I had a mess about with Photosynth today, Microsoft's new 3D image viewer software that stitches together all your shots into an interactive environment

I put this together quickly just as a tester for the software, this image only contains 14 images although it is recommended to take a few hundred for a good synth.

You may need to install a plugin for your browser to view the synth although it is just a small download for anyone using broadband.

Lately I have really been getting into photography, a quick glance at my flickr account demonstrates that. I have been trying to put together panoramic shots of some of the wonderful views we have here, but the static panorama shots just cannot compete with the power and versatility of Photsynth.

I shall continue with this experiment, be sure to check out my Photosynth user account page and see what else I can conjure up.

I came across this the other day and I am still amazed every time I watch it. This must have taken these guys ages to do this, like I said, amazing.

You can find more fantastic videos from these guys at their Vimeo page and on their website at blublu.org.

Its the little things in life that make you happy.

The various web standards initiatives have now been going for quite a few years, educating web developers about the optimal ways of coding web pages.

There are still many web developers out there that are either;
• too old to learn new things
• haven't heard of web standards!
• do not validate their code
• just cant be arsed

An example of this is shown here, this was taken from a website I have been asked to integrate into a CMS, I also feel it is my duty to remove non-standard elements or at least tidy them up a bit.

I found this piece of code;

<td bgcolor="#333333">
  <div align="center">
    <font color="#ffffff" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">
      <strong>
        <font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">
          nbsp
        </font>
      </strong>
      0.1%
    </font>
  </div>
</td>           

Now for anyone that knows even the slightest bit of HTML they will recognise that this is just a bandwidth consuming piece of crap, god only knows what the developer was thinking!

This can easily be replaced with;

<td>0.1%</td>

Then the style rules are placed within the external stylesheet such as;

td{
    background: #333;
    text-align: centre;
    color:#fff;
    font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 2em;
}

There really is no excuse for this standard of coding in todays world. The Web Standards Project and the W3C have been trying to educate developers to produce code that is clean, legible and semantic, this is neither.

The saddest part is, you would expect this code to have been produced years ago in the dark ages of framesets and tables but no, this was produced no more than 10 months ago!

I shall refrain from naming and shaming the developers, but you know who you are!

Yay! today it rained, well its still raining now as my ever faltering electricity is testament to.

Previously, in my old life(!) I never really had to worry about water, as in, you turn on the tap and water comes out. Here we have a water-well (no government water access for us), the problem with it is that we live up a rocky mountain and the water-well is only 5m deep. Apparently it cannot be dug any deeper due to the hard ground.

So when the washing machine has been on twice, and we've had a couple of showers and maybe done the dishes, that's the water in our tank nearly done!

So, even though when it rains and the electricity constantly goes out, it is a very welcome sight because we can fill up the tank at the house and not have to worry about having enough water to flush the toilet!

..really, yeah its been a while since my last blog post, for multiple reasons really, although mainly because I have been busy lately.

Well, since the last post I have been back to the UK, to Bangkok twice, finished a project and won another.

So December/January has been quite a good period for me, I have recently finished off the redesign for Sitara Village, a luxury eco-development located in Thong Nai Pan. It has been a good project for me, although the timeframe got a bit dragged out waiting for the client to decide upon the site copywriting.

December saw me flying back to the UK for the first time in 3 years which was a bit of a culture shock being re-inserted into western society (and weather) even for such a short period. If you ever get a chance to go to Scotland, do not go in December!, and especially don't arrive at Edinburgh Airport wearing shorts and flip-flops, that gem is taken from experience; although it should have been common sense really!

My return to the island has seen me really throw myself into my work, I have a few more projects in the pipeline after a bit of severe brainstorming over the last few months. Two of my 'ideas' has forced me to learn the Ruby programming language, of which I am a few weeks in, hopefully over the coming weeks I will have created enough of the code to get them on-line and get some testers to help me iron out the final look and feel of the sites.

My brainstorming sessions have given me a few new ideas, a few of them are sites that are specific to the island which include functionality for maps, travel timetables, accommodation and a business directory. Of these ideas the only ones that people have previously made are the accommodation brokers and travel agencies selling resort bookings to tourists. This is the biggest business on the island and I really should have got this site up and running a long time ago. It is only now that I have managed to get everything in place that I would need to enable me to pass on bookings to the resorts, the coming weeks should see a lot more activity on this project and others like it.

Any more news and I will announce it here first.

It's that time again, the Crestock Photoshop Competition is opening this week. The sample images were released last week but I only found the time to download them on Friday.

An interesting new twist to the competition is that this year they are suggesting themes for each round, setting a certain style that the entries will take.

The theme for the first round is 'US Election Propaganda Posters' and with the supplied stock images I am sure the entries wont disappoint.

My entry, shown above, was heavily influenced by some of the old soviet style propaganda. The composition of the armaments lined up down the sides as opposing forces really suited the supplied stock images well.

Here's hoping I do better than last year.

Remember, it only takes a minute to register and vote at Crestock, so if you like my entry, please vote for it.

I received an email this morning through my Flickr account regarding one of my pictures.

A social news website journalist was compiling a story about some new fossils that have been discovered and they wanted to use one of my pictures in the story.

Are the American election candidates getting to you, dont vote for them; vote for me instead.

http://www.tsgnet.com/pres.php?id=357563&altf=Sbz&altl=Ojnnp

For a while now I have been running this site using Wordpress as the main CMS. For the last few weeks I have been dealing with the site getting hacked 3 or 4 times a week. Regardless of the security tweaks that I tried to implement to stop this, it was still happening regularly.

Quite why it was possible to change many of my files that should have been protected I do not know, possibly due to a bad plug-in, but I cannot be sure. So by Friday morning I had had enough and it was time for a drastic change, I had now been using Wordpress for a while and I feel that I have tried to get the best out of it, yet it has failed me on numerous occasions.

So for the uninitiated, I have now ported the site over to using Drupal to manage the content, which was no easy task.