We passed a few days in the swiss alps around new year. We stayed in Thun, near Interlaken in the Berner Oberland and went for excursions in the Jungfrau Region. It was great. Actually, this region is part of the UNESCO cultural heritage “Jungfrau - Aletsch - Bietschhorn”, the most glaciated part of the Alps.

Really great snow and wonderful wother. And in spite of my ISO mistake (I forgot to turn it down to 200 and let it at 1600 the first day after new year’s eve…) I got some not so bad pictures I want to share here. The ISO performance of my new Nikon D90 is not bad. There is a noticable difference im comparison to my D70s I used before.

I took some series to build panoramas, too. And this is the most beautiful one I think. I spent some time in creating sharpening masks and blur masks to reduce the noise in the sky (caused by my ISO 1600…) without losing details. And at least for this size it works I think.

Panorama of Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger

This is the view over the Jungfrau with Mönch and Eiger on the left of the panorama. The very left one is the Eiger.

Eiger Nordwand and a schematic map of the region

They built a cog rauilroad called “Jungfraubahn” from little Scheidegg to the Junfraujoch, which is a hotel, a restaurant and certainly a great panorama viewpoint. They call it “Top of Europe”, although the hightest european mountain is the Montblanc. Anyway, the railroad they built in 1912 is quite impressive as they even made a station or two with windows in the Eiger Nordwand! We did not go up as it is really expensive to go there. The cablecars to the places whe went were expensive enough. But I want to go some day. Hopefully with a similar weather.

We had the chance to watch a roaring avalanche on the other side of the valley. It was quite far away and in the shadow. The sound needed a few seconds until arriving to our side of the valley. Nevertheless impressioning. We were on the way down with sledges from little Scheidegg (over 2000m) (which is directly in front of the Eiger Nordwand) to Wengern.

The weather in the valley was ugly. Cold, dark and gray. But as we went up we encountered with the sun. I love those seas of clouds! The clouds were at about 1300m, which is exaclty the altitude of Wengern. The upper village had nice weather, the lower part had really bad and cold weather. You can see this on the third photo of the three below. This was the upper limit of the clouds. A few meters below the temperature dropped noticable.

High fog in Wengern

The last day we visited Thun and Bern. I published one of the photos of Bern in a previous blog entry.

I personally don’t use Windows, I have to use it at work, but for private things, photo related things etc, I don’t, I have my Debian Sid machine and I am happy with it.

I am using F-Spot to manage my photos. But Lately I was searching something similar to F-Spot for Windows for my sister and my father in law. This is frustrating as there is no application which supports keywording or tagging, searching for tags and keywords, displaying all photos recursively in a directory sorted by date taken (EXIF date). Picasa does not. XnView does — almost. At least XnView supports displaying all photos recursively in a directory and all subdirectories and sorting by EXIF date. But it does not support any keywording, tagging or searching.

The frustration brought me to try out Windows Live Photo Gallery (for Windows XP). Well, it is Windows Live. Fancy user interface distracting the user, the UI is not as responsive as I would wish it to be and so on. But at least it supports all the criteria I was searching for. Without having to buy any other expensive Software. So I recommended it. The tags are written into the EXIF data, in the “Subject” and the XMP Keyword EXIF tags. You can change the date taken of your photos and this date is written into the EXIF tags, too. So there does not seem to be any proprietary Microsoft stuff in there.

Trying it out I recognized that it supports automatic face detection. :-) It is interesting that this monkey face is recognized and the face in the same photo but with less of black margin is not.

You can even display Nikon RAW files (NEF) with this application, see this Windows Experience Team Blog entry and this one, too. You just have to download and install the Nikon RAW Codecs.

My D90 RAW files are imported correctly, displayed as thumbnail but not displayed in large view, The application sais that I might have too less memory to display it… don’t think so.

Another one of the photos I took in Frankfurt. Not sure if I really like this photo. Hope you like it.

Winter in Frankfurt

RAW processed with UFRaw, adjusted and sharpened with Gimp.
This photo on Flickr

I was in Frankfurt city yesterday and I had a look on the Main, which is frozen a few dozens of kilometers upriver. As the day before was the first day for almost two weeks when the temperature climbed above 0°C it seems the some of the ice broke and drifted downstream.

Leaving the ice

It was snowing.

Waiting for Bibble 5… they promised it to be released in Q4 of 2008. Well, at the end of December they announced that at least they will release a public beta version until end of January. Hopefully.

I was hoping it, but now they announced that Bibble 5 will support the D90 RAW files. Great. (I don’t think there is so much difference between the D90 files and the D80 files as the workarounds (See the links in my earlier entry) is quite simple.

A few months ago I bought an 8 GB USB Memory Stick (A Corsair Voyager) which did not work with my Linux machines. The syslog was reporting these errors (or similar) all the time:

usb 5-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 5-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110

I searched for information about this and found the problem.

Here you can find the thread about this issue in the Corsair forums. The information there is a bit misleading as there are a lot of solutions presented which don’t solve the problem.

In the Ubuntu Launchpad bug report there is more information and a workaround to get the Memory stick working.

The problems seems to be the inq_timeout. In Windows, this timeout is set to 20 per default, Linux uses just 5. As I wish to be able to use this memory stick without having to recompile or reinstall a new linux kernel on each linux computer I want to use it, I filed a kernel bug report and I hope they will adapt the timeout to 20, too.

At the moment the workaround is to modify or create the file /etc/modprobe.d/options and add the line:

options scsi_mod inq_timeout=20

As explained in the Ubuntu bug report as workaround. If you have the kernel scsi modules built in the kernel (not as loadable modules), you have to boot your kernel with:

scsi_mod.inq_timeout=20

As explained in the Kernel bug report.