What we did at Godspell

Our production team has been busy…

Digital made me dumb

The last two nights I’ve used my Pentax SP500 (film SLR) camera, and I’m more than a tad annoyed at myself. Less so tonight than yesterday, but there we go — either way, it’s not good. I hadn’t really used the film camera since about January this year (I know, it’s appalling; more as a result of time than desire, however, as I haven’t had many planned opportunities for good photography sessions), so this was the first time I’d really used it since getting the digital toy (because, really, despite the optical zoom, that’s all it is).

It’s created three major problems, in terms of my photography skills. Firstly, I’m snap-happy. It’s ridiculous (ridiculously expensive!). Last night I went through a roll of 35mm film in one performance (didn’t cover the whole show, either), and tonight, when I was trying to cover the bit I missed, I went through another roll in under 15 minutes. Yeeaaahhhh.

That’s not so much a technical issue as a stylistic one, however. Far more importantly, I quite literally forgot that adjustable F-stop rings existed. Needless to say, when I remembered, I kicked myself rather hard. Stupidity++.

I’d also forgotten to use the spot meter until about halfway through the night (and, honestly, it’s pretty useful to have! Complain all you want about how they’re inaccurate and don’t truely measure what they’re seeing, but it’s a great reference point — I’m not saying follow them blindly, but they certainly help), which probably resulted in a whole number of too-dark photos (or too-unneccesarily-blurry photos — the shutter was set to quarter second exposure for most of the night!)

Speaking of enormous exposures, I’m really loving having a CHUNKY camera to hold again. Don’t get me wrong, I love my tiny Optio (it fits in my pocket perfectly), but not for night photography sans flash. It’s just too small to hold steadily, unless you’re braced against something incredibly solid, or you get lucky with the subject moving as your hand does (cool focused subject with blurred background — nothing to do with depth of field, just motion). The SP500, however… drool. I haven’t had time to get these two rolls put in for developing yet, but it just feels good to use. Ridiculously good. It’s like moving from a disposable camera, almost (a GOOD disposable camera, but still).

This is why when I got the digital I tried to convince myself I’d never use it for anything serious — because I fully recognise it’s a dinky little toy. It exists to be taken nearly everywhere, to capture anything, just for kicks. Like this police car, for example…

The Truth about William McCormack, from an anonymous Yahoo account.

The following is a reply to the message quoted inline below, posted on my contact form, with a return email address clearly not likely to be used for anything else but the purpose of ensuring anonymity in further correspondence. As stated, with something this serious I don’t think anonymity has its place, and I’m disregarding the message unless further contact is made.

I’m aware that he uses another name on occasion (he’s answered the phone using the other name — which I don’t recall — and I’ve also seen it on quotes and invoices, etc.), although whether that’s his “real” name and William is not I didn’t know. Having said that, is it of consequence? Yes, he is still working at the school. I’m not particularly interested in further contact unless you come out from the shroud of anonymity you currently hide behind, simply for the reason that any information you could provide I simply would not trust unless I knew who you were. When I published that letter, there was no degree of anonymity in its form, and it was hosted on a website where my name, address, and telephone number are all displayed prominently on the contact page. Unless you wish to meet similar standards of disclosure, please refrain from future correspondence on this matter.

This response, as well as your original message, will be posted on my website in the interests of transparency.

Regards,
Joshua Street

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 23:49 +1000, William McCormack wrote:

I am interested to know if William McCormack still works at your school. If so please reply to the email address I have given and let me know. I have got some very interesting information about ‘William’ McCormack that I would like to share with you. Did you know that William is in fact not his real name? It gets a lot better than this…

Godspell dress rehearsal

I filled up my memory card (256MB) on the digital camera for the first time thus far (without a change of batteries, no less!), taking around 130 pictures. Most of them sucked.

Having said that, the dress rehearsal itself (the first rehearsal in the venue, as well as the first dress rehearsal) was pretty amazingly ready, even if technical is still pulling together (we’ll get there). I’ve picked out a photo or three just because I felt like sticking up pretty pictures before the school itself had a chance to, so here goes:

If you’ve been in the Cathedral before, and are coming to the show, don’t expect it to be the same as you last remembered it…

Tickets may be purchased online or by calling (02) 9286 9515. The official Godspell website is http://www.godspell-themusical.com/, and the St. Andrew’s production website is http://godspell.sacs.nsw.edu.au/.

Ubuntu, Apache and making mod_rewrite happy

The following only applies to the Apache which ships with Ubuntu — so if you’re wondering why your mod_rewrite isn’t working with something else, chances are this won’t be that helpful.

I was playing with mod_rewrite in the context of WordPress 1.5 for use as a CMS on a new website, and it basically wasn’t working at all. The module was there, it was enabled, but it was doing absolutely nothing. I reinstalled Apache manually (from source), and tried to do the painful stuff that goes with that (PHP ./configure options, anyone? Some people might be able to do it, but not me!), but gave up in disdain when I realised I had 2 hours to get work done before a meeting and didn’t have a working Apache install to get it working on. mod_rewrite or not, it was back to the stock install that “sort of” worked.

mod_rewrite wasn’t working for the meeting, but that didn’t really matter… I’ve discovered that I care more about friendly URLs than most other people I’ve ever met in real life! That evening, I looked at the problem again, and, after trawling through apache2.conf (Ubuntu’s equivalent of httpd.conf — don’t ask why, I don’t think even they know) and talking to Michael about it, I discovered that I’d been looking in the wrong place.

It doesn’t matter whether rewrite.conf is in the mods-enabled folder (although it needs to be — but that’s not the issue at hand here) — by default, Ubuntu’s Apache install has a default virtual host setup under “sites-enabled” (actually just a symlink to “sites_available” — this is best practice when creating new vhosts, by the way: stick the config in sites-available and symlink to that from sites-enabled… there are a few reasons for this, which wouldn’t really affect the casual user, but if you were running LOTS of websites off it it’d soon become helpful if you needed to disable websites because of policy violations or billing without actually deleting the configuration.), instead of just the single “real” server. Okay, this probably makes sense… but for the fact that it didn’t SAY it anywhere, and additionally, despite having support for .htaccess files built into the apache2.conf file, it’s set to do absolutely nothing in the virtual host config “default”.

Basically, to get mod_rewrite to work, load the module by symlinking to mods-available/rewrite.conf in mods-enabled, then set AllowOverride to “all” in sites-available/default in both the root (“/”) container and the /var/www/ container. Whilst you’re there, it may be a good idea to get rid of the RedirectMatch, simply because it’s annoying… I haven’t, but only because I haven’t bothered to put something in the root of the default site.

This stuff is probably self explanatory to many, but it took me too long to realise it, even with help, and in my trawlings of Google I hadn’t found anything to say how to do it, so there we are.

Updated: see comments 3 and 4