790 - In The Darkest Place

Yup, I did manage another entry 🙂

I had a lot of stress today, we are at a very critical point with our software project, and like with all extremely distributed software systems, there are things you simply can’t test. You can run simulations, but they never turn out like the real thing. Thus, when we already thought we were done and began to roll out the beast (it’s a software distribution system in the large), all kinds of strange phenomena turned up, things that can only happen in the wild, and today was the worst in a week. I still have not fixed it, but at least I know now, what has caused the system to resonate and to hammer our oracle database with hundred thousand queries per minute. Actually pretty impressive that it survived 🙂

Anyway, back to photography. This is an image from my way home tonight. It’s 1/30s at f4 and ISO 2200, underexposed by -1.7 EV, that means actually an equivalent of somewhere around ISO 6400. I could have used f1.4, but I really wanted some depth of field here. The image out of the camera did not look promising, Adobe Camera RAW did a bland job, and again DxO Optics Pro did it nicely, providing me with a nice, contrasty image without ugly noise, an image that I could build upon in Photoshop.

The Song of the Day is “In The Darkest Place” from the 1998 album “Painted from Memory”, a collaboration of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. Another nice song, still a nice album, but again no video found. The sound sample from Amazon may give you an impression though.