Author Archives: Donncha

Using Image Calibration Techniques to Reduce Noise in Digital Images

This is interesting, especially after reading the TNG article on astronomy this morning where these ideas are used, it’s great to see it described in such detail! Basically, noise in digital cameras isn’t as random as may it may seem, and if you have a calibration image with that noise intact, you can subtract the noise from any photo.
This tutorial explains all that in more detail and could be very useful for cameras that take RAW images, but I verified that jpeg files can’t be manipulated so successfully unfortunately!

No JPEG image can have its noise reduced by the calibration steps described here – the data is too drastically altered by compression to allow dark or bias subtraction to work right.

Oooer, that NCT feeling!

I brought my car down to the Blarney NCT center this morning and checked in and joined a lot of other worried looking guys in the waiting room. The tension in the room was palpable as soon as I entered, and when vehicles were driven into the test garage half the room stood up and stared intensely through the windows. I read about discovering new earths in National Geographic.. when else am I going to get half an hour to do nothing but read? The disquiet and oppressive atmosphere was lightened considerably by a 3 year old girl and her parents – the parents were worried, but their daughter was oblivious reading her animal book and chatting to her mom!
Finally, just before 9am a man appeared at the waiting room door, said my name and I followed him out. With a smile he handed me my shiny new NCT certificate. Yay! No need to worry about that again until 2007!

Spam Spam Spam, Come on up and get your spam!

Here’s an updated list of recent spam to this list. It’s updated every few minutes so you can see a snippet of the spam that’s being deleted automatically here by Kitten’s Spaminator and diligent updating of keywords. Go wild!

I need to think about this a bit more. WPMU supports multiple blogs, run by multiple different people, all of whom can update their spam word lists. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a “I trust the following blogs” list so that spam words can be shared between blogs?

Slightly related, I started using PEAR Cache to cache frequently used database calls. Stuff like the “last posts” and other plugins now use that. It’s working very well and load on the server has gone down!

Oh, and when you’re updating to the latest CVS version of WordPress, a database table has changed. I ran the following to update my tables:
cd wp-inst/wp-content/blogs; for i in *; do echo "ALTER TABLE wp_"$i"_users CHANGE dateYMDhour user_registered DATETIME DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL "| mysql wordpress_db; done

Can I Speak With The Eircom Account Holder?

Just got a phone call…

Me: Hello!
Caller: Hello, can I speak to the Eircom account holder?
Me: Err, speaking.
Caller: Hi, my name is Laura and I’m ringing from Tele2 in Donegal and I want to tell you about our ..
Me: Haha, don’t bother, I’m not even with Eircom any more!
Caller: Oh! who’re you with?
Me: Ah, UTV Talk.
Caller: oh, we can’t compete with them, they’re one of the best!
Me: Yeah, goodbye!

* Names have been changed.

So, Go to UTV Talk for free calls at off-peak times to local, national and UK numbers, and use Telestunt if you’re ringing abroad or mobiles. Definitely the cheapest phone calls in Ireland!

Delicious Photography Links

Via Thunderbird’s RSS reader…

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