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Month: October 2007

libPNG/zLib compile error fix

libPNG/zLib compile error fix

Annoying little gotchas whos solutions are hard to find. Here’s one I’m making a note of on my site so I don’t have to look it up later:

Compiling libPNG requires compiling zLib as well. On Microsoft Visual Studio, you’ll get errors about invalid instruction operands:
inffas32.asm(647) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(649) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(663) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(720) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands

All due to the same assembly language problem. Fix them using the dword ptr command to clear up the reference:
– movd mm7,[esi]
+ movd mm7,dword ptr[esi]

Link

Mt Hood

Mt Hood

Got a great shot of Mount Hood right at sunset from the Pacific Crest Trail.

It was a real whim that I went up there.  It was a beautiful day – one of the few we have left before the winter rains come – so I wandered up to Mt Hood as sunset approached.  As it turns out, it was a 3/4 moon too – which I just got lucky with.  I hiked out to the spot I planned to shoot from.  But as sunset came I was somewhat disappointed with the colors even though it was a beautiful, cloudless evening.  I guess I was hoping for more oranges/reds – maybe a little Alpenglow (I’ve seen Mt Hood light up before – so I know it happens).

The pictures were just so-so in my book, so on a whim I switched to black and white.  Well, the oranges/reds that I did get on the mountain acted just like a red filter and as soon as I saw it I went ‘Wow’.  Maybe you will too.

Some random thoughts and a quick weekend shoot

Some random thoughts and a quick weekend shoot

Saturday was simply wretched – constant rain and wind all day, so there was no photo shooting. Instead, I had the perennial fun of getting to re-install my OS because the latest driver for my Intel motherboard RAID controller completely pooched the Vista shutdown cycle – and no amount of restore points helped. Shutdowns would just hang which meant every time you restarted you were told the raid was corrupted/shutdown improperly and would need to re-verify the whole raid (2+ hours). I’m now on my 4th Vista re-install, and I’m becoming more and more unhappy about the stability all the time. (Vista Ultimate 64-bit by the way). Plus that with just weird/random connectivity problems with my USB ports and odd audio behavior and I was ready to re-install. Now everything works again – but why? I had the same driver versions installed before, the same patches – why is the old install so unstable and a fresh one not?  That coupled with the latest drivers not always working as well as the previous ones (64-bit versions) and things just feel dodgy in Vista 64 land – which is very quickly grating on my nerves.  I want to do my photos dang it – not lose all my weekend doing OS re-installs.

On the plus side, I picked up a BFG nVidia 8800 GTS OC, and it’s very very nice. Unfortunately for me, it came at the expense of my ATI XT1900 going south. A couple notes:

  • The fans on the ATI’s are universally TOO LOUD. I simply can’t stand any of their dual-slot fan/cooling solutions anymore, and their single-slot solutions are only *just* tolerable from the noise standpoint.
  • My XT1900 was just 2 days out of warranty when it died. <sigh>
  • 3dConnect is the worst company. They never gave me my $75 rebate after 8 months of constant remailing, messages, and emails.  They actually have a phone tree that at NO TIME can you actually talk to a real person. I went through the whole tree – you either leave a message (which will never get returned) or just get an automated response which tells you to go someplace else. Horrible – 5 thumbs down.  On top of that their manufacturing sucked – cards ran way too hot right out of the box.
  • Performance wise, the ATI XT1900 from a year ago is about the same performance as the nVidia 8800GTS released this year (as far as Steam/Half-life 2/CounterStrike:Source are concerned – which is what I do) nVidia cards suck on Half-life, which means you need to get a high-end one in order to get similar performance.
  • The 8800GTS is QUIET – I have yet to hear its fans kick on.
  • Now that I have DX10 compliant card at home, i can try some coding experiments out (muhahaha!)

Got up early on Sunday morning, hit mass early, and then went for a little shooting – and it wasn’t a bad day for it. I got a couple of shots, but I think the best ones are done for the year. On the fun side, I saw a total Nikon fanboy at the Gardens. Nikon D200 hat, Nikon everything. The gardens filled up with people fast when they opened for the general public (photo members can get in 2 hours earlier than general public), so after shooting and the folks started pouring in – I took off. This was from a weekend or so ago, but it’s still a good shot. I’m going to start looking into some really big prints here 30-40″ range for a large wall-size photo. Now that I have this 5D, the 4200×1900 resolution should be able to do so without any trouble.

Another…

Another…

The fall colors have peaked, and are now well into reds at the gardens. Some of the trees haven’t started yet, others are starting to get bare.

It has been raining the last few mornings, so things have taken on a more distinctive wet look. Still some good shots, but I think I got my best ones already. Here’s one from this morning I took with my old Canon 17-40L lens. Man, you get some serious frame real-estate at 17mm on the full-frame 5D. This is actually cutting off the outside 15% too…

 

Another morning shoot out

Another morning shoot out

Went up to my favorite shooting ground in the Japanese Gardens again this morning until my battery died.

A beautiful foggy morning with a light rain kept the colors popping.  It’s as good as it gets.  Got a bunch of more great shots. The peak color is now for all you photographers – get out this weekend!  I’ll be going tomorrow to re-shoot anything I missed, but here’s a new shot I tried in a place I’ve shot before.

Fall leaves are just changing

Fall leaves are just changing

Fall colors are here – at least the first round. I went up to the japanese gardens here in portland, renewed my membership, and took a few shots. This year’s colors look better than last years by a good measure. More pictures coming, but here’s one to whet your appetite. Click for a larger image.

King of Kong – A fistful of quarters

King of Kong – A fistful of quarters

Watched this movie last night at the Laurelhurst. It’s about the race to the highest score for the classic arcade game Donkey Kong by Steve Wiebe (a laid-off Boeing employee, now HS science teacher in Bellvue, WA) and Billy Mitchell (a hot-sauce vendor with a long history of classic arcade game record scores). This really is a great movie to watch since it also includes commentary and a walk through the contests/rivalries between Mitchell and Wiebe.

However, it is also very painful to watch. I can only liken it to the ‘Best in Show’ movie about the crazy dog show people. Wiebe comes off as an average guy trying to become great in something. Billy comes off as one of the most arrogant, self-delusional, and (in my unprofessional opinion) emotionally/behaviorally manipulative guys you’d ever hope not to meet. Yet it’s the whole cast of other professional game players and the sadly myopic interactions they have with each other that’s even more painful. The Filthy Critic captures the feel of this movie almost perfectly. The best quote of movie that sums up a lot of what’s going on: Steve Wiebe is driving to a contest to play Kong, and his 10-ish year old daughter in a fit of insight says,

Daughter: “I didn’t know that book (Guinness Book of World Records) was that important”
Steve: “Well, yeah, it’s important for some folks”
Daughter: “I think a lot of people probably ruin their lives trying to get into that book”

Brilliant. A 10-year old girl sees what all these guys in the 30’s and 40’s did not.

Google Streets now has Portland

Google Streets now has Portland

Looks like the Google street-level view guys hit Portland this last week or so. They have all the streets for most of Portland done – including my house.

I could tell they did it last week because my car is in the shot of my house – and it had a white hat in the back window that was in there just last week. 🙂 So, if you know my street address, enter it into Google maps and check out my block.

Getting there…

Getting there…

Got a little more of the front page redesigned. At least the wordpress blog is better and much more readable. Still need to add the sidebar stuff – but this should be ok for now.

Widescreens and LCDs

Widescreens and LCDs

In my new group, I got a 24″ Dell widescreen LCD for my development work which recently got upgraded to a 30″. After only 1 week of use, I saw the Dell 2407 went on sale for $559 with free shipping, so I bought one and have been absolutely loving it. I couldn’t justify the $1200 tag for the 30″, and the 24 is actually plenty big for my living area. It’s now my tv (well, for movies anyway), console gaming display, and work display.

See, I was a die-hard CRT fan for many years. LCD’s had ghosting problems in games, the contrast/brightness was not good, fuzziness when not using a native resolution, etc. I stuck with my 22″ near-flat Trinitron CRT for a good while and it still puts out beautiful colors. But after only 1 week with the widescreen real-estate and the beautiful 1000:1 contrast ratio – I can’t hold out any more. Once you use widescreen for development or watching movies, you just can’t go back. Even better/worse – my Trinitron can barely keep up with the contrast when side-by-side with the LCD. In games, there is no lag or ghosting problems that are visible in the work I do (I have ghosted white to pink – but that was while I was trying to beat on it and I never see it in my daily use). It simply looks like they have fixed all my old complaints and LCD’s are now ‘there’ for me.

Also, I have a Huey Pro (made by Pantone – the color gods) which does monitor/color calibration. I do a lot of photo editing and fiddling around. This nifty little device plugs into your USB, and then monitors light conditions. You do a one-time calibration by sticking it’s suction cups to the monitor while it runs test patterns/colors. After the initial calibration, it just sits in a cradle on your desk and auto-corrects the color balance in the background based on ambient lighting conditions – even through reboots. Whites always stay white, reds stay red, etc. I can tell when I turn the overhead light on/off and it corrects on the fly. It saves calibrations that can be used by Photoshop so that when you edit your photos, they’ll be balanced correctly. Nifty gadget – and it works perfectly with the LCD.