Martin Geisler Online

Things are back to normal after my long warm summer break, I’m having lectures and classes as usual… except that our assignments are pretty easy right now because we’ve just started with Standard ML of New Jersey which is a pretty cool language. You can see me reading in our fine textbook Elements of ML Programming on the right.

The image is one of the better images I’ve taken with my new Sony DSC-V1 camera. I took it using the self-timer on a bright summer morning a couple of weeks ago. As one can tell, then there wasn’t a single cloud on the sky — I ate my breakfest outside and played a little with the camera before I headed for DAIMI.

I’ve already taken over 800 images in the three weeks I’ve had it, but I’ve “only” kept 280 of them for the rest were either boring (lots of test shots of my room), badly shaken because I’ve experimented with slow shutter speeds in low-light conditions or out of focus. But I believe I’m getting better as I practice more and more. The huge amount of images has made me think of making a program that can be used categorize the image. The program should be able to parse the EXIF headers that my camery embeds in the JPEG images and also be able to associate arbitrary keywords with each image. The program should probably also be able to do the copying of the images from the camery to the harddisk, for it’s important that the program gets to the images before they’re rotated or altered with other programs. The problem is that programs like the GIMP and feh remove the headers when they re-save the image. This is kind of annoying for the headers contain a lot of information about the shot, most importantly the date and time that could be used to sort the images nicely into monthly folders.

I guess that I’ll have to make some sort of image gallery here at GimpsterDotCom, but the images are huge — 2 MiB JPEG from the camera. I can probably bring them down to between 50-100 KiB by resizing them to 800×600 pixels (from the huge 2592×1944 pixel image the camera delivers) and compressing them harder, but that’s still between 10 and 20 MiB with 200 images! I’ve only got 15 MiB left of my quota here at GimpsterDotCom (where did the other 85 MiB go?) so I’ll have to clean up first or put the images somewhere else, such as DAIMI or something like that.

Today was a rather long day with five hours of lectures from 10 in the morning to 15 in the afternoon — the longest day so far :-) When I got home I had two plays with Thomas Jacobsen (a nice guy from the fourth floor here at [Skejbygård][]) on our table soccer game. I won the first game and lost the second so that was okay.

Then here in the evening we saw IMDB:Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002) on DVD. Really nice movie although I don’t like the way Gimli is portraied as the comic sidekick and how they’ve changed the story by dragging Frodo and Sam all the way to Osgiliath. I remember Faramir as much wiser from the book, but perhaps it’s because it’s been too long since I’ve read it.

It was also a pretty long movie: the DVD player showed two hours and 46 minutes when I stopped it. We have a movie club here at [Skejbygård][] where we rent and show a movie each Wednesday at 20 o’clock.

Tomorrow also looks like a busy day. I have a lecture on Complex Functions from 12 to 14 and then an appointment at the hairdresser at 14:15. At 18:30 Thomas Mølhave will be taking me with him to karate practice — I’ve never tried anything remotely like it so it will be interesting to see how it goes. We’ll be done at 20 and then head for [Skejbygård][] where we’ll be taking our new bar into use for the first time. I’ve invited a lot of people from my class to I’m sure that it will be a cool party. Luckily none of us have any lectures on Friday (except for RuneThorbek who does have a single lecture if I remember correctly…). So a long and exciting day awaits me tomorrow, I’ll go to sleep now.

I’ve got myself some new toys this summer: a new computer and a digital camera. I haven’t yet written about the new computer but in short, then it’s the most quiet machine I’ve ever seen. It’s a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 2×512 MiB PC3200 DDR RAM. The power supply and harddisk is the ones I talked about in March. The case is from Noise Control and has Magic Fleece fur on the inside. So I have a fair amount of computer power packed in a box with furs and only a single fan for the CPU. That’s a bit too good to be true, and it is for the heat cannot escape fast enough. I’ve therefore had to open the box a little to prevent my harddrive from crashing.

The digital camera is a Sony DSC-V1. You can go and read the reviews at the Digital Photo Review, the Digital Camera Resource Page og Steves Digicams. It’s a very nice camera and I’ve already taken some 450 shots with it. Most of the shots are useless and I’ll throw them away but there are a couple of nice ones in between. My only complaint about the camera is the size: it’s too deep to fix in a pocket so you have to carry it around in your hand or perhaps in a little bag. I’ll write more about it and put up some pictures when I get time.

Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve last updated GimpsterDotCom, as I’m sure many of you will agree… I just wanted to relax this summer and part of that was to ignore my website for two months — go figure.

But the site hasn’t lied still while I was gone. People have used the oppotunity to mess up a whole lot of pages. I’ve restored them again, but if I’ve missed something, then mail me. It also no longer possible for everybody to edit the pages without as a consequence of that mess.

I’ve spend my summer holidays home in Denmark doing nothing special really. I’ve visited my mom and dad a couple of times but other than that I’ve stayed here at [Skejbygård][]. There I’ve had a lot of really good times with all the nice people that live here.

But now it’s almost over — I’ve start again next Monday. Then it’s homework, lectures and assignments again. But it will be fun: I’m attending a course on compilers, languages and their semantics and complex analysis.

I had my last exam today — I got the grade 11 again. The exam was in DAIMI:dDistSik and I had to talk about “LAN systems and LAN technology”. I liked the question for I’ve been playing a lot with LANs in the last five years. I talked about the topologies of LANs (buslans, starshaped, ringshaped LANs) about the media used and about the MAC protocols used, that is the media access control protocols that determine how the media is shared between the hosts connected to it. It all went rather well.

When I had talked for about 15 minutes they started to ask me questions, they wanted to talk about an entirely different thing (it’s almost always a good sign when they want to change the subject radically) namely transactions. My lecturer asked me if normal two-phase locking (as opposed to strict two-phase locking) would be enough if we were given the guarantee that all transactions would be commited by the clients, that is that there could be no aborts. It was a rather specific and tricky question in my opinion — I knew about transactions, locking and was able to talk about that, but I couldn’t come up with a rigoursly argument for or against the use of two-phase locking… I guess that’s why they gave me 11 and not 13.

Anyway… this was my last exam, so I’ll be relaxing for a couple of months now. I’m really looking forward to it :-) I’ll buy a new computer sometime soon now and I also have to play with [PHP Shell][] (I’ve figured out how to implement a commandline history using JavaScript) and my new SPAM filter POPFile which is a learning filter instead of my old filter TMDA. I’ve been using POPFile for a couple of days now and it works very well, it learns incredibly fast.

Happy holidays to everybody (my apologies to those who still have a couple of weeks left… :-)