breaking daylight

discovering autopackage

i came home one day to find a fedora 7 cd in the mail – from a mate who got me started with linux a long while back. obviously burnt from an iso, the “bootleg” nature of the media is preety much how linux heads (him being a true fanboy) spreads the “love” of the community driven operating system.

i fed the disc into backup ‘puter, waved goodbye to my ubuntu “warty” (memories of the pain of installing cisco vpn client flashed before me), guided “anaconda” to slither all across the hard disks and hit the showers wondering what drives these developers to come up with these names to call their creation (maybe one of them actually hit the showers, looked down and thought “…hmm, anaconda!”)

fedora got up and running a little after the shower and meal. dived into working on installing the necessary extras to get it running to my likings. i was having dependencies issues when i was trying to install qtpfsgui with yum and naturally hit the web to find a solution. i kinda got side-tracked for abit and looked around to install inkscape when i chanced upon “autopackage“.

a pure linux fanboy would say that compiling your software installs is the only way to go. fanboy i am not, neither am i a programmer who has “c” on his fingertips – i’ll take any pre-compiled or pre-packaged installs over manual compiling any day. “autopackage” boasts software installs across different linux flavors along with automatically solving dependencies to support the software install. having relied on yum and apt for a bit, i was wondering … why another?

the same questions hit the linux heads as well and camps started to appear – some for, and most against. from what is reported, development was slow and support was lacking but once it hits stable release some actually liked the idea.

i for one am very impressed that i dont need to search the web for a specific distro version of the application i need – let alone worry about dependacies. all one has to do is download the “autopackaged” application file, set it to executable and double click it – thats it (you can also nod along with the quick text scrolls of the verbose output if that rocks your boat)!

sure its a very “micro$oft” way of doing things but competing in a global market where the standards have been established for years (minus security standards of course), wouldn’t it better to go with the flow instead of against it?

the old must go (+1)

night driving is fun

the old must go

it’s getting increasingly frustrating to find old buildings in singapore to shoot at these days. anything that is old and somewhat abandoned is either slapped with a “no trespassing, area secured with video cameras – land authority” warning (because it’s slated for “urban redevelopment”) or just plain fenced up for no apparent “redevelopment” reason (case in point – the matilda house). why can’t the land authority just leave it open for snap happy people to capture the essence of the building while they work out their contractual administrations for the construction work? the buildings gonna be demolished anyways – at least with a few hundred photographers recording its last days, the memory and character can be immortalized. its a win for both sides i feel.

theres a few for now at the very least…

discovering qtpfsgui

qtpfsgui is an open source application for hdr generation. presenting a simple gui, it seems to work off the bat with default settings, though, outputs are a lil too surreal for my liking – especially at larger sizes. with a number of options to tweaking its effects (sections that are somewhat names of persons who i think are possibly very important in math circles), i think this is a preety powerful piece of software with loads of potential.

available for windows, osx & linux (..very neat!)

aji karma

…need..to….focus.

photography as a hobby is a bitch. especially when you don’t make money out of it and you see what other’s can achieve with superior equipment. sure, it’s the person not the equipment that matters (i for one was super happy with a 2megapixel point-and-shoot for 2003-2005 and an FM2)…but at the end of the day, sometimes most-times, you want to be rewarded after you stayed up all night to make sure you didn’t miss the sunrise with a good, nicely exposed, sharp and crisp shot.

expensive, fast, clear optics are especially tantalizing when you are looking at these guys (hazmee, imran and sham) doing their magic. especially when you have are halfway through amassing a substantial amount of money supposed to be for further education….

many thanks for the wee morning rendezvous at changi and breakfast guys. haven’t had that much “fun” for a while.

who needs photoshop

hands up whoever thinks ms paint is dead?

painting the mona lisa