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Awaiting my Canon EOS 300D

Last week I decided to upgrade my camera. Having had my trusty Fujifilm S602 Zoom for almost two and a half years, I decided I really wanted the flexibility of a digital SLR camera. I chose to upgrade to a Canon EOS 300D which is a camera that has come highly recommended for a while but is also on offer for an unbelievable price right now. It offers the flexibility I'm after, with the ability to change lenses and upgrade where necessary. I've had the desire to upgrade for a while now but pricing has been an issue - being a student I don't have too much money available, although the bits of web development work I do on the side certainly helps.

I'm looking forward to the camera arriving so that I can experiment with it. I had my heart set on receiving it today but it didn't show up in the post - hopefully tomorrow! This reminds me very much of the time I was waiting eagerly for my Fujifilm camera and it didn't turn up when expected.

Posted in Photography, Web at 11:01 PM on Thursday 31 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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Churchill: The Hollywood Years

Back at the start of the year I ordered a DVD of a movie which I was an extra in a year or so ago (maybe almost two years ago - how time flies!). Well, it was released on Friday and arrived through my front door at lunchtime today so of course I had to pop it in and watch it.

The basic premise of the comedy is that the Winston Churchill that we all know as the leader of Britain during the war, actually wasn't the leader of Britain during the war. In true Hollywood style, Churchill was actually an American GI and the guy who Britain knew as Churchill was only ever an after-dinner speaker, brought in to cover up the fact that it was the American's running the war. The movie is entertaining certainly, and has a load of British comics in it, camping it up to the best of their abilities. I think I'm glad I didn't pay to go and see this in the cinema as I got the impression it wouldn't work very well on a big screen, but certainly worth a watch on DVD if you get the chance. A nice, light hearted movie.

Can you tell which of the extras is me in this scene with Rik Mayall? There were so many takes of this scene as the directors seemed to be getting highly annoyed with the local production assistants and with Leslie Phillips fluffing a load of his lines. Holding a gun like that for a long time is not easy, especially in a stuffy uniform when the sun is shining on you all day.

Posted in Movies at 4:09 PM on Tuesday 29 March 2005 | Comments (1)
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Why do systems not talk to each other?

In the world of networks you can barely move without being subjected to a computer network in one form or another. They're everywhere and affect all parts of our lives, so why do we trust them implicitly when they can't even talk to each other?

Traveling back to the Isle of Man today for an Easter break, I came across this problem of systems not communicating with each other. Because two systems weren't talking to one another it created confusion amongst passengers. The passenger information display system at Luton airport was showing my flight in a slot ten minutes earlier than the scheduled one and with a different airline code. After checking the screen and not seeing my flight I instantly checked my ticket to see if I'd arrived on the right day.

After a little checking I noticed the flight and headed to the check-in desk which had the same, different, details. They gave me a boarding card with the original details and pointed me to the boarding gate which showed the wrong ones. The tannoy announcements came out with the original details.

Which am I meant to believe? What if there had been a major difference? Why was there a difference in the first place?

Admittedly this seems to have been a bit of a rant about Luton airport but how often do you come across systems which could communicate more effectively with each other than they currently do? How much could those improvements improve customer satisfaction? The simple answer is 'often', and 'very much' respectively.

Transport for London recently improved their experience for travellers in London by capping the amount one person spends daily on their public transport usage as long as they use their Oyster card. By collating all of the data collected across their vast network of entry gates and other card readers they work out how much each user has spent. This stage they have to do anyway to enable a centralised charging system, but they have gone a step further and introduced the cost-savings benefit to the system as well.

I suppose at any one time the ticket machine you are using may not know what has happened earlier in the day - especially in the case of busses, where there is no physical link to the rest of the network - but by the end of the day the central system will know what transactions have been made on each card and apply the benefits after that. As long as money isn't debited from the card instantly (or there is flexibility in the process) the user knows that they can travel as frequently as they like across London's transport network within one day whilst holding just enough credit for a day travelcard.

Mental note to self: post things earlier in the day so my brain isn't only half awake and not fully able to explain things!

Posted in London, Systems, Transport at 12:39 AM on Monday 28 March 2005 | Comments (1)
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Random photos added to side bar

I have just added a number of random photos from my galleries to the right hand side of each page of the blog. With me having over 700 photos in my photo galleries I thought I might as well make better use of them and show them here in the blog as well. Photos in the side bar of peoples' blogs is quite popular in the 'blogosphere', with Flickr being the photo sharing service which seems to be used most often. There is no need to use their code here to display my photos though as all of the photos are stored on the dankarran.com server and managed using a database I designed a few years back.

Posted in Photography at 11:40 PM on Saturday 26 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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Does Google think the world is flat?

Experimenting with Google Maps today, I was trying to see if there were any backdoors to maps of countries other than the USA and Canada - the only two countries they map at present. I tried changing the domain to maps.google.co.uk (and other country domains) and I tried adding parameters to the end of the URL but neither worked despite numerous attempts.

At that point I wondered what would happen if I scrolled across the Atlantic, maybe something would pop up that way. Nothing did, and the sea mysteriously went grey, but still they allowed me to scroll as far as I wanted. One thing that struck me as a little odd (despite them letting you scroll beyond the limits of the map) was that no matter how far I scrolled, I never came back to the maps of the USA and Canada. It's interesting that they have implemented a system which isn't based on a globe, it's still based on flat, projected maps.

I wonder what will happen when - I say when because almost certainly they will - implement other country maps. Will they use a completely separate system for each or will they try to stitch them all together so people like me don't get lost in the middle of the ocean? Multimap, one of the most popular British mapping sites, appears to get around this problem by using a map layer which covers more than a single country. I think the map data that Google Maps use also allows them to do this, so perhaps they will implement a single system but with local sites zooming to the country of interest when loaded.

Posted in Geographic at 6:31 PM on Saturday 26 March 2005 | Comments (1)
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Test posting from w.bloggar

This is just a test to see how things go with this new software I am trying out, w.bloggar. So far it seems to work quite well, and it has even allowed me to upload this image to my server. I think I'll be trying this out a bit more over the coming days and weeks to see if it works well with MovableType, the software which I'm using to run this blog.

Posted in Site at 5:14 PM on Saturday 26 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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Spin the globe

A visitor to my site signed my guestbook the other day with a link to his creation - a globe that you can spin to your desired location. It's fun to play with but I found the earth being turned upside down quite easily, and then not being able to figure out how to return it to the angle I wanted it at.

A few months back I was experimenting with NASA's World Wind software, which does a similar job but also pulls in data from satellite imagery and other aerial photo sources whilst also allowing you to zoom to a much greater detail. When it is all working properly you can zoom in and even look at mountains and other terrain in 3-dimensions thanks to the SRTM height data collection on recent shuttle missions.

(I still had the same problem of disorientation in NASA's software too!)

Posted in Geographic at 12:51 AM on Saturday 26 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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Cosmetic changes

Whilst I prepare the blog for launch, there will be some bits that do work, some that don't and some that are somewhere in between. So, if you have found your way in here whilst I'm still tinkering with it, please excuse the mess and I look forward to welcoming you back soon.

Posted in Site at 12:02 AM on Saturday 26 March 2005 | Comments (2)
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Transparent Screens - an interesting concept

Over the past few days there have been a load of pictures being posted to Flickr, a popular photo sharing website, about 'transparent screens'.

The idea is that you take a photo of your computer screen which has a background on it of the area behind the screen. Take this photo, for example. The person who took the photo has taken a photo of their desk with a lavalamp on it, set that photo as their desktop and then taken a photo of the two combined.

I think it's pretty clever - especially with some of the others where there are cats sitting behind the monitor with tails sticking out. They have to be perfectly aligned for it all to work.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Photography at 11:01 PM on Friday 25 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my new blog. I am considering starting up a blog, or web log, in addition to the news section of my main site. The news section will become more site-specific - the way it's been going for a while - but this blog will contain other bits and pieces that I find interesting, probably mostly in the world of photography, web design and development and geographic information.

The blog will go live soon hopefully, at which point I will announce it in the news section and link it from the rest of the site.

Posted in Site at 10:22 PM on Friday 25 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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