BinaryJam

I got a new camera, its a Canon EOS 400D (EOS Digital Rebel XTi).  So I’ve been having a play.  I’m no David Bailey by any means so I’ve been experimenting with it and things I do know something about.  Tech.

First Windows Live Gallery.  This is now my preferred photo management software.  I pull photos off cameras with this and let it organise the folders.  I use it for tagging my photos and viewing them quickly or using the search function and tags to locate specific photos I want to see or print.  I used to to Picasa2 but have now switched, Picasa2 was great and for bulk tagging fantastic, still better than gallery for that, but I only want one of these things on the machine so I dropped it.

Live Gallery has a great built in Flickr uploader that works far better than Flickr’s own, it even sends the tags up so no more lost tags.

So great, he’s telling us about a file manger, well yes but what’s great about this version is the built in Panoramic photo stitcher part.  The photo above was a series of snaps welded together in Live Gallery’s photo stitcher.  Now I’ve used them before and these results are far better than any I have used in the past so I can recommend having a go with this it makes some great photos.

So now you have you ultra massive photos how are you going to view them.  Well I tried some picture viewers on clients but due to the large sizes involved they tended to chug along a bit on my laptop.  Enter Silverlight and DeepZoom.  I mentioned before that live labs put up a demo of a site called PhotoZoom.  I have uploaded my Stitchers to this site and I can say that the results are great.

Take a look for yourself. 

And Lastly as I was taking loads of photos of this place I tried another technology that of PhotoSynth, this is interesting too, I love the panorama photo’s more but for those interested in how the same place would look in PhotoSynth go look at my Synths  here.

No more time to go into detail thought I’d let the results speak for themselves.

Today is sunday and the view in the picture is my street from the car when I just got home from swimming with J.  What the picture doesn’t show because stupid camera phones are too slow is the bird of prey. 

Our street is full of house martin nests in the eaves of the roofs.  What I think is a  kestrel seems to have got wind of this and I watched one pull a house martin right out of the air then claw it into the tarmac where it sat for a few minutes on the pavement corner right in front of me, it was my getting out of the car that scared it off, lunch in claw.

I just thought it was amazing to see a bird of prey in the burbs. 

I’m hoping kes will come back later tonight when the swifts are most active catching insects.

Having recently attended a developer course in Wss3 development I intend to update many of the old 2003 web parts and techniques I had previously developed.  However I have a backlog of stuff to clear at work and no environment to build them on as yet.  When I get time and VPC sorted I will get round to it.

So anyone interested in sharepoint might want to subscribe to the sharepoint category of this blog (or not), rather than read the trite and silverlight and sap and other stuff.

Cat went under the knife again, more teeth out.  She’s fine and apparently has kidney and liver function far in excess of a cat of her advanced years (16) and will most likely live a lot longer.

The cats are part of the family so despite no pet insurance I keep paying for the treatments.  I can’t “youth” my cats.

Now she’s home and getting better, I’m glad and fuss her endlessly.  However it makes me think why the hell did I get cats  in the first place.

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Whilst there have been some excellent demos out there and Im thinking Hard Rock here, this is undoubtedly the best so far and demonstrates what Silverlight will be fantastic for

http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/

This is RIA at its best.

Recently I had the joy of trying to work with some Web Services from a 3rd party system not written in .NET.  In this age of full understanding of XML and Interoperability and Basic Profile 1.1 compliance  this was of course completely easy.

NOT!!!!

This was a complete pain in the neck.  I had problems at every turn.  Our existing .NET web service that provides a similar service, soon to be retired though, was written in .NET 1.1. So I just wanted to modify it rather than do an upgrade.  The remote system used  Http1.1 Chunked mode.  .NET 1.1 does not handle this.  So .NET 2.0 here I come (I know I know that’s still legacy !).

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I’ve been running with Mozy now for quite a while.  I had big intentions of testing it logged in as various users and not logged in etc etc and seeing how it works in different scenarios.

Well I haven’t had time for any of that.  But then I have had no trouble with Mozy since installing it that would have made me make the effort.

It just sits there.  So long as I leave the machine on now and again it will back-up the changes.  I made some initial tests of downloading and comparing files and they were fine.

It works underneath Family Safety Software so no problems there. As I tend to stay logged in I can’t say I became worried about it working when logged off, and we tend to use the switch user capabilities, this can send it a bit funny but log every one out  and it sorts itself out again.  Which I tend to do as I don’t have enough memory in the lappy to leave lots of sessions running.

Whilst I have all the goodness of auto backups now it does effect how you do everything else.

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Well I finally got round to upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Wordpress. This is just a note to let those who know, know that Fantastico upgrade worked fantastico and I never had to mess with it at all, even with a custom theme.

Lovely.

Once again I like A Small Orange as hosters.  Bu then I am easily pleased lately.

A little story popped up on the BBC news site today entitled, “Excuse me sir“.

It’s about the number of people being pulled up by the police for taking photo’s in public places.

I’d like to take this time to point out to any UK reader, you are entitled to take photos in public of pretty much anything.  Including other people.  There are no privacy laws applicable for public places.  You may find schools and enclosed kids playgrounds have rules about taking photos, so if your kid’s in a gymnastics competition you need express permission, but this is because its not public property.  However a footy match on public ground you can take photo’s of your kid, his kid her kid the referee and the team captains dog.

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A while ago we got an ecoKettle.  It’s won awards for energy savings awards, but is it any good ?

It’s really simple to use.  You don’t need instructions to figure it out just plug it in fill it up and go.

It’s larger than a normal kettle, as it has to store more water than a normal kettle, you can fill both reservoirs if you want before starting a boil cycle.  The idea being that you fill one side and release what you need into the other as and when you want a cuppa, ideally only boiling one or two cups at a time. Of course when you have visitors you can fill it up once and get two cycles out of it.  When really full this makes the eco kettle quite heavy, but time saving.  Filled as intended and the kettle feels off balance in your hand, it’s like the top volume of water is pressing the lever of the kettle split and trying to force it down at the wrist joint.  So stronger wrists might be needed, not a pressie for your gran, unless she’s strong of course.

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