CyanogenMod 7 on Orange Boston (Z71 Variant)

Some time back, to be more precise, when my girlfriend bought herself an iPhone 4, I wanted to see whats possible with my old Android phone: an Orange Boston (Commtiva Z71 Family) and decided to run some custom ROM on there.

Getting Aware Of Password Security

A few days back when Sony's PSN got hacked, everybody should have already thought about how secure their own passwords and data are stored in the net.

Unfortunately I didn't...

Almost Catastrophy (aka. SD-Card not readable)

The last 3 weeks I spent on a very nice vacation in Thailand: It was not just lying on the beach, but also included a trip throughout the north of Thailand with all it sights, temples and other stuff worth seeing. Therefore I had of course my camera with me and made some shots.

Until one day really spoiled my mood: Suddenly the card in the camera seemed to be unreadable. The only message I got was something like: "Card in the slot not readable. Please reinsert the card or format it again".

F***.

My first HDR

Stephansdom HDR, originally uploaded by max.pfandl.

Yesterday I've tried to create my first HDR Picture and went therefore to the Stephansdom in Vienna, which I thought would give me a nice chance to do so.

I didn't do it very professional: I just adjusted the exposure bracketing to -1 and +1 and shot the series. Unfortunately a friend of mine already told me, that you're not allowed to make pictures with tripods in there, so I had to make it handheld which of course made me to use a low aperture and this made it a bit blurry in the out of focus range.

Nevertheless: its my first try and I just wanted to play around with it: the Stephansdom will still be there, when I know what I'm actually doing ;)

For creating the HDR I used Photomatix which is able to work with the Canon RAW Format. It has quite some presets to choose from (from the more "creative" edge to the realistic side) and I just picked the default one.

Unfortunately I used a Version which had some nasty bug and destroyed my EXIF-Information. This should be fixed in the newest version now.

This is the result: hope you like it, but I'm quite shure I can do better than that :)

Exception in a Static Constructor

Some days ago, a coworker of mine had a very nasty bug which no one had a immediate explanation for: The problem was that in his application, he was trying to call a service: usually this worked just fine, but when the service was shut down while he started his tool, his application stopped working even tough the service was started right afterwards again.

After some research and debugging, he found the problem and since nobody in my team actually knew that, I think it's worth a post.