The 20th Century view of our nation’s public data is not going quietly, and it’s financing its battle with our money:
So here we have a state body using *our* money to pay for lobbyists to advise on how to stop oiks like *us* from gaining free access to the information *we* largely foot the bill for.
Ordnance Survey: Right Out of Order
Wonderful, innit?
It’s not only landmarks and historical sites that the online mapping services are missing. In some cases, it’s entire areas:
Multimap.co.uk doesn’t know that there’s a Kennington in London.
Multimap.co.uk doesn’t know that there’s a Vauxhall in London either.
Simply stunning.
Just been poking around the Flickr stats pages. Here’s a chart of camera brands arranged by popularity among Flickr users (the stats are derived from image EXIF data). The two manufacturers in the top two spots are predictable enough, but it’s interesting to see Sony* ahead of more traditional still camera brands such as Olympus, Kodak and FujiFilm. Also interesting to see Nokia camera phones ahead of other famous camera industry names such as Pentax, Konica-Minolta and Ricoh. Flickr’s statisticians point out that camera phones are the most likely to create images without EXIF data, and thus, as a general class, are under-represented in the stats.
Canon and Nikon hold the the number one and number two spots respectively, with Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel XT model, used to take 52,320,730 (sic!) of the images that have been uploaded to Flickr. The most popular Nikon model (in terms of images uploaded) is the D50 which has been used to shoot 25,368,091 of Flickr’s images. There are some staggering numbers involved here!
Equally interesting is the “Activity Factor” figure which Flickr describes as “… a number derived from photos, members and a model’s rank to indicate cameras that are used ‘a lot’“. In other words, the Activity Factor shows the cameras that are used the most by their owners.
My own camera (now a discontinued model) is responsible for 15,285,064 Flickr images, with 27,162 of those being uploaded yesterday.
(*Before you consider buying a Sony DSLR, you might want to check out the reviews on DPReview.com. It seems that Sony have some way to go before its still cameras match the quality of its video cameras.)
Back in March I posted about Fixation’s DSLR sensor cleaning service in London (incidentally, the third most visited post on this blog) and I’ve finally gotten around to availing myself of the service. I had my Canon 30D’s CMOS sensor cleaned yesterday and the results are pretty good.
Newly cleaned Canon 30D CMOS sensor
Only one major dust speck remains (upper right edge of image - view the original upload to see) with a less serious speck near the centre of the image and a few other faint ones scattered around. Some of these specks may be on the rear of the lens. I haven’t changed the lens since the clean so I can’t yet verify that. Either way, they will hopefully be invisible in most images.
Whatever one may think of the results, it’s a significantly better job than that once performed by Canon UK’s own cleaning service on the sensor of my old D60 (back in the days when Canon were in public denial about the susceptability of their DSLR’s to dust). I once managed to clean my sensor to a similar standard as that pictured here, but it took me an entire day of painstaking work with isopropyl alcohol, microfibre cloths draped over a rubber-tipped “art chisel” and lots of hand washing, regular wiping down of nearby surfaces and wash-dry cycles for the cleaning cloths.
Fixation thoroughly cleaned both the front and back of my attached lens as well as the sensor (so leave your favourite lens attached when you drop off your camera). The lens used to take this shot was the one attached when I took it for cleaning yesterday and it has not been removed from the camera body since, so this image is an accurate portrayal of the results of the cleaning.
It would have been instructive to do a before-after comparison, but I seem to have deleted the images I took of the state of the sensor before the clean. You’ll just have to take my word for the fact that it wasn’t pretty. The last time I checked, there were at least half a dozen specks similar to the one that remains at the top-right edge of the image, two or three of those significantly larger that the one that remains. Indeed, they were large enough to be annoyingly visible in ordinary images. In addition there was a plethora of fainter, light grey spots all over the sensor. It was a bit of a mess.
The image is of a large piece of (blemish free) white card, taken out of focus with a 50mm prime at F/22 and scaled to half its original size. I used the GIMP’s auto levels function to highlight the remaining blemishes on the sensor-lens combination.
The rather drastic light-fall off in the top corners is due to the lighting on the subject and not the lens (or the camera). Other shots I took had similar fall-off but in other sections of the image. I couldn’t seem to take a shot that didn’t have similar fall-off somewhere in the image - I think this might be something to do with the maths behind the GIMP’s auto-levels function (?) as I don’t recall the same tool in Photoshop creating results with this degree of light fall-off when used on similar types of image. But don’t worry, I took other images which were not underexposed in the top corners and which confirmed that no significant blemishes or dust specks are lurking there.
Fixation is surprisingly anonymous from the street and you could easily pass it by without seeing any clue that the company is there. The staff I encountered were pleasant and helpful and when the woman who dealt with me saw Jake (my three year old son) she recommended Vauxhall City Farm, a small, free to visit urban farm a block away. It was a great place to keep the little one amused while I waited for the clean to be done. (It’s clearly run by people who love what they do and is well worth a visit, especially if you have kids - and don’t forget to make a small donation on your way out, their money box is guaranteed to make you smile).
One final note, if you travel by car to Fixation you can get there without having to pay the congestion charge if you thread your way carefully. They have a limited number of parking bays in front of their offices, but if those are full you can always park in Tesco’s car park, barely a hundred metres away. (Tesco allows its customers a three hour stay. Fixation staff no doubt provide Tesco with a constant source of revenue, so it’s probably not that much of a liberty to park there).
A couple of weeks back I bought an Asustek Eee PC 900 in order to obtain some seriously mobile networking and computing (see screenshots). I considered waiting for the 901 but really wanted to take the device on a trip down to Cornwall so took the plunge. I opted for the black model; no kitchenware here thank you ;-). It sports 20 GB of storage split across 4 and 16 GB solid state drives, 1GB of DDR II SDRAM, a 900MHz Celeron Mobile CPU and a 1024 x 600 resolution display on a 22.7cm (8.9″) diagonal TFT panel.
Ubuntu Hardy Heron running on my Asus Eee PC 900
Like many other Eee PC owners it seems, it didn’t take long (about 5 minutes) before I decided that the pre-installed version of Xandros had to go. Functionally, there’s nothing wrong with the default OS but it probably won’t appeal to those who are used to the standard GNOME, KDE or other more conventional Linux desktops. Eee PC’s Xandros eschews common Linux desktop configurations in favour of a simple tab-based application launcher style interface. It also presents you with licensing agreements which must be agreed to for both the customised operating system and at least one of the tools. Nevertheless, it possesses a capable set of applications that will take care of the essential tasks such as web browsing, email, word processing, Skype, music, basic photo and video editing, and more besides. It uses tried and trusted free software favourites such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird, together with some of the most popular KDE applications providing the rest of the core functionality and features. Importantly, the Eee’s version of Xandros has (naturally enough) been tailored specifically for the machine and everything works perfectly with the hardware. However, it doesn’t feel much like Linux, not least because neither a terminal window nor package manager is available by default.
If you want a “more kosher” Linux desktop, the full KDE-based Xandros desktop can be installed, but I decided to go for Ubuntu instead. I initially tried a version of Xubuntu 7.10, eeeXubuntu, customized for the original EEE 701, but the wi-fi packed up after I downloaded the first batch of updates and a couple of hours of diddling about with suggested solutions failed to restore it. I was concerned that a GNOME installation might be a bit much for the Eee’s relatively limited hardware resources, but was attracted to the idea that the Eee would be running the same apps and tools as my desktop machine and so gave Ubuntu EEE a whirl, a customised version of Ubuntu 8.04.
The install went pretty well and most, if not all, of the Eee’s hardware worked without further tweaks. There were some issues such as the audio volume adjustment keys and the wireless adapter power switch failing to work (although the former can always be adjusted via the standard software controls and the latter can be switched on and off in the BIOS). In addition, shutting down Ubuntu from within a GNOME session fails to subsequently power off the hardware (requiring instead a five second push of the power button), whereas choosing the shutdown option from the login screen shuts the machine down correctly. There are a few other minor glitches as well, although workarounds and fixes, which I haven’t yet got around to trying, exist for many of these. (The fact that I haven’t got around to trying them yet indicates how relatively trivial the issues are.)
Multiple GNOME windows running on the Eee PC 900
Glitches notwithstanding, the core features worked fine. Ubuntu installed without fuss and the Wi-Fi worked out of the box. I was immediately able to connect to my WPA2 network and most of Ubuntu’s tools and standard functionality seem to be present and correct. My Wi-Fi connectivity survived the initial surge of updates. I needn’t have worried about performance, it’s perfectly acceptable thanks in part to the full gigabyte of DDR II RAM. The only performance irritation so far has been the boot time which is a rather agricultural 53 seconds. I didn’t record the Xandros start up times, but I think the boot up time was well under half the time that Ubuntu EEE is taking (there are scripts available that claim to reduce Ubuntu Eee’s start up time, I’ll try them out and report back). Not all of that start up time is taken booting Ubuntu, it takes around 6-7 seconds for the Eee’s BIOS splash screen to appear and the grub menu displays at around the 10 second mark.
I admit that I got a thrill when I first saw the Ubuntu logo together with the “circle of friends” on the black boot screen on such a small device. The ability to carry Linux around on a device weighing around a kilo, that is smaller than a typical computing book, is pretty cool. The key differences between Ubuntu EEE and the standard version of 8.04 seem to be driver installation scripts, smaller fonts, Evolution, GIMP and some other apps not installed by default, and the creators have tried to banish the brown and orange hues, replacing them with a conventional blue, Xubuntu-style desktop (based on the Clear Looks theme, I think). I wasn’t having any of that and restored the Human theme and Ubuntu’s default browns and oranges 
A blue background still appears momentarily somewhere between logging in and the session desktop appearing. I guess the Ubuntu EEE authors are in the “lose the brown!” camp.
This picture should give you a pretty good idea of the dimensions of the Eee PC 900
OK. I’m out of time this evening. I’ll probably create a Part II to this post in the next few days.
NB. The Eee PC’s screen pixels are physically smaller than those on most desktop LCD panels. For example, when viewed on standard 17″ and 20″ TFT panels the “original size” (1024×600) screenshots in my Flickr set will appear around 30% larger than the actual screen size on the EEE.
Of course there is intelligent extraterrestrial life. The clues are all around us. Hell, they even report the results of their Earth exploration on Wikipedia:
“Furthermore, humans have developed culture and technology (such as music, telephone and radio) that allows them to generate, record, transmit, and broadcast sound.”
Fantastic. UK taxpayers are paying to be spied upon. Technology will make slaves of us yet; this is not how it was intended to be.