For a non-Catholic this blog sure has many pictures of the pope..
But I promise this will be the last (at least for a month).
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Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Just one more..
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010A bit of nostalgia
Sunday, April 18th, 2010
SLR camera accessories for cheapskates
Sunday, April 18th, 2010I like taking pictures, but I’m not exactly willing to go and spend hundreds of bucks on camera equipment.
So I spent about 40 $ on some cheap camera equipment from focalprice.com and dealextreme.com (both cheap hong kong stores with free shipping).
Tripod – 14.47 $
http://www.focalprice.com/detail_DT011S.html
Cheap, light and folds nicely into a small bag that came along with it. Used it at home a couple of times, but if used with caution I think it will survive a couple of trips to the big outside world as well but will probably not last indefinitely like the other items I received. Very useful for setting up images with long exposures.
Shutter remote – 4.14 $
http://www.focalprice.com/detail_DI134B.html
Compared to the official one for my camera, it’s dirt cheap, and worked perfectly with my Canon EOS 1000D. Perfect for use with the tripod when I don’t want to shake the camera while taking pictures.
Lense Hood – 3.29 $
http://www.focalprice.com/detail_DI024B.html
Used to combat lens flare, I’m not J.J. Abrams. Makes the camera look cool, but I’ll probably never have a need to take pictures at an angle which will require this hood 
UV Filter – 3.88 $
http://www.focalprice.com/detail_DI004B.html
Pretty practical to keep the lens safe. Was a bit skeptical to the low price, but could not see any difference in pictures taken with it on/off in lots of light settings. I hope this will prove itself useful sooner or later by taking a hit for the camera lens
microfiber cloths – 1.8 $
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.6842
Extremely useful for cleaning the lenses as I always get fingerprints on the while changing. Also great for glasses, laptop screens etc.. Comes individually packed into cute little zip lock bags.
Polarizing filter – 7.89 $
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.14517
Prevents reflections from water/lakes, and makes the sky blue (read here how it works and see some examples, pretty fascinating).
(Left = without, Right = with polarizing filter).
Click for larger image
8X Macro lens – 9.14 $
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.17324
Good for taking pictures of small crap, but the field of focus is pretty small, but I’m sure this is true for all macro lenses
(Left = without, Right = with macro lens).
Click for larger image
The only downside is that with both the macro lens and UV filter attached the lenses will make a shadow for the internal blitz. Maybe I need a new blitz
All in all I’m pretty satisfied with the purchases I’ve made, and if you’re looking into getting some nice equipment for your camera it might be worth checking out focalprice and dealextreme instead of using hundreds of dollars. And IF it breaks or turns out to be rubbish, at least you’re only out a fiver.
What the hell is he wearing?
Sunday, April 18th, 2010We’ve kinda gotten used to the ridiculous hat big enough to hide an altar boy (too soon?)
Now somebody has dressed him up in something that looks a weird form of shoulder armor. This is obviously new territory for the Catholics, so they should learn from the experts in the field of over sized shoulder wear: Blizzard
PS: Why would he wear a gigantic hat, but just a tiny cape? it makes NO SENSE!
Why don’t you have a seat?
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
I’ve taken the liberty to solve the Catholic Church’s problem with child molestation (I’ll get working on their other problems shortly). Since this problem seems to pop up in almost every country they’re in, this is clearly a job for Chris Hansen. Hopefully they didn’t hide the evidence to well, but I’m optimistic seeing that Christians in general have a rather nonchalant attitude towards evidence
Go Cern!
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010I’ve always been a big fan of particle physics and astronomy. So when CERN fired up their massive particle accelerator to 50% today (7 TeV PER PARTICLE! which is kinda sick), that was definitely a 9.98 out of 10 on the awesome scale
Hopefully some preliminary results can be released this summer
One thing that really surprised me was the funky graphics produced:
And the fact that they use VLC, the best video playback software ever made
Earth hour sucks (again)
Saturday, March 27th, 2010For some reason Earth hour managed to sneak up on me this year, and has just passed. Leaving a trail of idiots who can now feel good about themselves for “taking action”.
I’ve said it before, and I say it again.. Earth hour is bullshit, and their list of “actions” you can take is even more retarded than last year, in addition to spamming facebook, youtube, flickr, myspace, twitter and annoying your friends (The only “action” you can take for Earth hour, is to promote Earth hour) they’ve added this gem that illustrates the moronic lack of substance of this event:
“Make an Earth Hour Lantern as a symbol of hope for the future”..
Fuck you, if I wanted a better future I’m sure I could find something more productive to do than lantern making >:(
Road slippery when wet
Saturday, March 27th, 2010I had a lovely highside on my scooter last year, and now I can add lowsides to my repertoire.
I was out having the first drive of spring, on a racing bike (I’m pretty sure these are the most uncomfortable bikes ever designed). I’ll say this for my friends Yamha YZF, the ergonomics might suck, but the front brakes are unbelievable In fact they are so good, that with a tiny amount of force they locked up the front wheel on wet asphalt and smacks me in the ground.
I was only doing around 25 km/h, so the bike is mostly fine except for a gear lever, left blinker (nobody uses blinkers in Trondheim anyway) and some plastic which will have to be fixed before it’s sold (My friend finally took to his senses and got a real bike, BMW F 800 GS, which I’m sure he’ll never let me ride) 
Me personally am fine, my right hand got a little bruised but nothing serious. What I don’t get is how my right hand got hit when I lowsided to the left, especially since my head broke the fall:
Maybe I should get a new helmet, or at least a visor before spring really hits Trondheim and I get my bike from winter storage.
Oups
Monday, March 15th, 2010While cleaning up in the core classes of Trekwar yesterday (documenting functions, formatting/structuring code, minor improvements) I also saw lots of equals(Object o) methods. And in my infinite wisdom I decided to use generics since it is used pretty extensively throughout the code anyway, so I changed basically all the equals methods.
example:
public boolean equals(Object o) {
if(o instanceof Structure)
return equals((Structure)o);
return false;
}was changed to:
public boolean equals(Structure s2) {
return name.equals(s2.getName());
}Now this is not a problem when writing code, as you pretty much always compare objects of the same type. However, the code also uses the Java Collections contains() method a few places, and it always uses the equals(Object) version. So when my classes no longer provided this method, the default one inherited from java.lang.Object was used instead. This caused a strange array of bugs to appear (star systems on the map not shown with faction color/icon except for the Cardassians for some strange reason, users not having any technologies, unable to build any structures, generally erratic behavior, etc..). Luckily I discovered the cause pretty quickly and only wasted about an hour or so on this
I guess the lesson is that objects that needs to be compared, directly or indirectly by contains() or other methods, should always define an equals(Object) method that just passes the call along to the equals method written with generics.
public boolean equals(Object o) {
if(o instanceof Structure) {
return equals((Structure)o);
}
return false;
}And perhaps that you should not mess around with your code for hours on end without stopping to test if you broke it once in a while
Debug poem
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Today I wasted two hours locating and fixing a trivial bug:
“Spent hours debugging my code, fixing hacks
but somehow mistook Math.min() for Math.max()”
Today I wasted 5 minutes trying to think of something that rhymes with “Math.max()”