Every blog on this machine now has the the spam words from my blog appended to their own!
Blog authors here should hopefully see a major decrease in the number of spam comments and trackbacks they have to moderate as I’m fairly diligent in updating my word list!
More on spam trackbacks to come later including mangled links to some of my content that was robbed to create a spam weblog. Thanks guys – just the motivation I needed to update my spam fight! nah nah nah! 😛
Author Archives: Donncha
Coming up on a new year
It’s almost 2005, I hope you’ve all had a great Christmas, whatever your beliefs or not! Normal service will resume here shortly including photos of the first white Christmas in Ireland in a long time!
Planet ILUG
Not sure who did it, but Planet ILUG is a site containing all the blogs here!
Horse and Rider on Beach
Beautiful afternoon, horse and rider out and about. Peace.
Boys At Play
Pictured at Garretstown Beach last Sunday. It was freezing but many people made the most of the dry, crisp weather and enjoyed themselves!
QWAD Framework – Cross-browser Rich Clients
The QWAD Framework looks good, uses JPSpan for client to server communication. Something to look at over the holidays!
The Zooming Quilt
Wow, nice! You can zoom into this image – looks great, and love the images used, lot of imagination there!
Creating LineArt from Photos
Yet another cartoon effect to try on my photos.
The examples on Creating LineArt from Photos look good, but they’re simple images. Anything with a complex background will probably make it throw a wobbler! Must try later!
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!