Recently I’ve obtained my first real Leica camera — the M7. Two reasons are behind this cultist decision. One was price: this particular camera was sold for less than $2000 being graded as “condition 4″ (fully working with few minor scratches and one insignificant decorative element lost) — you can’t get this price even on ebay or APUG. And that was one of the most expensive secondhand photo equipment shops in Moscow (being also Leica and Linhof official dealer). The second reason is more complicated and reasonable(sic!). Mostly I do not buy anything just because it is bargain cheap. And I’ve already got M-mount camera — Konica Hexar RF, which is more than suitable for everyday shooting. The codename for this problem is “abandonment”: as Konica’s photo business was first merged with Minolta and then sold to Sony, the service of Hexar cameras is done only in Japan. The round-trip for service would take months, not all spare parts are available, so repair process may not converge at all. And Sony service in Russia is notorious for overcharging and time-lags. So Hexar is virtually non-serviceable camera. That is the whole point in desire for spare camera in case anything goes wrong (and it actually went wrong — there was some annoying glitches with automatic film transport control). In search of relevant camera to replace Hexar if anything goes wrong I’ve explored all possible contemporary replacements.
- Voigtlander Bessa R*M is good fully mechanical camera with TTL metering, but the rangefinder base is so small that is literally sucks. Also it has got vertical metal shutter, similar to Hexar RF. In Russia it costs around $900 new (and it seemse that you should not buy used ’cause it’s not very durable).
- Voigtlander Bessa R*A has autoexposure in addition to R*M, but has no mechanical speeds at all. And the same crappy rangefinder, wich is certainly not suitable for Summicron 90. Costs the same as R*M.
- Zeiss Ikon is built around the same shutter as Bessa, but has better rangefinder with effective length up to 55mm. Handling is similar either to Bessa or to Hexar based on your initial preferences. Film advance lever is ok. Weight is significantly less, than Hexar or M7. But the framelines are weird! 85 instead of 90! I know, that if I buy Sonnar 85, then I will use 90 line on my Hexar and M7 and miss nothing. But to have frameline that is larger than actual frame is rather misleading. Also it does not have mechanical speeds, as R*A. Costs around $1200, rare, mostly sold in kits with Biogon 21 or similar lens (which I do not really need for additional $1000).
I have omitted cameras, which are older and can not be obtained new (like M5, CLE) because the main point of getting spare was to have serviceable camera. So the last and most expensive variant vas M7.
Wat I considered was different shutter system. The horizontal travelling cloth shutter is more durable and foolproof than vertical metal (you can bend it’s leaf even with film tip not to mention fingertips). With this difference M7 made a camera with difference from Hexar, and Ikon and Bessa were just few nuances off from Konica.
Really I did not consider buying M7 for regular price ($5k+ new and $2800+ for used in excellent condition). But it turned out that i got mine for $1950, which gave it advantage even over Bessa, which is just twice cheaper.
Saying M7 is good camera is stating obvious. But never using Leica before I found some interesting properties:
- Film insertion looks archaic enough to scare people off, but all they imagine is how to load old Leica with take up spools and so on. That’s because we have to hold baseplate in our hands while reloading! It looks way more scary than it is. In fact loading it simpler than loading SLR — just drop film with extended tip into camera and close it.
- Batteries are hard to find. Period.
- No several frame length AE lock is not that annoying, but sometimes you need it so hard you go crazy and switch to manual,
- No multiple exposures. Go buy M5 or Bessa.
- Handling is good. Camera feels ready for heavy-duty sooting. Controls are in good place, except shutter dial, which for me feels to be placed rather distant from edge. For me it’s not easy to turn it with index finger of my right hand. But I prefer AE anyway.
- Viewfinder is superb. Indication is clear and bright.
- In my M7 there is no DX contacts but IR sensors. Seems that they can make a mistake in DX, but I could not reproduce it. And, of course, I did shit bricks when I loaded Rollei Digibase CR200 without DX and saw DX of 5000 ISO. Then I doublechecked and found no DX was present on film.
- The shutter is quieter than Hexar, Bessa, Ikon and so on. And it much less shakes the camera.
As for overall conclusion M7 became my main camera quite easily. Something is just right about it.
And a picture of M7:

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Recently I found that anti-dmca.org domain now belongs to some squatter and it looks like forever lost for any good purpose. It’s sad, because I used one wonderful banner from there: “Programmers speak in Code. Mathematicians speak in Symbols. The Deaf speak with their Hands.“ And even the banner image is not recoverable anymore.
Update: found the banner using webarchive. Saving here for future use…

Programmers speak in Code. Mathematicians speak in Symbols. The Deaf speak with their Hands.
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As time goes on, I have found robust wordpress client for Android. This means that starting today most of posts will be written on my HTC Desire during my boring subway rides. Those posts will carry distinctive property: being too large for twitter and too complicated for my generic follower (I have twenty, but I can model generic one). Certainly you there will be much more hate, as people around will be pushing me with theirs elbows. On the other hand text will be schizophasic to some extent due to weird word completion of my on-screen keyboard. And on the third hand (as if I have got it, but I will be dreaming to get at least four until either my death or the moment I receive them) some posts will be in Russian, mostly at the momont of some severe hate or brain disfunction. And I still wish my readers (have I got any one at all???) some luck in case they need it.

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It’s prophesy time! As I see it, there will be no major movement for SMTP (for “spam mail transfer protocol”, thank you Captain Obvious) for at least few years. Legacy systems dominate the world. And solution will arrive — in the same way we liberate our blogs from spam comments new version of ESMTP will have CAPTCHA support, making sending mail a complicated and serious matter. Just to shield myself from ignorant idiots I will write E=ħν on my forehead and ask everyone to read it aloud. Or even compute ∫e–x2 up to second digit…
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As I was telling on Jan 23, I could not find any DP-DVI adapter in Moscow (note, that DP-male DVI-female adapter is passive, but DP-female DVI-male adapter alongside with DP-male DP-duallink-female both should be active, i.e. require special chip to re-encode signal). I attempted another try to search it offline in another computer components shopping area (somehow I prefer monstrosity of Akihabara) and utterly failed. Every salesperson upon hearing about DP-DVI sent me to mysterious E-16 kiosk. Reaching it I found myself before Apple Reseller shop and turned back swearing. Of course I’ve already got miniDP-DVI connector to use both of my displays with GT120 shipped with my MacPro.
On Friday regular shipment from NIX arrived to my office, including two noname DP_DVI adapters, I found in their catalogue recently. At last I can remove GT120 in favour of R4890, which can drive both of my displays (my Sapphire R4890 got single DVI, DP and HDMI). Though it did not cured my BENQ Q24W5 problem which seems to appear if somehow new video card is connected to it via DVI — it turns off display for two seconds every two hours or so.
Today’s picture will be unrelated — just some cute picture I found on my harddrive:

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Lately Apple California discretely distributed fix for infamous “Audio Bug” for MacPro 4,1. Apple was silent for nearly nine month from first reports of this problem to AppleCare call center. Now without commotion they suddenly responded to few customers via AppleCare and supposedly communicated with ArsTechnica journalist Chris Foresman and offered possibility for fix. In a week they published fix on their site, without any announcement. Users found info about fix from ArsTechica and/or MacRumours forum thread (in nine months it has grown into 60-pages monster). There is rumour, that i7 iMacs are suffering form the same bug, so it is interesting to find, if same type of fix was released for them.
The fix works. Temperatures are lower and allow to constrain fans more or less around 800rpm. Internals are a bit mystical, but I suppose that real work was done in IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext and AudioAUUC.kext is just a placeholder to indicate fix installation. And a picture to remember:
   
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Some time ago I was struggling with superior arrogance — I was trying to make Common LISP work on Windows. This is royal pain.
Worth to mention that my colleague spends his days trying the same, poking our self-proclaimed LISP guru (no offence, he knows LISP) every time something’s wrong. And there are lots of things that go latter way. I gonna put a list of things that can be considered horrendous for any generic user, whose primary OS is Windows.
- The thing any LISPer will tell you is that CPAN, gem and so on are worthless — LISP has wonderful asdf-install and cliky.net (and you even can fix unresolved dependency yourself ’cause clicky.net is wiki open for anyone, not only for project maintainers and so on — just put a page with link to tarball up). Poor windows user should know the pain and shame — he’ll need tar, shell, gzip and so on! You have no Cygwin installed? No MinGW? In this case you will not be able to use LISP implementations like SBCL (yeah, steel bank head-banging awaits you) or ECL. Even Clozure CL needs tar and gzip for asdf-install to work. Yes, this utilities are necessary for package unpacking, but if you distribute your port for win32 and include asdf-install, why can’t you include this two binaries as well???
- As win32 is no POSIX, why try to put POSIX scheme over it? Why user have to guess, where is his $HOME, why he has to put autoloading .lisp file there, not in “Application Data”, why asdf-install puts tons of garbage in users directory (yeah, windows doesn’t mast files starting with period)? I suppose code differs for UNIX and win32, there are lots if #ifdef’s and so on, then why we should keep suffering?
- And there is notorious win64! Lately it has become usable like any other version of Windows (since win7), lots of software work seamlessly, but not LISP! There are two binaries shipped with Clozure CL — one for win32, and other for win64. Surprisingly, win32 can’t work on win64. It is a feature — .exe just exits complaining! The developers are responding: “The 32-bit port should run on 32-bit versions of XP and Vista. (For obscure reasons, the 32-bit port doesn’t run on 64-bit OS versions at this point. We intend to address that, if only to avoid having to explain that it doesn’t and why it doesn’t.).”
- In case you will try to install cells-gtk you will fail! Then you will loot handful of libraries, recompile some with MSVS of gcc (compilers give different flavours) and poke your LISP guru nonstop… Then it will work. Probably. With Clozure CL.
- Windows port of SBCL does not support threads. No cells-gtk for you. Whine in wait for next SBCL release. Never. Give. Up. Hope.
- In win64 case you’ll fail even in case of Clozure CL. Because for every of two dozens required libraries you’ll either need to find win64 prebuilt binary (in most cases give it up) or recompile it. Unexpected things to come… For example, freeglut won’t compile with MSVS into 64-bit target. I found some patch (not for freeglut, but for Crysis (or what was it???) engine), it compiled, but still buggy — gl-gears display only Malevich square. Then I counted libraries necessary for cells-gtk and gave up…
- SBCL on win64 shocked not only me but even local LISP guru. It bitched about POSIX incompatibility…
And so on… Look, LISPers are arrogant enough to ignore anyone who uses Windows! They just want to make there life with LISP painful to that extent people would give up either Windows or LISP. Latter has much higher probability, but for ones trapped inside ivory tower it does not matter at all.
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It’s rather irritating not to be able to find any Displayport-to-DVI adapter (even single-link) in Moscow. Searching online gives you bunch of fake-shops, which never deliver desired equipment. Searching offline gives you handful of Apple Mini Displayport adapters and their direct clones. No full-size Displayport ever seen.
Even Amazon has several in their catalogue…
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Being ridiculously bowdlerized by censors in Japan, Seikon no Quaser walks towards to be scissored both in America and in Russia in case being licensed. For english-speaking censors the family name of protagonist may sound like ‘Hell’ and bring up unpleasant associations. On the other hand in Russia amused viewers will hear the word meaning ‘dick’ form Japanese audio track instead of protagonist’s surname. Also, being written ‘Хэлл’, it would remind viewers of various things, making them even more amused. For example, notorious russian blog hacker ‘Хэлл’, the “hero of Rail and Strapon war” — now we know how he really looks like:

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As lazy as he can be, our technician presented me with new server for my number crunching with a delay of three weeks. He was complaining to be forced to cut female SAS-connectors so that they would fit glamorous SAS-drive:
This looked awful enough, but things to come exceeded my humble expectations.
There is Russian proverb literally saying “How do you name the boat, so it will sail”, and I had variety of chances to test it. FreeBSD router named Zaphod was hanging twice a day until one cpu was disabled along with one of three ethernet cards. Willhelmine works without problems for three years already. And this one got name Erza. And her character too.
Our Tytania incarnation was build around Supermicro server board X8DT3-А holding two 4-core Nehalems and tons of ram. And this dreadful motherboard showed it’s riddles. The first one was easy one — Debian lenny netinstall cd ver. 5.03 has kernel 2.6.26 which has broken igb module. No dual-port ET eth controller for you until you either install patched kernel replacing stable deb, or go to unstable and install 2.6.32 (my choice). During installation just use any available pce-e or pci ethernet card.
The second Tytania’s riddle was much more tougher. X8-series motherboards have already become infamous for giving you “fucking winmodem” for SAS-controller (has to be pronounced ‘cunt-roller’). The name of this disaster is LSI 1068E and it has to be tamed before you will be able to boot off any of your expensive SAS hard drives. If you a blond and glamorous, go and install RHEL (or Windows if you prefer) and get that “winmodem” driver from LSI site (no link because they are greedy bastards!). In every other case you have to change mode of 1068e to IT (that is for “Initiator/Target”) to make it run like any other JBOD-host. The JPS2 jumper near SAS connectors has to be opened (and left in this state forever for anyone not to be tempted by proprietary fakeraids).

After this manipulations 1068E will allow linux to recognize itself via base mptsas module. But unfortunately there is very little chance it will allow you to boot off SAS-drives. Looks like some bug in firmware. The fix is obvious — download update, boot dos from flash drive and update the culprit. Guys from Supermicro even uploaded update to their ftp-site: ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/LSI/1064_1068/IT/Firmware/B3/1.24.05/L8i/. At this point you will encounter staggering third riddle: “Where is my SAS address???”. Flashing process is combined of three steps, two of them being writing images and third is some wizardry, asking you this 64-bit number. They do not give you any hint — any wrong move and you will lose this piece of expensive crap forever? If your number is wrong 1068E of course will not boot at all, but will leave you chance to fix this running “mptutil.exe –o –t” from your firmware-flashing drive. But exactly where you should look for it? You will be engulfed in astonishment when pointed out that mysterious SAS-address (when you pronounced fast sounds like derivative of ‘suck’ in Russian — you’ve got situation already, haven’t you?) is printed on that white stripe right above JPS2. It should be wise to write it down beforehand.
As farewell gift X8DT3 confuses both Grub and Debian installer shuffling numbers of hard drives several times during boot. One will never now if his hd3 will become hd0 or even /dev/sde? Everyone likes (or hates) Grub error 17… Had to install stage1 from bootcd with NixOS as Debian installer and even chrooted Grub from installed system were powerless.
You know, this experience is far worse then any hackintosh. You follow well used road, but it is strewn with rakes. Majority laughs at complaining suckers, but marches through the same rakes…
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