Automatic Number Plate Recognition demonstration

“jon -

just a quick ‘thank you’ for the code you posted re: parsing csv files.

i have a gi-normous excel csv file with individual records spanning multiple lines because of multi-paragraph ‘notes’
fields in each record.

your solution of counting the fields and then parsing subsequent data based on the number of columns is so common sensical it makes me embarrassed that i didn’t think of it.

thanks again,
bruce.”

• http://www.photofocus.com
• http://www.scottbourne.com

Working from that figure, 3.971 years are spent  using the applications per month!

Building the movie set for a serial killer who uses pencils as a murder weapon!

I took this photograph many years ago around Staffordshire University around 4AM in the eerie night, using a Pentax MZ-S, film, and a steady hand on the shutter release for a few minutes on bulb for long exposure. I remember when they said digital would never be better than film.

Click to enlarge

River through the desert from Yuma Territorial Prison, Yuma, Arizona.

A smiley face in ketchup from Johnny Rockets in Hollywood, California.

Desert road on the way back from Willow Beach, Arizona

I took this photograph on a road trip in the USA on a quiet little road leading to Willow Beach in Arizona.

Movie producers on the set

I took this photograph on a movie set outdoors in Hollywood. I was Production Designer on a short film called ‘ASK American Serial Killers.’

I like how both the Producer and Director in this shot are deep in thought while looking at what is happening on the set.

You can find out more about the movie ‘American Serial Killers’ at the mini-site here.

You can find plenty more photographs here:

Movie Stills Photography [More]

The cast and crew list included:

• Writer & Director — Sriram Rajan
• Producer — Anusha Sriram
• Director of Photography– Adam O’ Connor
• Editor — Stacie Dekker
• Casting Director — Oorala Yamada
• Production Designer — Jon Hassall
• Music Composer — Jayson Smiley
• Ist Assistant Director — Vanessa Abreu
• Laura Jean Bransky
• Ist Assistant Cameraman — Ben Kobbs
• Gaffer — Luke Kalteux
• Grip — Darion Taylor
• Head Makeup/ Wardrobe/ Visual Fx — Martha Sanchez
• Script Supervisor — Daron Arnold
• Location sound — Anton Haugabook
• Sound Mixer — Alexy Mohr
• Geeta Novotny
• Doris Guerrero
• Randy Tobin
• John Zderko
• Tim Maloney
• Latitia DeLaine
• Joher Coleman
• Kelsa Kinsly
• Jesse Jimenez

You can read why you should always use a source control system like Trac/Subversion in Ronald Widha’s post.

For a cheap and easy to set up hosted Trac solution, all you need is a DreamHost hosting plan. It is extremely cheap (I have a discount code for you). You also get some other notable benefits including:

•    Virtually unlimited bandwidth
•    Virtually unlimited disk space
•    Links easily to Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network so you can have your content mirrored at servers all around the world (blog example)
•    Free Google Adsense credit (usually $50)
•    Option to have a virtualised server with root access, with memory configurable to the megabyte instantly, and Railscrapetc
•    97-day refund guarantee
•    One free domain name registration
•    Option to host your email and documents with Gmail and Google Docs for free (this is usually chargeable for businesses)

I’ve hosted my personal sites and projects with DreamHost for years, and found them to be reliable. There have been some downtimes here and there but nothing serious. For the price I pay and the amount of resources I use (I use over 1TB of bandwidth a month) it is a fantastic deal. Ed Eliot agrees. I have also found the support to be very friendly and generally quick, and there is an option to have telephone contact (often unavailable with cheaper web hosts).

I also designed an application using DreamHost’s API and won their competition (prize money $$$ ).

You can get $10 off an already cheap hosting plan using the code JONH10. You’ll also get one free domain name registration. There is a 97-day refund period so you don’t risk anything giving it a go. Click here to sign up.

In summary, the cheapest DreamHost account will give you a one-click Trac and Subversion hosted solution.

And yes, I do get a reward if you sign up

Star trails in the trailer park — long exposure

This photograph was taken in a trailer park in Yuma, Arizona.

You can see that the stars in the sky have made trails as the earth moves relative to them.

I kept the shutter of the camera open for a relatively long period (about 10 minutes) using a Canon TC-80N3 remote control. This unit has various settings, such as self-timer, interval timer, long-exposure timer, and exposure-count. In this photograph I used long-exposure timer.

I also made a sequence of photographs that I intend to turn into a timelapse video soon.

If you have a camera such as a Canon 350D, 400D, 450D or 500D, you can get a conversion cable to use the Canon TC-80N3 here.

You can subscribe to this blog using the links at the top to stay updated, by email or an RSS reader.

You can find more star trail photographs on these sites:

• http://open-tube.com/17-top-star-trail-photography-ever/
• http://www.gdanmitchell.com/2009/02/10/scaffold-and-star-trails
• http://undefinedjourneys.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/star-trail-photography/
• http://blog.scenephotography.co.uk/?p=167
• http://photoburner.net/2009/03/19/stacking-star-trails/
• http://www.zebpalmer.com/blog/photography/twilight-star-trails-stanley-lake/

Space from AndyH Software

This software creates a visualisation of your hard drive so you can see how much space files and folders are using. Click on the screenshot to view an example.

For example, you may find that your temporary files are very large and deleting them would free up space. Or perhaps your photo gallery is so large that it is time to archive last year’s photographs to DVDs or an external hard drive.

It works with hard drives, CD/DVD drives, mapped network drives and FTP accounts.

You can try it out in full by downloading it from here. After 30 days you can decide to purchase it. The installation is very minimal and not bloated.

Download for Windows

Mirrored skyscrapers in San Diego

I took this photograph on a drive from Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California. I think these buildings are quite close the centre of San Diego. I like the different types of mirrored windows on the building reflect the blue sky — the squares, the seemingly perfectly smooth, and an interaction of two squared sets of windows making a zig-zag.

The picture was taken from a moving truck without looking through the viewfinder. I believe that pictures don’t have to be planned; if pointing a camera out a window and randomly pressing the shutter can make something pleasing, then something good has happened and the camera has added value to my little world.

However, the installation was so simple that I have nothing do add to the installation notes from the official site.

I have been using ClickHeat on my personal site and a few high traffic web sites. It has already proved useful on this personal site, as I noticed people had been clicking the graphical header at the top of the page expecting to be returned to the home page. However I had neglected to set this up, so I quickly made the change. Here is the heatmap that indicated this to me:

Here is a heatmap from a friend’s relatively high traffic social networking web site:

From this heatmap we noticed that most clicks were for opening message threads (as expected), but were surprised by the number of clicks to some of the more obscure options placed at the edges of the web site. As a result, the site is going to be redesigned so that these features are in the main left navigation bar to make the web site easier to use.

The system uses a tiny 6KB JavaScript library, and recording clicks only used a few bytes of bandwidth. The administration web site works quickly and doesn’t seem to be a resource hog at all.

You can download ClickHeat from the official web site here. It requires PHP and the GD graphics library, and is a simple install requiring no database. This UNIX permission calculator may come in handy when setting up directory permissions so ClickHeat can write its log files.

I have noticed a problem with the heatmap being aligned with the web site, and a separate issue with elastic layouts creating problems with heatmap display. There are already bugs raised for these issues on the project homepage, so they should be resolved in time.

Here are some relevant articles:

Tapefailure and RobotReplay alternatives
CrazyEgg and RobotReplay
CrazyEgg — Learn Your Visitors Habits
How Crazyegg improved our website overnight
Crazy Egg Launches Confetti
Crazy egg Review. Find out what people are doing on your website

A popular commercial alternative is CrazyEgg. The articles I have linked to will have much more information on the wealth of extra features that it has.

If you have any success stories from using heatmaps, I’d love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Paul Olyslager has sent me this article which gives a great overview of heatmaps and some of the alternatives to Clickheat.

ClickHeat heatmap screenshot

I previously tried a few different free trials of commercial heatmap systems. I dismissed a few as unreliable, and many were more than adequate. However, I’d like to have an open source project on my side like ClickHeat, as I could use the results as I wish rather than be tied down to a commercial supplier’s system. Also, ClickHeat will be free to use, although there will be time costs involved in implementing and maintaining it.

Heatmaps are a useful tool in user interface design and testing. While watching users use your web site or application in real life and real-time is ideal, heatmapping is automated and results from thousands of users can be analysed. Combined with metrics such as goal tracking with web analytics tracking such as Google Adsense, heatmaps allow you to compare different versions of a user interface and find the best to deploy.

I’ll update my weblog when I have some results from ClickHeat, and I also intend to write a brief guide on how to install and implement it.

You can visit the ClickHeat official web site here.

You can subscribe to my weblog using the subscription links near the top of this page.

Update: Further post available here.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/registry.html/ref=w_h_em-si-html_viewall?id=1K3Y9X1PADP8A

Includes:

• Manfrotto 7302YB M-Y Tripod with Ball and Head
  
  A light tripod with a head with no handle to help with panoramic photographs. It also looks like the head can be reversed, so I can take a high-quality photograph of the ground (nadir).
• Air blow Flash Diffuser for Canon 580ex flashgun
  Cheap and cheerful diffuser for a flash. This is inflatable so it should be easy to pack. It goes over a flash to create a larger area for the flash to illuminate, giving softer shadows. Harsh/sharp shadows can look bad for portrait photographs, so this could commonly be used for portraits.
• STOFEN OM-EY FOR CANON 580EX & 580EX II
  A more compact diffuser that goes over the top of the flashes I have, to give softer light and softer shadows.
• Car Video Recorder with Laser Indication Light
  In-car video recorder that records continuously in a loop, so taht if there is a car crash or other event it should be captured on video. This could be useful to avoid blame for car accidents that aren’t my fault that otherwise would be hard to prove. This is fairly cheap and cheerful. The only thing I’d worry about is that it looks similar to a mobile telephone and if put in the car the wrong way would be likely to be stolen. I think if mounted above the rear view mirror, this wouldn’t be a problem.
• Camera Hot Shoe Hot Shoe Triple 2 Axis Spirit Bubble Level for Canon Nikon Fuji DSLR/SLR Cameras
  This is a spirit level that attaches to the hot shoe (flash connection) of a camera. I had one for helping with panoramic photography but lost it.
• Canon Flash Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX
  This macro ring flash attaches to the end of the camera lens, and creates an even ring of light. This creates an unusual lighting effect used sometimes in portrait photography. Here are some examples:
  
• Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 EX DC HSM — Canon fit lens
  I had this lens a few years ago. It takes very wide angle photographs but without the fish eye distortion effect. Here are some examples:
  
• T-Eye Automated Driving Recorder ADR-3000 With built in GPS Module
  This is a better quality in-car recorder. It records a wide angle image forwards to record forwards and side impacts etc., and has a reverse facing camera with night vision to record inside and rear impacts etc. It also has a GPS and G-force sensor to record where you were driving and what speed. It automatically saves a recording if strong forces were involved, and can download via wifi automatically when you are in range of your wireless network at home so there is no need for archiving videos if you want to keep them all.
• Ricco Portable AA Battery Travel Emergency Charger for USB Mobile Phone MP3 Player
  This is a cheap AA battery to mobile telephone charger that I intend to use for a timelapse video project.
• 
  
• Canon 580EX II Speedlite Flash Unit
  I have two of these already, and a remote controller. They are very good, and with a third I would have a good lighting set.
• Sigma 8mm f3.5 Circular Fisheye EX DG For Canon Digital & Flim SLR Cameras
  I already have a Belarus-made 8mm fisheye lens which I use for panoramic photography, but this is better quality and more reliable.
• Canon EOS 500D Digital SLR Camera (15.1 MP, 3.0″ Clear View VGA LCD) Body Only
  I hope to upgrade my camera soon. The features this upgrade adds include HD video (very interesting on an SLR camera as you can use high-quality lenses, something the average camcorder is missing), and more megapixels. Normally I’m not concerned with megapixels, but I want to use a one-shot 360 lens for panorama photographs in situations with crowds, and this requires as many megapixels as you can get. The HD video could also help with 360 panoramic motion video.
• Vuzix iWear (PC Only — VR920)
  This headset has two LCD screens in the eyepieces, and a 3 dimensional headtracker, so it could be possible to make this into an immersive 360 panorama viewer to make you feel like you are really in the picture. We all thought we’d have that by the year 2000 but I’ve still never seen it happening. A review and demonstration of the VR920 virtual reality glasses is available here, and offical WR920 web site here.
  

That’s the end of my birthday wish list. Well, that’s all the items that Amazon sell that I want

• Capsule Hotel in Ikebukuro, Tokyo at HotelsByCity
• Featuring a photograph by Charles Tyack of the Capsule Hotel
• Capsule Inn Akihabara

They look very interesting!

Here is the photograph from Charles Tyack (click on it to visit his Flickr page):

Capsule Hotel — Links to Charles Tyack’s Flickr pages

I’m going to be publishing a photograph every week. You’ll be able to view this here, and if you are subscribed by email you will receive it automatically.

The Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens is my ‘workhorse’ lens, meaning the one I use the most. When I was using a 35mm camera (Pentax MZ-S!), my favourite lens was a 50mm lens. I found a prime/fixed lens encouraged me to move around and experiment with viewpoints rather than be lazy and zoom from a single point.

With a digital APS-C sensor with a 1.6x multiplier, a 30mm lens delivers approximately the same as a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera.

Public pay telephone in Santa Monica, California

I have been very pleased with the results, being the sharpest out of any lens I have, and the lens hood makes it look formidable. The chromatic aberration was very low, and if anything was visible it has always been easy to remove with Adobe Lightroom’s chromatic aberration correction.

It also works great when taking long-exposure photographs at night. It creates pleasing star effects through its 8 blade octagonal diaphragm:

Street scene at night in Santa Monica, California

The large maximum aperture of f1.4 is great for low-light and situations requiring high shutter speeds. F-stopping writes about this. I took this photograph as the passenger of a car travelling around 60mph on a dull English day, and it still came out very usable:

Hunters gathering at side of a road in rural Nottinghamshire. Crop of a picture taken at 60mph

A photograph using available light in a bar also came out well:

People at Bar Eleven

And finally I found the full-time manual focus very useful. This allowed me to refocus even if autofocus was switched on. Usually if autofocus is activated, a lens doesn’t allow you to manual focus and you can feel the focussing motors giving resistance.

You can find an in-depth review of the Sigma 30mm f1.4 EX DC HSM at Ken Rockwell’s web site.

I’m going to contact Sigma Imaging UK support, and fingers crossed they will be able to resolve the issue as I would like to get photographing again

I have diverted old URL links including the RSS feeds using Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Here is an example of the code I used, placed in an htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog_rss.php$ /articles/feed/ [R=301,L]

This code rewrites any requests to blog_rss.php to /articles/feed so that any requests from the old feed are now redirected with a HTTP 301 response header to the new feed. The ‘L’ indicates that this is the last change the RewriteRule should make, effectively ignoring any rules that may come after this.

RFC2616 from W3 specifies HTTP 301 as ‘Moved Permanently.’ Using this code should help search engines like Google, Ask and Yahoo to update their indexes. I’ve done my part by following the published standards.

WordPress also links nicely to Microsoft Word 2007, so I can take advantage of its grammar and spelling checkers, and the useful feature of holding down Alt and clicking on a word to access research tools such as dictionaries and a thesaurus. Skatter Tech’s article describes how to connect Word 2007’s Blog feature to WordPress.

I’d like to see Wordpress supporting SQLite, but it looks like this isn’t on the cards for some time.

With the burden of making my own blogging software removed, I intend to be posting more interesting articles in the future. I hope to be posting on more varied subjects than just web technology. If there is anything you’d like to hear about, please leave a comment. You’ll also get a funny avatar monster made for you if you comment

I used PHP, CURL, SQLite, AJAX and Google Maps.

If you are a Dreamhost customer, you can use the Dreamhost Real-Time Hit World Map here.

Screenshot:

If you are a Dreamhost customer, you can use the Dreamhost Real-Time Hit World Map here.

They are not for sale, and I would like to experiment with using something like this. I believe that it would make sense to convert a mobile telephone into a similar device, as they are easy to get hold of and generally contain a digital camera, Java/Symbian operating system, memory card and rechargeable battery. If anyone knows of any downloadable software that would perform this task, please get in touch via the ‘Contact’ link. Thanks!

After using both for the past few months, I have found that the DynDNS Spring Server is much easier to get started with initially, but Amazon’s EC2 is much more flexible.

Pingdom response times for Amazon EC2 server

Pingdom response times for DynDNS Spring Server

And an experimental Flash vewier of the same photographs here:
Photo Gallery — Flash Viewer — USA 2009

I switched from using the Panosaurus panoramaic tripod head to a Nodal Ninja 3, and am having good results. I’m sure the Panosaurus is perfectly adequate, but I couldn’t for the life of me assemble it!

Some technologies that I have been experimenting with recently include Amazon Cloud Services, including the Cloudfront, S3 storage, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. I have also made use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, and have plenty of ideas for how it could be used. The Mechanical Turk allows you to request tasks to be done by a huge human workforce of around 100,000. As an example, you could ask for 1000 voicemails to be transcribed, the workforce would transcribe them, and the result could be returned. All these services that Amazon offer are opening up many horizons.

One such horizon that perhaps shouldn’t be opened, is the fact that with just a credit card, a nefarious programmer could spawn hundreds or thousands of high-powered virtual servers, and launch Internet attacks, break encryptions etc. I hope Amazon have a strategy in place for such events so they can be avoided. Such an attack could be on something like the weakness found in MD5 SSL certificates which may be exploited using a large amount of computing power.