Tokyo Bay Timelapse

I finally got my shutter release timer from Hong Kong. It works great! Here is the latest attempt:

The original source video (sequenced from the original photos) was stunning, but I find I'm having a lot of trouble getting good quality output from iMovie '09. There are a lot of people complaining about it, so I guess it's iMovie and not just me. In frustration, I bought Final Cut Express 4, but it won't arrive for a few days so I guess we'll see the improvement in the next video.

I've seen a lot of other great time lapse videos on YouTube lately. There are a lot of really talented people out there. It seems to me now that the true secret is to think of it as a photo with some life breathed into it. The best time lapse videos I've seen would be beautiful as still photos. Adding the time lapse component just gives the photo a bit extra. Adding music, pan and zoom adds mood. But it should start with a beautiful and interesting photo.

Time Lapse

I ran across mockmoon2000's YouTube channel a couple of weeks ago and started what may turn out to be an obsession with shooting time lapse videos.

Below is my latest attempt, shot with an old video camera hooked up to my neighbour Joe's Mac Mini in webcam mode, using open-source software Gawker to create the movie. I edited it using iMovie '09.



The resolution and image quality was not very good, so now I'm waiting for a timer shutter release trigger to be shipped from Hong Kong, which will allow me to use my Canon SLR to create higher-quality, smoother videos. So hopefully in a few weeks I'll post something really nice.

Enjoy. ;-)

kill -3 to the rescue!

A basic and ancient weapon to keep close at hand when hunting down deadlocks and other weird threading issues in Java applications is the kill -3 command. I don't know of an equivalent on Windows, but if you are running on any flavour of Unix (including Mac OS X) it is available via the command line.

If you've never tried it, basically it gives you a dump of the stack traces of all living threads in the process. Despite the name, when you use the -3 option, it doesn't kill the process. This is handy if you want to take multiple snapshots a few seconds apart to see if anything changes.

Even better, it also shows you what objects have been locked, where, by which threads; and which objects are waiting for those locks. In no time at all you can find the source of the deadlock and do something about it.

I've only used this in development, but there's no reason you couldn't use it in production, provided your stdout and stderr are redirected somewhere you can see. Since it doesn't kill the process, it's entirely plausible you could find a workaround for some problems on the running system.