Category Archives: English

Sensor Cleaning Gone Wrong at Dealership

So I decided to give my 5D a proper sensor cleaning before my vacation. I have done this myself before, but since I had run out of sensor swabs, and I wanted it to be a proper cleaning, I gave the job to an authorized Canon dealership. Turns out that was a big mistake.

Now the sensor have more dust on it then it ever had before.

This image is from the second time I picked it up at the dealer. The first job they did wasn’t any good, so I complained and they took another look. I guess I’ll have to ask for a full refund and some sensor swabs so I can take care of this myself now.

I most certainly won’t trust them with my camera again.

Update: They didn’t give me a refund, but they offered to try to clean the sensor again. I declined. Mostly because I need the camera on monday. I did, however, get a few sensor swabs with me. I used two swabs when I got home, and now the camera is ready for action.

Pixelpost

Update: The pixelpost site got lost in a disk crash.

I’ve installed Pixelpost as a way to improve my photography. Although it won’t affect my photography directly, it will at least force me to look at my own images on a regular basis. The plan is to publish a new photo every day.

The idea came after reading a blog post from Alexandre Bussie, a French photographer and climber.

Oh, I almost forgot; the link to my Pixelpost-site. It is also placed in the menu of this site.

Bug when Updating Virtual Hardware in VMware

Just realized how fragile a virtual machine can be.

Yesterday I logged into a Windows server and found that some programs were missing (python among others). No big deal. I just assumed that someone else had removed them to free up space or something. Then I found a few files I knew I had both edited and deleted. And the files I knew I had touched suddenly had a timestamp dating back to 2008. Luckily this isn’t a critical production machine, but never the less, how could this happen?

When I checked the vCenter log, I found that the virtual hardware on this particular VM was updated just short of 24 hours earlier. The VM also contained a system generated snapshot dated 2008. The Windows event log, however, where having a gap from 2010 till 2012 (current day).

What has happened is this:

• The VM was powered off.
• The virtual hardware was upgraded.
• When the machine was turned back on, the system reverted back to a previous snapshot (without logging it), thus overwriting the current image.

There are several things here that I find “scary”. The first is that the VM went back using an older system state without even logging it.

The second “scary” thing is that the system generated snapshot was wrongly labeled with the year 2008, when it clearly contained data from 2010 (We actually tested this by reverting to this image just to check. We had nothing to loose anyway).