I was out taking photos again on Saturday and one of the things I was aiming for was to get some black and white shots. I'm useless at seeing in black and white so I'm never that good at it, but this image is the best so far. It's far from perfect of course, there is some white follage at the top left and the bottom left of the frame is a little dull but all in all I'm happy with it. I like the contrast between the shadows on the branches and their highlights and I think the branches...

I totally failed to get a Mono Windows Forms application to run under MacOS last night. I'm putting it down to my lack of understanding of how the Mac works and what's installed with my test system. I'll try it on real hardware at a later date. I did test out the look and feel under Windows more though and it doesn't look or feel that much like Windows. I'll have to dig into the theme engine to see what's going on and get an idea of where they are going. At this rate I'll end up submitting some code,...

I installed Mono 1.1.4 to take a look at where they're at and it's got the first integrated release of their System.Windows.Forms implementation. They've given up on building it on top of another framework such as Gtk# or using Wine and are now drawing the controls themselves so that they get really portable code. Realistically I know that it's the only way that they can do it, but I worry about the fact that they may not get the controls behaving 100% the same as under Windows (but that of course is easy to fix, if I find anything then...

It's cold and clouds keep getting in the way, but here's the best effort so far from tonights pictures. I know I can do better than this as I learn what I'm doing, but for a first attempt with a new lens I'm happy. As before the linked image is at 100% and just cropped to remove lots of black around the edge. The image is shot with an 800mm lens (400mm with a 2x teleconverter). One thing I'm finding now is that it's a lot harder to get the moon framed up properly. The moon takes up a large part...

I've looked and I've looked, but I just can't find a way to tell that a seek operation has completed in DirectShow. Am I just being stupid and looking straight past it? Can anybody help?

Here's the best image that I took last night: I think that's the quality limit of my camera and lens. The link is to the 100% image cropped down to size and sharpened in photoshop so there's no scaling involved. Hopefully my next picture of the moon will be much better.

I like the moon as a subject for photography. It's the easiest astronomical body to find in the night sky and it's easy to take pictures of it as well if you remember to expose it as a daylight object instead of a nighttime one. I've been playing around with pictures of it for a while now and I think I've hit the limit of what my lens can do sharpness wise. Time for a bigger zoom I think. Maybe it should be an L series zoom as well. I took some pictures last night with my current 300mm lens, but...

I took some sample images at the weekend using my new wide angle lens and although the pictures aren't great because I didn't put that much effort into them (I didn't even take a tripod with me) and the lighting wasn't as good as it could be they're what I was after in order to give myself an idea as to what I can now attempt, This image was just something I was trying to see how much I could fit in frame while looking through a window. I might try again and see if I can't get the light that's...

If you were, say, in charge of producing the film showing the highlights of a composers career, we'll say John Barry for now, for the british acadamy film awards what would your biggest priority be? Would it be trying to balance the amount of Bond compared to the rest of his work? Would it be choosing which Bond films to show? Or would it be to not show a short clip of an explosion from The World is not Enough, which was scored by David Arnold? In other news I seem to be able to identify Bond films by only seeing...

Today I developed my killer app. It fits all of the requirements for a killer app: It replaces a function in the OS that isn't good enough and it adds some very useful functionality. It replaces the functionality for copying files from my digital camera to my PC and mimics the way that if you're copying JPGs or the like then WIndows will copy the files to a directory based on the date on which you perform the copy (such as 2005-02-12). This would be really useful except for two minor issues. The first is that it doesn't support the...

It seems that Amazon only doesn't work if I use Firefox. This ditching IE thing is too hard.

Is it just me, or is Amazon.co.uk having big problems? I've been unable to check on the status on my orders for two days now and although the message says to try again in 15 minutes because it's down for maintenance I'm beginning to doubt that it's an accurate estimation of how long it will take. On top of that the book that I really need for this weekend hasn't arrived. It's even more annoying when a company you can usually depend on is having problems, if this was somewhere that I knew would be a little slow then I'd not...

I'm currently using the latest beta of RssBandit to read blogs and I have to say that although it's still far from what I really think I want it's still the best that's currently out there. The synchronising of state between multiple PCs seems much better than Newsgator and it's pretty nippy to use. I'd still like some podcasting support and using Firefox instead of IE would be nice. I might try taking the code I've been playing with and integrating it to see what happens, but then again I'm strapped for time at the moment so unless it involves...

Vegetius makes a lot more sense than Sun Tzu's "The Art of War". No stupid making the enemy general look at a traps pinned to a tree for this Roman. I think that there is a Sun Tzu cult of cool that means that everybody has to think he's great because everybody says he is. I disagree. And to counter the comment that I just know is coming: Yes Steve, you can borrow the book when I finish reading it so you can see what I mean. Maybe I should start posting which book I am currently reading, along the lines...

Last week I got a new lense for my camera to address the major problem with my digital camera, the fact that it's not that good at very wide angles. A 10mm lense on my camera is effectively a 16mm (although not really if you want to be accurate) but this lense is about as wide as I'm going to get. Or, I suspect, ever need. Finally I'm free to take the pictures of buildings that I keep wanting to take and never able to step back far enough to get into shot (Think of how Rowen Atkinson dies in...

I no longer seem to get comment spam, and so I am happy. Of course I don't know how many people are failing to send me real comments because I'm not saving the messages for later review since that would beat the point as I don't want to spend time deleting them. I'm going to try dropping the restrictions down a little bit anyway, I don't mind changing my rules when spams start getting through again as it's a pretty easy thing to do and I'd rather be as open as possible for comments.

After a few tweaks I think I now have all my comment spam being blocked. Again, let me know if you can't post a legitimate comment and I'll tweak. I took a look at SouceReader but I'm pretty sure that nobody is offering the features that I want with synchronising between different PCs and PocketPC. Newsgator comes close, but it's still not quite as good as I need. I'm hopeful that I can get what I want working with an existing client without too much work. I'd hate to have to support every version of RSS out there. Mind you there may be a...