Confessions of a Keytarist

This post is a continuation of the second histogram post entitled “The Highs and lows”.

Another important thing a histogram does is describe contrast within your images. According to Wikipedia:

Contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background.

Or, in more simplistic terms, Contrast is a measure of the difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of your photographs.
Images with histograms that have broad tonal ranges have a significant, or “high” contrast, whereas images with histograms that have narrow tonal ranges may appear dull or flat and are known as “low” contrast.

Continue reading

This post is a continuation of the first histogram post entitled “Getting Toned”.

In the last article, we discussed the basics of what a histogram is, what it represents and how it is generated. What we didn’t cover is why they’re important to us digital photographers. That’s where this post comes in!

Continue reading

A colleague of mine has been taking digital photographs for a while, and whilst his images are usually of a high standard to begin with, he’s beginning to use Adobe Photoshop to help bring out the absolute best in his photography.

The only crux is he’s never really used it and has asked for a bit of help.
To that end, I’ve decided to include a few tutorials in my blog to give him a bit of a head start into learning the dark art that is Photoshop!

The first tutorial I was planning to write up was how to use the level’s tool to make those little tweaks to the image brightness values that can really improve an image. However, as my colleague didn’t quite understand what we were doing and what the histogram represented, I thought it best to actually start with explaining what the histogram actually is…

Continue reading

A colleague came to me today asking if I knew of any way to remove the close button from a windows form, but still show the minimize and maximize buttons.

On the face of it, it sounded like an easy answer. I knew you could disable both the minimize and maximize buttons very easily from within the Visual Studio GUI – so surely there’s an option for the third button; the close button?
Actually, no. Whilst you can remove all three buttons in one go (changing the setting “ControlBox” to false.) and as previously mentioned, you can disable the maximize and minimize buttons (“MaximizeBox” and “MinimizeBox” settings respectively), there is no setting to directly control the Close button.

Continue reading

According to an article on the BBC tech news website, it is possible to determine individual pc keystrokes by monitoring power fluctuations in your mains supply.

According to the article, the six wires that make up PS2 cables are usually very tightly packed together and poorly shielded, leading to “leaking” of  information from the data wire, onto the ground wire.
The current on this ground wire eventually flows, via the motherboard and then the PSU, makes it way through the power cable and out into your mains ring.

Because the clock speed of keyboards is much lower than anything else used within a PC, it’s relatively easy to then filter out the other “background noises” also flowing along the ground circuit, until you’re left with just the key presses, which can the be easily read on an oscilloscope.
Then, because the data is sent one bit at a time, it’s simply a case of joining the bits and calculating back to the original key.

Whilst this is quite cool, the pair who have been researching this type of “snooping” have so far only proved it works up to a distance of 15 metres, and also requires the keyboard to be PS2, I think the discovery has come a little too late…

Original article: BBC News – Technology

I had to make a slight change to one of my applications for a customer today, making it check if it is already running on the local machine and, if it is, abandon it’s attempt to start up another instance.

My initial thoughts were to examine the executing processes and check for the existence of the application in the list:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

    string procName = Process.GetCurrentProcess().ProcessName;           
    Process[] processes= Process.GetProcessesByName(procName);
 
    if (processes.Length == 1)
    {
        //run application
        ...
    }

Now, whilst this works, it is easily “beatable” by simply changing the executable’s name. Doing so will cause the method “GetProcessessByName()” to return only a single match, instead of the current application and any other duplicate instances.

Continue reading

Ok.. so this isn’t really a technical post, but it does mark a (sad but) momentous point in my succession as a plastic rock god!!

For the first time since picking up a Guitar Hero controller at the end of last summer and not being able to complete a song on easy, I have tonight, finally, 100% completed a song AND gold starred it on Expert!

I stumbled across what appears to be an excellent program / plugin; VS.php
It allows for the development, debugging and testing of php files within Visual Studio 2008!

Although it doesn’t have a visual designer, which might scare some people off, I’m a firm believer that visual web “designers” are a bad thing anyway
What it does have is an in-built version of Apache webserver, which takes away the pain of configuring Apache on your local machine to test your sites.
It also supports IIS 6 & 7 with FastCGI.

One of the newest features is the direct support for developing Silverlight 3 applications alongside your php scripts. This means you can have one project that contains both php and Silverlight 3 source files.

On top of that, it also has full intellisense built in!

The only downside is that this cool application isn’t free, but at only $99 and with a 30-day free trial, it’s not a huge expense and would probably be a great buy for anyone who uses Visual Studio a lot, but also writes scripts in PHP.

Check it out here: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php