One of the speakers we had at Blue Fusion gave a wonderful talk on the mind. He went on about interfacing computers directly with the brain and similar ideas, but the most amazing bit was when he side tracked into a study on concentration. The idea is simple:
Watch the movie (requires java) of 6 people throwing two balls around and try to count how many passes are made. It is quite difficult. When you have done that, read on for the rest (do not read the rest until you have counted the number of passes)
Continue reading ‘Concentration’
There is an article over on IGN about the Nintendo Revolution’s Horsepower. As you cannot buy a next-gen console without buying an IBM chip, it is interesting to see how Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are playing their cards. Nintendo is the only one not going for sheer processing power, so maybe they will put the effort into getting some great games made for the console. The cheaper price will certainly tempt me to buy one over the other two.
So I updates Wordpress, Gallery and the plugin that joins the two, hoping that nothing would break…
Well, all hell broke loose.
First of all, gallery decided not to let me in with my admin login nor reset any passwords, so by logging in with a test I account and hacking that account with mysql to make it an admin I finally captured control of my gallery. I then re-edited all details for the admin account
So having got galler upgraded, then wordpress upgraded, and finally the wp-g2 plugin, I was left with my theme looking a bit wrong, as all the gallery specific stuff needs re-writing…
I plan to sort that all out soon, but will have to wait untl I have some more time.
No, I am not moving, but a friend is… From Blogger to Wordpress.
The Lost Oupost has moved, and it raises some interesting questions. Such as how do you get everything moved? The posts and comments are just some hacking of mysql, but how about external links and search engines?
I have never been one to rate my blog, but I suppose if it ever got a decent rating I might care more about it, so how do you transfer that over to your new blog?
I suppose you could try an apache 301 redirect if you have access to your own server, but I doubt if blogger lets you do that. What about with javascript? Doesn’t work very nicely…
I guess the best thing you could do is try to write a script to forward users and pass the old address, giving a temporary redirect with the new site and new page, and then either have that processed on the old server, or have the new one do it. Not a very nice solution, but then when you don’t host your own server you have limited options…
The good news is I get free pizza at work today… The bad news is I get it at 6.30pm.
I have to work late, and am not really liking the idea but am amazed it has taken 6 months for it to happen. I currently have a break in my testing, for various reasons, so thought I would introduce a few blogs I have recently started reading:
- illsley.org - A colleague from work. Joined at the same time as me but working in a completely different area (Web services I think)
- The lost outpost - A new friend I met through Blue Fusion last week. Also works for IBM, but works up in Southbank mostly (though I am not entirely sure what he does)
- eight bar - A blog of several people from Hursley Labs (also including Andy Piper, of The Lost Outpost). Some really interesting posts, mostly on Emerging Technology and Pervasive Computing. See the following posts for more info
I am thinking of getting involved with all the emerging technology stuff, as my old XDA would be perfect for playing with it (assuming its battery lasts long enough), and so you may see some interesting posts from me after all…
update: 22:27
Well, we have done a whole pile more testing. One developer came in to write a fix for the installer. A build is supposed to kick off at midnight in order to produce a new version to do final checks on tomorrow and give us new real cd’s and dvd’s to verify…
Worth a pizza ?
I known several people, including a new friend from work Andy Piper who will tell you that shooting digital photos in JPG is like throwing away your negatives with a film camera. I personally have not seen any reason to use RAW as i cannot actually see anything that you can really do in RAW that you cannot do in JPG.
I searched and found an article on the subject: RAW vs JPG. This author thinks that there is little advantage in RAW as you don’t get much more from it than with JPG. One thing he did say you get is you can recover for 1/2 a stop underexposure with RAW slightly better than with JPG.
I use gimp for most of my hardcore photo editing, but try not to need to do much to my photos. Just as well as a raw plugin is hard to find. I am of the belief that once I have taken a photo that is what I have. Occasionally I may polish up the contrast/brightness curves to make it a little brighter, or adjust the colour balance to make the colour more natural, but for most shots I don’t do anything to them (unless I want to mix them up a lot (like the coral on the top of this site, which is actually snow covered branches).
I try to take all my photos with the proper exposure, and do tend to check my on camera histogram to check that the exposure is not way off. The camera does a very good job with white balance too. Unlike with my old Canon G2, on my EOS 300D I hardly ever need to set the white balance to anything other than auto - though this might be due to the fact that if I am taking photos indoors I almost always use a bounced flash to give me some more light (which works wonders most of the time though a tall roof or odd coloured root makes it useless). Generally though I don’t have to correct many photos, and when I do a simple colour balancing and simple histogram manipulations look great.
One issue I think people see is what the image looks like pixel per pixel at 100% on a computer. I hardly ever look at my pictures at that size, as that is really low res for printing… I like real prints of my photos (Yes, I need to get more of them as I hardly have any) as a real print always looks far better than the image on screen (assuming you have a printing company that has sense and doesn’t mess up the colours, or if you print your own you have to have the colour matching set up really well).
I welcome your comments and opinions on this issue, as while I may sound made up if there is a serious advantage for using RAW then I will. I can write a script to dump all my raw images to JPEG for the web, and I may even end up cleaning up all my images before saving them (which would be a first) so that I can save them as something that isn’t too proprietary (maybe something with some compression, preferably lossless)
