Thingomy

Physics quote of the day:

As time tends away from the instant of first observation, the average position and velocity of a Battenberg particle tends towards that of my stomach.

I have spent some time today uploading old images that had managed to escape the net, and hadn’t been uploaded before. Some of them have been up elsewhere.

More are available form my gallery

Some knitted items (including an elusive Haggagus) by http://foxymitts.deviantart.com/ and a dice bag.

Some commisioned photographs for Lauraine Peterson Bridalwear

Some play with smoke and mirrors I did a couple of years ago

My former flatmate, Taro

Some beltane related stuff

Having not uploaded anything in a while, and having recently accomplished somthing that I’ve been trying ot do for a while, I thought I’d share.

Click to blow up.

That was taken out of my bedroom window the other day. I may well try do do somthing better at some point in the future, but it’s such a rare phonomen to get even a blue sky let alone one with vapour trails in it, I doubt it will be any time soon.

Note that I’m planning to play around with my gallery software using this post as a guineypig, so if the image isn’t displaying properly or errors start coming up, please prod me.

If you aren’t technical, you can stop reading right now, because you are going find nothing useful here.

Java is interpreted in c++.
I just attempted to run a java based Conway’s Life simulator.
The simulator was preloaded with a Conway’s Life implementation of a Turing machine.

Guess what: it blue screened windows.

I’ve just got back for london.

The purpose of the trip was to catch up with a couple of friends (check);get away from normal life for a weekend (check) and to see some random stuff (check)

list of activities partaken in includes:

Chistlehurst caves — it’s actually an old mine with 20 milesish or tunnel (apparently), not a cave at all, it’s in london, and has a lot of history, including use as an air raid shelter, ghost stories, part of an old doc who episode was filmend there, etc.

Brick lane — it’s a street with many curry houses on it, we had some very nice food there indeed, would happilly go back.

Had a good rake around some electronics shops — I was disapointed to find out that one of the purcheses that I’ve been saving up for is actually not up to the job I had in mind. I did however have a good gogle at the available options in the sony style shop. would you believe that they still have cassette take recorders for sale?

The tube — I’m getting the hang of this actually, it’s insanelly complex, but the oystercard makes the money situation really easy to cope with at least.

Got rediculusly drunk — twice, which is impressive, because I only had 2 bottles of cider the entire time I was there.

Had a very odd encounter on a train — in runcorn on the way back up. I changed train in crewe, and when it pulled up, I was surpised to find that it had more first class than it had anything else, I thought little of this, and moved down the train to the standard class bit. on pulling into runcorn, I saw a large group of stuffed suits walking past the train, and half the carrage started to speak to each other. One of the last of the stuffed suits cought my eye, because he was slinging a pair of canon dslrs and a 70-200f2.8. It turned out ther non other than Gordon Brown (who I don’t like very much) had just gotten off my train.

Took very few photos — this wasn’t really an aim of the trip, I did take the camera and took a load in the caves, but I doubt many of them really came out too good. They make the intermitents later.

Having not posted in a while, and having some good photos lying around, I thought it was a good idea to kill 2 birds with one stone.

My cat, Jasper:

I managed to take a photo of an event before it happened from hundreds of miles away, and all without knowing I’d done it…

In actual fact it’s a photo of Samhuine that I took last year.

Samhuine 2008

Beltane main web page

JR

There has been a lot of work done on this porject over the past days. Matt Williams has created the following:

Descussed further here:OSM GB-Talk archives. The method used to create this is not really sustainable, but once things are devoloped a little, we should be able to create similar results with only a little user interaction.

Milliams’ Verticality Meter has been set up and used to catagorise the images as to thier verticalness, with great results, the following map gives the output: map

This project was sponsored by ITO World Ltd who organised the project in the first place. Travelline are working with us to strongly support the improvment of maps. At the end of the day, the plan is to create mapping data by tracing the images to further enhance the data on OpenStreetMap.org.

I got a new job.

It’s working for Liverpool University, School of Archeology, the Classics and Egyptology; as a computer tech.

I will I’ll put some updates up here with more information about what I’m doing once I start… tomorrow.

It appears that some people looking at this stream don’t actually know what’s going on. About a week ago I got an email telling me that a company called ITO World were looking for somone with a camera to volunteer to go up in a plane and take an areal survey of Stratford-upon-Avon. I enquired what the deal was, and true to my usual form I got roped in before I knew where I was. It was however a fantastic experiance.

I haven’t imported all the images yet, but i’ve gotten to 793 so far — and the vast majority of them are fully usable.

I do feel like a bit of an idiot in that I managed to take 231 of them mis-focused — they are still perfectly usable — you can still see car windscreens, but they have rounded corners, not square ones. They just don’t have the same crispness to them.

I did have a worry that there would be large gaps in the coverage — but judging from the number of buildings that i’ve seen in about 10 images, I don’t thik it’s goign ot be a big issue. there may be some places near the edge of town that are only covered at low resolution, but it should be fine.

Now if someone would please inform me of the best way to ortho-rectify 900ish images, I’d be most appreciative… the collection is here, can be exported in a matter hours, however it ammounts to about 10GB, so is niether webable nor emailable.

There is another batch of photos up on flickr — these are some of the more aesthetic images I found, but these are at the resolution and angles that I did the whole town at. See here

I should also mention that Travelline are working with us to strongly support the improvment of maps. At the end of the day, the plan is to create mapping data by tracing the images to further enhance the data on OpenStreetMap.org.

The following should show up properly on my blog, appologies if it displays wrong on other systems, these are duplicates of 2 of the images on flickr: