The orchids in the kitchen have gone mad. Each Sunday we listen to, but don't understand, the local gardening program, and a recurring theme is how hard orchids are to grow. We just leave ours on the kitchen window sill and wait.
Which seems to work quite well..
I've been messing around with images and for some time I've been using a free program called "The Gimp" which can do useful things like layers and transparency. It can probably do lots of other tasks too, but it is such a pain to figure out how it works that I will never know.
For some time I've been looking for a decent free graphics editor which doesn't make me tear my hair out, and luckily I seem to have found one. Paint .NET started life as student project and now is a very well specified graphics editor which is great to use. It has a bunch of artistic effects as well as those features that I need to create images for the XNA games.
If you are after a good program to work with images, take a look here.
Microsoft has put up quite a funny spoof web site to showcase mobile working:
http://www.untamedworkforce.org/
It is quite neat, but the links drop you onto the Windows Mobile web site, which kind of gives the game away.
However, I was very pleased to find that the best of these sites (in my opinion) is still live. If you've not seen "Escape from Yesterworld" before, it is quite a treat. I especially like the videos:
Taking of good links, which we were, Simon put me on to this:
They are little gadgets that you can load into your phone. A bit like the lovely PopFly, but for your mobile device. You can create and download gadgets into your phone, and the user interface is very neat.
They are written in Java, but I can live with that and they seem to work OK on my Smartphhone.
Zoe put me on to these. This is my favourite one.
If you've got a Smartphone with a free internet connection you might like to take a look at what Virtual Reach can do for you. They provide a neat RSS feed reader for mobile devices and also some quite cute services that you can use to get local information as well. And all for free.
There are a couple of patches that you might want to apply to your Vista machine. I've put them on two of mine, and whilst I've not noticed a huge improvement, they haven't made things worse....
KB938194:Improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista
<http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194>
KB938979: Improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista
<http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979>
We went to see the Simpson's Movie tonight. It was good, but not great. Around 2 episodes worth of good stuff spread over three episodes worth of time. Worth seeing though, just for some of the one liners. And I'm sure that if I watch it again I'll find a whole new bunch of things to laugh at.
Stephen put me on to this, which seems very appropriate. After some fiddling I came up with a Simpson's version of me which I'm reasonably happy with...
...perhaps because it doesn't look much like me at all.
My biggish camera can take pictures in RAW format. This means that rather than compressing and processing the image data when it takes a picture, the camera simply dumps the output of the photo sensor into a file. It results in rather large files (around 14Mb in my case) for each picture but it does represent the epitome of quality, as you get all the data from the picture. It also means that you can do things like white balance compensation (making sure that things don't look yellow, or blue or whatever) after taking the picture, rather than at the time.
I was taking pictures of Seoul at night, and unsure about the white balance, so I took a few RAW pictures as well. The bad news was that when I got home, I now had to convert them into proper images. Fuji, who made my camera, supply a truly horrid set of programs to do this. They don't work very well on Vista, and I've lost the disks, so I thought I was stuffed. Until I found this.
These folks have written an image decoder for Finepix cameras that does everything I want. It is free and it works. If you want to play with RAW images and get the maximum quality from your camera, you should download the program and have a play.
Raw Seoul
Alan sent me this link. Check out the Steampunk LCD monitor. Wonderful.
We went for a walk this evening, it was end of "Cottingham Day" and the fairground was just winding down. I had the camera with me (of course).
Hollywood comes to East Yorkshire
Barrel'o'Lights
All the fun of the fair
Daniel Moth has just reminded me that the Micro Framework book that I helped write is currently available at a 40% discount for the next few days from here. Get one. Get two. I think that you really need one for every room in your house...
If you want to find out about more reduced price deals you can subscribe to the UK MSDN Flash Newsletter here.
I love it when people you admire turn out to be good folks. I've mentioned "The Pitchers" comic strip before. This is a wonderful take on Hollywoodland from the point of view of a couple of aspiring script writers by a pair of talented artists called Berger and Wyse (they also did the title sequence from the BBC TV show "Hustle" - which should have won an award). With a bit of luck they might one day they do a book of the Pitcher strips. I'd buy it on day one.
Anyhoo, last week they mentioned a "Trip Hazard" character, a clear infringement of my intellectual property rights since I've been not writing new Trip Hazard P.I. episodes for ages. They did it again this week.
So I emailed them to tell them they would shortly be hearing from my lawyers. They shot straight back with this link which proves they had the name first, and told me that now I would be hearing from their lawyers. I hope they were joking. I was. Honest.
If you have nothing better to do this summer (and who doesn't) you might fancy having a go at the MotoDev game development challenge. You can write your game in Java, or even user C# and managed code to enter in the Windows category. Closing date is in the middle of August.
If you want some ideas about how to get started, you can always have a look at my articles on Smartphone programming with Cheese on MSDN.
I've always loved radio drama. It is amazing the atmosphere they can conjure up. And you can draw your own scenery in your head. If you want something well cool to listen to you should seek out and download some Johnny Dollar. Johnny the "freelance insurance investigator with the action packed expense account" had a series of radio adventures in the forties, fifties and sixties. Cracking stuff.
Why not use babies to sell petrol. Indeed.
I'm not sure how much of this is true. But if it all is, we are in for interesting times.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
