Today has been spent wrapping things up before going on vacation. One of the things that absolutely needed to be done before we leave is to clean the sensor on my camera. I had tried to take a photo of a hot air balloon floating near our house, and that’s when I noticed the big black globs of dust.
I purchased the basic cleaning kit from Copper Hill Images on Trush’s recommendation (ordered on for him too). Then it sat, while I was too afraid to attempt the cleaning. The warning messages on the package and website are enough to scare anyone. A recent discussion with (Thomas Hawk)[http://thomashawk.com] helped over coming some of those fears.
Like everything in life, left for the very last minute, so today was the day. I read the instructions a couple of times through before I started. Sat at the kitchen table in the best possible light we have in the house and proceeded as instructed. First attempt, left some dust in 2 corners and little in the middle. A second attempt left less dust, but clumped together into one side of the sensor. After 6 more attempts there is still dust in the bottom right hand corner. The problem seems to be that I’m not making it right to the edge when removing the sensor swipe.
It’s not perfect, but it is a lot better than it was, and I feel more confident the next time I clean it will be better.
Posted in Photography at June 7th, 2007. No Comments.
As mentioned ealier this past Saturday was spent building a shed, amount other things. The shed is now 99% complete (lacking an external window), and I’d promised I would post a picture of it when it was done. Well, close enough to done.
This also marks my first upload to Zooomr Mark III
My Saturday started off fairly normal. Took the kids to karate, quick lunch, build a shed. At 4:45PM EDT, that’s when things got interesting.
I’d received an IM from Kristopher Tate, he was recovering the Zooomr PostgreSQL and needed some help. I’d offered him help during the initial 10 minute launch, and now he was taking me up on that offer. The issue, being the RAID adaptor had died, and left the database in an unstable state.
After trying a couple things, the root cause of the database problem became apparent, and the only choice left was to restore the pre-launch database. By 8:30pm we’d worked our way through the restore process, and reset the database to where it was at launch time. Kris had a couple other fixes that needed to be made prior to launch.
During this time I was allowed to access the sandbox system, take screenshots and share them with everyone. I was very impressed with how much quicker Mark III is, and with the new features. I created a couple groups, one of the joys of getting early access.
Just prior to launch there were a couple more database issues, and an issue with Gmail not accepting mail or marking it as spam. The database issues were fixed, but Gmail would have to wait, it was time to launch.
The launch went fairly smoothly and Zooomr Mark III was here to stay. There were a couple of adjustments required, but everyone seemed happy. At 3:30am with things looking pretty good, it was time for me to crash. I no longer have the ability to stay up all night coding like Kris. To be 19 and full of energy again.
Congratulations to Kris and Thomas on rolling out a fine update to Zooomr.
Zooomr is still down, however the blog photos are now available again.
The community had rallied around zooomr and managed to raise over $1500 during zooomr’s time of need. Hardware vendors like Sun and Dell stepped up to the plate too. Dell fixed the failing pieces of the existing database server, and Sun has loaned a x4500 with 48TB of disk to get Zooomr back up and running. Zoho has provided support, a comparable server to the one that died and colocation space.
The Zooomr blog is now also having issues, when it rains, it pours for Zooomr, and there has been a lot written lately about these outages, both positive and negative. Perhaps the best written, and the most up to date is from Zolio. His post makes a lot of valid points and summarizes Zooomr’s status. Thomas Hawk has also commented giving an even more detailed history, plus what the current plans are for bringing Zooomr back online.
[Update: The community has started a Zooomr Wiki page to report the latest news while the blog is down.]
[Update: The wiki is moving to Zoho]
[Update: Thomas Hawk’s official update]
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