Tag Archives: Pictures

Pictures

Canada Pictures

2 Comments
Canadian Falls by Night

I’ve just finished uploading my pictures from our recent trip to Canada. Beth has another set from her camera that will be uploaded to her Flickr account over the next couple of days.

Currently all of mine are in a single set, but as with our earlier trip I’ll probably break down the three hundred or so pictures into more manageable sets too. I’ll also post about some of our adventures – including the float plane that took six attempts to get into the air…

As a quick overview, the first group are pictures taken at the family wedding which was the main reason for our trip, then pictures of Toronto. After that we spent a couple of days up at Parry Sound, and finally we finished off the trip at Niagara Falls.

Update: Beth’s pictures can be found here.

Pictures

Holiday Pictures

Leave a comment
Sunlight through Stained Glass

I’ve uploaded my pictures from our holiday in France. Beth has a whole load more on her camera that I’ll link to when she’s uploaded them. Most of the pictures are actually in two places as I’ve done one big set with everything, and then a number of smaller sets for particular places we went.

Looking through the pictures, you’ll spot that we went to a lot of Churches – including finally getting round to doing the abbey tour at Cluny. It is certainly worth doing if you are ever there, as you get to see inside the one remaining part of what was the largest Church in the world before St Peter’s in Rome was rebuilt. Although you can get an idea of what it looked like inside by visits to Tournus and Paray-le-Monial both of those are smaller.

We also saw some of the smaller town churches, an interesting comparison being those in Saint-Gengoux-le-National and Buxy. The building in Saint-Gengoux-le-National is in serious need of restoration – with a noticeable crack running pretty well the length of the nave in the roof, and large lumps of plaster missing from the walls. Buxy is much luckier, in that they have been able to restore the building.

Both the building at Tournus and Paray-le-Monial (Paray-le-Monial being completed since our last visit a few years ago) but with slightly different styles. Tournus has opted for some modern stained glass, which certainly the writers of the The Rough Guide to France disliked. Paray-le-Monial has a little bit of modern glass away in the transepts, but seems to have stuck with largely traditional designs, which certainly produced some good pictures as the sun shone through them. Where Paray-le-Monial has gone modern though is in the light fittings, which I initially took for sculptures – definitely a different approach to trying to ‘hide’ the lighting. They also had put very discreet recessed sockets into the floor at regularly spaced intervals on the floor of the building. Perhaps one other thing to note, particularly from someone in England where to remove them would be considered sacrilegious by some – not one of the Churches we visited had any pews at all. It’s worth considering that despite what English Heritage might say about the matter, with medieval buildings such as these, no pews is much more authentic to the original building.

General, Pictures

Wedding Pictures

2 Comments
The Waiting is Over

If you’ve been reading Beth’s blog recently you’ll have been following her making the cake for Jo and Drew’s wedding which took place yesterday.

She has actually written up the day, well it’s actually about fifty-percent about the cakes, but there are details from the wedding too!

If you’re wondering about the comment about my foot – which I realise I haven’t mentioned on here, at the moment I’ve got an infection in my left foot, which I’ve had since the beginning of the week. The doctor said it was either an infection, or could be gout – saying that if it were gout the pain would be worse later in the week as the antibiotics he gave me would be ineffective. Anyway, the good news is that it isn’t more painful, so hopefully it’s not gout, but the bad news is that with it being in my left foot changing gear in the car is rather uncomfortable, as is wearing anything other than a slipper on that foot, so Beth did the driving yesterday.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded the pictures that I took yesterday to Flickr, or alternatively you can browse them in our gallery.

Pictures

Some Great New York Pictures

1 Comment

Up until now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Phil spent most of his recent trip to New York posing for a webcam. However going through my Flickr feed tonight I spotted that Phil has now published more evidence that they did do rather a lot else whilst they were there!

Although from what I’ve heard it was pretty unbearably hot at times whilst they were over there, the good weather has produced some stunning shots, such as the sunset view of the Statue of Liberty I’ve shown here. There are also some of the classic New York views such as this great shot of the concourse in Grand Central. If you like browsing through Flickr, Phil and Catherine have put together a nice set to take a look at. There are certainly a good few shots in there that are worthy of posting to some of the main and specialist Flickr groups.

Computers/Technology, Pictures

Testing Beta’s

Leave a comment

TechCrunch today published an interesting article giving tips for tech companies, particularly those involved in the latest online developments on how to make the best of their beta programmes. Whilst in the past most people would never see beta releases unless they were signed up to specific beta programmes, but now, with the ease of distribution offered by the internet, companies such as Microsoft and Google offer beta releases of upcoming products on free download. The article also makes interesting points about the kind of people who will participate in such beta programmes will be, and what technology they will tend to be using, and the importance of blogs and bloggers to the whole equation.

That reminded me that I was planning on posting another update on how my experiences with Shozu had been going, as although the possibility of actually using it had come to an end thanks to issues with my phone, as I mentioned at the weekend, I’ve carried on chatting over e-mail with Andy Tiller since then. Certainly I’m not alone with other bloggers commenting on how open Cognima are about their product, and Andy popping up to answer questions. We’ve actually had a good discussion about how I was looking to use Shozu in relation to how it works, and it is certainly a good example of how to run a beta programme.

50038516 Ccad0537F5 M

Following on from my posting on why Shozu wasn’t working, Andy was curious as to why on exactly the same phone, I wasn’t having problems with Opera Mini. My conclusion was that this was primarily because Opera wasn’t checking on the Java permissions. When I fire up Opera thanks to my lack of certificates I get a message from the operating system of the phone saying that Opera is attempting to access the internet, and giving me the option to allow this or block it. If I allow it then Opera has access to the internet for the duration of the time I am using the browser. If I subsequently exit the browser and go back in, I then have to reauthorise Opera. The difference with Shozu is that in order to provide specific features, such as the automatic resumption of transfers if the GPRS signal is lost, the application needs full access – as the loss of the connection and resumption would result in an annoying series of dialogs repeatedly asking for permission to connect. As a result, Shozu checks it’s level of permission and if it doesn’t have what it requires, forces you to exit. The argument I offered Andy on the subject was that Shozu doesn’t actually need this level of access, and could work at the reduced level I have available on my phone, so it would be better to offer a warning that the reduced level of permissions could adversely affect the user experience in Shozu but let the user use the application anyway. I also highlighted that if Shozu were an application on a PC I’d usually be careful about handing it full control of a connection until I was happy it wasn’t going to connect without my permission and clock up a vast bill, and as such giving Shozu users the option to use the phone operating system to restrict Shozu was helpful.
It is worth mentioning at this point that I don’t think I convinced Andy of my point of view, but at the same time I certainly felt that he was open to discussing other ways of doing things. This again makes a refreshing change, as sometimes you get the feeling that software developers (and I’m sure I give the impression at times too) take anything that seems like criticism of their product pretty personally, when in actual fact the users are only trying to be constructive.

It also kicked off a discussion at work, over some of the occasions when despite a whole series of requirements documents, user workshops, and even sitting watching users work it transpires that the users are actually using your application in a totally different way from how you originally envisioned it. Sometimes this could be as a result of a bug, or that having been given a new application they realise that they can use it to do more than they originally thought. However there are a number of occasions we’ve had some incident reports that appear really obscure until you work out what the users are doing. Equally some feature that seemed massively important, and that we spent ages developing, for some reason is now totally ignored and the users are doing the same thing in a totally different way (usually involving an Excel spreadsheet).

Certainly when I get a phone that is capable, or the guys at Cognima produce a version that doesn’t insist on specific permissions, I’ll take a look again. With the other options being the frustration of trying to get MMS to work reliably, or e-mail, that increases the size of any picture transfer by about 40% (the overhead on Shozu is only about 4%) it certainly seems a great way to send pictures on the move. Also, if you want to see a good example of the kind of mobile photo-blogging that Shozu aims to support just take a look at some of the more than 13,000 Flickr pictures tagged with Shozu! (And you can even see pictures of the guys who work at Cognima in amongst them too!)