www.lewiz.org

I know I didn’t blog about this when I first read about the proposed update, but now that it is real and I can use it, it’s definitely worth a mention.

Sun ship a modified version of the panel calendar that supports multiple timezones, very handy when you work in a global organisation and regularly collaborate with people in different timezones.

Admittedly, this doesn’t apply too strongly to me in my current role at Sun, but at home, it’s very handy to glance quickly and know what time it is in China.

Hopefully Sun will quickly abandon their (in my opinion) third-party changes now that a far superior implementation is available upstream.  I present you, the Gnome calendar:

The first update in what must be well over a month… the biggest change in my life has been at work (I’m sorry to say).

As part of Sun’s drive to maintain profitability they have begun outsourcing some of the more basic work to partner engineers in Poland.  This has both pros and cons:

The plus side is that I no longer have to deal with some of the more mundane problems like disk swaps, memory DIMM replacements and so on.  It also means that, as Sun made a profit, I got a bonus.  It wasn’t much to write home about though… my quarterly bonus was calculated as 128% of 0.8% of my base salary (don’t ask), except in my case, they worked it out pro-rata for the number of months I’d been working.  In the end I took home a whopping £67 (pre-tax) this month(!)

The downsides are that Poland get their hands on some calls before we do… in the longrun this can cause more work for us.  As well as this, Sun had to let go a number of employees.  Fortunately the large majority of those let go put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, so I like to think it worked out well for most involved.

Guillemont Park, the main campus for Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), now has a desk:engineer ratio that is looking a little underwhelming.  During the last two weeks most of us have moved desks; instead of being spread out over two sides of the building, we’re now all on one side, and I believe there may be plans underway to move engineers from another building to the now vacated side.  This is all rumour though, so who knows what will happen.

I’m happy with my desk relocation; it’s obviously not great to leave behind people who I’ve been working closely with, but the benefit to me is that I’m now sat in an OS/kernel/software community.  Over the coming months I’m trying to move into a more software role, although I will still be expected to handle other types of calls as they come in.

Furthermore, I am no longer in a team that deals exclusively with a large telecommunications company based in the UK… I now support this company, as well as a number of other important Sun customers, including investment banks, telcos and so on.  I am a member of the so-called ‘elite’ team.  (it refers to the customers, not the engineers!)

With some team members leaving, there was cast-off kit going round and somehow I’ve managed to upgrade myself from a single 19” CRT with Sun Ray to a dual-headed 19” flat panel Sun Ray config.  In terms of desktop real-estate, this mirrors my home setup, which is handy.

Hope everybody is having a good December… don’t forget to fire up xsnow!

I foolishly bought a roll of 50ASA B&W film months and months ago… unsurprisingly, I never did manage to use it in the UK, but comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas was 30C average, I took it along with me, and ended up shooting it on our trip to the Grand Canyon.

For a 50ASA film it’s actually rather noisy; presumably because the emulsion is so old by comparison with the likes of Ilford HP5 (a 400 speed that has similar properties in terms of noise)... but I really quite like it.

I’d expected a very smooth, low contrast film, but that’s not really how it turned out… it’s nicely contrasty and while it has plenty of grain, it’s very small and adds to the film.

Here’s a Grand Canyon shots that I edited very quickly (8-bit in the GIMP)... click for a larger image:

So, last week I was in Las Vegas on business… I’d planned on holding back until I had some really great photos to include with a proper beefy blog entry.

I’ve just got my 12 rolls of film back from Peak, and I’m very upset to discover that every single frame that I took with the F100 I bought second-hand the day before I went away is out of focus. I was using Vlad’s Sigma 24-70 1:2.8 for most shots, but not all… I took a whole bunch with my 50mm 1:1.8 and a few with the 28mm 1:2.8, and these are also OOF.

I had originally planned to shoot a roll, take it to a one-hour processing place and see how they came out. I later didn’t bother, figuring that the chances of the metering not working, were very slim. I guess I was right, the metering was bang on… admittedly the scenes I was shooting were bright but fairly low in contrast.

Instead, it appears that the focal plane is misaligned in some way… serious bummer.

When scanning through 35mm frames all of the photos look great… but tbh, I was really hoping for some good shots this time. I knew I had a few killer ones from the Grand Canyon… the kind that I could put into a photo album for the future. No such luck.

It’s my own fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have been so blase about it all…

The only positive is that all of the F3 shots (another six rolls) appear to be well in focus. I shot at some low shutter speeds for many of them, so a fair few will be lost to camera shake, but overall the exposure and focus look good.

Once I’ve scanned and sorted through, I’ll get some up.

UPDATE on a closer look, it seems that the film back does not have a pressure plate to hold the film flat… serious bummer.  I feel stupid for not realising until now, but then again, is it something you’d normally check?