March 2007 Archives

Once again I believe I am the first person in South Africa to own these fine products:

1. Sonnet Temp eSATA ExpressCard/34
2. LaCie d2 Quadra

Eat your heart out! South Africa's importers should only begin receiving stock in a couple months' time.

I have two brilliant little books on Marine Invertebrates and Marine Fish - one by Shimek, the other by Scott W. Michael. Now usually advise is something you take with a grain of salt since in the reef hobby, the only two certainties are

"The faster you go the worse things will get"

and

"Nothing else is certain"

However, those two books have never been wrong. So many times I thought I needed my cup of salt, but today I realised I need to start listen to what is written in there.

For starters, my beautiful sun coral was healthy for many months in direct lighting - something the book suggested is not good not due to intolerance, but due to competition with algae. I ignored this.

As you can see on the right, the coral was very healthy when I just acquired it. However that proved to be naive since after about 3 months the macro algae started getting a hold on it.

A recent picture shows the result of neglect... I had the coral directly under bright lighting the whole time, and even though I have barely detectable Phosphate and Nitrate levels, once the macro algae gets a hold it does not let go.

For now I have attached it sideways to a piece of LR so hopefully there will be less direct light, hence hoping to starve the algae.

There are many other similar incidents. Below follows a couple:

1. Purple Tangs are extremely aggressive and it is NOT a good idea to keep similarly shaped tangs in a smallish (< 300g) tank.
2. Green Brittle Stars are the most ferocious invert predators out there. But they are also incredibly cool.
3. Ribbon eels are incredibly difficult to get to feed.
4. Blue Linka Starfish are also difficult to keep.

I have been playing a bit with my microscope and under 4x, 10x and 40x objectives I managed to capture these pictures of various macro algae. Try to identify them... (PS Go to my reef gallery for the answers)

Algae A

Algae B

Algae C

Algae D

Algae E

Algae F

Algae G

(From CodeSOD: The Pyramid of Error)

if (error)
  if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to the file")<0){
    if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
      if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
        if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
          if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
            return fprintf(stderr, "An error occured while writing to stderr");
            /* lets stop here, its enough */
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }

My new bamboo shark died yesterday night. So too did my hawk fish that I sucked up when I siphoned my tank for the hypo treatment. This is very depressing. The whole reason I ordered the bigger tank was for the shark. To help keep the nitrates down. I guess we learn the hard way. Just because your aquarium is 6 months+ old does not mean you can add fish more quickly.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0703/07030805sigma200500mm.asp

And I thought my 70-200mm F2.8 Canon L lens was cool.... At least I can carry it ;)

Check out my new Reef Aquarium Galleries. I will be regularly updating these galleries so be sure to visit regularly. Comment here if you have any opinions/suggestions. To access the galleries, you can always use the link at the top right of this blog.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810218

In essence - when you do a Server.Redirect("SomePage.aspx?SomeParam=SomeValue") .NET conveniently will make that SomeParam persisted over the subsequent requests - i.e. if SomePage.aspx contains a form to be submitted, that form's action will be rewritten to include this param. Neat? No! How do you clear a querystring parameter no longer used? You can't. At least not elegantly.

This is why I prefer J2EE - you have to work harder, but you almost *never* have to implement workarounds to work around unneeded high level features.

I purchased a small Bamboo Shark a couple of days ago. He was eating at the LFS but not in my tank. Experience told me that sometimes these animals don’t eat not because they are not hungry, but rather because they do not like what you are offering.

Take my ribbon eel - refuses anything but LM prawns.

My shark - eats scallops, LM prawns and once in a while a piece of line fish.

My snowflake eel eats anything - squid, LM prawns, lance fish, krill, linefish, etc.

My zebra eel only eats LM prawns and krill. Will take one piece of lance fish but refuse any more.

My Bird wrasse eats anything.