Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5

Posted on

Eclipse is one of the those software tools, that I now wonder how I ever managed without. OK it can be a bit slow, and cumbersome, ok I'm ending up with loads and loads of Eclipse installations on my machine. We've fallen for the same problem as with Java... no one producer wants to take risk of shipping with a version of the product they haven't tested with...

any way...

Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5 is now available, and I will be updating to that to see what is new and great. The 'New and Noteworthy' pages are good but simple innvoation to help you keep up to date with the project.

Some things I will be checking out

  • Drag and drop in text editors
  • Hyperlinking in text edtiros

Photographic Workflow: Managing file formats

Posted on

An important part of the process of digital photography I think is establishing a 'workflow' that works for you (pardon the pun). Workflow may sound like it is something that is the domain solely of professionals, but even if you are amateur maybe only taking a handful of pictures it is, I would assert, very important.

I'm now posting to various different photosites, such as Photo.net, Flickr, Pixola, and various stock agenices. Each require a specific quality of image. Different resoultions, file formats, and maximum file size.

Whilst any photo tool can handle this type of transformation, I was looking for something more streamlined. So I'm currently investigating using ImageMagick

Some articles on using this are on developerWorks, an odd place for a photo article but never mind. With a great tutorial site on creating thumbnails.

More will be posted on this topic !

An alternative that I was considering pursuing is the use of Python and the Python Imaging Library 

Flickr

Posted on

Just started using Flickr! Previously I've posted to sites such as photo.net (which I must get back to using btw), Flickr is certainly offerieng something more. I think the attraction for me, as a software developer, is the additional APIs that are available to interact with it. One good collection of links of many.

Some notable Flickr extensions that have so far caught my eye.

To see my own space in flickr go here

The killer app?

Posted on

Spreadsheets are credited as being the killer applications for PCs. My mobile phone does an incrediable amount, including would you believe it the ability to make phone calls. It also has a camera; being an amateur photographer the camera on my phone is not one I would really want to use for taking images.

However I think I might have found a use for it. Being a software engineer we often draw all sorts of things on whiteboards. These are very transient data, but with a camera phone I can finally give these whiteboard drawings some sort of persistence. So I have in mind an application for my phone that will help me persist whiteboards.

So far I don't think there is a killer app for our powerful mobile phones - perhaps this will be it?

Well a bit of googling has found a couple of interesting things. There are 2 sites set to which you can email/MMS an image, and a PDF will be emailed to you. scanr and qipit. Both look useful services. A samples I've seen look pretty good. but I have one concern. Primarily that my employer would not like to me send copies of whiteboards to just anybody.

This leaves some form of local processing. A basic image manipulation program has enough featues; some of the work flow is described here

Now my next task is to encode this in a script, to make the images quick and easy to process.

Photo directory auto-resize

Posted on

IDEA:

Watch a directory on windows, and when I copy an image file into, resize it based on an existing script.

I upload to various online photo sites. Flickr's upload tool will do the resize for me, but others don't; they all have different requriements for size, resoultion etc. So I'll have a directory per site, and scripts set accordingly.

Using the following code snipet would be the first step to doing that I think.

http://www.codeproject.com/file/directorychangewatcher.asp

The usefulness of things… or why things do come in handy

Posted on

I'm a horder (or should that be an horder?) It pains me to see things thrown away, that to me have no value, but still retain something about them that could be useful in the right context. Of course by this definition nothing would be thrown away. This is a state that we should be in. Landfils are getting very full.

In the part "the old days" of computers when I first started using them, floppy disks could be 5.25" wide - and really floppy. There was a notch on the side of the disk that you could cover up with a small sticky label. This had the effect of making the disk protected against being overwritten.

Time of course moves on, and the systems that used this disk have gone by (or collecting dust in my garage). But I still kept those labels in an envelope full of various different types of labels. 15 years later we were packaging up some greetings card to sell for charity. We needed some small sticky labels to seel the packets. Those old 5.25" labels came out.

So next time you think "that might just have a use" save it, but be prepared to wait for 15 years!

Waste not…

Posted on

I posted this on my previous blog a while ago. It's still a very relavent topic so I've added it here.

Last year we went on holiday to the Isle of Skye, staying in a self catering cottage. In the week there, one thing surprised me more than anything else. It was not the stunning beauty of the landscape; but something that happened after dinner.
We had instinctively separated out our recyclable waste—plastic, glass bottles etc. However there was no separate recycling scheme evident—as there is in Hampshire. To send something that was recyclable to landfill seemed incredibly irresponsible.
The notion of responsibility came back to me in recent weeks, when I read about Winchester City Council’s suggestion that non-recycling waste only be collected once every two weeks. This caused concern by some, primarily health issues. I think though there is a deeper reason why there might be concern.

We have lost the notion of responsibility for the waste we produce. So long as it “disappears” from the front of our house every so often we are happy. Every day in the UK every person produces somewhere between 1 and 2kg of waste. Most of which just ends up in a hole in the ground, and there it will stay for a time longer than our lifetimes. On average only 12% is composted or recycled.

Take responsibility for your waste – reduce, reuse, recycle. Reducing the actual production of waste is ultimately the best – we can really avoid the problem!

Reuse is the second thing to attempt – yoghurt pots are great for storing odds and ends. I’ve loads of big yogurt pots in the garage holding screws. If we can’t reuse, then we must try and recycle.
Think Globally act locally.

For more information on waste, and how to reduce, reuse and recycle visit this website.
http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/HouseholdersRecycling.htm