Planet TLUG

Work Party

My Division at work won award for increasing profits and efficiency the most of any division in 2009. There was a cash reward for that which we used for 2 things. 

1. To replace a our old dead massage chair. 

2. To have a pizza party. 

I was happy we were going to replace the massage chair. I previously had spent a good amount of time trying to replace some of the parts for the old one, only to run into a stone wall of Japanese Corporate stupidity. Panasonic/National the company that made the old massage chair would not send me 4 belts to fix the chair, instead the insisted on sending a technician at the cost of $300.00 just to walk in the door.  

We got the massage chair and I did not read the email about the pizza party till the day of the party when I realized it would be held in the office. I was happy with that, I do not smoke so going some place you can smoke was not a big deal to me, actually it was a plus. Also I noted that most parties we have, everyone kinda migles within their own work group, and food is served too us.  This time was allot diffrent. With out servers people had to get up and get thier own food and mingle a bit with others. I think that worked out well.

At the end of the night there was still about 5-10 of us going strong telling jokes and playing drinking games. One of the developers streamed the event live from his webcam. All around it was the most fun I've had at work in a long long time. The night ended for me around 10 when the wife called wondering where I was? I am not surprised I did not even realize it was so late. I left and stopped along the way home for another beer and a awesome cheese stake sub at 2 Papas in Kichijoji.

Not a complete failure. 

At the end of 2009 I set out to take and pass a few certification exams. I took the RHCE exam and did not do as well as I would have hoped. As a kind of warm up to that Comptia was offering a Project Manager 2009 Beta exam. I HATE computer based examinations, certifications and tests in general, but I wanted to get the cobwebs out on something that would be nice to pass, and would be nice to have as a certification. The comptia exam was free, and it offered a chance to clear out said cobwebs. 

I am happy to report I received the examination report, and that I passed. Now on and up, lets get that RHCE, and maybe a some networking credentials. 

Erin Hughes, CompTia 2009  Project+ (2009 Edition) Certified

Thank you for following this blog all this time. As many of you already know, Zuco.org was like a chameleon. It changed so many times since its first moments in 2004. I picked up this name because this is my surname and the phonetic is weird and short enough to make a domain worth it. Zuco.org reflected many changes in my life. Since its first creation it was a place to share my thoughts, experiences and everything that I considered worth mentioning online. I deleted many of its contents during this time, redesigned it, stopped it, and started it again. It changed at the same time I changed my interests and visions of life.

Zuco.org until now was a photography blog and I’m spending a lot of time working on this, just because photography is my passion. So I decided to migrate the main purpose of this to a new blog, with the same design, the same ideas, everything is the same. Only the domain changes “DarkBoxNotes.com” This name matches what I’m doing in this blog and reflects better than “zuco” the contents of this blog.

What is going to happen to Zuco.org???

The links work, so for those that link from other blogs, don’t worry all links will work. If you find a broken link, please drop me a line. I’ll really appreciate it.

I will give about 30 days of life to actual Zuco.org and then I will transform this blog in my daily life diary, opinions, thoughts and so forth. It will be the same as it was before it got irradiated and mutated to a photography blog.

About languages, of course I will replay to comments in Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Catalan but the main language will be English. No time to maintain all this stuff in so many languages…

Why the name DarkBoxNotes?

Darkbox means that box that every photographer carries all day long: our loved camera. Usually is dark or even colored as the new Pentax K-X but inside all of them there is the kingdom of darkness. For just a few instant, light passes through the lens and captures unique moments.
Notes because I write about that darkbox in this blog.
Thanks to my friends @papadimitriou, @dannychoo, @tamegoeswild, @tangerinejp, @stevenagata and @Ashuttleworth for their help and suggestions.

I also created a twitter account for @DarkBoxNotes, please follow it if you found the content of zuco.org interesting.

Eric's Soccer

Erics soccer clubs send me more mail than anyone I know and most of the time it is anoying silly stuff. I would ignore them but if you do not reply they call the house and ask "Why haven't you replied to our mails?" To which I say "I was busy."

Here is a sample of 1 weeks worth of mails.

Man of the Match 
So the Tokyo Gaijin rugby football club, my team played the All France team. 

We went onto the field with a very lazy attitude and it showed in the literal ass whooping we received. 
We had not been beaten by All France ever since I had been on the team and I was pissed as I watched it happen in front of my eyes. 

We did play most of our 2nd and 3rd string players and allot of them are use to having other players on the field that they can count on to show them the way. It was weird for me to be on the field with so many guys who had either never played for the team or never played. That may have been the other reason for our down fall. 

The first half was over way to quick and at 1/2 time some one told me that I needed to come off the field. I was a little shocked cause, there were a lot more fatter guys who were sucking wind and not pulling their load. On the sideline I took off my head gear and jersey and prepared to help with water duty. 

Some forwards went down with injuries and need to be replaced. I went back on with out my head gear, but more fired up then I had been in recent weeks. I got in and got it on. I jumped in line outs and contested winning every ball back for us except one. I tackled and rucked with ferocity that I had not had in a long time, and generally was in the right place at the right time, most of the game. 

At one point I knocked some one out of bounds but was having trouble getting myself back up to my feet. Eric ran over with my head gear and handed it to me in a all excited voice like a 8 year old kid gets "Here Dad put this on it is good!" He helped me get it back on my head and helped me to me feet. I ran back out there and smashed on.  

I came up just short of a try two times and was the first to the ball carrier on most kickoffs. I was on fire but the rest of my time the team was lack luster. Which is sad. 

I love playing rugby but wont be able to play for a couple of months. It was good to go out with such a good game. 

At the end of it all I was awarded Man Of The Match by our team captain.  I made a little beratying but true speach and said "It is a sad day when I am the Tokyo Gaijin Man of the Match. You are all better than the preformance we put out today." 

At least that is what I meant to say. 

Link to the TGRFC match review.

Family Photos 

The other day we had a little time and I tried to sit the kids and me down for some family photos. It was too much work. Anna is so fast now and if she sees something that looks like it might have a light or make a sound she is grabbing it and disrupting the shot. Eric was fine with the whole thing and wanted to make a bunch of funny faces which we did, but we could not seem to get one photo where we are all looking at the camera and paying attention. 

Oh well that was just the jeans and tshirt version. We will try again later maybe with some nicer clothes on too. 

E./

Yuzawaya Closing 

We went to Yuzawaya the other day to pick up some model glue for Eric and I to do some projects with. 

I was wondering why it was so jam packed and where most of the stuff was... whole sections of merchandise had seemed to disappeared and been replaced with close out tables filled with purses and wallets. 

I liked Yuzawaya and will miss how convenient it was for getting hobby type stuff, but the building that houses Yuzawaya is pretty old so it would be a good idea to tear it down and put up another. 

Simply talking, we can say that White Balance is that thing you have to properly set in the camera to have the real colors! If you want an extensive technical explanation, go to the wiki.

So white balance is just a method to find the right color balance. That means “understand when white is white” and from that point, understand the real color of things in the image. The automatic white balance (AWB) in almost every digital camera, does not match 100% the colors and sometimes we have to specify what kind of light we are exposing the picture.

What kind of light? Light is just light! Different light sources produce different temperature lights. For example, the light in a cloudy day is totally different from the direct light of a sunny day or from the light of an electric neon tube. The colors render differently and our eyes and brain adjust automatically to that light to show us colors as much close as possible to the original.

An image will clarify this better.

These two images have been taken the same day, at the same time. I just changed the white balance. The first one, told the camera to adjust to a light temperature that didn’t match with the light in that moment. Let’s think about light from a non-technical point of view. Light comes from one or multiple sources and it reflects all around. Objects absorbed some portion of that light and reflect some other portion of it. The reflected light is the color of the objects. Depending on the light source, that irradiates the scene, the reflected light, it means the colors, will be different as well. That’s why white balance is so important in color photography. In monochrome or black and white it is not a mayor issue, specially in digital photography, because we can adjust the final image to match the tones of grays that we want.

How to use the white balance.

To understand the process, just imagine the light at dusk. Objects under that light get an orange tone. Our brain doesn’t try to render them with their real colors. The color of dusk light overcomes the rest, and all the image has that special orange-gold color. We can try to force that image to match as close as possible the real colors, but depending on the situation, this effort might be a waste of time.
Don’t confuse white balance as a way to render always the real color of things. Think about it as a way to render the image as real as the one we are seeing with our eyes.

These are the common symbols that you can find in any digital camera. They represent different kind of lights.

Usually it’s more comfortable to set the white balance in automatic (AWB), so in case of a hurry to shot, we don’t have to think about the light and set it manually. Just let the camera sensors decide for us. In case of low light environment, specially in closed locals with different kind of lights, the pictures tend to have a reddish color. To avoid this is not easy. It also depends on the camera.
Usually DSRL cameras and also some compact cameras, let you set the white balance based on the light temperature in Kelvin degrees. Just think that light can be expressed in temperature, the sun is the highest and the blue of a gas fire in the kitchen is one of the lowest. Based on this, setting the temperature as low as possible, will help to overcome that reddish light.

This is the menu to set the light temperature in a Nikon D200. The showed temperature, 2500K is the lowest and the highest is 10000K

Some cameras, like the Canon G11, have a superb automatic white balance based on the environment. This let you set the white balance in really hard situations with low light conditions.

Anyway, in case the white balance was not properly set, if you shot in RAW and you use a good edition software like Lightroom or Aperture, this can be easily fixed to match it as close as possible to the real colors.

Just remember. White balance has a direct relationship with the way colors are rendered in the picture. So before you shot in an environment with artificial light or if you are going to use a flash, think about the white balance.

Nice to see more open source conferences going to China. I can easily see that in the future the vast majority of my work will be done with significant connections to China. I'm especially interested in the China, Japan, Korea relationships, actually. Also great to see Sun sponsoring of the conference, and Sun engineers participating with technical sessions and community building talks.

It's excellent to see the 9th Annual Linux Kernel Summit and the 1st Annual Japan Linux Symposium coming to Tokyo in October. Check out this language from the LF website: "The Japan Linux Symposium will be the showcase Japan and Asia Pacific conference for The Linux Foundation." Showcase. This is significant. The Japanese may not shout about it much, but developers in this country are contributing to FOSS and their contributions are growing. The potential in Japan for open source is huge. I've been saying it since I got here. So cool that the LF clearly recognizes this potential by bringing their conferences here. Also interesting: the LF website appears in two languages -- English and Japanese.


I already hang out with the Tokyo Linux User Group (here, here), so I hope to attend this event in October.