring piece of drivel I've ever come across.

I always thought of the first Lord of the Rings film as a bit "they did this... then they went there... then they did that... then they went somewhere else... then they did something else... the end." dVC takes this a bit further by doing just the same but adding long boring bits of historical ramblings that flew over just about everybody in the audience (at least all four of us). They weren't even interesting, or funny... they were a bit pointless, really.

I wouldn't mind too much but the whole "doing bits" bits were poor too. The whole opening scene with the blood and secret messages splattered all over the place was pointless, not to mention pathetic. Why did he decide to set himself up in a funny position with blood all over his body again? As far as I can tell it was the "get Fred Bloggs" written on the floor that did it all... the rest just seemed to be for show.

As for the acting... well. That French girl, she's hot, but the dialogue between her and Tom Hanks was cringeworthy. The timing seemed way out. Remember the defining moment of the most recent Star Wars movie? The cheesy "I love you" line? Yup, sort of like that... only spread over a few sentences. Mr Leon wasn't great, either... he's seeming a bit "past it" and the whole French cop role is getting boring. Somebody needs to give him a big knife, a plant and a really young girl. Having said that, I quite liked the Albino guy... he did a pretty good job. But I think half of that was down to the fact that he was a funny colour.

Actually, I didn't want to comment on the plot too much but I've just realised how poor it was. It was a bit of a wild goosechase with some horrendously obvious twists (who didn't suspect the Butler the second they saw him?)... I really really hope the book is much better.

Did I mention it was a good hour too long? If they cut out some of the history rambling crap it would have been a lot more easy to watch.

It seems to me this film was made solely for the purpose of making some money. I think they knew from the start that they couldn't make a good film out of it, that it would get shocking reviews and so on... but as they say "CINEMA: IT'S THE EXPERIENCE THAT COUNTS."

The building of the CD rack

On Sunday (I think) I managed to eject a CD from my computer with an open bottle of Coke stood right in front of the drive. My CDs and DVDs live on the floor right in front of the CD drive to my right... it only took about an hour to clean all of the CDs that got totally coated in sticky gunk... and that was with Xiaoxiao helping out with the drying.

This is pretty annoying stuff... but it doesn't help that it is the second Coke incident in less than a month. The first one involved a nick to an unopened bottle that managed to spew Coke all over my floors and wall at high speed. So... after cleaning up the mess I decided that it was about time I bought a decent CD rack. One capable of storing all of my CDs and maybe a few DVDs as well. The main goal being that they are up off the floor. I have no idea how my room is so dusty, but it is. All of the cases were totally coated in fluff and dust... combine this with a sugary drink and you have a tough job on your hands.

Fortunately a quick trip to argos.co.uk and I found just the thing: a beech media storage unit for just £20! This thing can store 216CDs so at £20 it has got to be a bit crap. Not to worry, it doesn't really need to last that long. I considered a larger one, but it isn't really suitable for this room.

The Argos website is great. It's fairly easy to navigate and the search function actually finds suitable items, unlike the B&Q website which returned a comprehensive selection of wine racks after I searched for CD racks. A quick registration and I was able to reserve the CD rack. It was initially suggesting that I pick it up from somewhere in Salford... so much for that! I entered my post code and picked which of the Argos stores in Manchester I wanted to collect it from. Unfortunately the Arndale Argos didn't have it in stock, but I left my mobile number and email address. At this stage I hadn't paid any money but the wheels were already in motion to move the thing I wanted to a suitable store.

I received a text message this morning (along with an email) telling me that my CD rack was now in stock. I headed down, paid £20 and got on the bus back home (which is an entirely different story).



Here you can see the semi-completed CD rack in full distort-o-vision.

The whole thing came together really quickly. A few screws and some glue is all it takes.



The completed rack in the middle of my dirty room. One great feature is the wide base... no more of that leaning the big tall CD rack against a wall... this will quite happily stand on its own!



CD rack in-situ. I can even open the bottom drawer to get access to my camera... but I've had to put my laundry basket in front... no big problem. It's amazing to think that this is the first time that my wall has been totally clear! Woo! It is good!

I must admit... I'm impressed. It's far better quality than I had expected. I'll probably buy a second one when I move to Camberley to store all of the DVDs I have sat in the bottom of my cupboard. Without doubt one of the best uses I've put a £20 note to in ages!

Sun Java

Thanks to the license change for Sun's Java everybody using Ubuntu can now find sun-java5-bin in the multiverse repository. This is great for all involved. Congratulations Sun honchos :)

Raise the Red Lantern

I've just sat down and watched the first five minutes of Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. It was all sounding very similar so I decided to try and track it down. It turns out I've already read Su Tong's original set of novellas that the film was based on... now that I recall I picked the book up at great expense in Chiang Mai, Thailand.



Now that I remember what it's about I'm sure I'll enjoy the film. The book was excellent. I'm really curious now how certain parts of the book will be portrayed.

Time to un-pause...

Passing time

Not a great deal has been happening lately. I've been doing plenty of CompSoc stuff -- we've upgraded our two crappy NetGear switches to one 16 port Gigabit switch for the internal network and a 24 port 10/100 switch for the Internet-facing network. I've pretty much got the L20 tape library going (it just needs more testing) and on Friday we upgraded the two 200GB disks in RAID1 to four 200GB disks in RAID5 to triple CompSoc's storage capacity.

The weather has been so... well, nice, really, so I've not been out much. There was the whole focus screen fiasco with my Nikon FG... but even that's resolved now thanks to some funny liquid, an ultrasonic cleaning bath and Vlad being bored enough at work to sort it. But... I can't say I'm really happy with the FG. It's a nice little camera, but it falls a long way short of the Olympus OM-2 or even the existing OM-10 in terms of feel... by comparison it feels cheap, the shutter is all over the place and the winding lever is funny. But it's okay... because I discovered the Nikon F3 at the Real Camera Co. yesterday... what I want now is an F3.

The F3 is solid (like a brass brick), has all the useful functions (and a DoF preview that the FG doesn't) and is generally a great camera. It's fairly small too... bigger than the OM bodies, but not by a great deal. Again, it features an F-mount, which is the best bit. The only down side is that it's close to triple the cost of an FG for a body in good condition... I'm pretty much without cash right now so I'm biding my time until a great deal comes along.

In other news the second set of ball photos have turned up. This time the turnaround was two weeks, instead of getting close to two months. Partly the reason it wasn't even faster is because I was busy finishing my project report, which contributes some hefty amount of marks towards my degree.

With any luck I'll head out tomorrow and take some more photos with this FG before listing it for resale on eBay. I'll be very surprised if I don't cover my purchase cost (£35) and maybe make a little more. I need to shift the OM-10 then and I'm close to being able to afford an F3 (when the I get my share of the ball profits and the printing costs back :).



Last thing... I splashed out on a new 320GB hard disk and "Icy Box" USB caddy. It was an essential purchase to allow me to backup my photos and other things. I switched the order though: the old 200GB drive is in the caddy and the new drive is sat inside my Shuttle.

I'm seriously impressed with the enclosure... it looks smart sat next to my Shuttle, the blue LED is optional (woo!) and there is plenty of ventilation around the disk. If you're looking for an IDE USB2 caddy I'd seriously recommend this one.

My new Nikon

I wrote about the rather cool-looking Nikon FG a while ago. About how it seems to do just about everything that I want from a film camera. It's a similar size to my OM-10, it has a self-timer, 1/2-stop EV compensation (the OM-10 doesn't do this), aperture-priority, full-manual mode and, most important of all, a Nikon F-mount. Annoyingly there is no DoF preview, but in truth I very rarely use it. The top shutter-speed is 1/1000th of a second, which is mostly fine, but can always be annoying if you've got some fast film loaded and need to start shooting outside.

That said, Vlad brought my attention to the equally cool Nikon FA and FM, both of which have (optional) matrix-metering, much like the original FE. These are fairly expensive cameras though, around £100 on eBay. The ideal inconspicuous film camera has got to be the FM3a, but I won't be shelling out £300 for one of those any time soon. Obviously if I got serious about using a film camera the only way to go would be the Nikon F6 (sort of like a D2 without the vertical handgrip and CCD ;):



But, anyway, I've bought myself a cute little FG for £35 (including P&P) on eBay. I've arranged to sell the OM-10 and lens (plus the crappy tele it has) to photoSoc for £35, so it was more of a swap. The main reasons I wanted it over my OM-10 was for the EV compensation (an OM-2 or OM-4 would have been even better) but most importantly the F-mount. This means I can carry just one 50mm prime around with me, instead of one Nikkor 50mm and one Zuiko 50mm for the Olympus. I can also hook up any other Nikkor lens and use it just fine, assuming it isn't designed for the small DX-sized sensor.

Anyway, here are a couple of shots of the FG and the OM-10 for your viewing pleasure: