Just A Summary

Focussing a large format camera can be a tricky process if you’re not used to it. Unless you have a remarkably simple scene there’s usually a period of frantic adjustment of swings and tilts to try and get the plane of focus running through the most important elements of the scene. Most large format photographers will have heard of the Scheimpflug Rule which says that the plane of sharp focus, the film plane and the lens plane must all intersect in a single line. This is one of those useful in theory but useless in practice maxims.

The problem is that you can end up chasing your tail. Adjusting the focus moves the the line of intersection, which means that the plane of sharp focus is suddenly missing the nearest point, so you adjust the tilt to take that into account, but that changes the angle of the plane of sharp focus so it misses the far point, so you adjust the focus, but…

According to a quick search of groups.google.com, I’ve been using the same email address for almost exactly 9 years now and in that time I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to monkey with my mail headers and start hiding my obscured email address down in my sigfile beneath a sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’.

Why? Because, if someone wants to respond to something I’ve said, it seems to be the height of rudeness to expect them to do anything other than simply hit the reply button of their mail client—generally people (well me for certain, I can’t be sure about everyone else) don’t bother.

But there’s something worse (apart from the spammers who cause the problem in the first place) than the invalid ‘From’ header.

You probably don’t know this yet, but I’m in the process of preparing a course on Test Driven Development & Refactoring with Perl which I hope will find me some favour and income.

One of the trickier aspects, daft as it sounds, is finding a good problem to use for the course. Ideally you need something that you can see measurable improvement in as the code is developed, and a well defined set of requirements. One of the standard problems I’ve come across is that of scoring 10-pin bowling.

Remember boys and girls, always, always, always have a backup.

One of my earliest memories is of standing on a low stool, stirring a teaspoonful of sugar into fresh yeast to wake it up while mum heated a pan of milk to blood heat before everything all got mixed together to make a lovely, enriched bread dough that, now I think about it, I could probably make tomorrow without recourse to a recipe book.

She’d cover it with a teatowel and set it to rise, until the dough would be lifting the centre of the towel slightly. Once it was risen she’d tip the dough out and knock it back before dividing it up into buns and plaits (if I’d been good, I was allowed to do some plaiting…). She’d lay ‘em out on baking sheets to recover slightly, then, just before they went into the oven they’d get a quick egg or milk wash and a quick sprinkling of poppy seeds.

How long did it take me to finally get my finger out and move this blog over to the new box?

I think the only answer that makes sense is “Too long”.

Now I just have to wrestle the godawful CSS into submission.

My new firewall seems to have forgotten all about port forwarding rules for a week or so. Which isn’t good when that’s how this site is served.

All better now. I hope.

Once upon a time, when the world was still enormously old but I was a good deal younger, a friend with whom I played D&D pressed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic on me, telling me it was the best thing ever. So off I went and read it and it was indeed the best thing ever.

Well, I was 14 at the time.

And there’s nothing new in this post really. I’ve been indulging myself in a gadget buying spree including finally getting myself a decent film scanner and starting to get some of my old negatives and slides scanned in. I’ll be putting more stuff online as time goes on, but for the time being here’s a few photos from Silverstone a couple of years ago.

I’ve also finally bought myself a digital camera, in theory so I can’t use the ‘but film/dev costs so much!’ excuse. Asking how much the camera, power grip and decently short lens are going to cost me is, of course, beside the point. Here is an album of photos that will mostly be be of interest to my family. The last one is probably decent even if you’re not related to the subject though.

Our experience as contractors, engineers and architects during the last 15 years has proved one thing over and over again: The things placed on drawings are inevitably – always – wrong in many particulars. Drawings serve as an important rough sketch of something that will be built, but must be executed with constant attention to room shape, light, wall and ceiling detail, openings – above all to the feelings which arise in each place, in the construction, as it is taking shape. These feelings are too complicated to predict and cannot be predicted. When a building is built from plans that are conceived on the drawing board and then simply built, the result is sterile at best – silly most of the time – and sometimes unthinkably bad. This is something familiar in virtually all large buildings that have been built since 1950. It is inevitable, given the process of construction used to build them. And it is inevitable that this process must lead to unsatisfactory results.

—Christopher Alexander, Gary Black & Miyoko Tsutsui The Mary Rose Museum

Another installment in my ongoing series of reviews of books that Amazon will take an age to deliver.