What Jessie Did Next… – Page 8 – …being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.

Page 8 of 26

A Temporary Dip In Productivity

I have a bad cold. I attempted to ignore it since chugging the first lot of Nightnurse on Saturday night, but tonight I finally gave in – it’s got the better of me. Bother.

On a positive note, in the past few days I’ve received five emails from bands and producers liking my photos, wanting to use them in accordance with my turn-up-and-shoot usage licence (CC non-commercial attribution), and in two cases are prepared to give me good hard cash to show up at a gig to take some more. This is indeed good.

I’m not booked to do any pics for a week or so but Shrood are playing O’Donoghue’s on Saturday and Nicky will be there. I’ll probably find somewhere to photograph on Friday – it would be good to find a showcase night around Leeds so any promoter types are welcome to get in touch and drag me over, especially if there’s decent lighting and a bar 😉

Undefined Variables In PHP

April 1, 2009 / Jess / 4 Comments

Once again I find myself cleaning up undefined variables referenced in PHP. Yet more bedroom coders who think they can write stuff, causing notices, errors and warnings to spew out just simply because they can’t be arsed to learn to use isset().

THIS IS WRONG:

if ( ! $_REQUEST[‘blah’] ) {
echo “thingy isn’t set”;
}

THIS IS RIGHT:

if ( ! isset($_REQUEST[‘blah’]) ) {
echo “thingy isn’t set”;
}

For crying out loud, is it any fucking wonder PHP gets such a bad rap when you bloody idiots are making vague assumptions about undefined values being FALSE? I should set fire to every bastard one of you.

(Next week’s rant: !== vs !=).

Open Mic Monday: Some Weeks Later…

March 31, 2009 / Jess / 0 Comments

Ryan’s Open Mic Monday at The Hop has been going for some weeks. While most of Wakefield is dead on a Monday evening, this is where the party’s at. It’s usually worth a looksee even though it can get a bit packed out especially with “the grunge youth of today”.

Anyway, those who have shown up will be fairly familiar with me – I turn up, I take photos, I use it as practice space for my own photography in a no-pressure environment and try out new kit and new techniques. It’s useful, but last night I decided to instigate a new policy which is: if you’ve played at Open Mic and I’ve photographed you more than twice, I will probably not take any more pics unless you’re either extremely photogenic, you specifically ask me, or I’m trying out some new kit. I think that’s pretty important to point out: I was asked by one of the younger devotees last night why I’d not shot his set, there’s your answer.

(Sidenote: it’s nice if folks say “thankyou” once in a while. I was standing at a gig on Saturday with some folks who’ve used my pics before, and got utterly blanked. Come on chaps, at least nod and say ‘hi’, politeness costs nothing.)

Of course, if you do want me to show up and it’s an interesting venue with lots of opportunity to expand my portfolio then please do drop me a line. I’m always amenable to showing up and taking some pics especially if it’s in Leeds or Wakefield.

Update: Last night’s pics are here. I think I’m getting better at the B&W stuff.

Geek Joke

March 30, 2009 / Jess / 0 Comments

As seen on Facebook:

‘Thirteen die after C. diff outbreak at hospital’ – sounds like one seriously extreme kernel-patching meetup.

(Thanks Christo :))

A Postscript About DSG/Jessops…

March 28, 2009 / Jess / 1 Comment

OK, I got it wrong! A rather helpful chap from DSGi Head Office got in touch and pointed out that Jessops have never been a DSGi operation, stating:

“…in the UK DSGi operate Dixons, Currys, PCWorld; TheLink has sort of finished and is web only, as is Dixons, except the Airport stores. (There are also lots of European chains, which have names I can never remember); but Jessops has never been a DSGi operation.”

A couple of other comments from several folks indicate that Jessops competence is still very much changeable and your mileage will indeed vary. I must have been lucky!

Anyway, I won’t name names on this but thankyou for the clarification and consider me corrected.

Experiences With Jessops

March 26, 2009 / Jess / 4 Comments

As many folks know, there is no love lost between me and DSG (“Dixons Store Group”). The inefficient stores, the 16 year-old school-leavers and disinterested sales assistants, the “Mastercare” warranty debacle, the staff who aren’t particularly knowledgeable and the poor stock control all contribute to horrendous experiences in Currys and PC World (I won’t touch Leeds Headrow PC World with a bargepole – but that’s another story). Jessops seems to stand out in competence though. At least, they do now.

I’ve had good experiences from Jessops branches over the past year: I bought the Canon G9 in Marlow’s branch and they were helpful and considerate. I chinwagged for an hour with the manager in the Wakefield store where I’ve not bought anything major for a year or two but he didn’t seem to mind. Then this past fortnight I have had exceptional service from the Headrow Leeds store.

So what happened in Leeds to warrant this outpouring of joyfulness? The EOS 5D Mk II I bought was faulty. Nothing major but definitely an annoyance – a hair looked to be trapped between the focusing grid and the lightbox: when I took the camera bodies to be cleaned the bloke at Calumet said he’d have to have most of the unit apart to remove it so I went for a replacement. The nice lady in Jessops got me a 5D shipped in from the only store in the UK which had one left, I kept the first body while the second arrived, and then was in the store for about 10 minutes today doing the switchover. During the process I had phonecalls advising me of progress which I really appreciated.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had good times with Leeds Jessops either – the Merrion Centre store (now closed) were equally helpful when I bought my 30D. I didn’t have time to get it cleaned before I went on holiday so needed one with a CCD as clean as possible: we had almost every 30D body out of the box doing a dust-check (f/22, point at sky, take photo, look for dust). Seems to be something they’re used to, and experience speaks volumes.

Let’s backtrack slightly here for some background: DSG tend to get “lowest common denominator” staff in – at least that’s how it appears. I’m sure the folks in charge of the stores are great but that’s not how it comes across. For instance, I can walk into Currys in Wakefield and there’s shop-floor staff staring into the middle distance in a sort of “sales droid standby mode”, who seem to bluescreen when you ask them anything past “how much does it cost”. That’s always seemed to be the norm for DSG-owned stores, but they’ve pulled a blinder with Jessops. Indeed, staff seem to know what they’re on about (for instance being able to discuss photographic techniques and scenarios rather than them reading from a sales document stored in their heads – almost like I’ve gone to an independent shop).

It’s not always been this way: when Jessops aggressively expanded (and bought up Wakefield’s own local camera shop, Richards Cameras) the shops were largely staffed by salesmonkeys and the aforementioned pubescent YTS staff. I think it all changed about 2 years ago when they decided to get some folks in who knew what they were on about.

I heartily recommend them – and coming from someone who passionately hates DSG, that’s a recommendation to take note of.

Edit: Jessops it turns out aren’t DSG – see my followup post here.

Trinity Walk In Wakefield Is “Just Resting”

March 11, 2009 / Jess / 1 Comment

Wonderful plumage, Trinity Walk!

From one of the articles linked below:

A construction company working on a prestigious £200m shopping centre has confirmed that a bank backing the project has pulled out of the deal.

On Tuesday morning 185 workers at the Wakefield Trinity Walk shopping development being run by York-based Shepherd Construction stopped work.

The council have sold the sites, knocked down a substantial portion of the city, relocated the market, demolished a huge pile of parking, knackered the shops that are still standing, broken the one-way system, sold off the library books for that relocation, busted a pile of archeological finds, and now they’ve left a big hole in the ground. Hurray! Still, I bet the Ridings Centre are having a giggle.

As a friend put it: “buy up and flatten a load of buildings, blight the rest, chuck out the shops, then cancel it”. Presumably this will leave Wakefield in much the same state as Bradford and Leeds, where expanses of waste ground forlornly stretch where once shops, affordable flats and council parking stood.

More at the Wakefield Express story or the substantially less shit BBC News article.

(I’ve been occasionally photographing the changes round there and you can pretty much follow the timeline of Trinity Walk and the old/new market halls through my photos).

Subversion For All

March 11, 2009 / Jess / 0 Comments

Only a short post but one I felt of note since I come across developers and media designers who still don’t employ code version control, wipe out each others’ changes, and lose days of work regularly. Worse still they don’t understand the paradigm, or throw a perfectly good svn/cvs regime away because they can’t be arsed.

So, head over to Smashing Magazine’s round-up on Subversion and learn to do code control properly – trust me, it’ll save your ass when you have more than one developer or when you make cock-ups you only discover months later.

Canon EOS 5D Mk II

March 10, 2009 / Jess / 1 Comment

Happy new camera!

I now own a Canon EOS 5D Mark II – the Leeds Headrow Jessops had one in, and after a lunchtime jaunt (where I’d convinced myself it was a stocking error and they didn’t really have one) I happily bounced back to the office with a bagful of toys (body-only, since I have glass for man and dog, but I did add on some screen protectors and an 8GB Sandisk Ultra CF).

Good timing too – I spent the evening at The Hop shooting the Open Mic Night. It’s a regular night for me so I was able to compare the photos from my 30D in previous weeks: the end verdict is that the camera displays a totally different dynamic from anything I’ve used before.

The first big difference is the full-frame sensor. OK, I know this isn’t specific to the 5D itself but it’s taken vaguely 20-30mm off my lenses – the 85mm lens acts like a 50mm on the 30D; the 70-200mm acts like a 50mm… you get the idea. In short, I don’t know my glass any more: where I could pick out any lens straight away it’s now going to take some experimentation to get the optimum balance again!

Onto the ISO expansion: the high-ISO noise is pretty nonexistent. Fair enough if you run it at H2 (ISO25600) you get some grain, but I was happily shooting at ISO6400 last night: instead of riding aperture and shutter speed (my technique on the 30D) I found myself riding the ISO instead. It also meant I could take some cracking crowd shots, and stop making up for the poor light with low shutter speed. Brill.

Finally, the video – 1080p HD video to be precise. Now I’ve not worked out a way of resizing/transcoding that yet given a 5-minute performance yields a 650MB file, but it looked good; actually my big problem is that I can’t hold the sodding camera steady, a skill I suppose I’d better learn if I want to do video alongside still photos.

It chucks out 8MB JPEGs. Consequently my 8GB card was almost full when I left the venue. The end result of the Hop shoot is here.

Minor annoyance: Canon have rejigged the buttons on the top of the body. I suspect this will get really tedious when I’m swapping between the 30D and 5D at paid-gigs. However there are quite a few gigs coming up including an all-dayer at The Hop on Sunday (the “Oxjam” thing) so I’m sure it’ll get some hammer.

More when I’ve got used to it!

I’m Sorry, I Have Tickets

March 9, 2009 / Jess / 2 Comments

After a bit of a hammering on a crashing website, I managed to secure tickets to see the recording in Newcastle of “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” (show page here). Rob Brydon’s chairing, with Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden, Tim Brook-Taylor and Colin Sell.

I am utterly over the moon as a consequence 🙂

Byte Back UK Classic Gaming Convention 2009

March 8, 2009 / Jess / 1 Comment

In case you missed it I’ve been at the Byte Back UK Classic Gaming Convention which took place down in Longton, near Stoke-on-Trent. I was principally there to demonstrate the Domesday Project which I still have in my possession but it finished up as a bit of a general Acorn nerd-out! I met with quite a few enthusiasts from the BBC Micro maillist and the Stairway To Hell forums, it’s always nice to put faces to names you’ve talked with for years 😉

So what was there? Quite apart from the Domesday, I’d taken the MDFS network fileserver down and some random Beeb stuff. Ian Wolstenholme and myself constructed an Econet on our six-table Acorn island, networking together three stations and the fileserver; it was a bit of a frig and there were occasional bare wires and curses as the termination failed. Ian had also brought along a 6502 second processor and Teletext adaptor (probably the last time you’ll see that working given the digital switchover), but sadly the signal just wasn’t good enough and we had to make do with trying to decipher the headlines. Dave had an Atom there with an MMC card as storage (!), and you could buy RAMagic for the Beeb too.

Our room – “The Executive Suite” – was predominantly Acorn (Ian reckoned 75%). Adjacent to us were Superior Interactive and Retro Software showing off their Repton levels, and Retro Clinic had some fabby external Compact Flash drives for the BBC Micro. I was pretty impressed with those, and came home with one for my main Beeb – it’ll mean I don’t have quite a nightmare transferring stuff over, and also means I can back up things to the house fileserver more reliably.

Saturday was exceptionally busy, probably at capacity – I spent most of the day demonstrating the Domesday Project but did manage to nip out for a wander and a drink. It’s always nice to see reactions to the Domesday in action: they vary from the highly technical inquisition (since the LVROM usually has no screws in it I occasionally pop the top off so visitors can see the innards), right to the non-technical people who look to see if their school is on there or how areas have changed since the mid-1980s. Occasionally you’ll get a teacher who’s never seen the system, or a pupil who contributed and who’s named in the credits.

Sunday was quieter so we could tinker – we started the morning ambitiously extending the Econet to Rob’s A5000, and from there to the Retro Clinic stand. It sorta worked, although both Rob and Mark had fileservers running (although the network failed in interesting and fun ways resulting in some undocumented Econet error none of us had seen before). Actually, Mark’s fileserver deserves special mention since he had it running on a Master 128 using a CF card instead of a Winchester… yes folks, with a little bit of messing around (limiting the formatting program to 64MB) you can run an Econet fileserver off a flash card! Then at 3:30ish just as I was leaving Alex got his BBC Buggy working – with a rather weird situation where the buggy PSU could back-power the Master through the user port.

It was an interesting venue (“Bidds”) more a live music shed falling apart at the seams and with rather crap lighting but it served the purpose… I’d advise against trying the burgers or the hotdogs, mind. Bit damp too, and occasionally pools of water would appear in the back corridor as the rain fell.

Bizarre/heroic/fun stuff: Guitar Hero on a C64 (“Shred64”, GH on a SID chip, how cool?!), an old vector-graphics Star Wars machine (played that a few times I can tell you), various Game&Watch toys from Nintendo, and a Sega bare-board flight-sim setup for the US military.

Only one potential disaster: Leaving the SCART cable at home for the Domesday so haring it to Maplin with 30 minutes to go… then the monitor going pop-whine in a rather annoying fashion 5 minutes before the show was due to open (luckily there was a telly around with SCART – thanks to whoever found that for me!). Actually, I was pretty impressed with the Domesday and MDFS holding up over the course of the two days.

Photos are here – enjoy.

Anyway, if you’re naffed off at missing the Acorn geekery you’ve got another chance! The Wakefield Acorn Show takes place on 25th April at Cedar Court Hotel (just off J39 of the M1) and I’ll be running an 8-bit museum of sorts there with the Domesday and a few other things. There is a movement to try and get an Econet running, plus I’ll be running an 8-bit surgery if you’ve got a machine that’s not working properly or want some pointers.

In the meantime, it just goes to show – the Acorn 8-bit retro scene is alive and well! Game of Chuckie Egg, anyone?

Update: If you want to see more, David Glover took some video (there’s a little chunk of my bit around 1m20s) and a few photos, plus there’s pics from the Retro Software chaps here. Peter also did an extensive write-up on STH which you can read here.

Econet Level 3 On…

March 7, 2009 / Jess / 1 Comment

Ladies and Gentlemen, an important announcement: Econet Level 3 can now be run off a CF card.

(Well, *I* thought it was impressive.)

Byte Back Retro Festival, Stoke

March 7, 2009 / Jess / 0 Comments

I’m blogging this from the Byte Back Retro Festival in Stoke where I’m demonstrating the BBC Domesday Project, as well as the Econet and MDFS. There are quite a few of us in a large room almost solely dedicated to BBC Micro 8-bit stuff, quite mad really.

It’s nice that the Domesday System gathers such a crowd – I’d intended to blog this 2 hours ago but I’ve been run off my feet!

If you’re coming to the festival, come and say hello – we’re in the “Executive Room” which is next to the main arcade room and we’ll be having a few ales from 5pm onwards. There are many many BBC stalwarts there both from the maillist and the “old times”.

Photos will be in the usual place tomorrow.

New Trek Trailer Online

March 6, 2009 / Jess / 0 Comments

OK, I may be re-evaluating my opinion of this movie already. Looks like it may actually rock.

Trailer over at the official site.

Safari 4: First Impressions

February 25, 2009 / Jess / 0 Comments

I gave up on Safari yonks ago on my Mac and I’ve been a bit of a Firefox bitch for years, although I’ve heard good things about the Safari 4 Beta which came out the other day. It’s hardly going to ride roughshod over an installation I already use so I thought I’d give it a go.

Installation nice and smooth, although really why did I need to reboot? Am I running Windows on this thing? No. There is no need. Come on, Apple – stop being daft.

Truthful verdict on the app itself? It’s quite nifty. Blindingly fast on my Macbook, at least in comparison to Firefox; the really very fast Javascript engine will help a lot with my $dayjob work on webapps too. Rendering seems OK but I’ve not tried to do any of the more interesting stuff yet (book hotel rooms, upload content, all that foo).

One big annoyance – the positioning of the tabs right at the top. Thanks to Hitch, this can be sorted on the command line with:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

…which will shift them back below the location bar after an app restart. More undocumented UI fiddles here.

One minor annoyance – because of the preinstalled RSS feeds, it fills your “popular sites” shizzle with CNet, Youtube, Amazon et al. Easily sorted tho.

So far so good – I’ll try it in preference to Firefox for a few days (although probably longer if I can find a way of importing my stored security stuff, bookmarks, and stuff).