More Fisheye Experiments

Decided to try some long exposure shots with the fisheye at night. This one turned out ok. I took it a block down Greene in the darkest section of street I could find. The exposure introduces a lot of noise into the image so I used the Gimp to despeckle it and adjust the levels a little. That and the longer shutter timing should make the bowling fisheyes a lot better.



This one was also taken with a longer exposure under indoor lighting. I autoleveled it in the Gimp but even before doing so, the colors looked a lot better than the auto-exposure shots I've been taking. The image still has a lot of yellow but its closer to how the scene really looked than any other fisheye I've taken so far.



Much better at ISO 50.

Muffin Out Bowls Spare Master In Freak Accident

" I can look back on a life of achievement, on challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome. I've accomplished more than most men, and without the use of my toe."

In a surprise upset, Pookie Badmuffin (pictured above) defeated all opposition, including "The Spare Master", Joe "Pro Shop" R. (below) in what scientists are calling the most absurd calamity of the 21st century. Despite a series of unfortunate home accidents leaving him toeless and punctured, Muffin pulled it together in the third game of the semis to top the boards at 215. This surpasses the previous record-breaking high score of 180 by the legendary hall of fame bowler, Outpostbabu, whose unique delivery and uncanny skill wowed audiences earlier in the season.


"The Spare Master" steps down after a crushing defeat

Pookie Badmuffin's victory, however, may be bittersweet. National Bowling League Authorities are investigating claims that Badmuffin may have used performance-enhancing drugs popularized by athletes in other sports, most notably cyclist Tyler Hamilton and former baseball player Jose Canseco. If the blood doping allegations are true, The Muffin could lose his title, which many speculate will happen next week anyway when Outpostbabu (below, center) comes out of retirement to "show these kids how to roll".


Legendary bowler Outpostbabu walks away from what might have been, almost certainly was, and probably will always be, a strike.


After the game, Pookie Badmuffin (far right) celebrates his victory at a local Waffle House as competitors look over the menu.


Strike! Rising star RunsOnSumatra (center left) displays his victory beau geste to impress onlooking ladies.

Unit Testing Is Hard For All The Right Reasons

Last week I started a little experimental software project whose primary purpose is to apply standard software development techniques diligently and with rigor. This means coming up with a rough "top level" design, strict interface bounds, blackbox construction, and unit testing each component fully. The requirements for the project were laid out by a third party so that developers' influence wouldn't introduce a conflict of interest (ie coding the path of least resistance). I'm currently working on one of the main components of the system. Having come up with a strategy for the design and implemented the pieces of this component, I wrote up some unit tests for each piece and found it quite a challenge to cover all possible scenarios. In fact, writing the test cases is, at least for these relatively simple classes, harder and more time consuming than writing the classes themselves! I've already reaped some benefits from it however. In the testing phase I found a couple of one-off bugs that I might not have detected so soon without testing.

To help me out, I read through the following links and got some great pointers:

A Dozen Ways to Get the Testing Bug in the New Year (Particularly good)
Top 12 Reasons to Write Unit Tests
JUnit Primer