This is a simple post to explain why the people are usually blurry inmy lighting photographs. As an illustration, I took three photos of a speaker on stage, using different exposure times. An exposure time of 1/40 second produces a sharp speaker, but an overally ugly picture because of the noise in the image. Look […]
Why the people are blurry Read More »
This weekend, two songs started with a solo vocalist. I used the front lights to highlight the solos and provide a transition when the rest of the singers and the band joined in. In the following song, the female vocalist at stage left leads the song, so I highlighted her for the first look by
April 1, 2007 Lighting for solo vocalists Read More »
The documentation for the Boost.Python extractor class is not terribly enlightening for a new user. The examples given in the tutorial are code fragments, and it’s never clear exactly what the context is or what they are supposed to accomplish. That’s a shame, because the extractor classes are really cool and easy to use, so
Example: using an extractor class in Boost.Python Read More »
I finally had enough and wiped Ubuntu off of my computer at work, and now Gentoo is happily running. Maybe I could have gotten Ubuntu to do what I wanted if I had spent more time with it, but I was sick of playing with it instead of getting work done. To be fair to
How do you say “bye bye Ubuntu” in Zulu? Read More »
When there’s a slow news day, and no interesting disaster has taken place to make a good headline, you can always count on global climate change to fill in the gaps. Yesterday we learned about “natural wonders” that are being destroyed by climate change. Of course, this is a press release from the World Wildlife
Climate change catastrophe: filler for a slow news day Read More »
There’s a reason that the scientific community uses a peer-review process to validate publications. Unfortunately, the “global warming” branch of climate science doesn’t operate this way. Recently, excerpts of a report from the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were leaked to the press ahead of the release of the full report. As usual,
Science by press release Read More »
Challenges for this week: The set has been the same for over a month, so I had to come up with something to distinguish it from previous weeks. In addition, a couple of weeks ago our four Trackspots were transferred to another venue, leaving us with two Studiospots as the only intelligent lights. We have
Discovery Lights, 17-18 March 2007 Read More »
What an unusual pine tree! Who would have guessed that this is actually a giant antenna, cleverly disguised as a tree? I just hope that my taxpayer dollars weren’t used on this monstrosity.
Who got fired for this? Read More »
I have a Motorola E815 cell phone. This morning, I was reminded why it hasn’t been an entirely satisfying experience. The E815 has excellent reception (on Verizon’s network) and lots of software features that work really well. Unfortunately the mechanical quality leaves a lot to be desired. The E815’s weakness is the socket where the
The Dapper-to-Edgy upgrade was surprisingly smooth, once I figured out how to do it. Unfortunately, the new version overwrote my “/boot/grub/menu.lst” so I could not boot Windows. I have enough experience with Linux that this was a five-minute fix, but it could be pretty scary for an inexperienced person. Who knows what else got over-written
“Ubuntu” actually means “eats your config files” Read More »