This is the second time I've been hit by some type of exploit which allows injection of malicious code into the php/html files on my website.

I've gone through all the webserver facing directories and tried to lock everything down with the correct permissions so that this doesn't happen any more. I also switched to blogger because this never happened until I started using Wordpress installed automatically by dreamhosts "one click install" stuff, so, come to your own conclusion on that.

Hopefully this is the end of it, blogger is static web pages, so not arbitrary code should be able to be run on that.

I recently bought a Dell Mini 9, put OS X on it, and everything was great, except wireless.
It came with an 802.11g card, which worked ok when I was sitting 15 feet from the AP, 30 feet away through 2 walls, not so much. I’ve got several computers on 802.11n, and the Mini 9 will accept an Apple MA688Z/B Mini PCI-Express card and BAM, I’ll have 802.11n in the Mini 9, right? Right!

Except. It’s hot. Really hot. Like, burn your legs hot. My MBP gets pretty warm, but this was hot to the point of being worried about things melting or destroying themselves. I figured I should do something about it, so I hunted around home to find anything that I might be able to rig up to get some of that heat out of there.

That’s when I found my old Canon 300D laying on my desk in pieces from trying (and realizing it wasn’t going to get fixed by me) and there was a pretty large piece of thin metal on the back of it that looked like I could probably make it into a heat spreader. It actually worked really well!

Here is a link to more images.

I knew when I got my 430 EX II that I should do some reading about all the different modes and what meant what and how everything worked. So I did. I read the manual front to back and then promptly forgot everything I read because I didn’t apply it right away.

Fast forward to this last weekend when it was the nephews first Pinewood Derby. Taking photos and thinking “These look weird in the LCD, I wish I could remember what I read in the flash book because I think I was supposed to change a setting when I’m shooting fast moving objects with a flash.” Yeah. Weak.

So I have an entire flash card full of photos that look like the cars are moving in reverse because I couldn’t remember that I had the option to use high speed sync in order to freeze motion, or that I needed to enable second curtain sync instead of first curtain.

What’s the difference you say? Well, normally when you’re shooting with a flash, the flash is set to fire off at full power as soon as the shutter opens. This will give you most of your light as soon as possible and is generally fine for most stuff you will ever do.

When you’re shooting fast moving objects that are moving through your frame, however, it produces a very undesirable effect. Consider what’s happening. When the shutter opens, the flash goes off, you get a big burst of light and your properly exposed image. However, the shutter is then open until the end of the exposure. Now what’s going to happen? If there’s still a decent amount of light in your frame, you’re going to get trails of whatever was moving through it… except the trails are going to be in front of the subject:



The motion looks like the cars are moving backwards. That’s no good.

So what we needed was second curtain sync, I believe this is something that’s only supported on a camera by camera basis. Never the less, the 50D does support it. Second curtain sync will open the shutter, and then just before it’s going to close, then it will fire the flash. This will result in your properly exposed portion of the subject being in front of the trails from the longer rest of the exposure, giving you the perception that the object is moving forward instead of in reverse.

So yeah, hard lesson learned and quite a bunch of wasted shots. Oh well. Next year will be better!

Did some shooting at the rehearsal dinner and candid stuff at my cousins wedding this weekend.

I think I need to learn how to use my camera a little differently. I’m annoyed by a few things at the moment, most related to how flashes are handled. From what I understand, if I set my camera to Av (Aperture priority) mode, it will use the flash as a fill, not as the main source of light. This can cause some real long exposures when you’re working in dark light. Obviously that’s not something that’s good when you’re not prepared. Shooting in full manual would be an acceptable workaround, but that really only works if you’re not shooting candids. The best part about candid is that you’re getting stuff that happens real quickly, no time to meter. What’s the answer? I’m not sure.

I want to be able to tell the camera “Don’t go below F/4, or 1/60, do everything else for me”, but I don’t think that’s possible. I guess the next best option is shooting full manual, leaving the aperture, setting the ISO to something you think will be close to what you’re wanting to grab, and then changing the shutter speed.

Edit: As it turns out, I CAN do a lot of stuff like this, I just needed to read the damn manual for my camera and flash better.

Next up is color matching with the flash. I used my Gary Fong Lightsphere and didn’t have an amber dome. Used it in tungsten lighting and while the results weren’t terrible, it would have been better if my flash color would have matched the ambient lighting.

You see here the flash contributed a lot of light but the tungsten lighting that was right above their heads casts everything yellow. Nothing can really be done about it. I guess I’ll be picking up an amber dome soon.

There’s a bug in OS X where if you switch spaces with an app that has the dock minimized focused, it will disable minimize for all other applications. You get the minimize button grayed out and it doesn’t come back. This manifests itself often when running a VMWare Fusion VM on a separate space from other apps. I’ve been annoyed by this for a very long time.

Today I did some digging and found this in Apples forums.

There’s also a little app that someone wrote to fix it here - Just execute this when you have the problem and it’ll change the dock state from hidden to unhidden and allow you to minimize windows again.

Not exactly a perfect fix, but better than nothing.

I’m beginning work on a game. Progress is actually slightly faster than I expected.
Here’s an early video: link.
More progress has been made, and the code is much nicer than it was at that point. At some point I’m clearly going to need to consider some help on the graphical work.