I have now got to synths of the same room on my profile because the system doesn’t allow you to edit existing work, what would be good is if it could detect similarities between your work and combine them.

The better one of the two is embedded below.

While I was there I took almost 200 photos for a Photosynth, I didn’t take the photos in the garden but behind the garden next to a lake. The Photosynth software seemed to do some pre processing of the images before they were uploaded, I don’t know to what extent the process was completed on my computer vs on Microsoft’s servers what I do know is the upload took hours and hours on my slow connection.

Today I am going to try another Photosynth but this time in doors, I will photograph my lab at university but hopefully in a more structured manor.

My Photosynth is embeded below

This current issue raises several questions, first what was a consulting firm doing with information such as this? I can understand the need to view statistics and have information on prisoner distribution and the types of crimes committed but why wasn’t the data anonymized before it was given to this company and why wasn’t it encrypted.

There should be a simple policy for handling data such as this, never put it on removable media. Government agencies should have secure gateways, VPN’s or some other method that would allow those who are authorized to view this information without needing to copy it onto disk. Its going to take a serious incident (someone finding the lost data and doing something bad with it) before they really change there policies and way of working.

This morning I noticed several posts about Photosynth but I was in a rush so didn’t realize what had happened, it was when I got into work that I received the amazing news that Photosynth is finally here.

If you have no idea what Photosynth is I suggest you go an take a look although if you have a Mac you can read about it instead at Wikipedia, no Mac or Linux support I am afraid.

Rather than uploading the photos to Microsoft through the website you need to install a piece of software, I am unclear at this stage wether the software processes the images locally or acts as a facility for uploading them although I suspect it just uploads them, this then leads to the question of how long will Photosynth’s take to generate when they have been uploaded.

I will have the answer to all of these questions and more at the weekend, I was planning on spending the day taking photos and trying out my new tripod anyway now I have an even better task. Hopefully weather depending I will have my first Photosynth up at the weekend.

For years I have been using cheap little £30 tripods, it didn’t go very high and wasn’t very stable but it did the job, especially recently when I have been playing with HDR images and needed a stable image for each exposure.

The one thing I have found the most annoying with the old tripod is its height, I had to put it on a table to use or sit on the ground which was a little awkward and put me off using it.
The new tripod is a Manfrotto, the base is a 190 and the head is a 804RC2, they are significantly heavier which may put me off taking it as much but I hope it will give me better results.

I am planning on finding somewhere at the weekend and going out and taking some photos, now with a stable base I can try longer exposures and try and get a crisper hdr shot.

What annoyed me was when the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey interfered in the case, this case has nothing to do with religion and this Carey person has no place interfering. Carey made the argument that as the Judge ruled in favour of Mosley the judge was setting a dangerous precedent and that free speech was a victim and secondly public morality was a victim. His first point about free speech is really stupid, what is he saying, papers are allowed to write what they want about people and invade there privacy to get the information they need. His second point about morality being a victim is his opinion, yes what Mosley was involved in isn’t to everyone’s taste but people can do what they want, if he enjoys it he shouldn’t have someone criticising it.

I am not a religious person but I do respect the beliefs of those people who are, providing they don’t interfere with other peoples lives and that is clearly what they are doing here. Religion should have no part in government, the law or anything that affects the public as a whole, it should be something that people can choose to be a part of.

I hope that Mosley wins his libel case and this whole situation sets the dangerous precedent that consenting adults can do what they want behind closed doors.

My first introduction to the magical world to digital telecommunications was with a service BT ran several years ago, I can’t remember the exact details but I believe it cost £5 a month and for that you got a Cisco ATA and a 055 telephone number. I used the service for over a year and was very impressed with it, the call quality was very good as was the reliability; rather than using the standard SIP protocol I seem to remember the system used Cisco’s proprietary VoIP protocol, I ended up leaving this service after BT decided to move over to a SIP based system with there own hideous Router/ATA device.

I believe it was at this point that I started looking at Asterisk and Asterisk@home (now trixbox). Asterisk is an open source PBX that is controlled and run using configuration files, trixbox is the same thing but it comes packaged with a GUI, an OS and lots of other bits, it’s a complete IP PBX thats easy to install and run.

trixbox connects to the outside world using either traditional telephone lines (POTS) and hardware interface cards or digital lines, these are known as trunks. For many years I used a company called VoIP Talk who provided an IAX trunk along with a few numbers, the service they offered was reliable and had good sound quality, unfortunately I had to stop using them after they decided to stop me altering the outgoing caller id.

Within the house it was running in I made each telephone its own extension, I converted some existing phones using ATA’s and replaced some with VoIP phones, I ended up using Linksys hardware for most of this. This setup meant each telephone could be on a separate incoming or outgoing call at the same time and they could also call between each other. I was also able to setup ring groups, this is a list of phones that ring when one number is called, for example when someone calls me my office phone rings, as does my mobile and wireless VoIP phone.

One of the benefits of the system became obvious when I went to the Google IP conference in San Francisco, I took with me my wireless VoIP phone, this device connects to the internet using a wireless connection and then to my trixbox server using the SIP protocol, the phone allowed me to call home for free and other UK destinations at a regular rate. I also use the phone when I have wireless coverage in the UK, call costs are a lot cheaper and the quality whilst not as good as a mobile is acceptable.

One thing the system doesn’t do but I would like is the ability to handle SMS messages, at the moment I have an 0871 number which people can reach me on, when someone calls this number it rings my VoIP phone, a desk phone and my mobile phone, this works brilliantly but it doesn’t work with text messages. I am in the process of changing trunk provider to a company called aql as they are offering me the ability to change my outgoing caller id, they also offer SMS services via VoIP numbers so hopefully I will be able to set this up in the future.

VoIP is a system I would recommend to everyone especially businesses, it is very easy and cheap to implement and offers all the feature of expensive PBX systems. Here in the UK BT are changing there entire phone network over to VoIP so when anyone makes a call as soon as it reaches the local exchange it will enter the digital network, also when the ENUM system begins to role out call costs will reduce even further.

The site only took me 3 days to make, that includes the database work and all the php coding, I think this is a new record for me; the code may not be pretty but it works!
I am hosting the site, the database and the python script which will capture and process incoming TCP data on an old computer of mine; rather than hosting it using the same hardware I use for everything else I dug out an old HP machine which I have running on the University network, it saves on electricity costs and they have a fairly good internet connection.

The site layout including the images came from a WordPress template created by Collis Ta’eed, its a brilient theme that I only needed to tweak a little, I changed the gray background to green and dropped most of the fixed font sizing in favor of relative sized fonts. The styling for the input forms came from Antonio Lupetti’s woork site, again I changed the colour to green to match.
I have always been useless at creative things, and I am very grateful to the people above and to everyone else who creates things like this to share with the world.

The site works in a very simple way, on the front page you are presented with two movies and you select which one is best or if you haven’t seen one or both of the films you can skip the comparison, this process carries on until the site builds up a comprehensive list of your movies and so far the ranking seems to be fairly good. The site also allows you to search for movies and to choose to specifically compare it so it gets added to your list.

One the face of it the site seems to be rather pointless and at the moment it is but there are a lot of possibilities, as you rank movies the site will end up with a list of movies you haven’t seen as well as those you have, this is useful date with a lot of mashup opportunities. For example the list of movies you haven’t seen could be sorted by the overall popularity and the sent to an amazon wish list or even to one of the many DVD rental websites, there are also possibilities for social networking by bringing together people with similar interests.

There are a lot of possibilities for this site and hopefully it will expand and add new features over the coming months.

Over the years I have been a strong supporter of Microsoft products, people always said Macs were easier to use or simpler but I didn’t take much notice at the time; after using one for a bit I understand what these people meant, on a Mac almost everything is easier, something that would take multiple steps on a Windows machine only takes one on a Mac.

There are some significant differences that have taken me a while to get used to, the file structure is very different, and what I did find unusual at first is the fact that an entire program is contained within a single file and instillation simply involves dragging and dropping it into the applications folder. One thing I have been very pleased with is the battery life, it seems to be somewhere between 4 and 6 hours which is so much better than anything else I have.

I am not going to get rid of my Windows laptop and I will probably replace it when it gets to old but I will also do the same with the Mac, now I have one I don’t think I can go back to not having a Mac.