I was having an a virtual conversation with an associate today about SCUBA instruction. My associate is interested in getting their Open Water certification and was asking some questions. These were the normal questions. Such as recommendations on equipment, etc. They conferred that their significant other was less than enthralled with the idea of SCUBA diving.
This a pretty typical situation. One person is interested, their spouse may or may not be. As usual, I recommended trying a Discover Scuba Diving (DSD) experience. These experience programs (DSD is PADI specific) are fantastic for potential new divers. They offer a limited exposure to the instructional system and allow potential divers to try it before they buy it. In the case of the shop that I work at, Y-Kiki Divers, DSD programs cost $25.00 which is applicable to an open water course if the new diver decides to continue. I could go on about this, but its probably better to refer you (the reader) to better formatted information. Check Y-Kiki's Discover Scuba Diving page for complete details.
Digesting the information I provided my associate, I had another thought about Discover Scuba Diving (DSD) experiences.
This a pretty typical situation. One person is interested, their spouse may or may not be. As usual, I recommended trying a Discover Scuba Diving (DSD) experience. These experience programs (DSD is PADI specific) are fantastic for potential new divers. They offer a limited exposure to the instructional system and allow potential divers to try it before they buy it. In the case of the shop that I work at, Y-Kiki Divers, DSD programs cost $25.00 which is applicable to an open water course if the new diver decides to continue. I could go on about this, but its probably better to refer you (the reader) to better formatted information. Check Y-Kiki's Discover Scuba Diving page for complete details.
Digesting the information I provided my associate, I had another thought about Discover Scuba Diving (DSD) experiences.
08/12: This is why I do this
I had an opportunity to shoot a birthday bowling party today. While the birthday party was fun for all the kids and it provided images for both my Daily Photo Blog and my galleries I also got a quote that I will be using as an explanation of why you hire a photojournalist for you event
That pretty much sums it up. Not much else to say.
"What a relief it was not to worry about missing any moments or photo ops" - J.W
That pretty much sums it up. Not much else to say.
04/12: My first book is published
Well sort of. I finished my first book at LuLu.com. The book is a private photo book and overall I was fairly happy. I don't think that I would say I was impressed, but I was happy. The book had roughly 28 pages and cost a wopping $18.45 to create. It was a 9x7 landscape photo book. Interesting in comparison to other photo book creators because I could do some customized formatting. There were a few things I didn't care for all that much....
First, there page templates were somewhat inflexible. For instance, if a page contained three images (one vertical and two horizontal) I could not change the orientation of the page. In other words, whether or not the vertical was on the right or left. This would have been nice to change the orientation of the page based on which side of the book it was. Mildly dissappointing, but not a complete let down.
Second, there is no means of rearranging the pages. I found that after laying out the book, it would have been nice to move a few pages around. It turns out there is no way to do this in LuLu Studio.
I think both of these issues will probably be resolved as LuLu Studio becomes more formalized. The studio app is still in Beta. I applaud them for innovation. The entire Studio is Google Apps like, however, its interface is through Adobe Flash.
I think my next effort will be a hard cover book. A year of my son's best photos. I'll let you know how it goes.
-T
First, there page templates were somewhat inflexible. For instance, if a page contained three images (one vertical and two horizontal) I could not change the orientation of the page. In other words, whether or not the vertical was on the right or left. This would have been nice to change the orientation of the page based on which side of the book it was. Mildly dissappointing, but not a complete let down.
Second, there is no means of rearranging the pages. I found that after laying out the book, it would have been nice to move a few pages around. It turns out there is no way to do this in LuLu Studio.
I think both of these issues will probably be resolved as LuLu Studio becomes more formalized. The studio app is still in Beta. I applaud them for innovation. The entire Studio is Google Apps like, however, its interface is through Adobe Flash.
I think my next effort will be a hard cover book. A year of my son's best photos. I'll let you know how it goes.
-T
I got the images from my latest assignment up. They are in the 001257 album. The images are from the Reuters' Volunteer Day at Kennard CJA in St. Louis. The images are primarily for PR purposes and documentation for The Foundation. I'm not really sure what that means, but I heard it several times today.
As a Reuters employee in St. Louis I was quite proud of my company. Reuters allows employees to take a Volunteer Day each year. It is a day off of work as long as the time is spent volunteering for an acceptable charity. In this case, the recipient was Kennard CJA. In addition to providing the man power, Reuters also provides the required supplies - today it was mulch and paint. I don't want to say the amount, however, it was not too small.
Any way, the real reason for this was to talk about my first assignment with the new Nikon D300. I had used the camera for personal stuff, but this was the first assignment. It handled as marvelously as one would have expected. This is not intended to be a review. I don't like to do that, so I will leave that others who do.
Let me just say that this camera is pretty impressive. With the MB10 vertical grip I think it may be the ideal camera for me. If you want to see what it can do, checkout the galleries.
Later,
Terry
As a Reuters employee in St. Louis I was quite proud of my company. Reuters allows employees to take a Volunteer Day each year. It is a day off of work as long as the time is spent volunteering for an acceptable charity. In this case, the recipient was Kennard CJA. In addition to providing the man power, Reuters also provides the required supplies - today it was mulch and paint. I don't want to say the amount, however, it was not too small.
Any way, the real reason for this was to talk about my first assignment with the new Nikon D300. I had used the camera for personal stuff, but this was the first assignment. It handled as marvelously as one would have expected. This is not intended to be a review. I don't like to do that, so I will leave that others who do.
Let me just say that this camera is pretty impressive. With the MB10 vertical grip I think it may be the ideal camera for me. If you want to see what it can do, checkout the galleries.
Later,
Terry
One of the things that I love the most about software engineering is tackling new challenges. Rather obviously, one of the things I hate most about software engineering is tackling new challenges... that shouldn't be new challenges because they've already been solved time and time again.
I've been asked to work on a project involving PCAP files produced by Wireshark. The task is somewhat outside the range of what Wireshark, or libpcap for that matter, was really intended for. In all reality its interesting, but frustrating. Its that type of frustrating that you can only experience when having to discover something that is already well known but not shared.
Anyway, I cannot go into too much detail about project but lets just say its got some challenges. Some challenges are technical in nature, others are business in nature. I'm ranting today about one of the technical challenges. In order to make this project a success we must be able to reassemble IP packets (both UDP and TCP) and hand them off to an application. For those of you familiar with network layer architectures, we must reinvent the IP reassembly engine in a reusable and modular fashion.
If you've made it this far without glassing over and actually understood half of the first three paragraphs, you're probably asking yourself what there is to reinvent. Afterall every operating system in the world has an IP stack. You are correct. Every OPERATING SYSTEM has an IP stack. One which they are not so inclined to provide in simple function calls to an application. This is not, however, the brunt of my frustration... its the IP, TCP and UDP headers themselves.
A simple Google search for any of the three will render many results. Nearly each one will describe the IEEE layout of the requested header. Many will even include source code examples - most of which are intended for UNIX or Linux with a few for Windows. What I cannot believe is that with all of this, the headers which are obviously necessary for applications like Wireshark to work not to mention the kernel level IP stacks ARE NOT ACTUALLY DISTRIBUTED ANYWHERE!.
Alright that is a gross over generalization they are availble on many, if not most, *UX platforms but not on Windows. Windows is of course the target platform for my project. Why do you think this is? In order to do any libpcap work with the IP protocols, I have either reimplement those structures or steal them (excuse me, download the open source) from some where. And none of them are the same. Does this make sense to anyone? Why on earth is this not available in libpcap or WinPcap? If they are, where are they?
Alright I'm done ranting.... thanks for hanging with me this long. If this project continues and I do implement some headers, I'll post them here. Oh wait, I can't due to confidentiality and intellectual property rights with my employer. Maybe that's why you don't find any redistributions of the important stuff on the net - the important stuff is being done by corporations and private organizations that aren't ready to give up all revenue on their investments.
Does that call into question the usefulness of open source? That's a question probably best left for another time...
I've been asked to work on a project involving PCAP files produced by Wireshark. The task is somewhat outside the range of what Wireshark, or libpcap for that matter, was really intended for. In all reality its interesting, but frustrating. Its that type of frustrating that you can only experience when having to discover something that is already well known but not shared.
Anyway, I cannot go into too much detail about project but lets just say its got some challenges. Some challenges are technical in nature, others are business in nature. I'm ranting today about one of the technical challenges. In order to make this project a success we must be able to reassemble IP packets (both UDP and TCP) and hand them off to an application. For those of you familiar with network layer architectures, we must reinvent the IP reassembly engine in a reusable and modular fashion.
If you've made it this far without glassing over and actually understood half of the first three paragraphs, you're probably asking yourself what there is to reinvent. Afterall every operating system in the world has an IP stack. You are correct. Every OPERATING SYSTEM has an IP stack. One which they are not so inclined to provide in simple function calls to an application. This is not, however, the brunt of my frustration... its the IP, TCP and UDP headers themselves.
A simple Google search for any of the three will render many results. Nearly each one will describe the IEEE layout of the requested header. Many will even include source code examples - most of which are intended for UNIX or Linux with a few for Windows. What I cannot believe is that with all of this, the headers which are obviously necessary for applications like Wireshark to work not to mention the kernel level IP stacks ARE NOT ACTUALLY DISTRIBUTED ANYWHERE!.
Alright that is a gross over generalization they are availble on many, if not most, *UX platforms but not on Windows. Windows is of course the target platform for my project. Why do you think this is? In order to do any libpcap work with the IP protocols, I have either reimplement those structures or steal them (excuse me, download the open source) from some where. And none of them are the same. Does this make sense to anyone? Why on earth is this not available in libpcap or WinPcap? If they are, where are they?
Alright I'm done ranting.... thanks for hanging with me this long. If this project continues and I do implement some headers, I'll post them here. Oh wait, I can't due to confidentiality and intellectual property rights with my employer. Maybe that's why you don't find any redistributions of the important stuff on the net - the important stuff is being done by corporations and private organizations that aren't ready to give up all revenue on their investments.
Does that call into question the usefulness of open source? That's a question probably best left for another time...
19/11: Galleries are working!
Well after my last blog entry, I was sooooo happy to finally have galleries formatted the way that I liked them. It was a great relief to not have to rely on another sites fixed formatting, ie. Picasa. Don't take that to mean that I don't like Picasa... I love it. But for what I was going after here, it was not what I wanted. So getting JAlbum to work with Banana Album made my day... and then it destroyed it.
As it turned out, the galleries were working fine on my local server, but when I published them to my hosted (public) site the images appears as white text boxes. After fighting with JAlbum and BananaAl bum settings, I can proudly announce that they are working.... for real this time :)
I only wish I knew what fixed the problem. Oh well, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
If I get some time over the coming holiday, I'll probably add some CGI scripting to make a more dynamic gallery entrance and provide an easy way for me to maintain it (yes, I'm lazy).
Any way checkout my galleries.
Terry
As it turned out, the galleries were working fine on my local server, but when I published them to my hosted (public) site the images appears as white text boxes. After fighting with JAlbum and BananaAl bum settings, I can proudly announce that they are working.... for real this time :)
I only wish I knew what fixed the problem. Oh well, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
If I get some time over the coming holiday, I'll probably add some CGI scripting to make a more dynamic gallery entrance and provide an easy way for me to maintain it (yes, I'm lazy).
Any way checkout my galleries.
Terry
After some fussing and decision making, I've finally updated www.terrycordes.com. Most important in this update is a final gallery format.
I had previously been trying to decide whether to use a canned gallery application (such as Gallery or Coppermine), use a hosted gallery (such as Picasa) or build my own into the site. I decided on the latter. I won't go into exhaustive details (perhaps in a later article), but I felt it provided better overall control and more cohesiveness of the site.
To implement the galleries, I chose JAlbum. A friend turned me onto it some time ago and I really like it. As it turns out, the Banana Album provided nearly everything I wanted.
If you are interested, please check out the galleries at galleries2.terrycordes.com.
Hope you enjoy!
I had previously been trying to decide whether to use a canned gallery application (such as Gallery or Coppermine), use a hosted gallery (such as Picasa) or build my own into the site. I decided on the latter. I won't go into exhaustive details (perhaps in a later article), but I felt it provided better overall control and more cohesiveness of the site.
To implement the galleries, I chose JAlbum. A friend turned me onto it some time ago and I really like it. As it turns out, the Banana Album provided nearly everything I wanted.
If you are interested, please check out the galleries at galleries2.terrycordes.com.
Hope you enjoy!
15/11: Brand new blog
Category: General
Posted by: terry.cordes
Well this is the official beginning of this blog... I hope that I will be able to make reasonable updates to this blog. It will primarily be focused on my primary activities of my life: photojournalism, SCUBA diving and software development.
This should be the more dynamic portion of www.terrycordes.com. Where as www.terrycordes.com will be used primarily to provide information about my photojournalism service and SCUBA instruction, this blog will hopefully be wide ranging, like most blogs.
Stay tuned and hope you enjoy!
Terry
This should be the more dynamic portion of www.terrycordes.com. Where as www.terrycordes.com will be used primarily to provide information about my photojournalism service and SCUBA instruction, this blog will hopefully be wide ranging, like most blogs.
Stay tuned and hope you enjoy!
Terry
