machinehead

After watching the day the earth stood still on DVD, I decided to write about cutting cost and of course recycling and how we can stop killing the earth and hopefully the holes in our pockets. Let's set some ground rules for IT. 1. IT is ruled from business needs. Exception: There are IT business out there and these guys are thriving, because businesses need IT or rather buy IT. There is a difference between needing IT and buying IT which I hope to cover later. 2. IT is viewed as a cost to the business. Exception: Unless they start a shared service center and start charging other departments, but that's still funny money. 3. IT is expensive and difficult to quantify. Exception: This is normally comparative, but even comparatively, the figures are all fake, so don't believe the sales people. So with those 3 rules in mind, we can tackle how to reduce this unfounded cost for the following business functions: Emails - reduce cost by moving to a service provider if not get a ser...

I've installed windows 7 RC again. Not the beta on a VM, but a real machine. I figured, I'll run it through the workstation test. So far the results of the tests are (for windows based OSs) 1st place: Windows 2008 Server / workstation 2nd place: Windows Vista 64 bit ultimate / home premium - strictly for media center purpose, which is important. Pros and cons of Vista Let's revise the pros and cons of Vista before we proceed with Windows 7. And I mean pros and cons, because after using Windows for so long, I can't determine if it's a bug or a feature. 1. Time to boot Yes, vista takes ages to boot, but after it does, don't shut it down. simple solution. Yes, we don't know where everything is, but it's a searchable 2. Driver problems No salvation there, I bought a mac to solve that problem, but I still kept the vista 64bit ultimate windows desktop for my xbox media center extender. Now that PC has broken sound, but that's another story and I don't...

I'm trying to blog from flock now. It's a firefox based browser with preloaded add-ons intended to make my life easier. I think it's great however it shouldn't be used on public computers or shared computers, because of all the auto logon stuff that happens in the background. Still the best features is that I can drag my photos from picasaweb from the webpage into the upload tool and it will be plonked into facebook, photo bucket or flickr. So it does improve productivity provided you already have some sort of personal workflow. Blogged with the Flock Browser

Step 1: Observe the amount of light around you to set ISO ISO 200 - 400 : outdoors or (flash photography which is not described in this post) ISO 800 + : indoors or night shots without flash Step 2: Know your light meter The trick of photography is light. it's just to adjust the amount of light that comes through the lens. Looking through the lens is like looking through a HUD, other than the focus ring, you will see a light meter. it indicates if it is too bright or too dark. the answer is simple, keep it in the middle. To do this, the 2 things you can change is the aperture and the shutter speed. you just toggle with the 2 until you get the meter indicator in the center. Which one you do first depends on your personal preference. This is how I do mine. Step 3: Set Initial Aperture I first set my aperture to the largest which is the lowest number, e.g f2.8 Step 4: Set Initial Shutter speed Depending on my focal length, I set my shutter speed to the same as the focal length. This...

The thing I realise is about technical people is that they love their digital SLR cameras. The question I have is how much of it is art and how much is technical. Sure, there is the technical aspects of photography, balancing the iso, aperture and shutter speed. Picking the right lens for the job. For tech guys, it seems like, what's the fastest shutter speed, what's the lowest aperture, Maybe art comes in the form of "what is the job?". It's not about taking a photo of an object, landscape or person. I think there always need to be some story which makes the photo successful. If someone can answer the question on why is Singapore so hard to shoot, my answer is that's it hard to capture a perfect city. It's way too boring and hardly flawed. Not to mention the excessive cloud cover that makes everything even more boring. Well, I haven't been blogging here, but I've started a new photo blog as well just to remain creative. http://melvenphoto.blogspot...

I'm sure these robots wouldn't find it offensive to take pictures of them while the song was going. The band was off stage for a change of clothes and the gig still went on. Pros: Classic analogue tones with German precision. Great gig which makes you want to either get a new synthesizer or a Audi A4 Cons: Some songs\sounds sounded like they came from a kiddy Casio keyboard demo song.

This post tries to compare how the home is similar to the work place. Somehow most people are impressed with the amount of IT stuff i have in my home. To be honest, it used to be more impressive with a full height rack and all my mounted equipment. Since marriage and children, its scaled down to a 9U rack with the simple contents of: 1. cable modem 2. wireless router 3. cat6 patch panel 4. 16 port switch 5. network attached storage The rack nicely tucked away in the store room out of site. My machine count has scaled down considerably as well. 1. Windows Vista Desktop - Media Center, Games, Vmware, etc 2. Mac book pro laptop - my main "workstation" 3. Boring work laptop with office apps 4. Xbox 360 and Wii So in terms of space, it doesn't take up a ton of space as its just these 2 visible computers most of the time. However, this excludes my multiple mixers, audio interfaces, synths, guitars, amps, speakers, mics, effects pedals, drum kit and PA system. Which of course is...