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.

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.

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.

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

Yours,

Steven (stevey.eu)

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