Still As Life

48hourslogo.com - Online Logo Design Contests

Matt — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:20:01 +0000

I haven’t come across these guys before, but was recently approached by them to write a short article about them. I figured why not? They provide an interesting service related to one of my fields of interest after all.

After having a bit of a look through their website, it’s pretty obvious that they provide online logo design in much the same way as the Australian based 99Designs. The main difference is where 99Designs is focused on designs in general, 48HoursLogo.com is focused solely on logo design for businesses through a logo contest format.

In other words, businesses seeking a new logo submit their requirements, then designers using the site are able to submit their design ideas to be voted on by the contest holder. It seems that the minimum cost for a logo through 48HoursLogo.com is indeed notably lower than that of 99Designs, and the process of creating your contest is potentially simpler as well. I quite like the option to check style designs that you like as it can give designers a good idea of the feel you are after without you needing to try and explain it.

As a designer myself, I’m not really a fan of the contest idea for designs, but there is indeed a great benefit to being able to get a lot of different design options available to you quickly, it’s just a pity the designers aren’t all paid fairly. My personal opinion is that design by contest devalues the work of a designer, unless each designer is getting paid fairly for the work they do, but then it isn’t really a contest either is it? I believe you can’t surpass hiring a professional designer to do your logo one on one, simply because if you pick the right designer and are willing to spend, you will get the best quality possible, not to mention a potentially valuable contact! If you do go with a contest to get your logo, at least pay the winning designer fairly. $500 should be the bare minimum for a logo, remember that this is your public image, what people will identify you with.

I wonder if they’ll still pay me after that last paragraph

If you have used 48HoursLogo.com, I’d be interested to know your opinion on them, or even if you haven’t, what do you think?

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Low Light Photography Experiments at Burleigh Heads

Matt — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:06:46 +0000

I find low light situations quite interesting to photograph as you can get some really interesting lighting with lots of contrast since the backgrounds are often nice and dark. I think part of the reason I find it particularly interesting to experiment with is that I currently don’t have any lenses with a wide aperture, so it is interesting to see what other sorts of effects I can get by changing the ISO or shutter speed.

I had some time earlier in February to spend some time playing with different settings on my camera in low light. There were obviously some really bad shots, but I thought I would share some of the ones I am particularly happy with.

Continue reading to see them, note that this is fairly image intensive.

Gas

Outside

Visitor

Visionary

Darken

Gassed Up

Spotlight

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Why A Star?

Matt — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:12:52 +0000

I started reading through the book of Matthew again recently, and in Matthew 2, it talks about the three wise men (or magi in some translations) that came from the East. Something I’ve heard and read many times, but I got to thinking, why was it a star?

¹Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,

²Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

It’s also mentioned again in verses 9 and 10:

⁹When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

¹⁰When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

Why did they see a star? What does a star mean according to the Bible?

I did a bit of hunting with E-Sword and found some interesting verses.

Amos 5:26

²⁵Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

²⁶But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.

²⁷Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the LORD, whose name is The God of hosts.

According to Amos, a star can represent a god.

Acts 7:43

⁴⁰Saying unto Aaron, Make us gods to go before us: for as for this Moses, which brought us out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

⁴¹And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands.

⁴²Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of Israel, have ye offered to me slain beasts and sacrifices by the space of forty years in the wilderness?

⁴³Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.

New Testament confirmation that a star can indeed represent a god.

1 Corinthians 15:41

³⁹All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.

⁴⁰There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.

⁴¹There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.

Glory varies and comes in different shapes and sizes. In verse 41, one star is different from another in glory. If we think of stars in the sky, it’s clear that some are brighter and more brilliant than others. So if a star is a representation, or a symbol of a god, then it seems that not all gods are equal in glory.

1 Peter 2:19

¹²Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth.

¹³Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance;

¹⁴Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me.

¹⁵Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.

¹⁶For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

¹⁷For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

¹⁸And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.

¹⁹We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:

²⁰Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.

²¹For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Something referred to as the day star can arise in our hearts, and when it does, it’s like a light that shines into a dark place and allows us to have a greater understanding of the Bible and prophecy in particular.

Revelation 8

¹⁸And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass;

¹⁹I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first.

²⁰Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

²¹And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.

²²Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

²³And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

²⁴But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.

²⁵But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

²⁶And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations:

²⁷And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.

²⁸And I will give him the morning star.

²⁹He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

The morning star can be given, according to verse 26, to the people who live according to God’s will (in the NIV the wording is “does my will to the end“).

Revelation 22:16

¹⁶“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

So Jesus is the self-proclaimed Morning Star.

Conclusion

With this in mind, it seems to me to be reasonable to assume that the star the wise men, the magi, saw would have have been brilliant, glorious star outshining all of the other stars and probably would have been visible both day and night.

Further thoughts and passages of interest

There are some other interesting verses to note as well in the Bible relating to stars, however rather than being in the context of Jesus and God, they are referring to angels in general (Job 38:7) and to Lucifer/Satan, even to the extent where in Isaiah 14:12 he is also referred to as a morning star in some translations. The King James Version simply refers to Lucifer as the son of the dawn in this verse, the NIV though refers to him as both a morning star and a son of the dawn.

In Hebrew, it is a bit different again. Note that I don’t actually know Hebrew, so I am going off of the meanings of Hebrew words provided by Strong’s Concordance. The way I understand it is that in Hebrew, this verse simply says: “How did you fall from the sky son of dawn?”. There is one other word in there in Hebrew though between sky and son, in Hebrew according to Strong’s Concordance it is pronounced “Hay-lale”. According to Strong’s, it is based on the Hebrew word which is pronounced “haw-lal”. This word, according to Barnes Commentary and Strong’s Concordance means “to shine”. My understanding based on Strong’s is that haylale in essence is star, thus the sentence would read “How did you fall from the sky, Star, son of dawn?” I have capitalised star as it is used as a pronoun in this sentence. If it is dawn as this verse indicates, then it is a morning star as well.

Anyway, I’m going off on a bit of a tangent there and I’m already well past the conclusion! I would like to look further into where this leads, so I’ll write another blog at some point continuing on from this one, and if it goes where I think it’s going, it will be quite interesting!

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Rather Amusing Random Spam

Matt — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:53:05 +0000

I received 3 emails yesterday within about 5 minutes of each other, all from different email addresses, and they had just slight variations.

I’m not sure what the point of the emails was, there was no sneakily disguised link, no attachments, nothing at all, just the text. I thought they were quite amusing really. Anyway, enjoy, or don’t, up to you.

Spam Email 1

Moo Cow, Moo cow
Moo cow, moo cow,
How do you do, cow?
Very well, thank you,
Moo, moo, moo.
Two Little Birds Sitting On a Wall
Two little birds
Sitting on a wall,
One called Peter,
One called Paul.
Fly away Peter,
Fly away Paul,
Come back Peter,
Come back Paul.
Ladybird, Ladybird
Ladybird, Ladybird,
Fly away home,
Your house is on fire,
Your children all gone.
This Little Pig
This little pig went to market,
This little pig stayed at home,
This little pig had roast beef,
This little pig had none,
And this little pig went wee, wee, wee,
All the way home.

Moo Cow, Moo cow
Fly away Peter,
Two Little Birds Sitting On a Wall

Spam Email 2

Come back Peter,
One called Paul.
Your children all gone.

Spam Email 3

Two Little Birds Sitting On a Wall
How do you do, cow?
This little pig went to market,

Misc

Yep the last one did end with a comma, I didn’t just miss copying something.

Got any unusual spam of late? Anything similar to this?

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Flinders Beach Photos from January 23rd 2010

Matt — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:42:42 +0000

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.

The Old Flinders Beach Railway

If I had the opportunity to reshoot this one I would do it a bit differently, probably from closer to the railway line so you can actually make out the tracks and so on. I liked it at the time, but it really is a bit bland and boring.

Mooring at the Jetty

I am really happy with this one, it could be a bit more to the left perhaps, but that’s about it really.

Black Browed Albatross

Albatross

Orange Pilot

Take Off

Sea Snail Rock Pool

Mimicing the Rocks

Hiding

Contrast

Bubbles

Fallen

Alight

Subtle Crab

The River

Side by Side

The Beach

Out to Sea

The Kite

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Thoughts on MySchool.edu.au

Matt — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:16:50 +0000

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.

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VMWare Fusion “Failed to Lock the File”

Matt — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:58:25 +0000

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.

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Switching Video Cards on Your Macbook Pro

Matt — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:28:05 +0000

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

The graphics option

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

Log out

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?

Does it make a difference?

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.

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Activity Monitor System Memory Meanings

Matt — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:37:41 +0000

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

OS X Memory Types

Free
Wired
Active
Inactive

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?

Free Memory

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.

Wired Memory

This is the first memory option that you probably won’t be used to seeing. Wired memory is what is required if an application cannot be run, or has portions that cannot be run from the hard disk in the form of a swap drive. This means that this portion of memory will always be used as long as the application is running, it cannot be pushed to the hard drive if it isn’t being used. For the most part this shouldn’t cause you any problems as OS X is very good at handling your RAM efficiently.

Active Memory

Active memory, like free memory is exactly what it sounds like, memory that is currently being used by applications. This memory can be pushed to the swap drive if need be, such as if an application is minimised for a long time and the memory is needed for other programs that are being used more frequently.

Inactive Memory

This is the second memory option you may not be used to seeing. Logically speaking you could probably expect inactive memory to be the same as free memory, if you didn’t already have a free memory option. Have a look at the total used memory in the screen shot above. If you add it all up, inactive memory is included in the used memory. This can be quite confusing if you don’t know what it actually is.

Since it’s clear that inactive memory isn’t free memory, it appears a lot like you have this portion of memory that isn’t available to be used. In the screen shot above, you will see at the time I took it, I had 527.6mb of RAM listed as inactive, so out of my 4gb of RAM, that’s 1/8th of my total that appears to just be missing. At the time of writing this 810mb is inactive. So what’s going on?

Inactive memory is memory that has been previously written to but hasn’t yet been wiped to make it free memory. So if you have Safari open, then you close it. An hour later you may want to open it again, if the inactive memory containing Safari hasn’t been written over by that time, then Safari will load faster than if it had to be completely loaded into the RAM.

Basically the concept is that until the RAM is needed for something else, the application stays in it, even if you’ve already closed it. This is why inactive memory can sometimes get so high, yet free memory be so low, especially if you haven’t rebooted in a while.

Inactive memory is also used if an application does not get accessed in a certain period of time, despite being open. If this is the case and the application does not require wired memory, then it gets moved from active memory into inactive memory. After some time if it has not been pulled back to active memory and the inactive memory is needed for something else, it is then pushed to the swap drive.

What do the other options mean?

You may have noticed some other options beside the pie chart in the Activity Monitor, such as:

VM size
Page ins
Page outs
Swap used

So what are they? You might recognise the term “swap” from Windows, I also mentioned it above, but the others may not be as familiar, though Windows does use what is effectively the same functionality to help improve performance, particularly on low end computers without much RAM.

VM Size

The VM size stands for virtual memory size and is the maximum amount of space that OS X is allowed to use on the hard drive for memory allocation should there not be enough RAM. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a big number or not, you’ll notice on mine that it is 183.77gb. That seems huge compared to Windows which recommends using approximately double your physical RAM capacity. OS X automatically sets this size and it’s largely irrelevant. For example, I only have 6gb fee on my hard drive at the moment, so there is no way that 183.77gb could be used, even if I could manage to figure out some way to actually use that much memory! As long as it’s big enough for your needs it doesn’t really matter how big it is.

Page Ins

Page ins occur when something needs to be read from the swap drive into the memory. For example when you need to edit a document you have had minimised for a couple of hours, it may be stored in the swap drive. Once you pull it back up, it will be moved from the swap drive into active memory so that you can edit it quickly, much quicker than if it stayed in the swap drive.

Page Outs

Page outs are the opposite of page ins. Page outs are when something is moved from memory into the swap drive, usually from inactive memory. The inactive memory then becomes free for some other application to use it.

Swap Used

This is the total amount of space on your hard drive that is actually being used as virtual memory to help speed up your computer. In my case at the time I took the screen shot, I was using 3.34gb of space on the swap drive.

I hope this helps you make a bit more sense of your Activity Monitor!

For more information, see Apple’s Knowledgebase article on reading system memory usage.

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Macro Photography and Focus Stacking

Matt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:27:13 +0000

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

Focus Stacking

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.

Focus Stacking Links

Focus stacking tutorial on Flickr which led me to:
Focus stacking tutorial on Digital Grin.
Focus stacking Wikipedia Article,
CombineZM homepage - Free program for Windows that combines photographs into a focused stack. It seems to be quite popular, I’ve not tried it out yet though.