Digital art staff portraits for 9xb, which collectively took circa 60 hours to complete.
Credit: atrium09 (Flickr)
“In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.” – From Wikipedia.
I have been testing a programme called Photomatix and have found it very easy to use, with examples and tutorials to boot. I also played around in Photoshop with the HDR merge tool (FILE -> AUTOMATE -> MERGE TO HDR) but didn’t find this offered as many options or control over the final processed image. I’ll post my attempts at HDR later, in the mean time check out the Flickr HDR Group.
Tonight was very eventful, I took my girlfriend to see the new Will Smith film Hancock at the Odeon Cinema in Harrogate. As we were getting in the car after the film had finished, I witnessed an elderly lady stumble forward and crack her head on the pavement, knocking her clean out. I ran to help… but I had no idea what to do, I wasn’t trained in First Aid… What should I do?
Lets track back abit and lead up to this atrocious event.
The Film Hancock is basically about this guy with amazing superpowers. He has all the usual superhero strengths, he can fly, run through walls, throw cars, stop trains, repel bullets blardy blah, but he chooses to rebel against society and turns the public against him. To cut this synopsis short, he turns his life around and ends the film a hero – a satisfying end for any regular film goer like myself.
I left the cinema feeling ‘super’, you know the feeling you get as a kid when you saw a superhero film and immediately after you start to mimic their every move, well this is a bit how I felt, only I’m supposed to be grown up so I had to restrain myself slightly.
As we walked out of the entrance, we passed an elderly lady leaning against the wall with her walking stick by her side, waiting for a taxi. Thinking nothing of it we passed by and walked the 30 yards to the car. I walked around the car and was about to open the door when I looked up to immediately see this lady stumble 3 or 4 paces forward, hands fixed to her side, falling uncontrollably and unavoidably cracking her head on the pavement.
“Holy crap” I said, as Zoe turned to see what all the fuss was about. I let go of the car handle and made haste and ran back to her to give assistance.
Unfortunately this lady was out cold, knocked unconscious from the fall and looking in bad shape, not helped by her frail elderly frame. I was first there to help so I took the lead, problem being I had no First Aid training and nobody else around me had either. So what do I do, and more importantly what shouldn’t I do.
I was informed by an onlooker that an ambulance had been called and would arrive shortly, this was a relief, leaving me to focus on the old lady.
The years of watching TV hospital dramas were to be finally put to some use, I immediately checked her vitals:
- Pulse Rate
- Breathing Rate
- Temperature
Luckily her head was to the side and she was breathing clearly with no sign of any fluid or objects obstructing her airway, and her pulse was also steady and strong which was a relief.
I felt the patient was in a ‘Stable’ condition, her position was a little awkward but her vitals were good, so I decided to leave her in this position as to not make the situation worse and put a blanket over her to keep her warm, ironically given to me by the taxi driver who came to pick her up!
Now to finish off and make this lady as comfortable as possible until the ambulance arrived, I took my jacket off and delicately placed it under her head.
To fast forward: Lady regained consciousness, ambulance arrived, Paramedics did ‘their thing’ and the situation was dealt with. Only what was left behind was a big pile of blood from the head wound all over my jacket!!!
It may be ruined, the dry cleaners may be able to rescue it, but to be honest, with light to the situation I don’t care, the Elderly lady seemed to making a speedily recovery and that’s all that matters.
So one Will Smith Film, a bloody accident and a ruined jacket later and I’m going to hit the sack, fingers crossed for Ms Mitchell and her sore head.
Again, a bit late in the day this one, but on 29th June I went with my girlfriend to see Radiohead play live in Manchester.
They played at Lancashire County Cricket Club‘s ground. The place was really easy to get to – though we ended up paying £10 for ‘event parking’ in some car park around the corner which is a bit gutting having paid nearly £50 for a ticket in the first place.
However, we got there at about 17:30, I peed in a bush due to lack of facilities and we ate packed lunch then headed in. I haven’t seen so many people in a crowd like that before – but then I’ve never been to football matches where they get twice that number every week.
The weather was atrocious on the East side of the Pennines but once we’d gone over the top it faired up and the weather was absolutely gorgeous – we were lucky not to get sunburnt.
Anyway, we got to see MGMT and Bat for Lashes for warmup. MGMT really surprised me, good live band and Bat for Lashes had a cracking voice but seemed a little bit out of place on the day – she may have been better as the first act, but that isn’t to disparage her as an artist at all.
The main problem with the venue was visibility – I’m 6′ tall and I kept finding I couldn’t see anything so I feel for those that were smaller. However, with the exception of the usual minority, the atmosphere was the friendliest of any gig I have been to.
So, enter Radiohead: naturally they were sublime, there’s lots been written about it above plus lots of photos on Flickr and I’m sure that Youtube is awash with videos.
It took about 45 minutes to get out of the £10 car park and a further 45 to get to the motorway out of Manchester and we got home at 01:30 … but it was a really fantastic event and I would go and do it today if I could.
I’ve just looked up where we parked and it shows clearly why it took so long to get out – we had to get East to White City Way and were right at the back. Oh well!
Another 9xb success story, another exercise in modern Web 2.0.
A snippet from the client case study on the new 9xb website.
Pleasure Island approached 9xb looking for a website to support their prime time TV advertising campaign. Phase one of the project was to build an information site that would provide a reference point for the attraction with a design aimed to project the excitement of a day out at this theme park. Still in the pipeline is phase two, building an interactive park map and developing an online ticket ordering facility.
I was the account designer for Pleasure Island and I thoroughly enjoyed designing a website that wasn’t ‘ecommerce’ or ‘white label’, this actually had a great design potential that wasn’t fulfilled by their existing website.
Time for another snippet I think..
As a theme park, it was important for the design to have the wow factor, to get across the excitement of the attractions and to give browsers a real feel for the thrilling rides they’ll find at the park. Pleasure Island had a strong existing corporate identity and the site needed to mirror this style and tie in with their printed communications materials.
Using the powerful Javascript framework, jQuery we created seamless ride selection transitions on the white knuckle ride page, presenting ride videos and photos in an effective and slick way.
It’s about five weeks too late but I should let you know that I have a new job.
For various reasons I decided to leave Core UK, formerly known as Azzurri Education, formerly known as Progrid, (UK) Limited; I shalln’t bore you with them.
So, where am I now?
I’m pleased to say that I’m working for Ebuyer Limited in Howden, East Yorkshire as a web developer.
I’m now working with PHP, Linux, MySQL, XML and XSLT with Ubuntu on my desktop (hurrah!) with no Windows in sight (double hurrah!).
It’s a really exciting time for me. I became a customer of Ebuyer way years ago and have always had great respect for them so to be offered the opportunity to work for them actually feels like a great honour.
They have a lot of clever guys working for them and the first few weeks have been really hard going as there is a lot to learn – but learn it I shall.
Anyway, to keep me in a job go and buy your great value consumer electronics.
We’ve had a busy frog who’s incorporated the rather excellent wordpress blog software into our website.
If you bookmarked the old urls, or are reading this through RSS then you will have been redirected to the new location but you may wish to update your bookmarks.
The good news for me is that updating the blog should now be easy peasy and so I should be able to blog more often!
6 weeks and over 200 working hours later my employers new website has finally gone Live.
It looks great, and has received rave reviews from all 9xb’s clients and associates. One client was quoted in saying “Most probably the best website I have ever seen“… sweet to hear but I feel this client may have been flattering us slightly.
I as usual contributed both on the design and the build. My major contribution was in the ‘Team’ section, every member of staff (all twenty of them) had their own page created for them. In the initial planning meetings I came up with the idea of creating a set of high impact, computer manipulated photographs of the team, with the aim of setting the company apart from its competitors and highlighting the great personalities we have in the company.
Below is an example of a before (original) and after…
… yep, that’s me, a very rare shot of me too!
A few screenshots:
Things I did:
- Organised and creatively directed the companies photoshoot
- Creation of 20 high impact staff portraits
- Partial design, including team pages
- Overall execution of design and development
Please visit www.9xb.com to see it in all it’s glory!
To connect to my work PC I run Bitvise’s Tunnelier on my work PC and SSHD at home. My work PC then connects to my home machine and “asks” it to forward traffic from certain ports over the Internet to work. The idea being that I can then RDP from home to work using the SSH tunnel.
Now this all works fine, but I found that if the connection at work died then when work tried to reconnect the port forwarding failed with Received disconnect from <IP>: 11: Server denied request for client-side server-2-client forwarding on 127.0.0.1:3389.
What this message meant was that my home PC still thought that the old connection was alive and was honouring the old request to forward port 3389.
The only way I had around this was to restart my machine/all the networking services… until now. Now I just do sudo iptables -P FORWARD DROP and life is peachy.
I have not yet worked out fully what this has done – as it is just my machine and no other forwards are in place I am not concerned, but if you are not the sole user of your box then I would not use it as-is without expecting to upset a few people.
Ages ago I noticed that the shiny desktop effects on my Ubuntu Gutsy laptop had stopped working.
I have only just got around in investigating, I eventually sorted it out but only after a couple of hours of fiddling. The symptoms were that although my /etc/X11/xorg.conf reported that my device driver was “nvidia” I could not enable the desktop effects and glxinfo reported Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
locate reported that there were lots of nvidia remnants on my machine (which was once upgraded from Feisty) so I reckon in the past I had had to play around installing the Nvidia binaries rather than using the repositories.
Cutting to the chase, after a few failed tweaks, I did this:
- To get rid of the old nvidia binaries:
sudo /usr/bin/nvidia-installer --uninstallThis reported a few issues with symlinks but I ignored them and carried on, after which it successfully restarted X. - I ensured that “restricted drivers” had Nvidia disabled.
- In synaptic package manager even though the nvidia-glx packages were not installed I did a “completely remove” on them, and did a “reinstallation” of the 2.6.22-14 linux-restricted packages and rebooted.
- Finally I re-enabled nvidia in the restricted drivers menu and this time it worked fine. Hurrah!
Another reminder to use your package manager whenever possible!
