A shiney new toy
Last updated: 24 Aug 2007 - 20:39
Camera: A photo of my shiney new EOS400D DSLR.
I have just become the gleeful owner of a Canon EOS 400D digital camera. This stunning marriage of optical and electronics has already given rise to some pretty impressive pictures and will hopefully produce more during my up-coming visit to the north-west region of France.
Since shortly after this site started and I got my trusty JenOptic JD3300z a 3.3 megapixel digital camera with a surprisingly good lens and some decidedly unusual features (manual exposure adjustment, focusing etc.) I have become increasingly interested in photography. I would never consider all that messing around in dark rooms developing pictures, I haven't got the patience. Nor have I the money to buy film after film to experiment with. However digital photography has neither of these concerns.
USB, Ubuntu and Generally not Plug and Play
Last updated: 15 Aug 2007 - 19:20
In the past couple of weeks I have come across some mind-bendingly peculiar decisions in Ubuntu's default package selection particularly in relation to USB, and also how ridiculously over complicated USB really is.
Wordsearch...
Last updated: 15 Aug 2007 - 19:14
A particularly crazy idea I had whilst looking at a word-search on a box of breakfast cereal. I don't particularly like word-searches they seem rather dull to me. The idea of being trapped in one for indeterminate amounts of time is quite horrifying. How you can be in a word-search I'm not sure, but I bet a theoretical quantum physicist could come up with some explanation...
The style of the drawing owes a lot to xkcd.com which is a brilliant web comic of considerably more intelligent humour.
MATLAB - Radians to Degrees
Last updated: 05 Aug 2007 - 20:14
Written at the same time as the degrees to radians function as a compliment to it. Again, the function is incredibly simple, however, it's a handy thing to have in your path anyway. It's also a really simple function, showing the syntax to create a function that takes an argument, returns a value, and has a documentation string (if I remember correctly just type help r2d into MATLAB and it should describe the function if it's in your path.)
MATLAB - Degrees to Radians
Last updated: 05 Aug 2007 - 19:03
This is one of the earliest bits of MATLAB code that I wrote. It's basically a one line function that converts an input value in degrees to radians. The code is so simple I have no doubt that all users of MATLAB would be able to write it with a few moments of thought, however, I often found it useful to have this function in my path when writing code to allow me to call it without having to think, e.g. sin(d2r(alpha)) where alpha was the angle in degrees.
Brown takes over...
Last updated: 27 Jun 2007 - 21:20
Gordon Brown is tonight assembling his new cabinet. He is having some difficulty with the alan-key supplied but insists that getting the new cabinet from Ikea was a good plan.
Major re-write
Last updated: 29 May 2007 - 13:04
You may notice looking at the site that it looks slightly different, actually it's totally different, it just happens that it appears to resemble the old site. Over the last 4 days I have written the entire site as you see it now from scratch, over 2000 lines of code. Plus migrating all the old content to the new database structure.
Ah what blissful optimism!
Last updated: 12 May 2007 - 23:49
I've just caught a glimpse of the end of the last article I wrote on Tuesday about being finished the mouse project, and how I had plenty of projects and revision to be getting on with so I wouldn't be sitting around bored just yet. Well, it's amazing how quickly you forget these things but over the last couple of days I've realised that is actually, by definition what I should be doing, as I think it can be absolutely proven that revising = sitting around getting bored.
A kind of anti-climax
Last updated: 08 May 2007 - 19:57
The mouse project that I've been working on for about three months is finished. It seems like an age since I've not been able to think, "well, I could always get on with some mouse project." In all, I think I could call my mouse a success, it came second over all, but it was kind of disappointing to have to hand it in and know that the hardware and software are now static, apart from the slow degradation of time.
Environmentally Friendly, and a Great Name
Last updated: 30 Apr 2007 - 18:53
Flicking through this weekends Slashdot articles, I came across plans for a 40MW solar power plant in Ontario. This interested me immediately as I've just finished a piece of coursework on Solar Power plants (admittedly orbital ones, but solar none the less). However reading the body of the article I noticed that it is to be built near "Sarnia" in Southwestern Ontario. Sarnia of course being the Latin name for Guernsey the island that I'm from. It appears Guernsey people have been there for a while!