I’ve taken advantage of a bit of spare time to sort out our web sites, and in particular fix a few things which didn’t work quite right after our enforced emergency upgrade in February.
Hopefully you should see everything working properly now, but let me know if not. ☺
AgileArchitect.org has had the most significant makeover, and is now fully responsive and mobile-friendly, just like our other sites.
Happy browsing!
| Hedgehogs in our courtyard | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GH4 | Date: 09-05-2015 21:29 | Resolution: 3833 x 2555 | ISO: 3200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/40s | Aperture: 2.8 | Focal Length: 100.0mm | Caption: Hedgehogs in our courtyard | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 35-100/F2.8 | |
Great excitement chez nous last night. The security lights went on and we spotted not one but two hedgehogs snuffling around in the courtyard. Fortunately they stayed round long enough to get a few photos.
The security light provided good illumination, but kept on switching off (as it’s supposed to), so Frances ran around to wave at it and switch it back on. What was very funny was that each time the light came on, the hedgehogs froze mid-snuffle for about 10 seconds, just as portrayed in Over the Hedge, but which we’d never seen before in reality.
I spotted another one later on when I got up for a glass of water, so hopefully these welcome visitors will become a regular feature.
| Odd captioning practices at The Photographers Gallery | |
| Camera: Canon PowerShot S120 | Date: 05-04-2015 14:48 | Resolution: 3945 x 2630 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 3.5 | Focal Length: 10.4mm | |
We visit a lot of photography exhibitions. The majority are inspiring or thought-provoking, and well worth the effort of the photographers, the presenters, and the attendees.
Along the way there has been the odd disappointment: sometimes we just don’t connect with the material, on other occasions we have felt that the volume or quality of the work hasn’t justified a high entrance cost. On one occasion an exhibition presented such a biased left-wing viewpoint that I felt desperate for the injection of some balance.
However today we had a new experience – an exhibition based on a good volume of high quality work, at a great location, which failed abysmally due to comprehensive incompetence in curation.
The offending exhibition was Human Rights, Human Wrongs at The Photographers Gallery. The piece was meant to chart the path of human rights since the Universal Declaration in the 1940s, drawing from a large archive of reportage. It failed.
The main problem was the complete absence of any organising principle. With the occasional exception of sequential shots of the same event, there was no attempt to group items by location, subject, date or photographer. It was just a confusing "bunch of stuff". At times the confusion seemed almost wilful – two related, well explained pictures from Vietnam together on a wall, but separated by a wholly unrelated picture from Chad.
The curators provided copies of original notes on some of the images, but these were presented in tiny type well below the average eye line, underneath the photos. To ensure there was no chance of even this being readable the images had thick frames spotlit from above, so half of each caption was adequately lit, and half in deep shadow. In any event there was no attempt to present any context, explanation or information about what happened next – unless the photographer wrote this on the back of the original you were on your own.
The caption typist had clearly lost the will to live with the highly structured but low information content approach, and even managed to mis-spell "Untitled".
Even the choice of content felt random. There were lots of good pictures of American Civil Rights events in the 1960s. Fine. Plenty of pictures of Martin Luther King Jnr, a portrait of JFK and a nice picture of Nixon with Coretta King. Good. But why have a blurry picture of Lee Harvey Oswald but none of Johnson, Bobby Kennedy or Malcolm X?
The supposed light relief afterwards, pictures of horses on the American prairies, didn’t work either, with captions in about 8pt type several feet away from the related shot, and the beautiful animals captured against wilfully ugly backgrounds.
The Photographers Gallery has a great new location, but they don’t seem to know what to do with it. This is an abuse of our human right to a decent exhibition!
Apologies to all for the interruption to our websites and email service around last weekend. My server was hacked and used to launch DDoS attacks, and had to be taken offline and rebuilt with the latest software versions. Fortunately I only really use it to host the websites and our email endpoint, so it was a nuisance rather than a disaster. There’s a lesson that all servers need to be constantly patched and updated, and I’ll now have to either work out how to do this in the Linux environment, or switch to Windows which I understand a bit better.
If you did have an email bounced, please feel free to re-send. And if you do meet someone who hacks other people’s servers, feel free to give him a kick for me.
I’ve just solved a tricky problem with what I think is quite an elegant solution, and thought it would be interesting to share it.
I’m building a system in which I have to process fault data. Sometimes this comes with a standard fault code (hallelujah!), but quite often it comes with the manufacturer’s own fault code and a description which may (or may not) be quite close to the description against one of the standard faults. If I can match the description up, I can treat the fault as standard.
The problem is that the description matching is not exact. Variations in punctuation are common, but the wording can also change so that, for example, “Evaporative emission system incorrect purge flow” in one system is “Evaporative emission control system incorrect purge flow” in another. To a human reader this is fine, but eliminates simplistic exact matching.
I spent some time Googling fuzzy matching, but most of the available literature focuses on character or even bit-level matching and looks both complex and compute-intensive. However finally I found the Jaccard similarity coefficient. This is designed for establishing the “similarity” between two objects with similar lists of attributes, and I had a “lights on” moment and realised I could apply a similar algorithm, but to the set of words used in the pair of descriptions.
The algorithm to calculate the coefficient for a given pair is actually very simple:
This produces a very intuitive result: 1 if the token sets are an exact match, 0 if they are completely disjoint, and a linearly varying value between. The process does, however, ignore transpositions, so that “Fuel rail pressure low” equates to “Fuel rail low pressure”. In my context this matches what a human assessor would do.
Now I simply have to repeat steps 2-5 above for each standard error description, and pick the one which produces the highest coefficient. If the value is below about 80% I treat the string as “matched”, and I can quote the coefficient to give a feel for “how good” the match is.
Hopefully that’s useful.
| Winter light on the pampas grass, chez nous | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX7 | Date: 11-01-2015 10:45 | Resolution: 4592 x 3064 | ISO: 320 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/100s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 45.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO PZ 45-175/F4.0-5.6 | |
Apologies, my first blog post of the New Year really should have wished you all the very best for 2015. Please accept this as a pseudo-first post, with said wishes.
I also just wanted to post this shot from yesterday. A low winter sun, passing clouds and unusually upright pampas grass for January combined to generate this remarkable light pattern. As we were just going out of the door this is a grab shot taken leaning out of the bedroom window, but I think the result worked. I hope it’s an omen for things being “on fire” (in a good way) in 2015.
| Flower display at Clifton Hall House, Barbados | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX7 | Date: 16-04-2014 19:20 | Resolution: 3123 x 3123 | ISO: 3200 | Exp. bias: -66/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/8s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 12.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8 | |
I’m making use of my new Windows MacBook to catch up with photo processing, including a few shots from our trip to Barbados last year. One of the things I particularly love about the Caribbean are the splashes of colour from the various flora, and I’ve noticed that an increasing proportion of my photos are nice flowers.
This display appealed because it’s all related shades of red, pink and brown. This makes it almost a “monochrome”, even though there’s no black, white or grey in sight!
Barbados has an interesting little tradition that people throw open some of the larger or historically significant private houses to visitors a few days each year. Clifton Hall House had fallen into disrepair, but was recently bought up and renovated by a Massimo Franchi, an international lawyer and sports agent (Scottish, despite the Italian name). He personally made us very welcome, and after our tour of the house we spent a happy hour on the veranda discussing our shared interests, plumbing and DIY with him! Nice bloke, lovely house.
Here’s a thing. Do a search for a restaurant, theatre or somewhere else you’d like to visit, using Google Chrome. Get a map using Google Maps, in Google Chrome. Print out a copy for reference – blank page!
Copy the URL into Internet Explorer, print out the map. Works…
| Looking down over the Cortina D'Ampezzo Valley from the Selva Pass | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 550D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 05-09-2013 15:13 | Resolution: 5184 x 3456 | ISO: 100 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/160s | Aperture: 7.1 | Focal Length: 20.0mm (~32.4mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
The astute among you will have noticed that I place a random panorama in the masthead of all my web site pages. I’ve just refreshed my album with a number of new images, which I hope you’ll enjoy.
| The Linn Cove Viaduct on the Blue Ridge Parkway | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GH4 | Date: 30-09-2014 10:28 | Resolution: 3624 x 4832 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/160s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 12.0mm | Location: Linn Cove Branch | State/Province: North Carolina | See map | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8 | |
We start by driving back to the Linn Cove Viaduct, the last piece of the Parkway finally put in place in 1987. It’s a great feature in its own right, but there’s also some very colourful foliage on the slopes of Grandfather Mountain above it, and great reflections in a small lake slightly further along.
Then we move on to the Moses Cone Estate, home to the inventor of denim. The manor house itself is charming, but is now a craft centre and you can’t even get a cup of coffee. We decide to do the walk down to his Bass Lake, which is pretty and relatively easy, but misleadingly described on the map and turns out to be a round trip of almost 5 miles. We get some great shots at the lake, but by the time we get back up the hill to the car we are both almost speechless…
Dinner is taken at a small Mexican across from our hotel, which is most impressive for the sheer industrial volume with which they are producing and serving some very tasty fresh food. We are in and out in 40 minutes, during which time three couples are served at the next table. Unfortunately our otherwise very efficient and hard-working Hispanic waiter fails to understand the highly technical concept of beer, so I fail yet again to get my preferred drink.
The MacBook Pro has arrived, and for a nearly four year old PC it’s in very good nick. There’s one unfortunate scratch on the top lid, but otherwise it’s very clean and works well. The 8GB RAM I switched out when I upgraded the Alienware M17X fitted into the Mac with no problems, so it’s now up to its maximum RAM. Installing the 1TB SSD (Moore’s Law now applies to solid state storage!) was also trouble-free.
Installation of Windows was a bit of trial and error:
To start with the good news, this is a great stand-alone laptop, with a superb screen and very handy form-factor. The screen is bright, clean and viewing-angle tolerant, and I really do like the 16:10 form factor much better. The 1440×900 resolution is high enough, but not excessive (with the concomitant problems of small font sizes etc.). Why none of the mainstream PC manufacturers is just putting this display or something very like it into a slimline high performance model (such as the Dell XPS) is a complete mystery, but they’ve all gone down the 16:9 aspect ratio route, and I have yet to see a PC display which shares the other characteristics either. My big red Alien (maybe I should just start calling it/him "Optimus Prime") is nice and bright and the same vertical size (albeit in a 17" model), but quite intolerant of viewing angle.
Performance is pretty good. OK it’s no match for Optimus Prime, but few things are. However if the experiment works I may end up buying a newer and top spec MacPro which should redress the balance a bit.
The Mac keyboard is great for bulk typing (much better than the Dell Latitude), but the layout is a bit of a mystery and suffers from the usual Apple arrogance which I characterise as "if it was good enough for Steve Jobs, it’s good enough for everyone else". What’s the idea behind swapping the @ and " symbols on a British keyboard, for example? I’m getting used to using the Fn+arrow keys instead of Page Up/Down etc., but the lack of a proper "Delete" key is really clumsy. Fortunately there’s a reasonably easy fix using the excellent little SharpKeys utility, so I now have F12 set up to do this. Similarly, why, in the age of Twitter do we have the fairly useless § and `, but no hash key?
Where the Mac does lose out is external connectivity. Optimus Prime, and his smaller Dell Latitude cousin, both expose USB 2, USB 3, e-Sata and dedicated VGA and HDMI ports. I do a lot of plugging into projectors and external screens, and the Alienware/Dell solution "just works". The Mac has two USB 2 ports, fine, and a FireWire port which seems to work as well with big external disks as the e-Sata ports on my other machines. However everything else, including external display feeds, is channelled through the "ThunderBolt" port.
ThunderBolt seems to be a rather clumsy and immature technology, and I haven’t managed to get it working yet. Known issues include the fact that although the connector is identical to the "mini display port" on a lot of recent PCs, it’s electrically different and the two standards won’t inter-operate. I suspect that I have received a mini-display port display adapter, not a ThunderBolt one. However even when I do get the right hardware, there seem to be some serious limitations. ThunderBolt hardware is not hot-pluggable, and has to be plugged in permanently from start-up to be recognised. While it’s connected the PC can’t sleep (because that would disconnect the ThunderBolt hardware). This is a long way from what I’m used to, and might amount to a "deal breaker". The experiments continue.
One last moan for now. I managed to leave my power supply at home yesterday. No problem, I thought, several of my colleagues use MacBooks and I’ll just borrow one of theirs to recharge, and then work from the battery (which has quite good life). First attempt failed, as Geoff’s Mac is about a year older than mine, and the power connector is completely different. Second attempt was a temporary fix, as Reuben’s laptop is the same age as mine, but not a solution for the whole week. A visit to PC world uncovered two options, as Apple have changed the connector again since my laptop was in production, and it took some time to find someone who knew which was which. This is a long way from Dell, where everything from the tiny power supplies for the projectors through to the brick which drives Optimus Prime are 100% interchangeable.
Oh well. Onwards and upwards…
| The Crabtree Falls, North Carolina | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GF3 | Date: 29-09-2014 12:55 | Resolution: 2774 x 3698 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 14.0mm | Location: Upper Falls | State/Province: North Carolina | See map | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO PZ 14-42/F3.5-5.6 | |
Day 9
We awake to something we haven’t seen so far this trip – rain. Fortunately I’m a great believer that bad weather makes good photographs, so hopefully we’ll still enjoy the day. We get back on the Parkway and head north. Some of the views are almost invisible behind the rain and cloud, but others are very dramatic with rising mist. We seem to have found an area where the Autumn colour is better advanced, which also makes a positive difference.
At lunchtime we hike down from the road to the Crabtree Falls, one of the most dramatic waterfalls in this part of the world, and still photo-worthy even at this time of the year. The infrared camera renders the somewhat moody scene beautifully. On the way back the rain starts again and I get a lot of complaints…
Late lunch / early dinner makes up for this. We each have a “Philly” sandwich served with a baked sweet potato with cinnamon. Absolutely sublime.
We motor quickly through some very interesting looking scenery on our way to the overnight stop at Boone (named for the famous trapper), but we have a whole day in the area tomorrow so things look promising.
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