The composition of this photo may be a little mundane, but I was impressed by this little building in Old Montreal. I was even more impressed that the iPhone 3GS was able to get such a decent photo of it, considering the low resolution of the sensor and the short focal length of the lens.
Walking around Old Montreal and spotted this interesting restaurant
_MG_1955
Originally uploaded by robtain
I’m not getting out and about to shoot as much as I like, so I try to find interesting visuals close to home. Fortunately, the lilacs in our backyard have benefited from the recent wet weather and are in full bloom.
Taken with a Canon 60D with 18-55mm EF-S lens.
The question: Should I just give up on writing (see below)? Thanks to Michael Tripper for the link.
After installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro, I quickly discovered that I had shortchanged the Bootcamp partition when assigning disk space (only 32GB).
A quick search on the web revealed numerous methods for resizing, the most common procedure being to:
Ahem! Easier said than done… After deleting the Bootcamp partition, I had a horrible sinking feeling. Bootcamp Assistant kept telling me that it could not create a new partition because some files could not be moved. Following suggestions in various forums, I ran Disk Repair, Repair Permissions, defrag’d with Drive Genius, etc. all to no avail. After a few attempts, the message displayed by Bootcamp Assistant had also changed to “Please reinstall your system“!!!
I spent an evening backing up my system with Carbon Copy Cloner, booted from the Snow Leopard DVD, reformatted my MacBook hard drive and then restored my Mac partition (5 hours).
Now, when I ran the Bootcamp Assistant, it told me, “Boot Camp Assistant cannot be used. You must update your system software before using this setup assistant.” Oh Geez. I ran Software Update, repaired permissions and disk repair again without success.
Then I happened across a forum posting that stated that Bootcamp Assistant would not work if journaling was turned off for the mac partition. Funny, The Snow Leopard DVD has formatted my hard disk with journaling off by default. Somehow, that seems very wrong.
It was a simple matter to open up disk utility and activate journaling for my primary drive. I didn’t even have to reboot. And I was (happily) able to recreate a larger (80GB) partition for my Windows 7 installation. Winclone restored the system without incident and I am up and running again, but only after having spent a good 6-8 hours in total watching progress bars and beachballs.
We chose Linux as the platform for Sakai. The main reason was cost — no licenses for the server OS and the availability of low cost server hardware. We opted for CentOS 5 as the flavour of Linux. It is basically Red Hat Enterprise and has proven to be robust in the past.
CentOS is easy to install. I began with a virtual machine running in VMWare Fusion on my iMac. This allowed me to walk through the install process as a dry run, test out tools and steps, and to roll back if anything broke.
I opted for a 64-bit build of CentOS, so that we could take advantage of large amounts of memory later on if needed.
After installing CentOS using the GUI, the next step was to prepare the system for installing Sakai from source.
To install Sakai 2.5.x from source, we need several things (with caveats):
Out of the box, CentOS has both Java 1.4 and Java 6 installed. Java JDK/JRE 5.0 needs to be downloaded from Sun and installed (Note that Sun Microsystems is withdrawing Java 5.0 as of September 2009, so if you want it, download and archive a copy now).
Installing a new version of Java involved unpacking the distribution in a local directory (e.g. /opt or /usr/local) and the using the “alternatives –install” command to make the system aware of the version and to select it as the default Java version. Use “java -version” to confirm that the correct java version is selected.
Next: Installing Tomcat 5.5
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A colleague showed me this video a few days ago and it cracked me up. Craig Ferguson is a funny guy.
Monte Carlo
Originally uploaded by robtain
This photo was taken by my grandfather sometime in the 1950s. I have a crate full of old slides and am trying to get it together to digitize them all.
Wine Glass
Originally uploaded by robtain
I might have composed this better, but the was a combination of timing and circumstance. I saw the glasses on the table. It was late afternoon and the sunlight was pouring through the patio door onto the table. I wanted to see if I could capture the particular quality of light that was visible at this time of day.
Flower Girl
Originally uploaded by robtain
So far I am loving my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. The shallow depth of field that I can attain really makes photos like this portrait of my daughter really stand out.
I now have three lenses in my kit, but since I bought the 50mm, I have only taken it off the camera once. The other advantage is that it means that I can better shots in lower light and not have to resort to a flash.
