http://cake-plus.ch/

We heard the chocolate cake is to die for. We are so getting it for Christmas, topped with Christmas decorations. Sweet

"I am a good programmer myself and I match X% of the qualities you mentioned. Therefore, your article is excellent/good/not so good/crap (depending on the value of X)

I also read two other articles on the topic:

• Confessions of a Terrible Programmer.
• Where are Software Engieers of Tomorrow.

I decided I should analyze what focal lengths I used while taking my photos so that I can take a more conscious decision. After some trials and errors, what I came up with was:

find . -exec exiftool {} \; | perl -ne  '/^Focal Length.*equivalent:(.*)\)/ && print "$1\n";' | sort | uniq -c

which runs exiftool on all my photos, extracts the 35mm equivalent length (I took my photos with at least 2 different cameras) sorts them and generates a pseudo-histogram.

I thought I was done, but I then realized that something must have been wrong with the data as some of the focal length ranges were well beyond what any of my camera has. I investigated a little and found out that some of the photos from my G3 have an incorrectly calculated 35mm equivalent. This means that such a simple script will not do.

Here is my second try:

find . -exec exiftool {} \; | perl -ne '
if (/^ExifTool/) { $camera = ""; $lens=0; };
if (/^Camera Model Name.*: (.*)/) { $camera = $1; };
if (/^Focal Length.*: (.*)mm/) { $lens = $1; print "\"$camera\" $lens\n"; }; ' > photos-lengths.ssv

Now I have a text file with something like:

"Canon PowerShot G3" 7.2
"Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL" 38.0

This file can be conveniently read into R so that I can plot a real histogram:

lengths <- read.table("photos-lengths.ssv")
lengths_camera <- split(lengths, lengths$V1)
num_cameras <- length(lengths_camera)
old_par <- par(mfrow = c(floor(sqrt(num_cameras)), ceiling(num_cameras / floor(sqrt(num_cameras)))))
# one chart for each camera.
for (c in names(lengths_camera)) {
   l <- lengths_camera[[c]]$V2
   # filter likely corrupted data.
   l_filt <- l [ (5 < l) & ( l < 100) ]
   hist(l_filt, xlab="focal length [mm]", ylab="#photos", main=c, breaks = 30);
}
par(old_par);

This little script produces a nice matrix charts with histograms of focal lengths for all the camera. So the conclusions is that I could get a 30mm prime lens, but also a 10-20mm lens would not be a bad idea

Time and time again, I realize how precious my photos are, only after they are gone. The last time they were my PhD defense photos… Auch. Fortunately, they are gone, but not forever

You will find several tools for photo recovery on Google, but most of them either commercial or give you a only a “free preview”. Thinking about it, it’s a very good business model: people are very willing to swipe their card if they can see that they get their photos back. Should have written one as well Fortunately, there are also free ones, two of them I tried by myself.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery is an excellent and easy-to-use Windows application for photo recovery. It is extremely easy to use and does an amazing job. It is also completely free, but I think is fair to reward the author with a PayPal donation.

PhotoRec is a cross-platform program for photo recovery. In fact, it runs on Dos/Windows/Linux/BSD/Solaris/MacOSX, which is really impressive. It also supports a whole range of filesystems, including FAT/NTFS/Ext2/3/HFS+. It has a simple (n)curses based interface, which is a bit of a disappointment in the age of cool animated GUIs, but it’s also relatively easy to use. Also, it has an impressive range of configuration options. And it works on Linux and my Mac. I no longer need Windows! Simialrly, the program is really free (including the sourcre) and you can rewerd the author with a donation.

Both tools worked for me smoothly and (unlike some other commercial ones I tried which ran out of memory) managed to recover almost one thousand photos from my 4GB CF card, including the wanted defense photos I don’t know which of the tools is better and I recommend both (although I would lean slightly towards the PhotoRec as I don’t have Windows anymore). Also, if you don’t get what you’re looking for, you can try both of them (as a rule all image/disk recovery tools are read-only so you can try all of them many times with no risk).

• playing with Bro and packaging Bro for Debian
• playing with Apache logs and importing them to the relational database
• playing with Bro logs and importing them to the relational database
• learning Python and Javascript
• playing with Google Maps
• writing a web application to visualize the collected logs on Google maps
• creating a webpage documenting all the above.

As with procrastination projects, they are by definition never complete. I do have something working now, and you can see it in action (works best in a decent browser, but should show something in IE as well).

GeoWebStats

Visualizing Apache logs on a webpage. Here are three links (it might take a while to load them for the first time, so please be patient):

• Blog Visitors – last 7 days
• Gallery Visitors – last 7 days
• Homepage Visitors – last 7 days

The script is quite customizable (for example you can specify the regular expressions you want to filter on, group stuff) but for security resons those demo links are locked.

GeoBroStats

Simiarly to GeoWebStats, GeoBroStats visualizes raw TCP/UDP conections based on Bro conection summaries (this might also take a while to load):

• Today’s SMTP connections that transfered 10kB+ (mostly spammers)

The script is also quite customizable, but for security resons those demo links are locked.

Let me know what you think about it. I know that the user interface is very crude and needs some work. I have also almost finished GeoWebStat’s website, but knowing me, it will take a while

After 3.5 years of work, 0.5 year of writing, 5 months of waiting, 2 months of nerves, 2 weeks of getting really nervous and 1.5 hours of defense it finally came through!

That means that after I publish my thesis, I can be called Dr. Tadek

I feel a big relief to have successfully closed this chapter of my life. To celebrate this we opened a 1975 Colheita Port, which we have kept for over a year for this occasion (I’ve been saying that I will open it only if and when I graduate).

Now it’s time to do all the stuff I have be putting of until I finish and of course enjoying the first really free weekend!

More importantly, my new mobile number has changed and is now 076 394 2998 (076 FYI AXYU). My current mobile 078 857 3165 is no longer valid.

As a final remark, I got a sunrise relax plan, which means that I am charged by hours (something like 0.49CHF/hour or 0.05CHF for <5s) when making calls to the sunrise network or fixnet. Therefore, if I’m calling your sunrise or fixnet, I might be either extremely talkative or very succint. If you have another mobile, the latter is far more likely

• http://sailingissues.com/index.html in particular http://www.sailingissues.com/greek.html
• I also ordered a book Greek Waters Pilot, which seems to be a must have.

I found a bunch of charter websites (just googling for “greece bareboat charter gets you a lot of results) but still need some time to sort them through. I also need to figure out which the boat I want. So far it looks that a 6-8 people boat is an expense on the order of 1500-2000 EUR/week. Also, you can get an early-booking discount until sometime in February.

Any experiences/suggestions/recommendations about chartering a boat in Greece?

Now, I am enojoying my week long vacation at home (or more precisely, trying to enojoy vacation while touching up on my MLJ submission. Still not done yet… grrr) and getting mentally ready for a new start (and my PhD defense in some time).

On Monday, I am starting a real job at Google in Zurich. I’m a bit anxious, but very much looking forward to it.

Wow. My blog is getting really personal this time… that’s second to last time, promise

I found a really nice electronic store in Zurich – Pusterla Elektronik to help you.