Welcome to my musings on whatever topic catches my eye, plus stories, recipes, handyman tips, welding, photography, and what have you. Oh, and analog/digital hardware design, and software. Please comment on the blog post so everyone who visits can see your comments.

Year: 2007 (Page 10 of 11)

Skype Bashing

It’s interesting that so many IT pundits are eager to pounce on Skype’s recent outage. I’ve been a full-time Skype user since October of 2003. My business relies heavily on the telephone and I switched all my business operations to Skype as soon as the SkypeOut and SkypeIn services became available, 2-1/2 years ago or more, and I got rid of landline telephone service. In that time Skype has served me very well, has never missed a message, provides great convenience, especially with the call forwarding function, and has saved me an enormous amount of money.

Skype suffered a “two-day” outage recently. First of all, the outage was not two days, it was 28 hours. I know because I was on top of it the entire time. I suppose that since it was more than 24 hours, it becomes “two days”. Two days of outage in four years of flawless operation of a brand new and extremely robust technology that nobody ever tried before is pretty darn good. In 30 years of running businesses I’ve had a lot more outages of landline telephones than Skype. Furthermore, Skype has been forthcoming about the exact cause of the problem. (A bug in their network allocation algorithm that was revealed when a Microsoft “Patch Tuesday” triggered the rebooting of millions of computers) The problem is fully understood.

In an eWeek commentary, Andrew Garcia makes the point that Skype gives no special consideration to businesses. He says, “[this failure] has conclusively proved there is no separation of services when it comes to business-class versus individual accounts using the Skype service.” This is news? How is it relevant? Since when does standard telephone service differentiate between business and non-business service when it comes to restoring service after a failure? Either the lines in your area are up or they’re down, either the CO (central office) is up or down. Once that twisted-pair of wires is up on the pole, there’s no difference between business and residential. If any special consideration is given, it is given to hospitals, emergency services, and “lifeline service” (residential service to persons with medical problems).

The bottom line is that given the thousands of dollars I have saved so far by using Skype, one 28 hour failure doesn’t concern me in the least, especially since the cause is fully understood and fixable.

I Love Winter !

Untrodden

I can’t wait for winter to get here! By that I mean temperatures at or below freezing. Yes, really I do. So I thought I’d come up with a top-ten list of reasons I like winter. I wondered if it would be difficult to come up with ten things. It wasn’t. I came up with ten reasons as quickly as I could scribble a list with a few keywords for each one. Here we go:

1) When it’s warm and humid I feel tired and slightly ill. I don’t feel motivated to do anything because everything is an effort. My brain runs slowly. As soon as the temperature drops into the low 70’s or below, I feel energized and alive, brain and vision are sharp. The colder it gets the more energized I feel. And don’t suggest that I haven’t tried the “dry heat” of Arizona. Yes I have. I lived in the southern Nevada high desert for seven years, in Guatemala for five years, and Florida for three years. I know all the types of heat and I don’t like any of them.

2) I enjoy cooking and eating what I cook. When it’s warm or hot I have no appetite and certainly no desire to cook. I get through the day on one sandwich and a hard-boiled egg. It’s great for losing weight but I lose one of my favorite recreational activities: cooking. When autumn comes, I find my thoughts again wandering to food, recipes, stews, soups, baking, making bread, yumm!

3) Yes, springtime brings some nice smells of wildflowers and nice smelling trees, but the first thing I notice when winter thaws out is the return of the smells of all the molds and biological processes of nature. Every spring there will be that one day where I step outside and say, “Oh yeah. There’s that stink again.” Winter air is crisp, clean, and dry. There are no funny smells because there are no molds, spores, no flying insects, no fleas or other vermin, no rotting garbage because everything is frozen dead, dead, dead. I do miss the songbirds singing but there are always crows who are undaunted by the cold and continue to squawk and argue with each other in the winter silence.

4) I work with paper quite a lot and I like to write, and in winter the air is dry and paper feels and acts like paper should and not like a damp dishrag as it does in the summertime. My fountain pens write much nicer in winter than they do in summer when paper is limp and full of humidity. My laser printer is also much happier and feeds paper better in the winter.

5) In winter I enjoy feeling clean after a shower and becoming completely dry afterwards so that clothes slide on smooth as glass. In summer, one steps out of the shower and never becomes completely dry because the humidity prevents complete drying and sweating resumes immediately after showering. Clothing feels sticky and drags on the skin when compared to the smoothness of winter.

6) I live in a college town and on Frat House Row. My street should be renamed Animal House Street. When winter comes, the yelling, screaming, partying, 3 AM lover’s quarrels in the middle of the street, and crazy driving stops. Traffic drops way down. Everyone is huddled in their homes, hopefully doing their schoolwork, and I can go take a peaceful walk on the crunching snow in peaceful silence.

7) Nobody likes winter here where I live in West Virginia–nobody. I bring it up all the time with people I meet and everyone I’ve met here says they hate it with a passion. I did meet one single soul here who said she likes the idea of snow but hates the cold. Fine, then why do I like winter? Because you don’t! Yes, I’m a cranky old contrary curmudgeon.

8) My cat is like me and is much happier and active when it’s cold. During the summer she is lethargic, uncomfortable, sometimes sitting forlornly with her mouth open and tongue hanging out with a look on her face that says “Make it stop, please!” On those rare summer nights that cool off, she sits jammed up against the window screen, straining to encounter the cooler air.

9) I like to wear clothes, not fancy clothes, just clothes. Sitting wearing nothing but my undershorts is not my idea of comfort but when the temperature goes above 85F with humidity of 50 percent, undershorts is all I can bear to wear.

10) Crawling into a clean cold bed at bedtime and warming it up is one of the finest pleasures known to man.

11) Ice and snow are beautiful things with endless variation in their form and appearance and they evolve from moment to moment, melting, freezing, growing, shrinking, always changing shape. Each day of deep winter I am greeted with a landscape that looks completely different from the day before. The decorative icicles change on a daily basis. Yes, I hate slipping on an icy sidewalk but it’s a price I’m willing to pay and another reason I like lots of snowshowers because snow provides good traction and prevents slipping on the ice below.

12) The holidays! There’s no need to explain the joy of the foods, decorations, music, spirit, and fun of the holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year are the most special times of year and they all come in the WINTER!

Oops, that’s twelve. Oh well.

Shooting the Moon

Caucasus Mountains, 05Aug07
Notice the Caucasus Mountains, just east of the terminator, but still in sunlight.

It seems that a lot of people like my lunar photos, taken with a plain Fuji S700/S5700 low-cost camera, and I get a lot of questions about how I do it. So I thought I’d write up a little blog entry here with the details.

1) In order to get maximum resolution from refractive optics (your lens, in other words) you want to operate at the highest F-number you can get. This means closing the lens aperture as far as you can. On my camera f-13.5 is as high as I can go. Your lens might offer f-16, f-22, or even f-32. If so, use the highest F-number you can.

2) The most attractive moon photos can be had when the moon is between a thin crescent and first-quarter or so because you will have nice sharp shadows on the surface of the moon. Everybody likes to shoot the full moon but a full moon has no shadows and looks pretty flat and boring.

3) Because we will use a high F-number, the required exposure time will range from around 1/40th of a second for a full moon up to 1/2 second or longer for a thin crescent moon so a tripod is a requirement.

4) Use the highest resolution your camera can do. Use ASA 100 film speed in order to minimize noise from the CCD. Set jpeg compression to the highest quality and largest image, or shoot raw. If your camera has a “sharpness” setting, set it for maximum sharpness.

5) Use a delayed release on the shutter because touching the camera causes the tripod to vibrate and it takes about a second or two for the vibrations to die out after you take your hands completely OFF the camera. Just because the camera’s display does not seem to show vibration does not mean there is none. Vibrations of 2 or 3 pixels amplitude are invisible on the LCD display. I use 2 seconds, gently press the shutter release and then remove my hands completely. I also sit absolutely still. I shoot from a wooden porch usually and if I move at all the camera will vibrate. Remember that you are trying to get every pixel sharp and so the SLIGHTEST vibration will blur the image. If the wind is blowing, forget it. If you have problems with vibration, try hanging a ten pound weight from the center post of the tripod. Many tripods are equipped with hooks for this purpose. This will cut down on vibrations a lot.

Once you are ready, zoom in all the way, focus or set the lens to infinity focus, choose a trial exposure time, and see what you get. If the exposure is too dark or too light, change the shutter speed to compensate. Always leave the lens set to the highest F-number possible.

Too dark is better than too light. You can brighten a dark image fairly well in post-processing (PhotoShop or whatever) but an overexposed blown out image is useless.

Take numerous shots. Some will have vibrations that you did not perceive at the time. Bracket your shutter speeds. You might even bracket the focus if you are not sure of perfect focus. I usually take about 15 to 20 shots and hope that one or two will come out okay.

Lastly, crop the image so the moon dominates the photo and then you might try a bit of image enhancement. Use the “unsharp mask” function (Laplace transform) at very mild settings. Since you have likely cropped a 3,000 by 2,000 image down to 400 by 400, and you are going for fine details, use a small matrix. Many “unsharp mask” functions default to a 50×50 matrix and that’s way to big. Try a 4×4 or 5×5 matrix. Play with it and see if it makes it slightly better.

And that’s it. Good luck!

Moon 27Aug07 2
Before and after “unsharp mask” enhancement.

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