What I thought yesterday...

Yahoo Account Theft... hohoho_christmas_hohoho

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 04:42:04 +1000

Just received a couple of yahoo messages askign me to go to a link on geocities 'hohoho_christmas_hohoho'.

It appears to be a phishing site designed to steal your yahoo id and password when you enter them, posing as a photo site.

If you've done so, I recommend logging into yahoo asap and changing your password.

A 160 Mp digital camera.. and a very cool battery

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 04:03:30 +1000

I came across this 160 Mp camera today. A real digital replacement for the film 6x17 camera, yielding a 950 Mb file (uncompressed) for the full 6x17 format. At 30k Euro, I don't imagine I'll be getting one any time soon - but it's a damn cool idea.

On a more affordable level is the rather wonderful USBCELL which produces a AA rechargeable battery which has a flip off head to reveal a USB socket. So you can recharge the battery by simply plugging it into a pc USB port. They have plans to produce specific versions for mobile phones and cameras, which would do away with the swag of custom battery chargers we all have to carry around.

Some shots from Lisbon trip

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 06:34:07 +1000

Taken on the M7 with B&W film, then machine scanned and touched up in Photoshop Elements 4. These are lower resolution jpeg's than the actual scans I worked on.

I'd appreciate constructive criticism, especially on my PS skills which are very basic ;)

Girls in costume in the Barrio Alto

The Santa Justa elevator

Men in a doorway in the Avenida area

Cobblestones above the Alfama

First review of Leica M8 (Digital)

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 06:24:12 +1000

So here's the first online review of a real Leica M8, due to be officially launched at Photokina this year. Looks like it will retail for around USD $5k, or GBP £3k... painful - but not as bad as some predicted.

Released alongside it will be a Tri Elmar M 16-18-21 mm F4 ASPH lens, which will work on film based M's as well. They won't be available in retail until November apparently, leaving a little more time to see actual image files and more review before parting with your money.

It's a beautiful camera - I hope it handles as well as the M7 and that the image quality lives up to the film cameras. The only thing I can't find any reference to is how it allows exposure compensation, hopefully it's a little more useable than the M7's dial.

What can you do with Picasa?

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 19:38:04 +1000

So I finally started playing around with the editing tools in Picasa. I've found it to be a great tool for managing lots of shots, but a little light on serious editing tools. However, I thought I'd try to see what could be done, using some of the shots I took in Austria last year.

This image uses the Focal B&W tool to desaturate around the lady in the red top. I also cropped it down from the full 35mm negative.

This one has had quite a bit of work, cropped down from full 35mm. I also used the Graduated Tint tool to darken the sky and pushed up the contrast.

Cropped again... and I warmed the rocks up a bit by inverting the image and using a Graduated Tint.

Glazed fruit buns considered harmful

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 11:19:56 +1000

So this morning I happily toasted one of the delicious fruit buns I brought home from Benito's last night. I idly wondered whether the sugar glaze would make a mess inside the toaster, but decided that it should be fine.
Went back to chat with my colleague James on Yahoo, only to smell the telltale burning odour of too thick a slice of bun in the toaster. "If I whip that out quickly it should still be edible and the smoke alarm won't go off..." oops... all that sugar glaze was now molten, and sticky, and pretty much glued to my hand.

Now I'd heard before that when making candy one has to be very careful with the molten sugar. Well, now I know from personal experience - molten sugar is sticky, it keeps on burning, its only redeeming feature is that it's soluble in cold water.

Am I glad that I know that the best first aid for a burn is to put it under running cold water - oh yes I am.

So if there's a moral to this story it could be that one should beware of grabbing hot buns, in case one ends up in a sticky situation and gets ones fingers burned. (sorry, I couldn't resist)

On another note - I read Joel's blog entry on software pricing last night, after it was forwarded to me by a colleague. He goes into some detail regarding demand curves, profit maximisation and price discrimination. It's a good read, and I agree with Joel that studying at least first year microeconomics is a damn handy thing to do, just in case you're a CompSci student wondering what filler subject to take to make up the points. Just don't sweat the daft graphs... you're really not allowed to use trivial algebra to solve the problem, you really do have to draw the four complementary graphs to get full marks on the exam ;)

Polaroid of my brother Jim

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 22:25:06 +1000

Found this old polaroid while clearing out boxes in my apartment. It was taken around ten years ago, in a warehouse in Fitzroy where Jim and I were living. I must have come by a pack of colour pola film cheap, would have been shot on the Hasselblad 503cx I had then.

Polas weren't as immediate as digital is, however I think they were more exciting to use. There was some of the alchemical mystery that you get in the darkroom around the process. At the time the most significant downside was that unless you used the posneg film, they were not really able to be reproduced. Guess thats not really such a problem now.

Where do complicated solutions come from?

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 00:15:06 +1000

I've been confronted recently with the need to come to grips with a rather complicated software solution. The complication in this case isn't just a particular piece of code, or in fact even just the code - peripheral things like the build process and the deployment are complicated too. The general justification for all this complexity is that the problem is complex, and therefore demands a complex solution. I'm not sure that a complex solution is quite the same as a complicated one, but leaving that aside, I just don't really buy it as an argument.

Flamenco, Manolo and Laura

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 02:05:02 +1000

This was shot years ago in a club in Fitzroy. Laura was (and probably still is) a very passionate flamenco dancer. I used fast colour transparency film, I forget which one - I think there was a 1000 ISO extachrome around at the time.

Dave at the European, taken by May.

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 01:14:16 +1000

This Image is actually black and white, shot on 3200 TMax. I accidentally scanned it as a colour neg in my film scanner and I liked the effect so here it is.
This was taken the same evening that I took the shot of the wine bucket that I posted previously.

New scanner - Epson 4870

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 23:49:08 +1000

Theory of Constraints (Agile Management For Software Engineering, David J. Anderson)

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 01:52:44 +1000

I've just started reading Agile Management for Software Engineering, by David J. Anderson. In the very beginning he talks about the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which he characterises as finding the constraint in your process (the slowest link) and tuning the entire process to that speed. The effect is to minimise inventory by achieving a continuous flow of production.

A couple more black and white scans

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 10:10:11 +1000

Both photographs of gates coincidentally. Both needed some retouching in photoshop, partly because I haven't always been kind to my negs - and these ones are 20 years old or thereabouts (not sure what that is in neg years). I'm going to have to figure out how to put nice borders around these jpegs to stop the white areas bleeding into the background.

another day, another scan

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 19:41:15 +1000

what I did with my new film scanner (and photoshop)

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 22:25:10 +1000