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.

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.

I got the cats when I was 22(?23) just married, just moved into new house and a friend had a litter of 50,000 kittens and would I like two?  Liking cats I agreed with the then wife and we had two lovely moggy kittens.

They have had no illnesses or problems until now 15/16 years later so nothing to complain about. 

However owning cats though has altered my choices of work, house, holidays ever since.  When offered a role in Seattle and having it subsequently cancelled before the move (along with 1000 others) I never fought hard for the same role but via alternate route after finding out that the cats would now be indoor cats as having a cat flap is inviting death and having them eaten.  This played on my mind and I let it drift on by, other things influenced me more on this but cats influenced me quite a bit.

The house I live in now was chosen due to its position in the estate with cats in mind.

I avoid two week holidays because I don’t want to put them into catteries. 

When I had the cats I thought they might peg out at 12-15 which didn’t sound that long when your 22.  But here I am now nigh on 40 and faced with the great and bad possibility of another “n” years and some cats can go on to 30.  Thirty years !!! I’ll be gone 50 if that happens.  While they are healthy  and happy and active I don’t mind but Holly just sits all day all night doing nowt but eat and sleep, Kryten is out and about and having fun ( I suppose whatever counts as fun for a cat ).

So what am I saying. 

Well if your young and thinking of getting a pet, think long and hard about how this will effect your life and if your ready for it.  I might have chosen differently if I knew how much of an effect the cats would have on my circumstances, I love them to bits and would never part with them, but things may have been a little different had I decided on a goldfish.

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

This is RIA at its best.

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 !).

Then I added the Web Reference to the test project called the method and nothing, all my values were empty.  I discovered that the returned values had a different namespace from that declared in the WSDL so the proxy class could not de-serialize it.

As a temporary fix whilst waiting for a patch to the other system I knew I needed to re-write the WSDL. 

The short version of this story is I managed it and found more bugs in schema compliance but could not have achieved this without a bunch of tools to help me and they are not the tools you might think.

First knowing that I was dealing with Java services and Interop was my main concern I was unwilling to rely no WSDL.exe to generate my proxy, also I wanted access to the response stream in my debugging so I using the great

WSCF - Web Service Contract First by Christian Weyer of Thinktecture.

This tool give you far more control over the generation of your proxy class than the built in Add Web Reference of Studio.

To test the WebService initially I tried using the handy but limited WebService Studio, now this is great for quick testing of .NET web services but just was not up to the job in this case so I was recommended

SoapUI.  This is a JAVA tool, horror of horrors!

This fantastic Web Service Workbench allows for the testing of web services and integrated Basic Profile compliance testing as well as a Test Workbench complete with Schema compliance validation testing and Load testing.  This is the new SoapScope only FREE.

Then lastly I needed to edit and validate the new WSDL I was hand crafting.  So a handy tool to edit and check was required and this is the probably the biggest sin the Microsoft developers bible

Sun Eclipse Java EE editor.

This is the Visual Studio for the java world.

The EE version of this comes with a plug-in for WSDL editing and validation. Without which I could not have achieved this.  It too is free unlike XML Spy and can be extended and extending with plug-ins, one plug-in I added was SoapUI so now I had an integrated development and test suite all in one handy workspace.

Moral of the story is just cos your a .NET developer don’t think that all your answers lie in Studio and windows binaries, Java would not have got as big as it had without a similar toolset to ours, and in some cases its a letter better than ours.

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.

Since Mozy my flickr updating has tailed off, my local backup has become non-existent and that whole grandfather-father-son stuff is important I am not sure that Mozy keeps historical stuff just.

Bad side. There has to be one.  My questions to Mozy support staff about my problems were slow in handling and then completely uniformed.  I don’t mind when someone says I don’t know, but I expect that to be followed by but we’ll fnd out, not why don’t you have a try.  After all It’s a paid for service.  Still I expect they have their hands full managing all that bandwidth and storage.

I can heartily recommend it, despite tiny niggles.

Lovely.

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

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.

If an official challenges you and orders you to delete the photo’s inform them they have no right and only a court order can force you to do so. Also if you waste my time by dragging me to the station expect a law suit, so perhaps you better check over the radio first.

Here is a real handy guide written by a lawyer that worth printing out and sticking in your camera bag to shove in peoples faces when they get in your.

http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php/2004/11/19/uk_photographers_rights_guide

This won’t stop you getting a punch in the face from angry people, but you can at least feel smug and content in the knowledge that you’re in the right as you tend a bloody nose.

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.

Whilst the top part of the kettle feels solid the base is flimsy by comparison and would just not sit level on the table no matter how much tweaking with the cable underneath.  Also it doesn’t fit tight so I always felt a wobble when putting it in position.  I didn’t like this.

The latch lid needs to close properly, always ensure you shut it right and its clicked into place.  Whilst using it we never had a situation when the latch did not close properly but it was always in my mind that it might not. Cos if you don’t shut it right when you pour your hot cuppa all the top reservoir will come flooding out, and I mean flooding as the potential energy it has compared to the lower energy for the pouring angle is much higher.

For the same volume of water as my old kettle this boils a bit slower, not excessively its still a fast boil, just not as fast as I was used to.

Be careful when you pour the boiling water.  Now because you only boiled what you needed, or an estimate of what you needed when you pour the water into the cup there could be more water than you needed, but not a lot.  So when you put the kettle upright that near boiling water as its started to cool already hits the hot boiling element at the base of the kettle and reboils extremely vigorously.  This has the effect of spewing boiling water out of the pouring nozzle and spitting, I’ve been hit by boiling drips a few times from this, you have to remember to gently return it to an upright position.

All in all whilst a great idea we decided to part with our eco Kettle.  I always felt I was going to drop it, It didn’t sit right on the work-surface, it only comes in white and we have stainless kitchen, its heavier, slower, I felt it could be a little dangerous if not careful.  We donated it to staff at our local school with the pointers to look out for.

We put our old kettle back which fits snug, looks good, boils fast, is smaller and lighter.  We just don’t fill it up all the way when making a tea, isn’t that much easier ?