irisquest.net

I was thinking about buying a remote control for my Canon 350D in order to be able to experiment more with long exposures. Of course, the camera's build in shutter timer is very helpful, but it gets quite annoying to wait 10s for each shot. Canon offers an official shutter release cable (Canon RS-60E3) which looks quite good, but besides the price it also comes with a very short cable.

I'm not a huge fan of self-portraits, but while browsing some old photographs, I've came across this one. It was taken around February 2007, when I was experimenting a bit with a Zenit 11. It's quite the classic shot, I've seen dozens of these on Flickr, yet they're always interesting - it's the same scene, but a different person or camera.

A wrinkled man, with a funny hat and long beard, shouts - "Step in, don't be afraid - the first ride is always free." Rising his eyes in attention, the boy runs to the man and demands a free ride.

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
~ Vladimir Nabokov

When working with large log files, a very common requirement is to extract a piece of log that's interesting. Most log files are actually text files, therefore it should be quite easy to do this, as long as you know the start line and the end line.

The following bash script will print to the standard output the content of the given text file, from the given start line to the end line.

A few months ago, as I was browsing a book shop, I noticed this book, with a cheesy cover and weird title - "The Ground beneath Her Feet", by Salman Rushdie. The title really reminded me of a personal experience and when I've started reading the description from the back cover, I was even more convinced that I know this story.

Sometimes the only way to move forward is to break with the past; to lose a part of yourself and go forward. This is when One becomes Two, but I'd rather not see it as the magic "two" - let's call it, the anti-magic one. Unstable and unpredictable, the two pieces float freely, craving to find a new direction.

Upgrading to Drupal 6 seems like a big step, even though I can't say that I'm using many modules, nor that I have a very complicated setup. Today, during a test upgrade, I've noticed the following problem: the image module, version 6.x-1.0-alpha2 failed to upgrade with the following SQL error: Unknown column 'f.nid' in 'field list' query.

Yesterday, on my way to work, a young man stops me and asks, "do you speak English?". Oh, somebody is in need of directions, I say to myself and reply with "Yes". The stranger, with a very innocent look in his eyes and a brief smile on his face, asks "Do I look drunk?".

It's very easy to let the past shadow the present. Sometimes, it comes as an illusion, under the mask of pleasant memories; the ones that bring a smile and seem to last forever. But when you wake up, you find yourself chained down and unable to move forward.

"Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see."
~ Martin Luther King Jr.