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I recently had the pleasure of spending 7 days in New York City, in connection with Frankie95 - a festival to celebrate the life and 95th birthday of Frankie Manning, a Lindy Hop legend. Sadly, he passed away only weeks before thousands of dancers from around the world showed up in New York, which meant the event transformed into a memorial event, celebrating his life and the dance he helped create. There’s a really good short documentary here, about Lindy Hop and Frankie Manning in particular.

Frankie95 was absolutely fantastic, and in-between all the dancing, performances, and great bands, there was even time for some sightseeing around New York. I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures on Flickr (below), and you can see even more here (sightseeing) and here (dancing).

Today I managed to properly unlock my iPhone 3G, which was previously locked to the Telia operator in Denmark. Due to the incompetence of Telia’s customer service, something which should have taken a couple of hours took a total of 7(!) days, during which time my phone was not working. By sharing this, and the solution below, I hope others won’t have to waste so much time.
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Light is everything, as I re-discovered as a party yesterday, where a glow-row supplied hours of fun and entertainment:

I’ve recently moved one of the products I’m maintaining to a new server, because it wasn’t performing as well as it was supposed to. In the process I’ve spent some time tweaking the server and simplifying the setup, and the following is an overview over some of the tools I’ve found most useful.
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I don’t normally just link to news elsewhere, but I’ve been waiting a long time for a review of the new Canon 24mm f/1.4 II lens, and it’s finally up at the Digital Picture.

The review shows the mark II as a significant improvement over the mark I in CA and sharpness as wider apertures (where I’d planned on using it), and a lot of other good things. It will be a long time before I’m able to scrape enough money together for buying one of these babies, but they say patience is bliss.

I’m almost done moving my sites from Site5 to Dreamhost, since I like their way of offering subversion better, and there was a few extra features that I thought was cool, such as webdav, which I now use to sync OmniFocus between devices, and Passenger to easily run Ruby on Rails applications.

In the process, I’ve also decided to switch to Wordpress, since it has all the blog-related stuff I need, and not the extra weight of a lot of features I rarely use. Hopefully it will be easier to maintain sites for a few of my friends as well. I found upgrading a multi-site Drupal installation a tedious process. Dreamhost has a neat one-click managed install of Wordpress, where they automatically maintain and upgrade your Wordpress installation for you, if you can live without the ability to install custom plugins and themes. I’ve done a custom install, ’cause I wanted some plugins for Flickr integration, but it will make offering my friends and family a basic Wordpress installation as simple as clicking a button.

Moving day is usually also a good time to clean out your closet, and there are a couple of things that I’ve let go when moving my site. First of all, I’ve shut down the photo galleries, since I hadn’t put anything in them for years, and I felt they were not relevant to what I do now. These days I use Flickr to expose photos to the world, and Facebook for friends. I’ve also not transferred a lot of posts from 2007 and earlier, and I’ve unfortunately not yet found a way to migrate comments from the old posts.

I have wanted to get a fast prime lens for a while, but wasn’t sure whether to go for Canon’s 50mm f/1.2, 35mm f/1.4 or the new 24mm f/1.4 II to put on my EOS 50D. I had an idea that wider lens would support my style of photography better, because I often shoot dancing indoors, where it’s hard to get a good distance to the subject, but I had no hard data to back it up.

I use Adobe Lightroom for almost all my image editing, and although it is a fantastic piece of software, and can show me picture counts by lens, camera, etc., it cannot show me how many pictures I’ve taken at various focal lenghts.

So I wrote a small Ruby script to do just that. It takes a folder and a result file name as arguments, and scans through the folder for any pictures that matches the file type (jpg or raw) and the camera model I’m interested in (to filter out the compact), and counts all the focal lengths used, and their frequency. It then stores the results in the result file in CSV format.

If you like, you can download the script here. There is also an example result file, which shows a run of all the pictures I’ve taken in 2008. The script uses the mini_exiftool gem that wraps the exiftool binary, so you’ll need both to run the script.

I just love how simple it is to put these kind of utilities together with Ruby. You are welcome to modify the script as you like, and I’d like to hear about any improvements or other cool stuff you come up with.

The image below shows a graph over the 6608 pictures I’ve have kept, taken with my Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, over the last 1 1/2 years. This is the lens that I use for 75% of my pictures.

This shows a couple of interesting things (at least to me):

• I primarily use the lens at it extremes: 17mm and 55mm
• I clearly prefer the wider focal lengths, from 17-35mm

So now I am sure that it is the Canon 24mm f/1.4 II that should be on my wishlist - now I just have to save up for it

Today was the 5 year anniversary of our Swing Café at Studenterhuset in Copenhagen.

We were two who exhibited about 10 photographs each, and I did a slideshow of pictures from various Lindy Hop related events in Copenhagen and the rest of Europe, including Goodnight Sweetheart (GNSH), Herräng Dance Camp and CopHop.

You can view the video in high-resolution (~280MB) by clicking the image below. If you are on a slow connection, there’s also a lower resolution version available here (~110MB).

I just picked up my new EOS 50D today, and wanted to see how the low-light/high-iso performance of it was, compared to my 400D. I upgraded to the 50D because I was expecting it to be a much better low-light performer. I shoot a lot of dancy-photography, which usually happens indoors in lousy lighting conditions, so I was hoping the 50D would be a massive improvement.

The following will be a small review of the Canon EOS 50D, focusing on the low-light performance. If you want to get a more technical or extensive review of the 50D, the following sites might be interesting to you:

• DPR’s pre-view and forum
• Roland Lim’s thorough use-oriented review, and comparison with 40D and D3.

For my own little test, I setup some items in a dark room, lit only by a single table-lamp. Don’t be fooled by the brightness of the pictures - to achieve that at ISO 100, a shutter speed of 2-3 seconds was needed. Seeing how the 50D would perform in this kind of setting was exactly what I wanted to know.

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Something I keep coming across when working with Ruby on Rails view templates, is wrapping blocks of content in common DIV tags with certain properties, so I can easily style the application with CSS.

For example, a page can have multiple content boxes, and possibly a sidebar with a number of info boxes. What I used to do, was something like this:

<div id="sidebar">
  <div class="infobox">
    Here is some help
  </div>
</div>
<div class="content_box">
	<%= render :partial => "table", :locals => {:people => @people} %>
</div>

Instead, by looking at the implementaton of the content_tag_for ActionView helper, I was able to find a way to do this:

<% sidebar do %>
  <% infobox do %>
    Here is some help
  <% end %>
<% end %>
<% content_box do %>
  <%= render :partial => "table", :locals => {:people => @people} %>
<% end %>

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