by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 19, 2004 | Uncategorized
It has been a long time since I posted a tutorial in my Photography Tutorials section so I thought I will add one that shows a new feature and combine some of the older ones to produce a final result.
I will use Photoshop to change the overall color of an image by applying a color tone to it. This effect only works on a small amount of images but used correctly it can be valuable technique.
The sample image is one I took on Trafalgar Square in London recently and features the well known fountains. These fountains are made from a bronze material and has the typical green cast due to oxidation. I wanted to create a special photo by showing these fountains as they may have looked without the oxidation.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 17, 2004 | Uncategorized
As before [1, 2] I will mention feeds that I unsubscribe from not because I find them boring but because they annoyed me to the point of unsubscribing.
Lockergnome is usually a pretty good resource for lots of things, in particular I read their RSS & Atom Tips in my aggregator but I am now unsubscribing from this useful resource due to spam.

(edited to remove the name of the company advertising)
I can understand the need for advertising in RSS feeds and will tolerate it in full text feeds, I will however not tolerate it in feeds that only show you a snippet of the story forcing you to open their page and view their banner ads. They are already seeing revenue from me when I click on their RSS item – when it is interesting enough – so why should I also see the ads in my RSS reader. If they want to see ad revenue from me, then they should feel an incentive to get me to open the full article in my browser by posting interesting content. As it stands, they just annoy me.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 17, 2004 | Usefull Things
Via MJ whose blog I discovered by a referer entry in my logs I notice that IOL has RSS Feeds for their news, this is excellent news since I always liked their news but could never be bothered using an actual browser to read their site regularly.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 14, 2004 | Usefull Things
I have been spending a lot of time looking at network dumps of SMPP traffic to assist in debugging some network issues. I was a bit rusty on some of the finer details of all the various TCP packet headers and my reference was at home. Google found an amazing resource on firewall.cx titled Anylising the TCP header.
The document spans 7 sections covering the following:
Section 1: Source & Destination Port Number
Section 2: Sequence & Acknowledgement Numbers
Section 3: Header Length
Section 4: TCP Flag Options
Section 5: Window Size, Checksum & Urgent Pointer
Section 6: TCP Options
Section 7: Data
It is beautifully colorful and well written. Something that can easily be passed on to someone who does not know a lot about networking or as a simple resource to just catch up on forgotten knowledge.
Firewall.cx has huge amounts of very good documentation on it, well worth poking around in for networking people.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 13, 2004 | Photography
I have a lot of files that I keep related to my photography and need to be able to find them again later on. I have given a lot of thought to how to organise the photos so that I can find them by associated categories and based on date.
A few months ago I decided to move away from my flat directory structure, with directories being category names, to something more advanced. I gave the opensource tools available a look and non of them really looked easy enough or powerfull enough to do what I need to do. Someone at worked showed me ACDSee and its great categorisation system and I thought I would use this as the tool to store archive my photos with. I remember ACDSee from the mid 90’s and figured a product this old and mature would be a safe bet.
As it turns out the introduction of the database into ACDSee is by no means mature, I discovered this when the application crashed half way through making a backup and then corrupting it’s database. Some reading of their forums got me to this thread which suggests I am not the only person suffering from this DB issue. I managed to recover the database after hours of messing around and immediatly exported it to a text format. Now I am starting down the road of developing my own archival system.
The full entry contains details of how I store my files, this is as much intended for someone to get some ideas for their own workflow and for me to document how I work so that I can write the archival system to compliment my workflow.
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