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.

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.

As you may have read I have been playing with GIS data.  Much of the sample data I have to play with is broken down by postcode.  Which makes life really simple, here for example is a map of the number of aardvark owners in a particular region plotted by registered aardvark club houses.  This map lets the club owners see the current club houses and distribution of people by postcode.  This way they could see if they need to site a new clubhouse or the effects of moving one.

I had a list of all  (most at least) the UK postcode sectors by lat/long.  My member data was by partial postcode. So the first thing I had to do was modify my matching postcode data to fit with my people data.   I did this by creating a new table of larger postcode areas and an average centre point for that new location.

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Considering great advancements have been made in linux installs, why is it so hard when it goes wrong.

My ubuntu attempt failed miserably, I admit I’m trying to install it on an old old machine, but if it boots into ubuntu, which is full blown linux from CD why does it fail miserably to install.

Were I not familiar with windows and linux and partitions I would have a dead machine by now, had I been a normal user trying this I would be stuck.  Having tried googling problems all I find are forums filled with fanboys slaggin off each others distro.  The level of support I have found in the community for linux is abysmal compared to windows.  At least MS has support.microsoft, ubuntu’s equiv was pitiful.

Now after clearing down the disks and doing a Suse install, which went great until reboot time, I find myself in the same old situation.

I’m confronted with a white screen.  Completely blank. The forums are of no use whatsoever, again.  If I were a normal user then again I have a dead box with nowhere to turn because I didn’t buy this thing.  The linux boys would have you believe that linux is a great alternative for everyone to windows, but it aint, its a long long way from being an end user product.  It’s great for techies like me with a bit of knowledge but not for the rest of the world.

In case your wondering how I fixed the white screen. Here’s how.

Its a window manager problem.  It’s trying to display at a resolution or color depth or sync rate not compatible with your monitor.

First you need to get to a normal Terminal Window, this can be done by pressing ctrl-alt 1 or 2 and will switch from the white screen to a text login.  Login using “root” as the user and the password you gave during the install.

I tried running a program called Sax2 but as the window manager was already running it said could not open device.

So I ran “mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old”

Then “cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.install /etc/X11/xorg.conf”

Switched back to the window manager screen with Ctrl-Alt-F8 and hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace twice, this kills the windows manager and restarts it in the nastiest way possible.

But hey presto it worked, it started in a low-res mode.  Then I could use the interface and programs to set it up properly.

If you are thinking of having a go on linux, do it on an old machine so you can at least do stuff whilst the linux machine is dead.  Buy a book complete with Distro, it wil help you no end in trying to fix your problems,  I relied on an old RHat7 book I had to gain the knowledge, its transferable knowledge for most of it. 

Give it a go but tread lightly.

So it looks like things are really starting to swing towards blu-ray in the war of the HD formats on disc.

In this announcement (taken from the register) Warner Studios have decided to drop HD-DVD from the supported formats and plumb for blu-ray only.

It’s a real shame that this format war is being fought with content providers instead of what is the best technology for the consumer, I’m not advocating either technology here, just that with studios now dropping HD-DVD and blockbuster only carrying blu-ray, for some of us the only movie rental store available nowadays, that the technology of choice is obviously blu-ray and is being made for us.

Saying this I’m still not ready to put my hand in my pocket and buy a HD player, only when one of the formats stamps the other into the muddy ground will I do it.  I have been burnt by a format war before, I went with the +RW option, spent quite a lot on a burner to find that -RW media was cheaper (at the time) by a lot and then dual format players were released at a fraction of the cost some months later. 

I have a love hate relationship with sony for many reasons, I got burnt in some way or another on my cd burner, Mini DV cam, Laptop, mp3 player in fact the only sony device that truly worked for me from the time I bought it was my PS2 and I sold that to get an xbox (v1) (doh!).  Not to forget the PSP, it works perfectly, except it’s too precious to take anywhere I’m scared of damaging it.

I’d like blu-ray to win, it give me an excuse to buy a PS3 !

Ok, Ok, so it’s old news.  But now I have control over my blog I can add things like google analytics. It has a great map function and from that I can see where my traffic is coming from. 

What this does show is I have a reader in India and I’d just like to say.

“Hi Guarav, how’s things back in Bangalore, how did you tech-ed pitch go and send me your contact details”.

So you can’t get better targeted blog postings than that all triggered by Analytics.

For those who know I have been creating Silverlight project demos that work in conjunction with sharepoint. Some, like the template, just exist inside a webpart, others like the photoviewer and more lately the videolibrary read sharepoint lists to get their data.

So far all of these have been silverlight 1.0. There are a variety of reasons for this, mainly I don’t have vis studio 8 and all the extras. I still don’t, but I was curious as to if it were possible to embed 1.1 projects as part of a webpart.  Today I got my answer.  Yes.  It is possible to get 1.1 parts as part of a sharepoint part.

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So, i’m sitting down on the sofa and the boy is sitting next to me. Then he starts to rub his foot by his face repeatedly . What on earth are you doing ? I asked.I got dog DNA he replied. ROFL.=

On Saturday I took J for his first indoor climbing session and proper climb.  We had done a little bouldering with me holding the scruff of his t-shirts and stopping him before he got out of manageable handling.  But this time it was for real, ropes and harnesses.

We went to a place in Birmingham called Creation indoor climbing.  This is not a bad little place, actually its reasonably large and for those who remember “the Rock Face” (probably one of the best ever climbing walls with a huge 75 ft overhanging lead (23 metres))  it has the old bendcrete wall covering large portions of the site.  It’s bouldering is a little shabby  which probably comes from the large surface area the not particularly thick landing mats cover.  The climbs are well labeled in the french grading system, something that I’m getting used to now, makes more sense for indoor routes.

Back to J, he had a great time, whilst I don’t think I have a budding Ben Moon on my hands, yet anyway, he had a good attempt at climbing.  For a child he has an over developed sense of danger and was concerned he would hurt himself, something he didn’t have climbing outdoors when he tried to climb higher than I would let him.  One of the problems with teaching a five year old is that you cant teach them to just jump off and feel the rope catch them, if they don’t feel comfortable, and what first timer does, they just won’t do it.  An adult you can say just jump off I’ll catch you and they do, whether you catch them well ….. of course you do and they learn with each fall to trust the belayer.  I’m hoping to take him again this weekend if I get time.

Some of the best news in a long time for climbers is that another wall is opening in Birmingham.  The people behind it I have considerable faith and trust in, all committed and experienced climbers.  For those who remember the Rock Face, “Phil” is project manager.  The new wall is called RedPoint and opens sometime in September.  With the list of facilities and people involved I have really good feelings about this place, and its easier to get to than Mos Eisley (Mosely, Birmingham).

Technorati tags: climbing, indoor climbing, sport climbing