jwible

Does the blower have dip switches by any chance? It's sometimes possible to set the fan to a higher speed. Moving the air around faster may help...

kensuf

I think the dip is me for believing the building engineer who told me it was 15 tonnes...

Dunno. At this point I'm at the "I have some information, time to go to my higher authorities with it because anything we do from here is going to involve writing at least one check, which may be small, or may be very big."

mollusk

I read this and I can help but thinking about this song:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I'm sure that there is a really apt parody for your case in there.

kensuf

At least I'm not getting fired over this.

mollusk

How much did you contribute to Rick Scott's campaign?

KiddSisko

Yer boy has skilz!

Found a set of prints and negs in storage that I had forgotten all about. The subject was a film shoot on our office property in 1988. The director and I recently connected on Facebook and I reminded him of the stills I shot. So I scanned the prints that I had and sent them. Considering we're talking pictures from 20+ years ago, he was amazed and pleased. But a few of the best prints suffered from wear and I considered reprinting them, but then looked into having the negatives scanned. I'd never done that, so it was all new to me. Curious what the differences would be, I decided to send the entire roll for scanning.

A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. difference! From reading, I've learned that digital scanning of negatives is a bit of an artform given that you're still dealing with a physical medium, with many light and color intensity and contrasts. If you have a perfect negative, the scan will come out great, but if the image is dark (deliberately or otherwise), or has a wide range of light contrasts, then that's where the art comes in. Either a high end scanner, or multiple bracketed scans plus some photoshopping will eventually produce the ultimate results for those frames.

Speaking of photoshop, before sending off the scanned stills to the director, I did some fixing. What was interesting on all of the exterior shots from this set of negatives was a high cyan content when scanned. It was

Edit: Huh? That's strange. Someone or something did an edit and took out the picture I posted. So, once again, here's the picture with before and after. The fixes were cyan adjustment, grass planting, lens flare removal, plus some background enhancement.

Urthwhyte

Bottom-left looks decidedly more 80s with the cyan tint left in.

ridethecliche

Howdy geeks!

Need a little computer halp!

The last two times I have restarted or shut down my laptop, it has refused to start back up without giving me a ton of grief. It's an old HP laptop.

Here are the symptoms:
-Battery will not charge
-Laptop will not turn on using just the power adapter.
-Charging light on the front of the PC will blink.

I got it to start working both times by basically trying again and again and again and I set the bios to default to see if that would help. The light stopped blinking and I was able to turn the machine on again after that. It's an old POS (6 years), but it does everything I need it to and I really don't want to spend 600-1000 dollars on a new laptop or desktop.

The battery is charging currently and the power supply is working. So I guess those are fine. What gives?!?!?!?!

Thanks so much!

Enthalpic

My guess is the battery is toast. Fake "charging" and "charged" indicators are common with all sorts of stuff. To do it right you need to test it with a multimeter under load but why bother; old batteries suck and even a cheap netbook can do what a 6 year old laptop is doing.

ridethecliche

I have a netbook! Which is why I'm okay for now (on the laptop currently).

I don't think the battery is toast because it's charging right now and the %'s are changing and they were much lower earlier. The computer would power up from just the battery earlier, but the cord wouldn't work, though now it's working. I'm so confused. EEP!!!

Hoping to hold out on getting a new computer till around my bday. Ack!

shovelhd

It could also be a flaky adapter or DC power plug connection. If it's an Asus EEEPC, they are known to have poor quality DC plugs on their adapters that wear out prematurely. A new adapter works for a while until that one wears out.

ridethecliche

Nah, the laptop is giving me the issues. It's a HP Dv5000.

waterrockets 

We've finally done all our prototyping and have decided on an architecture for our offline maps solution on Android. Whew. Now I get to dive into some slightly mathy coding -- my favs.

mollusk

Spawn2 is taking geometry in HS and part of what they are studying is fractals. I was shocked that the name Peano didn't come up.

mattm

Some interesting reading if you're into security n stuff.

Funny that I was just reading his "Exploiting Software" book (w/ the black hat on the front) over the weekend.. reading that also got me brushing up on assembly, because, let's face it; you aren't a real hacker unless you speak assembly.

mollusk

Here is a geek "fail". On Saturday I was out hurting myself badly on a bicycle whilst my inlaws and 15 year old son were electronics shopping form my SIL. She decided that she didn't want to pay for cable any more and would live with broadcast TV. They went to Radio Shack and bought an antenna. There was nothing. Her TV is analog.

markieta

C#, VB, Or something else?

I am in Geographic Analysis and would like to focus my research (if I chose to take graduate studies) on multi-criteria decision making processes in GIS with a supplementary focus in multivariate statistics.

In my third year of Uni and thinking about taking my graduate studies...
I spoke to the program director of the masters program that I am interested in and he mentioned that I should take a math course (math for professional programs) and that it would also help to be familiar with one or more programming languages.

From my experience, many GIS applications are built around the .NET framework. I believe Python is implemented in GIS applications to be used for scripting and tool creation/manipulation. I am not exactly sure... Although I am sure that many open-source GIS softwares are created with C# or VB which leads me to believe there may be some sort of advantage to learning one of these two as opposed to anything else on the market.

What would you recommend, purely from your personal experience with the two programming languages. Is one easier to learn than the other? Should I take courses or teach myself?

I don't expect anyone to be familiar with GIS, but if you are, can you please offer some input on the programming experience you have had with it.

mollusk

It has been a number of years ago, but I have done some GIS stuff. I cannot talk about details because it was military.

Mostly with GIS you have a specific data structure. If you know Python you can do just about anything you want with the data. Since Python is free it beats the hell out of Matlab on price point.

waterrockets 

You need to let go of the language, and learn to program. .NET/C# is certainly a good way to go, but I'm doing GIS-related stuff in Java on Android right now. It shouldn't matter what language you're using, as you should be able to pick up any language and run with it. The challenging part is not the language, but the thought processes.

kensuf

^^ truth.

mattm

"Let go of the language" is cute but a bit obtuse for my tastes. While any language should be able to get the job done, usually it comes down to the domain & environment, and at some point you have to decide on one to learn.

If the APIs in question are all written in python, then python makes sense. If the APIs are c/c++/c#, then .Net could make sense. Of course, these can be mixed & matched if you really wanted to, but that's a different discussion.

If .Net is currently used with the GIS apps in question, then that sounds like a place to start (C#). To that end, do a search for "Visual Studio Express" (free) and get coding!

Yes there are similarities in all languages, and you could argue that learning any of them will help you learn all of them. But you have to start somewhere... hence the need for a specific answer and not pontificating on the philosophy of coding.

Fwiw I've done a little bit of GIS-coding in perl; perl was chosen b/c of the environment (Apache/BSD/CGI). Any language can move bits around, the real question is does it fit well with what you're working with/on.

waterrockets 

The question was what language, and no specific APIs were listed. If the desire is to get hands dirty and learn, before the toolset is chosen, then you can pick a language that will be easier or more convenient to learn. Maybe he has a roommate who is a Java programmer, for instance.

Pontificating on coding philosophy?

mattm

I actually agree mostly with what you said, though it may be hard to tell from my previous response.. was just trying to give a more actionable answer.

Guess I got a little carried away. =]

waterrockets 

10-4

jwible

Nerds. The fights always start when someone throws down the mouse.