Thingomy.co.uk

I’m getting a little behind on things with the Blog as i have much do do currently.

I took a quick trip to Germany to see CeBit 2008 this is a large electronics Expo, handling everything from hardware, software, photocopiers, software, security systems, online services, basic components etc.

I spent 2 and a half days there.

the intel stand was insane — it was a building to it’s self, and they had some really impressive lights, mac2000s to be precise

TMobile wasn’t much better, it’s difficult to see just how big this really is, the puprple screens are full colour, ever changing visualisations of music from a live singer who is behind me. the screens loop al the way round the front part of the stand.

The following is a very odd contraption that seemed to be linked to an exercise bike with utterings of oxygen flow control and olfactory sense triggering. the contraption it’s self was more interesting — it was a pair of projectors, an arbitrarily curved screen, a bunch of software to seamlessly connect the images from the projectors, and a Canon 350d being used to automatically calibrate them:

Some really sodding scary survielence kit — with the stuff below (and a few added extras) it’s possible to wire a buildings cctv, a map of the building, and a bunch of computers together to give a location and biometric face recognition of every person in the building in real time, open doors automatically, detect mood from expressions, etc. The other wibbly toy is a scanning laser range finder, which is an idea I had years ago.

A company that had developed some safety equipment for use in mechanical systems, designed ot provide interlocks/warnings if straying outside a set of parameters had spent a huge deal of time developing a demo that involved a real (presumably off the shelf) model digger, with a joypad controling it. The joypad had 2 2d analog sticks, but the complete muppets had gotten the control system wrong. They had gone to all the trouble of developing the system, but were using a nonstandard control layout, I was most disappointed.

The photography hall was good — sigma was there in force, with one of every lens currenlty in production form them, including the slightly obscene 200-500 f2.8 (with 2x tc) that’s a 400d mounted on it. I had a go on that one.

There was also a bloke taking portrates with an almost as obscene medium format job, and the largest umbrella i’ve ever seen. I took the opportunity to practice my flash stealing techniques.

some other random stuff seen there — the last one is of to billboards, they have wheels, and move around randomly, I’m sure someone abducted R2D2.

A slight excursion was had to Hamburg for a day, this was the results. it was a good chance to practice using my new 16-80 lens:

Please note that until I return to the big smoke, my mobile will be very unreliable due to poor coverage, and other network issues up here. Feel free to contact me with it, but don’t be surprised if it fails. Email works, and so does my home landline.

Some people really do have way too much time on their hands:

http://www.recedinghairline.co.uk/files/c1c3be2fda2b218e858029a4bde7e96c-397.html

Aside from amazement that anyone has the time to even learn that stuff, it all looks reasonably sound except for a couple of points:

1) Interpuncts — the point (no pun intended) in principle may be fine, but I don’t see any issue with using a decimal instead, as you are literally saying “17 and 99/100″ this can be correctly represented as 17.99 — preceding it with a £-sign gives it a unit. This allows the rules of SI units to be used with currency. Now what really irritates me is people putting the pound sign after the value. I just shot myself in the foot.

2) More fundamentally, these rules that are being discussed came from somewhere, and in most cases (as with most of the modern English dictionary) it was extracted from common use and formalised. If everyone makes these mistakes, maybe it’s the rules, not everyone, that’s wrong.

In general however, this is an impressively set together post.