Alan’s Blog

Google Chrome First Thoughts

September 2nd, 2008

Well I like it it a lot for all the reasons that Google tell me that I should, except for a couple of things :

1. I cant work out how to detect RSS feeds on a page. Even if i could detect them its seems there is nothing I could do with them as when i click on little feed icons i just get a nasty dump of the xml. It must be me but so far I cant find a way around it. I definitely miss my live bookmarks and sage plugin for firefox.

2. I don't get a new tab with a right click on the tab bar. I guess I will get used to that

Other than this its great. It's snappy and so far I haven't found compatibility problems.

Of course this is WAY more than a browser. Goodbye Microsoft. I give you 5 years!

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A lesson about leaking strobes

August 15th, 2008

My Ikelite DS-125 strobes come in two pieces, the expensive head bit with all the extremely expensive electronics and a relatively inexpensive (relatively is the key word) battery compartment. Now what I didn't know is that the expensive electronics are sealed from the batteries. It says this in the manual and if I had known this when my strobe showed signs of flooding I would have got straight out of the water and would have had a chance to rescue the electronics.

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Posted in Under Water Photography, Photography, Scuba Diving | No Comments »

Underwater Cave Photography is hard! (4th Trip)

August 15th, 2008

Progress has been slow in my quest to take a decent underwater cave photo. A lot of travelling and othe distractions have kept my cave diving gear dry for longer than I would like.I took one of the strobes into the ocean and had a nasty flood where I learned a valuable lesson.

Back to the cave

With one strobe and a far more solid tripod mount I headed back to Cenote Taj Majal. I decided that around 10 am would be a good time in August to catch a few nice rays and around 11ish I would get some of the nice vertical beams coming down into the dome rooms.

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Posted in Under Water Photography, Photography, Scuba Diving | No Comments »

ViPlugin for Eclipse

July 14th, 2008

I have avoided IDEs for along time mainly because I cant live without vi. I set up vim with exuberant tags and really didn't feel that I needed anything else. I could click around fairly happily finding the classes I wanted. As my code gets bigger though and i get a bit more advanced it was starting to be a bit of a drag. I experimented with eclipse and pydev, but just couldn't stop hitting j k and escape.

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Posted in python, Tech Stuff | No Comments »

Underwater Cave Photography is hard! (3rd Trip)

July 4th, 2008

After strobe nightmares this trip is all about ambient light in the cavern zone. The idea being to take some of the pics i took earlier with a lower iso and longer shutter speed by using a tripod.

First things first I had to some how get the camera housing without a tripod mount onto the tripod. After some deliberation I decided epoxy would do the trip. If it doesnt work I will get one of the local metalworkers to tap out a thread in the aluminum tray. So here's some pics of how it looked.

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Posted in Under Water Photography, Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, Photography, Scuba Diving | No Comments »

Underwater Cave Photography is hard! (2nd Trip)

June 1st, 2008

Following on from my first serious attempt at underwater cave photography. I decided to play with a remote slave.

I have two Ikelite DS-125 strobes. I left one on the camera housing and set up another one with a slave sensor. My plan was to revisit Cenote Taj Mahal and check out how the slave would light up a small formation. The slave sensor I used is triggered by a flash. You can change the sensitivity of this trigger. I thought hmmmm.. caves dark so daylight wont trigger this. Surely if its set to max sensitivity it will be easier to hide maybe. Of course i was wrong. So here's what I learned about strobes in underwater caves.

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Posted in Under Water Photography, Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, Photography, Scuba Diving | No Comments »

Underwater Cave Photography is hard! (1st Trip)

May 10th, 2008

After endless problems with my Ikelite housing, I finally conceded and bought a new one. This seems to be OK and so far hasn't leaked. After a couple of dives in open water i headed off to Taj Mahal to catch the early morning light in the cenote. I have taken some interesting photos with my old Canon powershot and the Canon housing but never with a DLSR. I can say its tricky. Really really tricky.

Taj Mahal Cenote

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Posted in Under Water Photography, Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, Photography, Scuba Diving | No Comments »

No More Flickr… Let’s see how Zooomr is

November 22nd, 2007

Though I publish photos on my main website. I wanted a way to quickly share pics with friends and family. As quite a few other people were sharing their photos with me using flickr, i decided to go the same way.

As it turns out free flickr is far too restrictive so its time to find something else.

There is a limit of 3 sets (groups) that is far too small and also on the number of photos that can be uploaded.

I will give zooomr a go and report back. It seems it has no limits and looks pretty decent.

If you know me and have a zooomr account let me know and I will add you to my contacts.

Posted in Photography | No Comments »

Photoshop Batch processing with Python

November 20th, 2007

I meant to look into this for a while and now I have I am very pleasantly suprised!

 
 
import win32com.client
 
ps = win32com.client.Dispatch("Photoshop.Application")
ps.Preferences.TypeUnits = 1
ps.Preferences.RulerUnits = 1
 
mydoc = ps.Open("IMG_1630.jpg")
if  mydoc.Height > mydoc.Width :
   print "Portrait"
else :
   print "Landscape"
   mydoc.ResizeImage(Width=640)