The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jun
29
Photo of the Week 19 – Enlightenment
Filed Under Photography on June 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
This is a shot I got on the spur of the moment in the College Cemetery on the campus of St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Ireland. I had come to the cemetery planning to shoot a few HDR shots when I saw the sun picking out just one cross in the very last row of the cemetery. The HDR shots didn’t turn out nearly as interesting as this unplanned shot.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of the original shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/1600 sec
- Focal Length: 112mm
- Focal Ratio: F5.0
- ISO: 400
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: -0.33
[tags]Celtic Cross, cemetery, Maynooth, Ireland, photography[/tags]
Jun
25
OS X Trojan in the Wild – The Time For Smugness is Over
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on June 25, 2008 | 5 Comments
Note: This article was written for, and first published on, the International Mac Podcast blog.
It’s being reported this week that there is a Trojan Horse in the wild that’s targeted at Mac OS X (both Tiger and Leopard). This is quite a nasty beast which basically gives the attacker total control of your computer. This gives them access to all your files and allows for them to snoop on everything you do and hence collect sensitive data like banking details and credit card numbers. If you run Mac OS X this should concern you. However, there is no need to panic and lose sight of the realities of the situation. This is not a virus or a worm, it’s a Trojan. What’s the difference? Viruses and Worms spread from machine to machine, often without any need for any interaction on the user’s part, Trojans on the other hand have to be installed by the user. They work by pretending to be a legitimate program which an un-suspecting user then installs. They get their name because in many ways they are the digital equivalent of the wooden horse of Troy.
[tags]security, Trojan, OS X, Apple[/tags]
Jun
23
Photo of the Week 18 – Connolly’s Folly
Filed Under Photography on June 23, 2008 | 3 Comments
As some of you may know I do a weekly slot on the NosillaCast with Allison Sheridan, and at some stage I happened to mention that I was thinking of buying a graphics tablet but that that would have to wait because money was tight. Allison had an old Wacom tabled lying around that she hadn’t used in ages and she very kindly dusted it off and posted it to me. Thanks Allison!
Anyhow, the tabled arrived late last week so over the weekend I had a play with it. Among various experiments I re-visted an old image of Connolly’s Folly near Maynooth which I shot last year. Applying a much improved version of the Selective Colour technique I described previously on this blog I generated this week’s photo of the week. I’ll be creating a tutorial on this new technique soon because it’s a lot more powerful than the one I described originally. For a start it’s non-destructive, and it also allows for the desaturated areas to be slightly re-saturated so the effect is more subtle and less glaring.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of the original shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/320 sec
- Focal Length: 18mm
- Focal Ratio: F9.0
- ISO: 200
- Camera Mode: Auto
The image was processed using the GIMP. The black & white conversion was done using the channel mixer, the coloured regions were enhanced with an 80% LAB Colour Boost, and the black & white regions are 10% re-saturated.
[tags]photography, selective colour, Connolly’s Folly, local history, Maynooth, Ireland[/tags]
Jun
21
FireFox 3 – Greatly Improved but Not Perfect
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 21, 2008 | 2 Comments
I’ve been recommending FireFox for years now. In fact, I’ve been using it as my primary browser since it was called FireBird. It has been a more secure and a more feature-rich choice for years. (If you’re interested in the security aspects then you might enjoy reading a recent article I wrote for the International Mac Podcast blog comparing Safari and FireFox from a security point of view.) What got me hooked on FireBird was it’s plugin architecture. The idea of being able to customise my browser really appealed to me and as FireBird has grown into FireFox the list of available plugins has grown too. No other browser is as expandable as FireFox. If you can think of it, the chances are someone’s written a plugin for it!
However, FireFox has long suffered from two major shortcomings, memory leaks you could pilot a large ship through, and a non-native look. FireFox has been chewing up insane amounts of RAM for years, and has always looked like a fish out of water, particularly on OS X. These two problems are both fixed in FireFox 3 and if that was all they’d done I’d be recommending it highly, but they’ve done much more.
[tags]internet, browser, FireFox, FireFox 3[/tags]
Jun
20
MSN Music Update
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A few months back I posted the news that Microsoft were going to shut down the servers that make their old MSN Music DRM work. This would have killed the DRM so that music people bought would stop working the next time they upgraded their OS or their computer. Today the news is out that MS have delayed the shut down for at least three years. This is obviously good news for the poor unfortunates who bought music form MS, but it doesn’t get around the core problem that DRM is a fundamentally flawed concept. You never actually own music that you buy that’s encumbered by DRM, you are just renting it for an un-known length of time. If you’re lucky you get to keep it for a few decades, if you’re not, just a few years!
[tags]DRM, Microsoft[/tags]
Jun
15
Photo of the Week 17 – Stars Over Taghadoe
Filed Under Photography on June 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I shot this photo quite a few months and all but forgot about it. It sat un-processed and forgotten in a dark corner of my gallery gathering electronic dust until I stumbled across it yesterday. The raw image didn’t look too promising, the whole thing had a very nasty red colour cast and didn’t look at all appealing. Some fairly extreme twiddling with sliders in iPhoto managed to turn this ugly duckling into a beautiful swan! The moral of the story, don’t be too put off when your shots don’t look great straight out of the camera! To give you an idea of how much editing had to be done I’ve included a small version of the original below.
If you’ve been following this series you’ll have seen Taghadoe before, this is the same round tower you saw silhouetted in Photo of the Week 5 – Nightfall in Taghadoe. It’s a real hidden gem located just a few miles outside Maynooth Village in Co. Kildare, Ireland.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of the shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 14.6 sec (using tripod)
- Focal Length: 18mm
- Focal Ratio: F3.5
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Manual
- Exposure Compensation: -1.0
[tags]Photography, Maynooth, Ireland, Kildare, Taghadoe, Round Tower, astrophotography, stars, night[/tags]
Jun
15
Pondering the Snow Leopard
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 1 Comment
The details released by Apple are sparse at best, but we know that the next version of OS X (10.6) will be called Snow Leopard. The name is very fitting precisely because it’s so similar to the current OS name, Leopard. Snow Leopard won’t be wedged full of new end-user features like Leopard was, instead the big changes will be under the hood, with a strong focus on efficiency and stability. This release would appear to be about consolidating what’s in Leopard already as well as laying the foundations for future big cats from Apple.
[tags]OS X, Apple, Mac, Snow Leopard[/tags]
Jun
15
Bokeh – Pause Apps on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 1 Comment
Allison kindly got me a review copy of Bokeh so that we can talk about it on the NosillaCast tomorrow. To help me get my thoughts in order I’ve decided to do a review here too. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I just love small single-purpose apps. I don’t want a disk, RAM, and CPU hog that will do 500 things, only 20 of which I will ever use. Instead, I’d prefer 20 small dedicated apps that do just one thing, but do it well. Bokeh very much follows this philosophy. It has one function in life, to reclaim CPU cycles when you need that bit of extra grunt. It does this by allowing you to pause apps. Clearly you can get by without it this app, if you really need all your power for a single app then just quit every other app and you’ve got running and you’ll get the self-same effect. The problems is, you then have to re-open all those other apps when you’re done. If you’re anything like me, you were probably in the middle of about five different tasks in about twenty different apps, and getting back to where you were will be a lot of hassle. It would be much easier to just pause the apps rather than quitting them, enter Bokeh!
[tags]Bokeh, review, shareware, Mac, OS X[/tags]
Jun
13
Reflections on Lisbon
Filed Under Polemics & Politics on June 13, 2008 | 9 Comments
For those of you not up on European affairs, the Irish people voted yesterday not to ratify the European Reform Treaty, commonly known as the Lisbon Treaty. Since all EU nations have to ratify EU treaties for them to come into effect this is a big deal. 27 countries worked for eight years to get to this point and Ireland just rejected all their hard work and pain-staking negotiation. On reflection I should have realised that this referendum was always destined to fail in Ireland given our current state of affairs. Two simple facts doomed the treaty.
- It’s a long and complex document which is not designed to be read by un-qualified people. It’s an international treaty between 27 nation states that amends and compliments a handful of other treaties. Stuff like that gets complicated.
- The Irish people have no faith in their government or major political parties
The first point means that people have to form their opinions based on the advice of others. If they had faith in their government they would believe the government when they laid out the pros and cons. But the Irish people are very suspicious of their government and indeed all their major political parties. This made it easy for the No campaign to spread Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) by the lorry-load, which they did. In a situation like this a no vote is the expected outcome. “If you don’t know, vote no”.
[tags]Lisbon, Ireland, EU, Reform Treaty, NO![/tags]
Jun
11
Reflections on WWDC 2008 Key Note
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 11, 2008 | 3 Comments
Another WWDC Steve-Note has come and gone, and my predictions were right in some ways, and totally wrong in others. I’d expected the keynote to be iPhone heavy, but not iPhone only! The fact that OS X 10.6 got no more than a passing mention is a little disappointing. As expected, we got to see lots of cool demos of apps for the App Store, as well as a demo of the new features in the new iPhone 2.0 software. The biggest surprise there was how cheap the new software will be for iPod Touch owners, just $9.95! Unsurprisingly, half the planet was right about there being a 3G iPhone, however I’m pleased to have been wrong about GPS. Mobile Me is roughly what I’d expected, but not all I’d hoped for, the lack if iDisk access from the iPhone is disappointing. The continued lack of any sort of access to files for iPhone apps limits what developers can do with the SDK. Un-surprisingly we didn’t get a BlueTooth keyboard for the iPhone, or a Mac Tablet. The biggest disappointment of all is that iPhone 2.0 software still seems to be missing basic text-manipulation functions like select, cut, copy & paste, and that Notes on the iPhone still don’t seem to sync to anywhere.
[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2008, WWDC, iPhone, Mobile Me[/tags]