Loading ...In January 2010 I was down on the Mornington Peninsula in Melbourne, Victoria. On the 23rd we checked out Flinders Beach, the water down there is amazingly clear and I got some really cool photos, especially in and around rock pools.
I didn’t do much in the way of experimenting with these, just used settings that I knew would work.
Check them out below, note that this post is fairly image intensive.
I’ve been looking through the Australian government’s new My School website, which shows the graded performance of schools around the country, both public and private in the areas of reading, writing, spelling, grammar/punctuation and numeracy.
After looking at all the schools I attended, and those that my sister attended that I didn’t, there seems to be a fairly consistent pattern.
Grade 7 seems to have the worst marks in general, and that seems to improve across the schools I looked at by grade 9. Of course, I can only look at 2 years worth of data, so I can’t really compare the same students as yet, but that does seem to be a consistent pattern across the two years.
Note that I only looked at 1 primary school as myself and my siblings both went to the same school for primary, so my thoughts here are more in relation to high schools.
It seems to me that the data currently shown is not actually very relevant, or useful for choosing a high school. The reason I say this is because it seems to me that the performance of the high school is directly affected by the primary school. It is my opinion that grade 12 averages should also be shown. I realise each state marks grade 12 separately, but the only way I can see to really determine anything useful from this information, in relation to a high school, would be to see the grade 12 performance. If a school average improves from grade 7 to grade 9, then it is logical that by grade 12 it should have improved more.
A school that has high performing grade 7 students for example doesn’t, in my opinion, reflect on that school at all, but on the primary school that is feeding most of the students into it. It’s not until the higher grades that the high school’s performance really can be shown, I mean in grade 7, they haven’t really had long at all to help any poorly performing students.
What do you think? I mean I don’t have kids, I’m just looking at it as a bystander, and honestly, I don’t know how relevant that data is without the year 12 results. The year I completed grade 12 which was only 4 years ago now, and the year before, my school was highly ranked in NSW, yet according to the My School data, it’s in general, a below average performing school. That doesn’t seem very consistent to me. How do you know if your high school is just performing well because it has a good primary school feeding it, but then the performance drops in senior years? Or is it well performing in senior years but with a bad feeder school? This just doesn’t tell us.
On another note, I find it quite pathetic that the news anchors and the Education Minister, Julia Gillard, all claim that the site is a huge success and that parents clearly want this information simply because the website received 1.5 million hits and crashed a few times on the day of launch.
In my opinion that simply indicates poor planning on the IT side. As for the views, there is no way to prove they were all parents, I’m not after all and I ran 10-20 searches on the day it went live. There are going to be numerous teachers looking at it to see how the school they teach at is performing, there are going to be ex-students curious to see how their school is officially performing and then students currently attending schools having a look at their school out of curiousity.
I in all sincerity do not believe it is as much of a success as the minister and media would make it out to be. It seems to me that it is more of a novelty for students and ex-students than anything else, with just enough information to appeal to parents, though I don’t believe it is enough information to truly make an informed decision.
I just had a thought though, the information is perfect for private schools. In my experience in rural areas, the public schools seem to outperform the private schools in grade 12, however the information on the My School website indicates that the private schools are better performing than the public schools. It makes me wonder if perhaps there has been a bit of a push from the private sector to put this information out there to encourage enrollments in their schools rather than public schools. Just a thought.
I had a VMWare Fusion crash today with a Windows virtual machine running. When I tried to bring it back up though I got a “Failed to Lock the File” error. Restarting VMWare didn’t fix it, rebooting didn’t fix it. After a quick search I found an article on a similar issue with the Windows version of VMWare.
They suggested locating and deleting the .lck file in the virtual machine folder. I figured I’d try this, even though my situation was a bit different. To find the .lck files in OS X you will need to look inside the VMWare package. Simply right click on it and click “Show Package Contents”.
There were 3 .lck files inside my package, I could not get VMWare to open the virtual machine until I had deleted all 3. After doing so it worked perfectly fine. There does not appear to be any data loss except for what wasn’t saved prior to the crash.
If you have a unibody Macbook Pro in the 15″ or 17″ models, then you probably have two video cards. In the case of my Macbook Pro, I have an nVidia 9400m and an nVidia 9600m GT. By default the 9400m is enabled. For the most part this is perfectly fine for my usage, but sometimes the extra power of the 9600m GT would be really great, especially when I don’t need to worry about the battery usage, such as if the power is connected. I always wondered how to switch video cards though once I realised that it didn’t do it automatically.
I finally got round to looking up how to actually do it, as there is nothing obvious in the System Preferences about it.
Turns out, you just need to go into your System Preferences, then hit the “Energy Saver” button to be taken to the Energy Saving settings.
OS X Energy Saver Settings Pane
By default the “Graphics” option is set to “Better battery life”, however as you can see from the screen shot on the right, I am now running on the “Higher performance” setting.
This option is in essence asking, no do you want to use the lower power graphics card, the nVidia 9400m (Better battery life), or do you want to use the higher power graphics card, the nVidia 9600m GT (Higher performance).
To me, this seems a bit unclear, and I have to wonder why it is worded this way and why it is even in this section. To me it seems like it should be perhaps in the display settings section.
Upon thinking about this more though, it does make sense. I’m only thinking display settings because on Windows, the display settings show what graphics card is running what display. In OS X though, Apple aren’t trying to say, hey we’ve got two graphics cards here, they are trying to say, you have two options to make either a big difference in your battery life, or a big difference in your performance. This is especially the case with Snow Leopard as it allows the graphics card to be used more for general purpose computing with OpenCL. So, it really does come down to a matter of energy saving, not what hardware is being used to give those savings.
Log out to change your graphics settings
Wait, what?
That’s right, when you want to change the graphics setting, you have to log out. This is an unfortunate design issue as it means that you have to close everything down before you can change it over. Fortunately it’s not a full reboot, it just logs you out and back in. Still though, it would be nice to just be able to select the alternate option and have it happen automatically without needing to do anything further.
I realise that particularly with OpenCL there are going to be some issues with switching graphics processors on the fly, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be enabled, take over new jobs, switch the old jobs to the new processor and then switch the old processor off, it could involve some screen flickering while the controller is switched but surely that could be done?
Yes, it absolutely does. The 9600m GT results in a much faster experience, especially when using a virtual machine as well.
As for battery life, there is a difference here as well, it seems to me to be between half an hour and an hours difference depending on what you are doing.
Ever wondered what all the different memory types are that are shown in the pie chart at the bottom of the system memory tab in your Mac OS X Activity Monitor? If you’re used to the memory usage information that Windows shows, then the OS X descriptions might be a bit confusing. The reason for this is because there are actually more types of memory shown.
OS X System Memory Activity Monitor
In Windows all you see are what is free and what’s in use.
So what are these two extra types of memory that OS X shows?
This is exactly what it sounds like. Free memory is memory that hasn’t been written to yet. This will generally be at it’s highest straight after you turn on your computer. Continue Reading
As I mentioned back on the 1st of January, I would like to focus on my photography some more this year. As part of that I bought myself a Canon EOS 500D DSLR camera.
Over the past couple of weeks since I got the camera I have been reading a number of articles on photography and I’ve been looking around Flickr and photography blogs a lot more, so I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve come across that I’ve found particularly useful and inspiring.
I found Thomas Shahan’s Flickr gallery yesterday, he’s done some amazing macro photography of various insects and spiders.
Face of a Southern Yellowjacket Queen (Vespula squamosa) - By Thomas Shahan
Adult Female Jumping Spider - (Phidippus mystaceus) - By Thomas Shahan
Compound Eyes of a Robber Fly - (Holcocephala fusca) - By Thomas Shahan
Thomas Shahan’s macro photography got me looking at focus stacking as he has mentioned using it on some of his photographs. The way I understand it is that it combines a number of photographs of the same thing that all have different parts in focus. It then combines them to bring all of the desired sections of the photograph into focus.
I’ve been meaning to redesign the Still As Life blog for ages, the old design had a lot of issues, the one that I finally got the most fed up with was the width, it just wasn’t wide enough for me!
In saying that, I still haven’t actually redesigned it (I’m too busy working on a couple of big contracts and redoing the TerraMedia website!), I just decided to install a template from Wordpress.org that suited my needs. I decided to use Tranquility, I’ve used it a couple of times before as a temporary template on other sites. I quite like it and it meets my needs here, so until I have time to redesign it, I’ve decided to use it.
I’ll probably customise a number of things yet, but when I will get round to doing so, I don’t know.
I’ve also decided I’m going to import all of the worthwhile blogs from the old Blogger site, into Wordpress. Then I’ll get rid of the Blogger site altogether since it’s completely unused! The posts that aren’t worth importing I’ll just delete, I don’t need them and they are fairly old anyway.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new look, it’s definitely wider and much easier to read the links!
Have fun!
Something else I got this Christmas is an Apple Magic Mouse. This is the latest generation of mouse from Apple, and it is an absolutely fantastic device! Just turn on Bluetooth on my Mac, turn on the mouse, tell the Mac to find Bluetooth devices, it straight away detects the mouse and pairing is just a matter of a couple of clicks. From there it works perfectly! Note that it does need Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher.
Click on the photo to see full size on Flickr. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.
Happy new year everybody, I hope 2010 see’s you well!
I’ve been away from Brisbane since the 20th of December. So far I’ve been in Wagga and Batemans Bay, soon I’ll be on my way to Melbourne as well. It’s been a great break, but today I’ve had to sit down and get back to work.
This Christmas I got a couple of things that I would like to focus on more this year.
The first is from my parents, a Taurus T-DI box for my bass guitars that has a built-in pre-amp. The idea here is that when I play bass at church, or anywhere else with a PA system, I don’t need to take my amp. It doesn’t matter whether I’m playing accoustic or electric, I just take the DI box and plug my guitar into it, then from it to the PA system. There are already plenty of DI boxes at church which I normally use, but the Taurus DI box has a pre-amp built into it. This is a particularly useful thing as it gives me extra control over the volume and tone of my bass from where I am, and allows me to use the electric bass directly through the PA system more effectively.
The timing is perfect as my old Peavey bass amp has actually just died so I need to get a new amp anyway, but this is a very useful interim device.
So what I would like to do this year is focus on my music more. Every year I go through 4 to 6 months of frequent playing, then 6 where I don’t play much at all. I’d like to keep going all year!
The second thing is something I got myself a couple of days ago, a Canon EOS 500D Digital SLR camera. I’ve been experimenting with photography for years, but I’ve only ever had point-and-shoot style cameras, this is the first DSLR I’ve ever owned. I have been considering getting a high definition digital video camera for a while now, but decided not to because none of them in my price range actually take decent video. After much contemplation, I decided to go the still camera route, and focus on my still photography more. When picking a DSLR though, I kept the video in mind, and the Canon EOS 500D jumped out at me as it takes HD video as well, for around the same price as the video cameras I was looking at. I also tossed up going with the 50D, but it really was a bit too expensive for me at the moment as a beginner in the DSLR arena and doesn’t offer the HD video option, maybe in a year or so (excuse me while I day dream for a bit).
I got it in a kit with 2 lenses, an 18-55mm IS lense and a 55-250mm IS lense, it ended up being $1599 with a backpack bag from Camera House. I also got an 8gb SD card with it, but I’m probably going to need to get a 16gb or 32gb one if I want to shoot in RAW format. From my experimenting so far, the 18-55mm lense seems to be the better lense, but I’m definitely going to have to get myself a 1.4 f-stop lense at some point as neither of the lenses it came with are very good for low light photography unless the flash can be used.
Then again, every time I use it I think of something else I want to get for it!
I’ve spent the past few days playing around with it a lot and I’ve got a number of shots to put up on Flickr for you to check out. I just have very little mobile reception here in Batemans Bay, so they will have to wait until I get to Melbourne, or somewhere else.
So the other thing I would like to focus on this year is my photography.
I’ve decided that I want to focus on these things because everything else I do is work related in some context or other, so even when I’m doing one of my hobbies, it usually ends up being work related somehow. Personally I think thats a good thing since it means I enjoy what I do and I can make money from my hobbies. I just think I’d like to start looking at some different things and focusing on some of my other hobbies and developing them further.
I’m sure I can tie photography into TerraMedia anyway once I get better 
I have a big project under way at the moment, but once I get a chance, I’ll do a write up on the camera so far (I am very impressed!), and once I get home and test out the DI box, I’ll put up a write up on it too! I’m looking forward to it! This year is going to be one interesting year and I’m really looking forward to it!
What are you looking forward to this year?
I recently replaced a 4 year old server for one of my clients which was running Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 as it was starting to seriously struggle to keep up with every thing. On top of that, almost every morning it would be unconnectable, it really wasn’t worth fixing.
The new server is running SBS 2008 and is a very nice machine from IBM, it’s only a base model, the x3200 M2, nothing more is needed really, but the build quality is absolutely impeccable for the money.
Anyway, the new server has taken over everything now and the old one is going to be turned into a backup machine running some other operating system, unsure what as of yet, but first, I need a back up of it, just in case. I figured the best way to do this is as a virtual machine so I can boot it up anywhere if I need it.
I figured I’d try the Microsoft option for doing this, since logically they should know how best to turn their operating system into a virtual machine from a physical machine, right?
I downloaded Disk2VHD from Microsoft’s SysInternals team at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx and let it do it’s thing. I ended up with a .vhd virtual image that is supposed to work with Microsoft’s Virtual PC.
It doesn’t though. Nor does it work in VMware Player, so this isn’t very helpful to me.
@calrion mentioned that VMware have a freely available converter that will turn a physical machine into a virtual machine, so I figured I’d give it a try. After a quick search, I found VMware’s vCenter Converter which claimed to support Server 2003 among numerous other operating systems. It was a fair bit bigger than Disk2VHD and had to be installed on the computer first, whereas Disk2VHD could be run from a USB drive.
However, it converted SBS2003 with about 90gb of data into a VMware virtual disk (.vmdk) in about 2 hours (Disk2VHD took about 3 hours).
Upon booting up the new virtual machine in VMware Player, it seems to be running great, no issues at all.
One thing to be aware of though is that SBS 2003 recognises the hardware changes and decides that they are quite significant, so you must reactivate SBS 2003 and you are given a massive 3 days to do it in. If you don’t particularly need it for anything but just in case there was something that got missed in the migration, then I’d suggest making a copy of the virtual machine and booting it to test it is fully functional. After testing, just get rid of the copy. Do the same every time you need to boot it, if you don’t want to re-activate it. The reason I suggest this is that the re-activation notification doesn’t occur until the first boot on the new hardware, hence the 3 day timer doesn’t begin until first boot. If the virtual machine has never been booted before, it will never start. If you do need to use it on a regular basis, you might as well just activate it.
Any CAL’s you have installed will also need to be transferred activated again with the hardware changes, if you want to use them. I don’t as the new server looks after all the clients.
Good luck 
I am currently using a copy of the virtual machine to experiment with a few different options for continued use of the old server while still running SBS 2003. This is quite helpful as it means I don’t have to risk screwing anything up more than it already is on the physical server, or removing anything that I may need later on etc.