Obsolescence

I've been working for the owner of the biggest boat not in government hands for a week now. I must say it has been eye-opening on several levels.

Like the bureaucracy.

But what gets me is that I've fallen woefully behind the times. A couple weeks ago, I installed Oracle 10g EE and TimesTen on my Linux PC at home. I actually installed Oracle several times because the permissions were wrong: for some strange reason, $ORACLE_HOME was world-unreadable (only owner- and group-readable). This kind of got my goat because it means that ordinary users cannot run SQL*Plus and so forth.

So after numerous recursive change ownership attempts (I was staying up all night because I was to meet the TimesTen architect the next day, who'd flown in from HQ to visit a certain large mobile carrier) I gave up and just put my username ("orly") in the dba group. That didn't sound too elegant to me, but I had to get TimesTen and Oracle Cache Connect working so that I'd have something to say to the Very Important Person the next morning.

Only yesterday I found out that the world-unreadable directories of Oracle 10g are a feature, not a bug. And all along I thought something was wrong with my computer. It's a security feature, no less!

And Oracle 10g has been putting old-time DBA's like my former self out of business! no more turning of db_block_buffers and java_pool_size and friends!

In the old days, one would manually configure those parameters in the initsid.ora file, add up the numbers, and configure SHMMAX to be larger than the sum total of all the parameters, which was the SGA size. No joy, Oracle 10g has taken that job security feature away from us. Nowadays you just set the SGA size you want (ideally less than your total physical RAM..) and 10g will automagically tune all the other parameters to fit the desired SGA.

Talk about taking all the fun out of the Ukrainian nuclear power plant.

And there's no more need to manage data files and tablespaces manually. Also one had to manage rollback segments, and if you were doing a huge transaction, switch rollback segments before starting the transaction. All that is gone! Oracle 10g has this Automatic Storage Management feature which robs the old-time DBA of more job security.

To be honest, I haven't kept up on Oracle Database and even after I knew I was going to work for Big Boat Owner, I concentrated on TimesTen because I thought the database wouldn't change so much between 8i and 10g. Oops.

At least, there's a ton of material on Oracle University (free access!) and I've been told the certification exams are free. The only question is, of what use is an Oracle certification if you're inside Oracle? it would only be of value if you left.

But on a side-note, TimesTen is an amazing piece of technology. Stuff like MySQL Cluster (which I evaluated at some length in my prior job) are rickety hack-jobs by comparison. And TimesTen is deployed in the most exotic of places, including the Arleigh Burke class next-generation destroyer. I'm sure hope they're not running it on Windows, though..

Stalin == Borat?

Last Day

Yesterday was my last day at 104 Rada St.

It was a bit sad, my empty desk. I've spent 13 months of my waking life mostly at that desk. And at the end, just the default CentOS wallpaper.


Anyway, no rest for me. On Monday I start work for the guy who owns this yacht:

Little Surprises

After several years of reading about them, we finally got a DSLR last weekend. And, overconfident geek that I am, I haven't opened the manual at all.

Some interesting bits I discovered:

• the EOS 350D has mirror lockup (MLU)!
• the 350D can do second-curtain sync in the body with the built-in flash! (but my old EOS Elan II can do this too)
• the 350D can do flash exposure compensation (FEC) with the built-in flash!
• the 350D has controllable dark frame subtraction! (useful for the astrophotography which is the raison d'etre for buying this camera in the first place, because our existing Powershot SD500 is good enough for almost everything)

I was pretty surprised (and delighted) to find these features because after all the EOS 350D is a Rebel, i.e. an entry-level SLR. The last Rebel I had didn't have MLU, or FEC, or second-curtain sync control on the body.

Some not-so-good bits, as Ken Rockwell and others have commented over and over:

• the viewfinder is truly tiny, it's almost impossible to judge critical focus at macro distances (no, make that truly impossible)
• having no auto ISO is a pain in the behind, I found myself pressing the ISO button every other shot

Still, all in all, I sure am happy we got this instead of the Pentax K100D or Pentax *istDS. And I got to use all my ancient Zeiss and Russian lenses right away.

Macro Photography on the Cheap

A couple years ago, I bought a set of Vivitar extension tubes (a 12mm, 20mm, and 36mm) for less than $10 if I recall correctly from a guy on e-Bay. The catch? these are M42 screw mount extension tubes, whose design date back to the post-World War II VEB Pentacon camera.

I have a modest collection of M42 screw mount antiques, which I use for fun (though not for profit). So the extension tubes seemed like a good idea at the time. I also have a couple of M42 screw mount to Canon EOS adapter rings. A Canon EOS film or digital SLR can still meter even with these ancient lenses, although of course one loses autofocus.

Still, it's kind of cool to mount an East German Carl Zeiss Jena telephoto lens onto a Canon camera. East meets West kind of thing (although Japan is in the East, so..)

Here's a 200mm f3.5 Hanimex telephoto lens which I got for under $20, with the three (stacked) extension tubes attached to it:

And here are some results: one is the front of a Ukrainian MIR-1V 37mm semi-wide lens, an ancient design with a perfectly-round diaphragm and no stop-down pin ("MNP" is the Cyrillic lettering for "MIR" or "Peace"):

An engagement and two wedding rings:

Both pictures taken with an 85mm f2.0 Ukrainian LZOS Jupiter-9 screw-mount lens, with a 20mm extension tube, using natural light and ISO 1600.

Through A Tunnel, Darkly

We've all heard about the steadily degrading quality of viewfinders on SLR (Single Lens Reflex) cameras of late, particularly the reduced-size APS-C digital SLR's. But I have never actually seen how SLR's of today compare to those of yesterday (and yesteryear).

This image below is what you see through the viewfinder of a Canon EOS 50 (Elan II), which was a middle-class film SLR camera in the middle of the 1990's. As a middle-class camera, it has a pentaprism finder with a modest 0.71X magnification at 50mm and 92% coverage.


Not too bad as film SLR's go, especially compared to the EOS 300 (Canon Rebel), EOS 66, and their ilk, which have dimmer, smaller pentamiror finders.

Now, what do you think the following image is?


It's the view through the pentamirror finder of the Canon EOS 350D, which is Canon's current, soon to be phased out budget do jour digital SLR. This camera has a viewfinder with supposedly 95% coverage, and a magnification of 0.8X (more than the Elan II).

However, taking into account Canon's disingenuous quoting of magnification with a 50mm lens, even though the 50mm lens is nowhere close to being the standard lens on digital SLR's with a 1.6X cropping factor, the real magnification of the EOS 350D compared to a 35mm film camera is more like 0.5X, or roughly 30% less both vertically and horizontally compared to the Elan II.

Both images were taking using a Canon Powershot SD500 using afocal projection. This is done by simply putting the camera in macro mode, zooming appropriately, and holding up its lens to the viewfinder of each of the SLR's. Of course care was taken that the amount of zoom was identical for the two photos taken.