Serendipitous altruism

Go_awstats.sh completely automates the trivial yet tedious task of Awstats batch Apache log reports production, and it even does it somewhat smartly – I’m talking about the “only rebuilding what needs to be rebuilt” part, not the code itself which is plain stupid. This script is in production on the host of Serendipitous Altruism as the sample output testifies.

This release corrects a major year calculation error that appeared when the logs began to span more than two years. I am now confident that the whole thing works, hence the highly symbolic bump up to revision 1.0

I believe that Awstats is still the best HTTPD standard log reporting program, and this is why I am very interested in making it work automatically and painlessly.

I am currently supporting a French centrist political party, mostly helping local militants to improve their web presence by giving them tailored tools and pushing them toward a sensible communication strategy and the organization that goes with it. WordPress and Dokuwiki were of course among the first tools out of the box. I then soon considered the constellation of militant small-time blogs and decided there was a prime target for aggregation.

I first deployed the Lilina PHP news aggregator – I love it and it worked very well for tiny “me and my friends” feed aggregations. With Lilina under new management there were even prospects for improvement. But when the number of inbound feeds began to soar toward 150 I realized that the whole user experience was sinking into a pit of cold molasses. Unexpectedly the host was not even significantly loaded, it was just that updating from that many feeds sequentially was taking much time.

Enter Gregarius. Of course I knew about Gregarius before. But I had no reason to go through the slight hassle of using the Mysql database that Gregarius needs : deploying Lilina only requires the unpacking of my custom distribution of Lilina patched for provinding RSS output. Lilina crawling gave me the reason. On top of that, the Lilina theme for Gregarius really made migration as painless as possible for Lilina refugees who can feel at home right out of the box.

Installation was dead easy and importing all those incoming feeds was done in the single step of entering the URL for Lilina‘s OPML output and waiting a few seconds for all the feeds to be fetched and parsed. And there you are : 130 blogs (and growing) aggregated effortlessly with reasonnable response time and barely any load on the host. Gregarius is even easier than Lilina to administer, and it has categories and tags that Lilina does not, and also does searching.

So from now on I’ll use Lilina for aggregating up to about a couple dozen feeds. Beyond that the territory belongs to Gregarius !

Direct sunlight creates unflattering hard shadows. Not having an assistant holding a reflector for me while I stroll along La Defense with the kids I had to improvise with the material at hand. Luckily, La Defense has a plentiful provision of variously reflective walls even larger than the largest reflector my non-existing assistant can handle.

So here is a picture of Calixthe dancing Coupé Décalé in the afternoon light. Barely a meter on our left was a large glass façade that provided the wonderful fill light on Calixthe’s face. That goes to show that even with no fancy hardware there are always plenty of opportunities for nice lighting that await the innovative souls.

Football photography packing list and hardware setup” was the brief… Here is the debrief !

First, thanks to Julien for loaning his Canon Eos 350 XT and Vosonic X’S-Drive II Plus VP2160. The VP2160 was nice to have but I simply could not have obtained the same results with my Canon Eos 300D in place of the 350XT. As Giampi said in the understatement of the week : “The 300D is not a sports camera”… I would go even further to say it is near useless for that task.

The most important thing I discovered it that focusing is quite a challenge – anticipation helps greatly but it is not always possible. I have found that prefocusing on a higher contrast subject at the same distance helps, but again that is not always possible. Corner shots, free kicks and high arcing balls were golden opportunities for anticipating the trajectory and focusing on the receiving end players. I was able to do it better than I expected, but that is not saying much and it was even worse when merely reacting to the action. As expected, keeping the people on the ball in focus was horrendously hard and I have to work on that – a lot.

I was moderately content with the AF performance in good light of the Canon EF 70-200/2.8 L behind the Kenko Teleplus Pro 300 AF 2x teleconverter mounted on the borrowed Canon Eos 350XT. As the sun began to set AF got worse and out of focus images became even more frequent. I shot the whole set at ISO1600 with aperture priority at various settings trying to keep the speed around 1/1000-1/2000s while maximising depth of field. The Canon Speedlite 580EX with the Better Beamer FX-3 helped a little with the lighting but considering the distances the AF assist was of course ineffective. Someone even mentioned that the camera was slowed down by trying to find the AF assist pattern – I’m not sure about that but it may be worth checking.

I surely made the focusing on action even worse by shooting with AI focus instead of AI servo. I’m quite ashamed of that mistake. Maybe I forgot to set it up properly because I’m not used to do it on my 300D which does not offer that choice… As usual, discovering new hardware on the event is a truly bad idea… I guess that’ll serve me as a reminder to force AI servo next time and to get intimately familiar with new hardware before covering an event.

In order to preserve my self-esteem I shall now blame my hardware a bit : the Canon EF 70-200/2.8 L is quite slow with a teleconverter. But since it is not too expensive I’m going to stick to that solution… I wonder if the Canon 2x teleconverter is any faster than my Kenko.

Quite unexpectedly the 350XT lasted the whole game on a single battery with the batery indicator still showing full at the end – that was only about 700 frames but I would guesstimate that this is four times more efficient than the 300D with its more powerful battery. I’m impressed ! Less impressive is the use of different batteries for those two cameras. Lack of commonality is especially irritating considering that the Canon Eos 20D does use the same BP511A batteries as the 300D…

On the contrary, the 580EX seems to have exceeded the capacity of the four 2400mAh batteries : shooting every frame with flash was a pretty heavy workload… I’ll add a Canon CP-E3 to my letter to Santa Claus !

I was also surprised to never be hindered by filling the 350XT’s buffer. Maybe that is a hint that I am not shooting enough – perhaps as a result of my inability to keep interesting things in focus. I lost a few shots when shooting too conservatively – with many GB of storage at hand I had no reason to do that but bad habits die hard.

The 140-400mm focal length range provided by the doubled 70-200mm was a good range when shooting from the sidelines. The second body with the 24-70mm was not very useful – as expected a 70-200 would have been much more useful. A trans-standard zoom was nice to have for the team shots and for catching the penalty kicks from near the goal but the team shots could have been handled with a 70mm and the goal shots are traditionnaly a job for remotes. So two bodies with three lenses would be fine – let’s add a new 70-200mm on the Christmas shopping list. The Canon EF 70-200/4 L would be ideal for the second body, not least because it is not unreacheably expensive. The flash could easily provide the lighting difference between f/2.8 and f/4 – but then a second 580EX is probably useful because it adapts to the crop factor to reduce the wasted light.

After some post-processing the results are not as bad as I feared but correcting my erratic exposures and random focus did degrade the quality a bit. But the noise and softness before going through Neatimage were much harder on the eye…

All things considered this was a great learning experience and I look forward doing it again !

I’m shooting football tonight for the first time. For the second time ever I’ll attend a football game and last time was thirteen years ago – that tells much about my expertise… I am lucky enough to attend Guinea vs. Cameroon thanks to an invitation from the Guinean national team. An international match – what an awesome way to introduce myself to football photography !

For such a great occasion my hardware setup reminds me of that Tank Girl quote… “Feeling a little inadequate ?”

My friends Guillaume and François being on vacation there was no way to take advantage of some of their stash of heavy gear. So all I could do to to scrounge up a semi-decent kit was to borrow a body from Julien. I also took his Vosonic X’S-Drive II Plus VP2160 portable hard disk to replace my Vosonic X’S-Drive VP2060 whose ergonomics I partly blame for a recent data loss. So here is my packing list :

• Canon EF 24-70/2.8 L
• Canon EF 70-200/2.8 L
• Kenko Teleplus Pro 300 AF 2x teleconverter
• Manfrotto 681B monopod with Manfrotto 3229 swivel head with quick release
• Canon Eos 300D
• Canon Eos 350XT
• Canon Speedlite 580EX
• Canon Speedlite 380EX
• Better Beamer FX-3
• One 256 MB and three 1 GB CF cards
• Vosonic X’S-Drive II Plus VP2160

On top of all that, some learning material digested beforehand can’t hurt… I found Photo.net’s sport photography introduction to be a good starting point.

The problem with football is the fast action moving impredictably around the whole pitch. The most useful focal lengths are said to be 70-500 and short reaction times give no time for swapping lenses. So I intend to mount the 70-200 with the TC on the Eos 350XT on the monopod with the 550EX and the Better Beamer. The 24-70 will go on the Eos 300D with the 380EX. So the bad news is that I have a gaping hole in coverage between 70mm and 140mm. Another 70-200, even a f/4 would have been nice. Decent long glass in place of the converted 70-200/2.8 would had been even better but that is definitely not within my means so I should stop dreaming. But a replacement for the 300D shall surely be on my Christmas letter to Santa Claus so that I can at least stop borrowing bodies.

Too bad I only have one battery with the borrowed 350XT – I have four for my 300D so I’ll probably end up shooting part of the game swapping lenses on it… Which is exactly what I wanted to avoid. Why aren’t the two bodies using the same batteries ?

All in all I have the vital minimum but not much more. Compared to the pro shooters I expect to be on my left and right I’m feeling whoefully short on hardware… But let’s be a hero and prove that I can produce decent pictures with this ghetto rig !

In “The Art of Camo” (an article for the American Institute of Graphic Arts), Phil Patton says :

Camouflage attracts modernists raised to believe that ornament is crime. Camo ornaments legally, you might say – its pattern has a job to do.

That quite nicely puts my feelings into words. I worship pragmatism and generally can’t stand pointless decoration… Camouflage is an excellent excuse to indulge in some. So maybe this is the reason why I love camo patterns… Well, that and the way I’m irresistibly attracted toward the sort of large and expensive hardware that camouflaged people play with…

From Panayotis Vryonis own account, development of the Lilina PHP news aggregator he created has not been very active in the past few months. But fear not : new developments could well appear on the horizon in the coming months – Ryan McCue announced his intentions in a comment on this blog :

“I now a project admin on lilina and plan to make a lot of changes”.

This is good news for Lilina users, especially as Ryan McCue intends to integrate my Lilina RSS output patch to the distribution.

“Jihadis Adapt to Counter-Terror Measures and Create New Intelligence Manuals” is an article by Abdul Hameed Bakier published at the Jamestown Foundation. It describes the sort of documents that the jihadist movement has been producing. From what I read in the article, much of the published material describes basic operational techniques already available from open sources and paraphrased with a few Quranic verses sprinkled along. But among all that chaff there is certainly original source material from the rather large experience surviving experienced members of the jihadist movement have gathered on various theaters. There are plenty of American servicemen writing about their daily lives but I am quite curious about experiences from their opponents. Too bad I am not fluent in Arabic…

I have noticed that when using my 300D with my 580EX in high-speed sync mode I sometimes get a grossly over-exposed band on the left in portrait orientation or on the top in landscape orientation. Worn shutter, flash malfunction, body malfunction, communication error between flash and body, confusion between normal flash synchronization and high-speed flash synchronization, excessive shutter speed in normal flash sync ? I posted my problem on Photo.net but the answers were inconclusive. I am left scratching my head about it and I can’t even find out how to reproduce the result reliably… For now my bets are on user error…

Here are a few frames featuring the overexposed band in case they remind someone of a known problem. One of the most likely root causes is the somewhat loose flash hostshoe.

This morning as I was cruising on my way to work some idiot had the bright idea of overtaking me and then tailgating me with an obviously hostile posture. Hopefully not on purpose he crushed my left skate under his front tire. As I went down writhing in pain he merrily went on his way and fled the scene like a true automobile weasel. In the shock of the moment I could not remember the make of his car and even less his license plate. But I do intend to go to the police and file a complaint against him in protest against violence toward rollerskaters. Meanwhile I indulged in a little open-letter style rant in french to blow some steam off…

Considering the beating that my left skate took I feel lucky that I got away with just a badly sprained ankle. I must even say that I am pleasantly surprised about how much my 2004’s FSK Crossmax protected my foot. Had the skate not shielded me and absorbed part of the stress my ankle would certainly be in a very sorry state with probably a few ripped ligaments. So now that I’m back in the market for a pair of urban mobility skates I shall certainly buy another pair of semi-rigid freestyle skates, and very possibly the same brand.

Since I won’t be skating for a while I have plenty of time to ponder my purchase…

Under the blazing sun during the start of the Le Mans 24 hours skating race I shot only two hundred frames before running my three freshly recharged batteries flat. I first thought that they were nearing the end of their useful lives, but during the night I managed to shoot four hundred frames on a single battery I just recharged. The intense heat from direct sunlight may have something to do with how fast power is depleted.

This comes as a surprise to me : I am used to rotating batteries in an inner pocket near my body to keep them warm in extreme cold weather but this is the first time I encounter performance degradation in extreme heat. And I have no idea how to attack this problem.

Robin Tichy mentions that “Li-ion batteries outperform their counterparts in high-temperature conditions ranging up to 40°–45°C. SLA and NiMH batteries do not perform well in higher-heat situations”. The BP511A batteries I use in my Canon Eos 300D use Li-ion – maybe I should consider myself lucky I did not use NiMH batteries…

Last week-end I got a first taste of speed skating at Le Mans 24 hours thanks to the nice people at AstraZeneca who kindly invited me to be part of their team. I took a few pictures of the event from my point of view as a first-time racer.

I ran the 4.18 km lap in 9’22” on average. Even after my fastest lap in 9’01” I was far from exhausted… I discovered that the secret behind fast racing is not so much physical performance as tactical choices : riding with the right pack changes everything ! I knew that in theory but finding out in practice was an epiphany. The tactical dimension makes speed skating much more fun than I thought it would be.

I achieved those results on my pair of 2004’s FSK Crossmax with 237mm chassis. From what I understood, I did quite well considering the limitations of my hardware. My large T-shirt and baggy shorts were probably also a significant drag. So next year I’m getting proper racing skates and tight fitting clothes… Only pushing below 9″ shall satisfy my need for speed !

I’m glad I found an excuse to splurge on exotic hardware but I’m afraid my progress may have as much to do with improving my skating technique… Double push here I come ! Meanwhile I recommend the excellent howtos published by the highly competent LondonSkaters.

The powerstraps on my pair of 2004’s FSK Crossmax have worn out a long time ago – friction from the buckle got the better of them. Apparently I am not the only one to have broken a strap on FSK skates. This article by Steve Davidson at Londonskaters describes how to replace it with a ratchet strap. But I was not aware of that solution at the time so I bought a pair of Myth “G-Strings” velcro straps – a type usually favored by quaders. After a year of use I must say they served their purpose quite well : ankle restrain has been adequate. The main drawback is the clumsy manipulation of a strap not anchored to the skate, especially the heel cable that was tricky to put in the right place in a hurry. The plastic covering on that cable soon gave way but the rest of the strap has been sturdy enough to remain functionnal in spite of moderate urban abuse. So overall I am quite happy about how those straps extended the life of my trusty roller skates.

I bought Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare yesterday and of course I could not resist the urge to play it immediatly. I selected a scenario at random and ended up in “Three young tigers” commanding some Philippino/Malay/American coalition going up against the PLAN in the usual disagreement over the Spratlys.

Installation was fast and trivial but my immediate impression was one of disappointement. The graphical interface is still its more than a decade old Harpoon II self with its windowing system independant from Windows own and limited to a window (no full screen) with a maximum size of 1280×1024 pixels. As promised it is rock stable – no crash, no glitch and no problems whatsoever switching between H3ANW and other applications. But I expected some ergonomics improvements and there are none. Interaction with the game is still as clunky as ever and the concept of contextual menu and drag’n’drop are still unknown in the Harpoon world.

On top of all that, even on an Athlon 2400, H3ANW is still the CPU hog that Harpoon has always been – I pegged CPU usage to 100% during the whole game. And I do not yet understand what the increased CPU usage brings : I have not found the AI to have improved measurably.

So to me, H3ANW is a stable bug-free Harpoon II with multiplayer capability. Not bad if only for the sheer nostalgia value. I do not regret my purchase and I will surely find much pleasure in toying with imaginary haze gray heavy metal, especially if I can find a like-minded friend to play with. But I do not believe that H3ANW will appeal to anyone outside of a small circle of old Harpoon players and hard-core naval warfare afficionados. That traditionnal audience will find just what it needed, but the casual gamers who overcame the initial hurdle of getting interested to a realistic simulation with historic context and getting used to the NTDS symbols will certainly be horrified by the woeful ergonomics.

Shooting people on a dance floor last week-end I faced the limits of my flash’s recycling speed. Bouncing against high ceilings with nearly no ambient light, even when shooting 1/60s f/2.8 at ISO 1600 the power of the Canon Speedlight 580EX was more than welcome. A couple of high-power discharges or even a single one were enough to keep the flash from firing for the next frame. As a result I produced many black frames.

I was mostly using recent 2400 mAH NiMH batteries which lasted reasonably long and were not the cause of this issue. The problem certainly lied in the recycle speed of the flash itself. Indeed Jamison Boyer had exactly the same experience just a week before me.

The solution is an external power pack feeding the flash’s high voltage input. This means either a Quantum Turbo or a Canon CP-E3. The Quantum Turbo is said to fully recycle a 580EX in less than 1.5 seconds whereas the CP-E3 does it in less than two seconds. But the CP-E3 weights 0.42 kg including batteries whereas the Quantum Turbo weights 1.1 kg. And considering the lower price of the Quantum Turbo the opinions tend to favor the compromise embodied by the CP-E3.

In his good introduction about high voltage batteries in general and Quantum hardware in particular, the heavily equipped Ralph Paonessa mentions the Quantum Turbo Compact that is in the same bulk and weight class as the CP-E3. But the Quantum Turbo Compact costs three times as much as the CP-E3 so there is no contest.

Some folks at Sportsshooter also mention the Lumedyne Tinycycler but it does not seem very common.

For the time being I don’t have the luxury of an external high voltage power pack. As Lord Rutherford once declared : “gentlemen, we have no money, therefore we must think”. My workaround is to shoot with both eyes open. In addition to improving situational awareness it allows to keep the outside eye on the flash readyness light and only shoot when it is lit up. Not quite as comfortable as an endless fast supply of power but that will have to do for now…

Capturing emotions photographically is not something I only achieve very randomly. But that day I was lucky enough to be at the right time, at the right place with working equipment and a steady hand.