stevey.eu

Three Dimensional Cinematography

Hav­ing seen Avatar in “3D” this week­end just gone, I left the the­atre with my mind a wash of con­trast­ing thoughts.

First and fore­most Wil­helm Roll­mann (not the U-boat com­man­der) I salute thee. We have pro­gressed from his early tech­niques of cre­at­ing anaglyph images in 1853 via var­i­ous incar­na­tions to what we today know as three dimen­sional cinematography.

Any­one born pre 1990s will no doubt recall the card­board glasses with red and cyan lenses, oh what a joy they were! In some respects I feel it is a shame that they have improved to the stan­dard they are today with polar­iza­tion, there is a lack of what you or I asso­ciate with 3D images when we put on what could eas­ily be described as a cheap pair of sun­glasses. By all means do not take that state­ment in the wrong man­ner, I am utterly fas­ci­nated by the whole con­cept and the ever improv­ing methods.

Look­ing at my first expe­ri­ence with the new era of 3D I feel, being an avid film col­lec­tor I must com­ment on the fact that Avatar as a film even in two dimen­sions, leaves a lot to be desired to put it rather mildly. In 2154 would the US mil­i­tary still be using vocab­u­lary such as “Ooh-Rah”, wear­ing the same stereo­typ­i­cal com­bats, and still wear­ing their caps backwards?

Dear James Cameron,

Please can you leave the writ­ing, and prob­a­bly even the direct­ing of cin­ema, to those with con­sid­er­ably more talent?

All the best,

Steven

Now, back to the point of this arti­cle, 3D cin­ema as a whole. Bar­ing in mind that this is the first 3D piece of cin­ema I have seen of the new era, I am by no means an expert and fully appre­ci­ate there are a num­ber of for­mats on the mar­ket. I am writ­ing of my expe­ri­ence with RealD.

The con­cept has come on leaps and bounds, but as with ani­mated cin­ema in its hey­day, there are still many more steps to be taken to improve. One major flaw, that seems to be expe­ri­enced by many, is the blur­ring or ghost­ing of cer­tain ele­ments of the image, in par­tic­u­lar the mid­dle and far dis­tance. Is this is a side effect of the polar­ized glasses, I do not know, but for some it can be nau­sea inducing.

I do believe that with the right improve­ments it is going to be a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence, but until that day arrives, I will be stick­ing to my reg­u­lar two dimen­sional view­ing. My eye­sight will thank me, I am sure.

Plotting leaked postcode data

Using the leaked post­code data that turned up on WikiLeaks:

UK gov­ern­ment data­base of all 1,841,177 UK post­codes together with lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude, grid ref­er­ences, county, dis­trict, ward, NHS codes and regions, Ord­nance Sur­vey ref­er­ence, and date of intro­duc­tion. The data­base was last updated on July 8, 2009 and is over 100,000 pages in size.

You may be aware that in Sep­tem­ber 2009 this file appeared on Wik­iLeaks, at the time I thought lit­tle of it until I stum­bled across an inter­est­ing post by Paul Battley

He plot­ted his local postal dis­trict in alphanu­meric order using JavaScript and the HTML5 can­vas ele­ment sup­ported in most mod­ern browsers (you need not apply if using Inter­net Explorer). The whole process is done by using a Ruby script and a dataset in CSV for­mat that has been processed with dos2unix.

My main rea­son behind ask­ing Paul for the source was to have a try myself and in ret­ro­spect upon find­ing it to be Ruby based, as a prac­ti­cal method to help me bet­ter under­stand Ruby and how it works.

Click the image to view the ani­ma­tion. Bare in mind if you use any­thing such as NoScript you will need to allow my domain for the ani­ma­tion to work.

I may have a play around with new datasets, and alter­ing the colours at a later date. For now I have plot­ted NR1 with Paul’s orig­i­nal set­tings.

Testing YOURLS/bit.ly

What it says on the tin really, just test­ing some plu­g­ins and features.

GoogleSharing

I came across an intrigu­ing project this morn­ing, called “GoogleSharing”:

Google­Shar­ing is a spe­cial kind of anonymiz­ing proxy ser­vice, designed for a very spe­cific threat. It ulti­mately aims to pro­vide a level of anonymity that will pre­vent google from track­ing your searches, move­ments, and what web­sites you visit. Google­Shar­ing is not a full proxy ser­vice designed to anonymize all your traf­fic, but rather some­thing designed exclu­sively for your com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Google. Our sys­tem is totally trans­par­ent, with no spe­cial “alter­na­tive” web­sites to visit. Your nor­mal work flow should be exactly the same.

Essen­tially, as they like to call it “a spe­cial kind of proxy”. Rather than giv­ing anonymity to all of your traf­fic, it sim­ply takes effect on any traf­fic between you and Google.

The fun­da­men­tal rea­son behind offer­ing such a ser­vice (which is also open source, so you or I can pro­vide alter­nate prox­ies) is to stem the amount of infor­ma­tion Google can col­lect about you, from every­day ser­vices like searches.

In a nut­shell any per­sonal infor­ma­tion is stripped and then all the remain­ing data, or iden­tity, is passed onto another user, and you obtain a new iden­tity, all via the proxy. This mix­ing of infor­ma­tion will make it nearly impos­si­ble for Google to gather the wealth of per­sonal infor­ma­tion it usu­ally does.

For a full, and quite frankly bet­ter expla­na­tion, in far more detail visit the home­page at http://www.googlesharing.net/

The (as of the time of writ­ing) exper­i­men­tal Fire­fox addon is avail­able directly here.

Dear Brett

My feed (atom or other) no longer 404s.

Can I have my feed back on the ALUG planet now please and thank you?

Yours,

Steven (stevey.eu)

–

(This will mean noth­ing to any­one, except a hand­ful of Aluggers)