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I have just read three cracking thrillers: Nothing to Lose, written by Lee Child in 2008, Zero Day, written by Mark Russinovich in 2011, and Perishable Goods, written by Dornford Yates in 1928. All three are great yarns, and well worth a read. If you would not discover some or all of these any other way, please feel free to take this as a recommendation.
Each book is a child of its time. In Zero Day the heroes battle a devastating Al Quaeda cyber attack on the west. The plot of Nothing to Lose is also about religious extremism and 21st century geo-politics, although from a very different standpoint.
There’s a refreshing lack of religious extremism and geo-politics in Perishable Goods. Chandos & co have to rescue a kidnapped friend from villains who are motivated purely by money and personal revenge. The book wears its 80+ years very well, although some of the writing, attitudes and technology are now amusing. (My favourites, slightly paraphrased, “I was totally alone…, except of course for my manservant” and “after a few minutes the cars were started and ready to move”).
From this you might conclude that the two recent novels are similar, and Yates’ very different, but that’s not correct. It’s actually Zero Day which is the odd one out. The others are both personal battles, largely on a scale where all the protagonists physically interact with one another. Zero Day inhabits a much larger canvas, in which the key players have no such interaction, and portrays a frightening vision in which misfits in odd corners of the world working for small financial rewards can unwittingly create genuine weapons of mass destruction. This anonymous “action at a distance” is genuinely scary, not least because it could really happen, it might even be in progress today.
I enjoyed all three books, but Zero Day really made me think.
Review: I Do Solemnly Swear
By D M Annechino
Pedestrian Thriller
The bar for this sort of thriller has been set very high by the likes of Tom Clancy, “24” and the brilliant play “The Last Confession” about the death of and succession to Pope John Paul 1. This book fails to reach that standard, and left me feeling very dissatisfied.
Ultimately this is a conspiracy plot which involves almost everyone in the White House except the central character, and feels like a tired reworking as a result. Furthermore that conspiracy is not really credible, with Aryan supremacists who have presumably just quietly ignored Barack Obama, Colin Powell and the many Jewish members of recent US administrations. Many characters know much more than would be realistic in a successful conspiracy, which fundamentally requires secrecy.
Although the book inhabits the real world of current Middle Eastern politics and players, other realities are ignored. For example early on there are several misogynistic “a woman can’t do this job” challenges to the new president, but no one thinks to mention Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel or any of the US’s successful female Secretaries of State.
The writing fails to be either intriguing or suspenseful. With only one main exception the main characters remain true to the new president’s initial assessment of their personalities and loyalties. The chief of staff and housekeeper behave suspiciously, but the reason is immediately disclosed, rather than the disclosure being deferred for a page or two.
Many of the details are simply laughable. Apparently the head of the Secret Service is a dwarf of 4ft 10. The villain is a Nazi who refers to “Capitalist Pigs”. The president is a long-standing career politician, but apparently has no advisors except those inherited from her predecessor, and although she has a country to run, the president is worrying about her biological clock, despite being about 50.
On a practical level my pre-release review copy of the book had a number of oddities of grammar, typography and layout. While these may be rectified before publication and were not critical, they were suggestive that the work has not received a great deal of review before printing.
It’s a shame, because the premise of this book is a good one, but the execution does not deliver a worthy read.
Action At A Distance
Sunset and Swirling Sea
| Sunset and swirling sea, Dubrovnik | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 01-10-2011 16:17 | ISO: 100 | Exp. bias: -2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/5s | Aperture: 14.0 | Focal Length: 30.0mm (~48.6mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
Too many of my recent posts have been technical ones, especially with trying to get the “Micro Four Thirds Lens Correction Project” off the ground, so here’s a nice picture to address the balance.
This is from our short trip to Dubrovnik, just about this time last year. The rocks were lit by the last rays of the setting sun, and while I normally go for short exposures of moving water, this subject demanded a slower speed to really capture the swirls of the crashing waves. I’m pleased by the sharpness, given that this was taken at 1/5s hand held! Thank <insert deity of choice here> for image stabilisation!
MFT: Formula, What Formula?
In a discussion with Phil Harvey of exiftool fame, it became apparent that the first problem I have to solve in respect of Micro Four Thirds lens correction is to understand the formula, or formulae, being used to apply the correction.
Most image processing software supports geometric correction via three parameters labelled a, b and c. These are the parameters in the following formula:
Ru = scale*(Rd + a*Rd^3 + b*Rd^5 + c*Rd^7)
In this Rd is the distance of a point in the image from the centre in the distorted image, and Ru is the distance it was in the undistorted image. The model is that distortion is radially symmetric, and has the effect that concentric circles of image points move either closer to or further from the centre than they should be. This translates into the more recognisable types of distortion when straight lines in the image cut across these imaginary concentric circles.
There’s a couple of useful pictures here.
There are several variants on this formula. Wikipedia has a much more complex looking version which appears completely different, as it allows for the effects of off-centre lens elements and different profiles in different directions, but if you ignore these effects then with a little bit of factoring it boils down to exactly the same equation. Bibble, for example, switches the labels a and c, and other versions factor “scale” into the individual parameters, but the basic formula is the same.
The problem is that if this is the formula used in MFT in-camera corrections, then the data isn’t the right shape. We should just see three or maybe four fractional values, and the rest should be zeros, or maybe constants for a given lens/camera combination. While in some cases you can select values from the MFT data which work, it’s inconsistent and there’s no explanation for all the other data.
We know that MFT cameras also correct in-camera for chromatic aberrations. Maybe this could explain the other data points? The trouble is that this doesn’t work either. CA correction formulae work in one of two ways. They either provide a pair of shifts for the different colour channels (requiring two further parameters in addition to the three or four for geometric correction), or you get three sets of geometric correction parameters, one for each colour channel, as per the following taken from a DNG file using one of Raphael Rigo’s tools:
r : 1.000168 -0.128185 0.052356 -0.005116 0.000000 0.000000
g : 0.999694 -0.127995 0.052335 -0.004995 0.000000 0.000000
b : 0.999967 -0.127973 0.052642 -0.005050 0.000000 0.000000
While this might explain the number of values, you’d expect to see three sets of very similar values in the MFT data, and that doesn’t happen.
There are other ways of doing geometric correction. There are other formulae, but they don’t seem to be in common use. There’s also a non-linear approach (see http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/lenscorrection/ again), but this would need either a series of small values with the same sign (for a cumulative curve), or a progressive sequence (for an explicit curve). Of course, there could be some sort of complex differential version, but that’s cheating!
I have to assume that the model is capable of interpretation, especially since for some lenses a simple mapping works pretty well. However, it’s clearly not as simple as we’d hoped.
It’s Not Over…
You know how they say “it’s not over till the fat lady sings”? Well, if the fat lady starts singing along to her iPod in the gym it’s definitely over. I’ve never seen a gym empty that fast! 🙂
The Micro Four Thirds Lens Correction Project
Although most Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lenses are tiny, the cameras produce great JPG files with apparently little or no geometric distortion. They do this by applying corrections in camera, and the correction parameter data is also stored with the RAW file. Unfortunately this data is only useful if you can read it, and most RAW processors can’t.
Although there’s no obvious reason why not, Panasonic and Olympus have not published the specification for this data. That leaves those of us who want to use a RAW processor other than LightRoom or SilkyPix struggling to get decent results with our MFT images.
Building on some excellent work done by “Matze” (thinkfat.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/dissecting-panasonic-rw2-files.html)and Raphael Rigo (syscall.eu/#pana) I decided to have a go at implementing a parser in my CAQuest plug-in for Bibble/AfterShotPro. However although getting the raw data is fairly straightforward I have discovered that the algorithm is more complex than we thought, and seems to vary from lens to lens.
I have therefore decided to open up the exercise to a “crowd-sourcing” model to try and get several eyes on the problem. As we uncover algorithms which work well for one lens or another I’ll publish them here, and also build them into CAQuest. Over time we may come to completely understand the complete MFT algorithm, and our work will then be done. Of course, if one of the MFT partners wants to help by publishing the algorithm, that would also be perfectly acceptable :).
The project pages are here: www.andrewj.com/mft/mftproject.asp, with a discussion hosted at the Corel AfterShotPro forum.
The VMWare Disk IO Problem – Fixed At Last
Regular readers will know that I’m a great fan of VMWare desktop virtualisation, but my enthusiasm has for a long time been muted by an odd problem. After shutting down or suspending a VM my laptop was thrashing its disks for 5-10 minutes, for no apparent reason, making the system almost unusable in the interim. I’d tried all sorts of variations on disk arrangements but to no avail.
Finally today in desperation I tried googling, which hadn’t worked previously, and I lucked on the solution. The following site wasn’t the first reference I found, but it probably offers the best explanation:
http://olafd.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/heavy-disk-io-after-shutdown-in-vmware-workstation/
The solution seems to be to simply add the following to each vmx file:
mainMem.useNamedFile = "false"
The difference is little short of miraculous. Not only has the disk IO problem vanished, but I can now attempt operations such as starting or shutting down two VMs simultaneously, which would previously have rendered the system completely unusable, or even crashed it.
It’s early days, but so far the only downside seems to be that the visible time to suspend or resume a VM has gone up from a couple of seconds to about 15, but that’s a tiny price to pay.
What annoys me is that if this fix is known, and its effect so dramatic (even if not for every user), then why don’t VMWare make it more visible on their own sites, and provide it as an option in the WorkStation UI?
Addendum
Interesting little “gotcha” on this, recently uncovered. If you have a VM with a lot of RAM, and/or your working files are on a slow disk it can take some time for saved state to write completely to disk after VMWare says that saving is complete. If you power the host down while this is happening you will corrupt the saved state and have to completely reboot the VM. I assume that if you wait for the disk to quiesce before powering down the host then things will be OK. Just be careful out there!
Re-Use Achieved with Elegance
| Portal to the Kruisherenhotel, Maastricht | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM | Date: 24-07-2011 11:38 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -1 EV | Exp. Time: 1/40s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 18.0mm (~29.2mm) | Location: Derlon Hotel Maastricht | State/Province: Limburg | See map | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM | |
I just realised I haven’t posted anything for a week or two, so I thought you might like to see one of my photos. We had a great trip last year to Maastricht, enjoying not only the wandering around a beautiful European city and great shopping, but also an Andre Rieu concert. We’d never heard of this musician and showman before, and now you can hardly move without him popping up somewhere!
Steadily reducing church congregations are a common problem in many European countries, and like elsewhere Maastricht has the challenge of what to do with churches which are no longer viable in their original use. It’s criminal if they are destroyed, and a great shame if their architectural value is degraded by any conversion. In Maastricht they seem to have this tapped, having developed several old churches very sensitively, with the new structures “floating” inside the old shell. The Selexyz bookstore is a prime example, where you can visibly see how the bookstore and coffee shop just “sit” inside the old building, which could easily be re-adapted to its original use, or a different new one. However our favourite was the Kruisherenhotel, pictured here. From the copper entrance portal and throughout they have filled it with fantastic sculptural elements using very modern materials, set against the backdrop of the original painted ceilings and stained glass windows, again with the majority of the original architecture preserved. This is how it should be done.
Jon Lord RIP
| The late Jon Lord and the very talented Anna Phoebe performing a spine-chilling version of Sarabande at Superjam in the Albert Hall, July 2012 | |
| Camera: Canon PowerShot S95 | Date: 08-07-2011 22:45 | ISO: 800 | Exp. bias: -1 EV | Exp. Time: 1/20s | Aperture: 4.9 | Focal Length: 22.5mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM | |
Since I was first old enough to take an interest in “real” (heavy/prog) rock music, my favourite band has been Deep Purple. I can honestly say I’ve studied their music (my relationship with it goes a long way past just listening), and seen them several times. Like the other great bands of the era their music has a unique “fingerprint”, unmistakeable for any other. In Purple’s case, it was the inclusion of a Hammond Organ, driven by a man who was both a great rocker and equally an orchestral composer. That was Jon Lord. I read sadly of his passing yesterday. He was a lovely man, and a great musician, and will be sorely missed.
I saw him in concert only twice, but both provide strong memories. The first time I saw Deep Purple, in 2002, he had already retired and handed the Hammond over to Don Airey. Half way through the first half of the concert, Airey did a long organ solo, which went at one point to a single note, while he was lit by a single lamp fading slowly to black. The note continued, and the lights came up, to reveal Jon Lord at the keyboard instead. The house erupted with admiration, possibly the greatest outpouring of emotion at a single musician’s appearance I have ever experienced.
Then just over a year ago, we attended the Superjam charity concert hosted by Deep Purple at the Royal Albert Hall (see here for my review). Pride of place in the first half was an appearance by Jon Lord. His set included an absolutely chilling rendition of Sarabande with the violinist Anna Phoebe, a couple of duets with Rick Wakeman, and a final ensemble where they were joined by two more keyboard players, including Gary Brooker of Procul Harum fame.
I will play his music tomorrow, and think of him with some sadness, but mainly with great thanks for how his music has enriched my life.
A Case for Extreme HDR?
| Interior of The Church of St Lawrence, Ludlow | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 550D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 11-06-2011 17:25 | Resolution: 4968 x 3427 | ISO: 800 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/50s | Aperture: 6.3 | Focal Length: 28.0mm (~45.4mm) | Location: River Corve | State/Province: England | See map | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
I’ve just been processing the shots from my steam train trip to Ludlow last year. Most are quite disappointing: the light was very poor, and you actually can’t get many pictures of a train if you’re travelling on it, and getting on and off at any stop other than the final one.
However, I was quite pleased by this shot of the interior of Ludlow’s St. Lawrence’s Church, an HDR combination of three originals. What was interesting was that I normally make strenuous efforts to achieve as natural as possible a result when I have to use HDR to overcome lighting challenges, but here for the second time in a couple of months I’ve tried subtle, and then gone for something more extreme. (See here for my attempt to emulate the great Dutch masters!) This was generated using some of the most extreme settings in Photomatix Pro, but I think they produce a good result.
I was also pleased to find that my geotagging process had worked. I wasn’t sure of the church’s name, but from my image browser I opened a Google Map at the geotagged coordinates, and could immediately confirm the location as St. Lawrence’s.
Sometimes things work better than you expect!
Galaxy Note Battery Problem – Update
I’ve identified one cause of the problem afflicting my Galaxy Note and some other phones running Ice Cream Sandwich. I’ve been progressively synchronising all my various calendars with Google Calendar, which has worked fairly well, with one exception.
Google Calendar can’t reliably handle annual reminders, you know, those unusual events like birthdays and anniversaries. It frequently gets in a twist and reports that they have a repetition pattern it can’t handle. The nasty knock on effect is that this essentially crashes Google Calendar sync on the phone, but only after hanging the device in a high CPU state for a minute or so, which drains the battery rapidly as it repeats over time.
The fix is to go through the calendar on the browser and fix the repetition pattern for each annual event back to “Yearly”. Sync should then run smoothly, and battery life settle down, although you may need a “battery out restart” to get back to normal.
What is depressing is that these bugs have apparently been known about since last year and Google have done nothing to fix them. Oh well…
On a positive note I continue to be blown away by Swiftkey. Its ability to predict what I want to type is uncanny. I’ve typed this on the Note much faster than I could ever do on the iPad, and probably not much slower than I’d manage on a laptop. Highly recommended.
Finally, Something Smaller
| Detail from the side of Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GH2 | Date: 27-06-2012 19:24 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/1300s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 42.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO PZ 14-42/F3.5-5.6 | |
First Impressions of the Panasonic GH2
Regular readers will know that technology miniaturisation has been on something of a negative trend chez Johnston. My most recent TV, desktop, main camera and most notably laptop purchases have all been significantly larger and heavier than their predecessors. Even my latest phone, purchased a few weeks ago, is rather larger than the previous one, although there’s no real weight penalty.
However, I’ve finally bucked the trend. Recovering from knee surgery (which limits my carrying ability), and thinking about my next holiday under the cloud of increasingly challenging airline luggage limits, I’ve taken the plunge and invested in an EVIL camera (“Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens”:) ), in the shape of a Panasonic GH2. It’s funny how several influences came together:
- A very good Panasonic cinema advertising campaign featuring a professional taking great shots in Yosemite, using a Panasonic G3,
- Rave reviews of the new OM-D,
- A growing desire on my part to get a new toy and kick-start my slightly stuck photographic activities.
I had a look at the OM-D, but it just didn’t fit my hand. Oddly the Panasonic G3, almost identical in size, felt fine, but came up short on spec. A bit of research suggested that the GH2 would be a better match for my needs – a similar package, but closer to my Canons in capability. However, what really swung it was a review by Michael “Luminous Landscape” Reichmann, a man who apparently thinks nothing of spending £10k on the latest medium format wonder, who used a GH2 as his main camera for a six-month stay in Mexico last winter. Sold!
It’s been in my hands a few days now, and so far I’m very impressed. In terms of functionality, it’s closer to my Canon 7D than anything else in my fleet. There are proper knobs and switches for all the major functions, but also a comprehensive set of custom functions and buttons (the lack of which is one of the things which would make the Canon 60D a poor replacement for my much-loved 40D). Handling will take a little getting used to, but it all makes sense and with a bit of practice should work by feel with the camera up to the eye – very much my preferred mode. The electronic viewfinder is very clear, now I’ve got it focused at a point which works for my eyes with glasses either on or off!
The camera is rich in features with some, like the ability to change the aspect ratio in camera, potentially very useful. However, it has to be said that neither Canon nor Panasonic have made any progress against my list of enhancements we really need in DSLRs. Let’s hope the next generation do better, and in the meantime I’m off to investigate the growing phenomenon of GH2 “hacking”…
Image quality is really very good. Despite the smaller sensor noise levels are similar to my Canon 7D, certainly up to ISO 1600. I haven’t played with the really high ISOs yet. Beyond that is the performance of the 14-42mm “power zoom”. This comes in a package which when switched off looks like one of Panasonic’s tiny “pancake” primes, but extends when powered up to provide a useful zoom with 28-84mm range (in 35mm equivalent terms). It’s pretty sharp throughout its range, and chromatic and geometric aberrations seem to be almost absent. This conflicts sharply with the Canon EF-S mid-range zooms: the 17-85mm suffers very bad CA, the 15-85mm has very noticeable geometric distortion for a large part of the “wide” end, and neither is very sharp at the edges of the frame. Admittedly the Canon lenses have almost twice the zoom range, but I’d much rather have a really good 15-45mm “L” zoom, if only Canon made one… 🙁
All this comes in a tiny package. The camera is just about as small as it can be and fit my hands. Powered off, it’s about 3″ deep. And the body plus standard zoom is less than 500g. That’s about 40% of the weight of the Canon 7D + 15-85mm combo, or less than that lens alone. I suspect a “three zooms plus fast prime” lens set will probably still weigh less than the 7D and standard zoom lens, and not cost much more.
Now I don’t know how reliable it will be, or how it will stand up to regular use. The current version couldn’t compete with the 7D for fast action, or in very low light, although the gap is narrowing with each generation of these new mirrorless, smaller sensor cameras. Whether there’s a case for the 550D is more questionable. Will I dump my Canons for the GH2? Not yet, but it feels like the writing may be on the wall…
Update, September 2012
The apparent excellent performance of the tiny MFT lenses is due to in-camera correction of the JPG files. The RAW data shows the geometric challenges of such lenses in their full light. If you are prepared to use either SilkyPix or Adobe LightRoom as your RAW processor, then it will automatically read the correction data and re-apply it, but this is not available to users, like me, of other RAW processors. I’m becoming slightly obsessed by this problem, and now running a project to try and get to grips with it. However, I thought it worth updating my original post with this note. If you shoot JPG, then the MFT cameras are little short of amazing. If you shoot RAW, be prepared for a bit of a challenge…
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