i just heard about a new ep by amplifier, called fractal, which can be freely downloaded here. a purely improvised record, consisting of four songs with a playtime of 22 minutes.
(and apparently they released a new album last year, called the octupus, which seems to be very good. i think i need to start another music shopping spree soon ;-) )

last weekend, i did a hike through the roseg valley with anmut and nik. the weather was stunning, it was warm (t-shirt time!), sunny, not many clouds. and, of course, snow. not as much as there’s supposed to be that time of the year, but still enough to be happy :-)

here are some impressions from the hike and the rest at the roseg glacier restaurant:

(and yes, most of these photos would have been perfect for project 52 a month ago…)

here’s my project 52 shot for the fifth week. the topic was

in & out.

obviously, this topic is aimed at fashion. and, well, as you might know, i don’t care much about fashion. in particular not about what the majority thinks is in & out. so i decided to interpret the topic differently. i quickly got the idea to photograph cars going in and out of a tunnel. there are two tunnel ends near to my place, so i started checking them out. one of them is not good for this, since there’s pretty dense vegetation where i should stand to take the photo. the other one is better, with only little vegetation, but a safety net which is always blocking the view a bit. well. tonight i got around to take some photos. it was not very easy to get cars enter and leave the tunnel at the same time (i guess during rush hour this is easier), so i decided to combine four shots into a nice arrangement. so here’s my in & out photo! please click the photo to get a larger version:

this time, i also have an alternative version. focussed not on the road, but some vegetation. i really love the bokeh of my wide open 50mm lens. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 1/100s, f/1.4, 50mm, iso 1600. arranged using gimp.

today i took my camera with me to university. here are some impressions.

and yes, ducks walking on ice can slip and fall down:

here’s my project 52 shot for the fourth week. the topic was

als ich klein war…

i’ve been playing around with some old toys yesterday, but after finding out that this seems to be a common idea for this topic, i decided to think more. when today, we made an excursion to a water reservoir nearby, where we often went when i was little, i watched out there if there’s something i can use. near the entry we often used, there’s a old, dead tree lying. when i was little, it was sooo huge, and we climbed on it a lot. well. nowadays it’s little itself, compared to me. so i decided to photograph this tree leftovers, rotting for like 30 years, in a way i might have seen it when i was little. using my fisheye lens, i started playing around, and got a nice shot of the ground end of the tree, which is caved out by now. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 1/250s, f/2.8, 16mm fisheye, iso 200.

today, we visited a water reservoir not far from here where we used to make bike tours or just pay visits to when i was really young. here are some impressions.

it’s not the first time i’m annoyed by php, and surely not the last one. i’ve often called php an ad-hoc language, which is changed a lot and contains many inconsistencies. and often tends to break backwards compatibility. for example, i recently upgraded to php 5.3 (while upgrading the server; before, it was running 5.2 if i recall correctly). this instantly broke the openid server i’m using to login to mathoverflow. this was easy to fix, apparently some behaviour changed and i had to replace two or three lines of codes by almost identical ones to make it work again. now i stumbled about something else, while posting something new on blackness. namely, the member function setdate of the datetime object changed a little bit: on success, it no longer returns null, but the object itself. (in case of an error, it still returns false.) well, the blackness editor was expecting null to indicate success, and complained that the data was invalid. great.
i mean, its nicer to return the object (to allow cascadation, at least if one is sure no error occurs – otherwise one is screwed), but why just change this between two versions?! such changes make upgrading php a russian roulette: it might break your programs. and in many cases (like this), it might take you a long time to find out that your program is broken. and when you found out it’s broken, you have to search for the problem, identify it, only to find out that php just changed the rules a little bit. this is just bad. and yet another reason not to use php for anything serious.
(and a programming language not useable for anything serious is, well, to be bluntly: a big pile of crap.)

here’s my project 52 shot for the third week. the topic was

lieblingsfarbe.

so finally i have snow, which i really could have used last week. well, that’s bad luck. but the good thing is, snow and shade encapsulates my two favorite colors, if there are any: black and white. (just look at this blog, which colors are prominently featured.) so i took one of the snow photos from today, made it black and white with my favorite photo editing program, gimp, and here it is. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 1/160s, f/5.6, 31mm, iso 100, aps-c; modified using gimp.

while complaining last week that all snow was gone, when i had to produce a photo for project 52, i got snow this week while staying in zürich. here are some snowy impressions from around noon:

later, it started snowing again, continuing until the evening. on my way back from my current quest, i took some more pictures (and already lamented about the absense of my big camera, which is much better suited for low-light photography). the interaction of snowflakes with beams of light is just a perfect thing to photograph!

walking through falling snow is just great!

when i noticed that the spielwiese‘s archives list was pretty long (one line per month, that accumulates over time), i looked for a way to turn this into a tree which is by default folded together to a short list of years. after a short search, i found the wp-dtree plugin, which works nice, but doesn’t really do with the archives what i wanted to do. so i created my own plugin, which uses wp-dtree’s javascript code to create an archives tree as i wanted it. now i polished the plugin a bit, and decided to upload it here, so other interested persons can try it out.
to use it, you must have the wp-dtree-30 plugin installed and activated. otherwise, you won’t see anything. you can download my plugin here. just unzip it into your wordpress’ plugin directory, activate it and add the “lazyone’s archives.” widget to your sidebar and configure it as you wish. as usual, no warranty for anything.
note that you need a new enough version of wordpress. wp-dtree-30 requires wordpress 3.0.1, and my plugin requires wordpress 2.8 (for the new widget interface). so if you have a wordpress installation older than 3.0.1, either upgrade or don’t use the plugins.