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Well that was a fun evening.

Just a quick note to say we’re back from the Tweetup hosted by Sweet Mandarin. An absolute damn fine way to spend an evening: good food, good weather and good company. Lisa and co provided dim sum, a half dozen of us decided to stay for a full meal.

This is a brilliant example of how to use social media to promote your business and get it right. A few messages in the right place, and a genuine interest in people. No high and mighty pretentions, but simple ideas promoted well. I applaud you girls.

One trick they have missed… Sweet Mandarin does a £10 all you can eat Dim Sum at the weekends. I think they should be pushing this more, If the rest of their menu is anything to go by, this is superb value for money. If you’re in Manchester this weekend, drop by and give them a try, you won’t regret it.

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I occasionally make insightful, if somewhat obvious posts to the GeekUp community. One of my most linked to and pointed posts was in response to a common thread: “how to set up a freelancing business”. I formed “Kian’s Rules For Freelancing”, and present them here for your consideration. The old footnotes are recorded with numbers, the new footnotes are recorded with roman numerals.

Kian’s Rules of Freelancing

1. Try and hit the ground running.
2. The customer is not always right. They are, in many cases wrong.
   • The customer is rarely right. Often they’re very wrong.
   • The customer is never right. They are always wrong.^[i]
3. There are approximately 9 usable business hours in a day. Any more, and you’ll kill yourself.
   • Those are 9 business hours. Not necessarily 9 hours coding. Some days, you will do bugger all coding.
   • That is an average. There may be the occasional “oh shit” race condition which means that there becomes 26 business hours in a day. Remember to balance it out.^[ii]
   • If you’re working less than nine hours a day, make sure the money is still coming into the pot.
   • As Paul Robinson has observed, GeekUp, open-source projects and community are often “business”. Remember to factor that in. ^[iii]
4. Try not to bite off more than you can chew. ^[iv]
   • You are a developer, not a designer. If you need designs, hire a designer.
   • You are a developer, not a network engineer. If you need network support, hire a monkey.
   • You are a developer, not a 24-hour on-call support service^[1]. If you need a 24-hour on-call support service, hire a minion.
   • You are a developer, not a one-man army of God. You are not going to single-handedly end poverty, restore world peace and produce cool music^[2].As such, if the project looks like it needs an army, consider hiring an army.^[v]

Footnotes

[1] Unless you’re stupid enough to sign up for that.

[2] Unless you’re Bono.[3]

[3] Or me.

New Footnotes and Annotations

[i] Usually this boils down to “the customer does not know what they want”. The sign of a good freelancer is the ability to beat the client’s real requirements out of them. A stick is a tax-deductible tool.[vi]

[ii] See the past three weeks of my life for a good example of this.

[iii] When you attend these events as a regular “Joe Blogs”, an employee for something-corp, you treat these events as learning experiences, possibly networking, but generally for fun. When attending these events as a freelancer, yes you’re doing all of the above, but you’re keeping an ear/eye open for new opportunities. That takes energy. Factor it in.

[iv] Refer to One Another As I Have Referred You (refer work to others, and hopefully they will refer back to you)

[v] Projects have costs. A business has to spend money. Spend money to make money. Learn. This. Lesson.

[vi] This is not a slight on businesses. Requirements capture is by its very nature hard.

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I admit that I have been somewhat absent from community offerings for the past few months. The projects that I am currently working on have been a little hectic, with some appropriate last minute deadlines changes.

But

I’m hoping that July is going to be a free month. Completely free to do with as I please. As such, I am planning on taking it easy, pimping for some new work to start in August and catch up with those community events I managed to miss since Christmas.

So the question to you lot is - where would you like to see me over the next month. I can turn up and talk on a topic, or just turn up and be generally awesome. Tell me where you would like to see me over July, and I’ll try and book it in.

Oh and whilst were here, please take a look at this post by The Hodge. He could do with your support.

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Now my new larger easel has finally arrived, I can announce one of my new projects. “Northern Geeks” will be a series of portraits of geeks in the north, showing them in their natural habitat and “at play”. I want to show geeks are people too.

The final images will be put into an exhibition, put online and be made available as a book.

So I need volunteers. If you would like to be part of this project, please send an e-mail to kian@kianryan.co.uk with the subject “Northern Geeks” or comment on this post. Please enclose a small “geek bio”, and what you do for kicks (this can be something tech related or completely different). Sport, gaming, gardening, gerbil farming, anything. I’m looking to shoot and print in July with an aim to exhibition in August/September. If your natural habitat is a company office, please ensure you can gain permission to be photographed there before applying. All volunteers will be given a copy of the book as thanks.

Go on - be a part of something special.

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Last Thursday I went to the Old Abbey Inn in the Manchester Science Park for the third Manchester Geek Girl Dinner. I took Kian as my date – its a women only event unless the men are brought as a date.
Ruby_Gem organised a lovely venue for the “BBQ” and talk. Sadly on the day the BBQ broke so dinner was oven cooked instead – still good food though.

The speaker was Lesley Allger from BAE Systems. She spoke about her various roles during her ~30 years that she’s worked with BAE Systems. From “shop floor” engineer to team management to head of her own team. She spoke of key mile stones which effected her time with the company and how she has learnt to manage geeks (and manage her own shiny lust!).

At the end of her talk she mentioned some of the company stats which illustrated how few women go from engineer to “executive engineer” (a broad term used for a specialist or project manager, I believe).

The discussion that followed the talk was broken up by diner – burgers, chicken, stuffed mushrooms, corncobs and veggie kebabs. Al of the food I had was lovely (definitely worth going there again!).

After food was consumed and drinks were had we continued discussing how to change the perception that women were only there to fill quotas. My personal opinion on this is that I think it really does revolve around getting into schools at an early point (say around Year 4 – Year 6 [8-11year olds]) and educating kids about what interesting things they could do – not just girls do art/beauty treatments/teaching and boys do science/tech/building. Doing workshops and activities that get kids involved could well be a good foot in the door to getting more women interested in the future.

I would like to add many thanks to BAE Systems for sponsoring the event and *squishes* to Ruby_Gem for organising a great night out!

Hope to see some of you tonight at Manchester GeekUp!

My gallery.

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Last night Cat took me to the Geek Girl Dinner in Manchester. What’s a Geek Girl Dinner? Well most tech events have a heavy male ratio and bias. Geek Girl Dinners (GGDs) aim to change that balance by only allowing boys to attend that are invited by the girls as dates. In a non-poly recognising environment, each girl is allowed to invite one boy.

Discussion was varied last night, ranging from female attitudes in the workplace, to what women bring to the workplace, why on earth does it all matter anyway to problems with the education system and nurturing the geek spirit. The evening was kicked off with a talk by Lesley Allger from BAE Systems. Although I thought the conversation was positive, not everyone agrees.

Food was excellent from the “Old Abbey Inn”, paid for in part by BAE. We were all sent home with “breakfast bags” of tea and marmalade, currently being consumed while I’m writing this post.

Many thanks to Gemma Cameron for organising the evening.

(Apologies for the quality of the photos, Cat will be posting better ones later.)

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Reposted with permission. I believe in this strongly:

If you do one thing tomorrow make sure it’s that you go to vote. I don’t care who you vote for, that’s your choice, I don’t care if you take the ballot paper home to use as loo paper. What I do care is that people turn out, that they register that they’ve turned up to vote and that if they don’t vote for a candidate it’s an active choice rather than

“Don’t trust any of them, can’t be bothered going to the polling station”

Make it an active choice, show these weasels that you’re not disconnected, that you do care, and if you’re anything like me it’s that you don’t care for any of the current bunch of self-serving w*kers.

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Those who have to dip their toes into the life of a designer once every so often understand the importance of typography. One of the hard parts of typography is finding the right typeface that isn’t going to break your piggy bank (or your client’s piggy bank).

This morning Tamara pointed me to Font Squirrel . To quote from Font Squirrel’s website:

” We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We’ve done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format.

It’s a simple directory of excellent, high quality, free fonts. Well done guys and keep up the good work.

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“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an ASP.NET page in possession of a component, must be in want of a form.”

I’ve just come across this sticky little scenario in one of my projects:

ASP.NET components need to be wrapped in a form tag for their post-back magic to happen. As such, the form tag is usually as high level as it can possibly go (usually just inside the body tag). Some mailing list (sorry - mail marketing) companies provide you with a HTML form to integrate into your site so users can subscribe to the site’s mailing list. Sometimes these forms also come with a little chunk of Javascript to perform some page validation before performing the post.

So what we’ve got looks like this:

<script src="somethirdpartyvalidator.js"></script></p>

<form id="Form1" method="post" runat="server">
    <form id="MailingForm" method="post" action="somethingremote.pl" onSubmit="validate(this);">
        <!-- Insert some form components here -->
        <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
    </form>
</form>

<p>

And here’s the fun. When you click the submit button, it doesn’t perform the expected behaviour and perform a post to somethingremote.pl. Instead it performs a regular post-back to your site and (most likely) will do diddly squat. The culprit is __doPostBack, injected by ASP.NET at runtime, which hijacks the onSubmit event of the parent form to provide the post-back functionality. Your poor little mailing form doesn’t even get a look in.

The answer is to provide a little roll your own javascript for your own submit functionality. This article demonstrates a version of this technique. My version of the is shown below:

<script language="javascript" src="somethirdpartyvalidator.js"></script></p>

<script language="javascript">
    function submitForm() {
        var theForm = document.getElementById('signupForm');
        if (validateForm(theForm) != false) {
            theForm.encoding = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded';
            theForm.action = 'somethingremote.pl';
            theForm.submit();
        }
    }
 </script>

<form id="Form1" method="post" runat="server">
    <form id="MailingForm">
        <!-- Insert some form components here -->
        <a href="javascript: submitForm();">Submit;</a>
    </form>
</form>

<p>

The variation from James Byrd’s original article comes from which form we submit. In the original, James posts the global form (in our example Form1) and instructs the reader to simply blank out any values they may not want to communicate to the third party. This seems overly permissive to me, especially in a potentially dynamic environment where you may have hundreds of components and as such my version simply selects the target form from the page before passing it through the validator and performing the submit action. The postback event is avoided, the third party only gets the data they need and the world is a happier place.

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Two code posts in one day, aren’t you lot lucky?

I’m currently working on a small project working with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. I admit I’m rather enjoying the experience, it’s nice to get back to proper bare metal GETs and POSTs with non of the fluff of normal ASP.NET getting in the way. Since this is a relatively simple project I’m using Linq to SQL rather than the Entity framework. Whilst putting some boilerplate code together (after following the excellent NerdDinner tutorial) I realised there was a lack of a simple generic repository for common object operations. So I present to you my basic, generic repository:

using System.Data.Linq.Mapping;
using System.Linq;
using System.Linq.Expressions;
using BrandingScience.Models;
using System;</p>

<p>public abstract class Repository<T, C> where T : class where C : System.Data.Linq.DataContext, new()
{
    private C db = new C();</p>

<pre><code>// Query Methods
public IQueryable&lt;T&gt; FindAll()
{
    return db.GetTable&lt;T&gt;();
}


public T Get(int id)
{
    MetaTable mapping = db.Mapping.GetTable(typeof(T));
    MetaDataMember pkfield = mapping.RowType.DataMembers.SingleOrDefault(d =&gt; d.IsPrimaryKey);

    ParameterExpression param = Expression.Parameter(typeof(T), "e");
    var p = Expression.Lambda&lt;Func&lt;T, bool&gt;&gt;(
          Expression.Equal(Expression.Property(param, pkfield.Name),
          Expression.Constant(id)),
          new ParameterExpression[] { param });

    return db.GetTable&lt;T&gt;().SingleOrDefault(p);

}

// Insert/Delete
public void Add(T t)
{
    db.GetTable&lt;T&gt;().InsertOnSubmit(t);
}

public void Delete(T t)
{
    db.GetTable&lt;T&gt;().DeleteOnSubmit(t);
}

// Persistence
public void Save()
{
    db.SubmitChanges();
}
</code></pre>

<p>}

T is the table class you want to create the repository for, C is the DataContext created by Linq to SQL. Pretty straightforward. A typical implementation looks like this:

public class JobRepository : Repository<Job, MyDataContext>
{
}</p>

<p>public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    JobRepository jobRepository = new JobRepository();
    List<Job> allJobs = jobRepository.FindAll();</p>

<pre><code>// Return a single item and change the title.
Job job = jobRepository.Get(1);
job.Title = "Mutated Gerkhin Production";

// Create a new item.
Job newJob = new Job();
newJob.Title = "Mutated Gerkhin Anti-Coagulant Production";
jobRepository.Add(newJob);

// Delete an old item.
Job removeJob = jobRepository.Get(2);
Console.WriteLine(removeJob.Title); // Output: Survival of human race.
jobRepository.Delete(removeJob);

// Save all changes to the repository.
jobRepository.Save();
</code></pre>

<p>}

This version currently does not support dependancy injection, which is something I’ll be looking into shortly. But for now, it saves a heck of a lot of time to just get the simple stuff done. I’m surprised MS didn’t actually ship Linq to SQL with something similar.

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I’ll make no bones about it, VS08 SP1’s Javascript Intellisense saves me from having to dive into the docs every five seconds. Not having that fingertip intelligence to my hand would probably cost me quite a bit of time each day. However, since I often end up using multiple frameworks in one project, I tend to use the jQuery.noConflict(); to avoid it conflicting with the other frameworks. Unfortunately, the moment you stick var $j = jQuery.noConflict(); into the top of your javascript file, your intellisense will break for the rest of your script. I’ve currently got two methods for handling this:

1 - Create a “preload” file

This is a small script that sits in between loading jQuery and loading your page scripts. All it contains is the following statement:

    var $j = jQuery.noConflict();

Save it as preload.js and you can then sandwich this in between loading the jQuery framework and loading the page scripts as so:

<head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/preload.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/whatever-you-want.js"></script> 
</head>

In your actual work scripts, you can then reference jQuery and the preload using the standard VS reference notation:

/// <reference path="jquery-1.3.2.js" />
/// <reference path="preload.js" />

Visual studio will have sorted out it’s type resolution for $j meaning that so long as you also have the jQuery .vsdoc file in the same folder as jQuery you get this glorious view:

The pros of this technique are that you can drop in new versions of jQuery at a whim and not have to worry too much about having to update preload.js. Of course the downside is that preload.js then needs to be sent to the client, with all the associated overhead of a get request.

2 - Append noConflict onto jQuery

There are those that will believe that the jQuery file is sanctimonious and should never be tainted by a developer’s touch. As it is I’m already using ASP.NET and cursed for all eternity, so how much worse could it be? So path two is pretty straightforward, open up the jQuery and jQuery.vsdoc files and add var $j = jQuery.noConflict(); to the bottom of the file. Again, this will sort out all the resolution gubbins while you’re working away in your own scripts.

Just remember that if/when you update your original jQuery files to also replace the noConflict statement at the bottom.

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Tomorrow (Saturday 2nd of May) is the final day of the photographic exhibition At This Space. I hope you all get chance to drop by and I really hope that you enjoy it.

This post appears on kian ryan - code, photography, bob available here. If you want to leave a comment, please do so on this page.

The “At This Space” exhibition is opening on the 26th April, at 5pm. I’m invited to the private viewing and you’re not, so neerrrr. If you want to try and bribe your way in (there’ll be free drinks, and people, and cheese[1]), then drop Cat Ashton a line and she’ll try and weasel you in. Cat’s work is being exhibited there as part of the exhibition.

Otherwise please, please, please drop by Tuesday to Saturday, 10am til 6pm. These are young, upcoming, budding artists who need all the support they can get. Hell, one of them may even be the next Henri Cartier-Bresson or Richard Avedon. The exhibition is being held at the rather fancy-pants Urban Splash location in Castlefield:

Urban Splash (Mooch)
Worsley Street
M15 4LD

I was there today helping put up some of the work, and occupying space at other times. The exhibition looks great, the space is superb and there’s some excellent work on the walls. All very much worth your time.

[1] I may be lying about the cheese.

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So, with all this exhibition prep you’d be right to think my other projects are getting squeezed for time. In this selection there are two photos that were taken on Why Photography shoots - you’ll have to guess which!

This is Nick Harris, a GeekUp regular.

Newly fixed pinhole camera cap for my Canon bodies. Just in time for Pinhole Photography Day - this coming Sunday.

Kian took me up Rivington - ended up getting a dent in the driver’s door on the car that day! But also went up Rivington for the first time (nevermind living here for 3 years nearly!)

This is my friend Jenna. She’s somewhat shy around cameras..

Walnut has turned rather photogenic lately - not like she hasn’t been all along - just more so recently!

The rest of the gallery.

Right I’d better go get ready for We Will Rock You!(be warned there be music!).

Today a new theme has gone live on my photoblog. It is Sliding Door by Wayne. Thanks to NovaWildstar for pointing me at it.

All this is a face lift that’s been on the cards for a while - the exhibition opening Monday was just a kick up the butt to get it done!

Now I just need to sort my gallery theme/solution.

Also done some general rejigging of the categories and pages - also all my linked pages now resolve(even if there’s nothing in one of the files!)!

On Tuesday 28th April 2009 will be the general opening of At This Space. We will be at Urban Splash, Worsley Street, Castlefield, Manchester. General opening hours will be 10-6 Tuesday until Saturday.

If you want to come to the private viewing - drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do!

Here’s a sneak preview of my series “Why photography?”

Over the last week I’ve been a little busy - last Saturday I went car shopping, Sunday I bought a car and Monday my sister and nephew came to stay for a few days. Now, of course its Easter weekend. Today (Good Friday) bought new Red Dwarf. This had me somewhat excited!

April 7th 2009 (spring cleaning!)

April 5th 2009 (ice cream at Fredrick’s post first real drive!)

April 10th 2009 (shot after dark in the garden)

All in all its been a busy few days. The next few days I’ve got a few shoots going on for ‘Why Photography?’. Anymore volunteers for it would be great! Especially if you’re not too far from Manchester!

Been a little busy with the end of term, my birthday party and fund raising for the exhibition next month. Still doing my project though!

April 1st 2009 (if you look carefully you can see me!)

March 25th 2009 (outside the exhibition venue!)

March 28th 2009 (Cookie at my birthday party)

March 31st 2009 (Hannah is a poser atm!)

March 18th 2009

This is Walnut - she’s growing up too quickly! She’s about 10 months old.

Well, yesterday was my 21st birthday. Thank you for the lovely messages! I started my new Project 365

March 16th 2009

March 17th 2009

Today I have been sat in the office trying to get prints done for a print sale fund raiser for my exhibition next month. If anyone would like a card with this on the front then let me know. Also if there are any others on the site you’d like then drop me a line.

Today is my 21st birthday. This means pretty much one thing - starting my “new” project - Project 365 is starting again. Since the last one was derailed thanks to the break-in.

I’m currently scanning negatives from my last few shoots today. I’m quite happy atm. Also writing about the photographic books I’ve been reading recently.

Also if you fancy dropping by, tonight there is cake and games.

Today was the first set of shoots for my project “Why Photography?” which will be exhibited in late April/early May.

Tootdood’s metaphoto (photograph of a photograph being taken…etc..)

The first person I was intending to see was Tootdood. He was the first person I could arrange to see about why he does photography. I was very pleased that Tootdood introduced me to AirAdam. Adam agreed to join the project too. Which makes him another of my favorite people!

While photographing AirAdam, Pixel.Eight wandered across us. Once AirAdam wandered to do some more photography, myself and Pixel.Eight wandered around Market Street, Piccadilly Gardens and upto Victoria train station too, chatting and discussion photography.

Today I have shot 18 frames on the Mamiya C220 with either the 55mm or 80mm lenses. Been using Kodak Tri-X 400. Gonna dev in Kodak TMAX when I’ve finished the second roll.

Looking forward to further shooting!

In April/May I will be exhibiting in Manchester. The venue is still to be determined, but the opening night will be the 30th April.

Now this is your chance to get involved.

Are you a photographer?

Would you be willing to give me 30 minutes with you, your thoughts and camera for a photograph and interview?
(and are somewhere relatively close to Manchester or going to PhotoCampLeeds this weekend)

If yes, could you email me on cat@catashton.co.uk

On the 28th January we were broken into. Sadly, my laptop, Wii and 360 were taken. They also tried to take the film scanner, but left it without a power supply. They have also damaged the TV amp.

This does however mean that I’ve lost about 6 months worth of work.  Everything I’ve done since about August (except certain shoots that have been printed off-site) is gone. This also includes my Project 365 which I was about 8 weeks from concluding!

In the past month we have replaced the scanner power pack, my laptop, the kitchen window and we’re in the process of sorting the other stolen things. Project 365 will restart on March 16th - my 21st birthday!

Also got a back-up solution being tested atm. Now time to get on.

This term I have been working on getting my work into photographic competitions. Tonight one of them closes - The Renaissance photography competition. I have entered 4 photos in 3 categories.

Happy Birthday (Emotions)

Dancer’s Heart (Emotion)

Ready to Dance (The Human Body)

Roma (The World We Live In)

">
">
">Competitions gallery

So a few months ago my Epson R340 gave up the ghost. The yellow print head clogged and the paper feeder claimed it was blocked when part way through a print. Epson customer services told me that it was going to be more cost effective to get a new printer rather than to repair this one, they offered me an all-in-one unit that didn’t really do photos, but at a reduced price.

At this point we gave it up for dead and started looking at new ones. Of course, to go with the Epson V700 we purchased earlier in the year we wanted to stay with Epson and I wanted access to larger scale prints at a reasonable price.

That’s where the Epson R1800 stepped in. Only to find that the ones that were still being sold were going fast and it would soon be easier to get replacement compatible cartridges for the new model R1900. Sadly that meant that it was going to cost about the same as the scanner and we simply couldn’t get it then.

Yesterday (6th Jan) Orange Tentacle bought the Epson R1900 from Parks. It takes up almost the whole desk it is on leaving enough space for the Epson V700 and the in and out post trays.

The print quality is wonderful once the print heads are fully charged (took about 3 prints to get the heads charged with ink). Comes with colour profiles for Photoshop and glossy prints that you can see reflections in!

What would you say makes your house a home?  Or any house a home?

Hopefully its an object and not *huge*… I’m wanting to take photos similar to Irving Penn’s Cigarette series:

Please leave a comment.

This afternoon I had a press pass for the Bolton Big Switch On.

Bolton Big Switch On Gallery

Photographed the event for APNA News. Met a fair few of the local freelance press photographers in the Manchester area (sadly didn’t get any contact details for anyone) and some of the staff photographers from various news papers. Have to say they all seem a rather friendly bunch!

There may be more photos at a later date - got so much to share!

Although I'll be keeping this account open, I'll only be using it for commenting on other people's entries. As of now, I'm migrating my serious blog over to my domain:

www.kianryan.co.uk

All the content that would usually appear here, will now appear there, and probably in a more organised form to boot (Wordpress has somewhat more granular control over its content than Livejournal does).

This is course does not mean I'll be neglecting either my friends list, or my communities. And I will still use my other account for my day to day ramblings. Those who need to know where that one lives.

SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(anyone who knows me will understand quite how important that is)

I suspected something's been up with me for a few days.

I thought I had *had* the fresher's flu/lurgy/whatever bug and got away with a mild incarnation of it.

I'm exhaused, dazed and sat at Manchester Piccadilly. I grabbed a cup of tea at Starbucks, read a very pages of Private Eye and have now realised that I am seriously unwell. I feel like I'm going to vomit.

It's ironic I think that the only chance I've had to realise this is the first time I've slowed down in two weeks. Annoyingly, I've still got to go to Brighton, and I've still got to work. If I had realised this sooner I could have done something about it.

(Ed) Balls.

For those of you in the know - yesterday (that is Friday the 24th October) was my friend Tessa’s birthday party. Only the coolest kids got an invite and only the great and good ventured forth for the night of games, drinking and frivolity! These are photos from the night in question.

Used Canon 10D, Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6, Tamron 28-75mm f2.8, Canon 85mm f1.8, Vivitar 285HV with Stofen.

The rest are in the gallery.

This morning I thought I’d have a play with my new lens - Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6. Someone on my flickr feed had some time playing with them in Photoshop’s tool yesterday and inspired me to play with my toy.

The original images were taken from our front gate in a circle to include the *whole* view from there. Maybe next time I’ll do a section of the view and more of it in detail.

The crew hard at work putting the final touches the the pistes ready for the event.

http://www.kianryan.co.uk/

The calm before the storm, the minions put the final touches to the pistes before the Manchester Cadet International Fencing Tournament starts. In under an hour's time, around four hundred fencers descend on the venue.

</div>

More in the series availible by clickling on the image.
Constructive comments and blatant praise all welcome :-)

Canon EOS 50E
“Canon EOS 50E (film body) with BP-50 battery pack. Bought for £50 from Cash Converters on September 19th 2008. Lens 50mm f/1.8 (auto-focus, plastic fantastic) bought last year sometime.” Caption from gallery

Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 and Canon 85mm f1.8
Both beautiful lenses - really fallen for the Sigma, lets pray it doesn’t do what the last one did!

You can see the test/sample images I’ve take with the Sigma and Canon. The EOS 50E test images will happen next week when I have chance to develop the rolls!

This week I started back at Manchester Metropolitan University.  I am officially a second year!  With that means that my student loan has come through.

Do you know what that means boys and girls?? Shopping time!  I’ve bought myself two new lenses - Canon 85mm f1.8 USM and the Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6.  I also bought a new camera body, Canon EOS 50E, one beautiful film body!  Yes, a automagic film body, but it works nicely along side the digital body.  Sadly, I haven’t been able to get the lithium batteries that the 50E requires, but I do have the battery pack to go with it which takes AA batteries instead!  Not to forget about the ordered things that have still to come though the mail - sensor cleaner, filters for the lenses (don’t forget to get your UV filters to protect the front element!) and a few other odds and sods for the camera bag.

This does, however, mean that my dear Epson R340 printer is being dicky. The yellow printing head is clogged and has been quite rapidly not printing things right for a couple of weeks. Kian is working his technical genius on it to help me out (I really don’t want to buy another printer for another 6months or so - when this one hits 3years old I was planning on replacing it…). Annoyingly, Epson feel that it is time to replace my printer and offer no way of repairing it - only replacing with an all-in-one unit (further down the scale then the R340, but *slightly* cheaper!).

Things that are happening at uni - part of our education this term is that we must enter 2 photographic awards/competitions/contests, one of them being the Nikon Discovery Awards. There are a few people that don’t like the idea, but I’m not too sure that their reasons are that logical - the work, if chosen by our tutors, *might* have a chance of winning a place at an exhibition and having their work printed and publicised by Nikon and the British Journal of Photography.  As it is, the brief for it is so broad that I don’t feel restricted by it in anyway!  Its getting us ready for next term where we *must* put on a public exhibition.  So, on top of the Nikon Discovery Awards I need to choose another photographic competition to enter before Christmas.  Got a couple in mind.

Still debating going to the fencing competition this weekend - its the Manchester Cadet.  I’ve not been around the fencing scene since last December - got the next lenses and camera I want to try out.  We Shall See.

Today I decided to re-organise my gallery - have a look.

I’ve also put on-line my photographs of the Anti-War/Labour Party Conference Protests (flickr and my gallery).

Tony Blair

Wanderings around Manchester, near St. Peter's square. These were taken just after I purchased the Modo monopod, and we're a test run of my "travel kit".

Minolta XD-7
Vivitar Series 1 f2.5 - 3.5 28-105mm
Tri-X, T-Max Developer 6mins @ 20oC

http://www.kianryan.co.uk/

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More in the series availible by clickling on the image.
Constructive comments and blatant praise all welcome :-)

I wasn’t much in the mood for arranging my face today so I thought I’d try an idea that’s been bouncing around my head for a few days - a blurred, backlit portrait.

Take:
Canon 10D,
Vivitar 285HV
Stofen
Cable release,
PC Sync cable
tripod
lighting stand
and a blank piece of wall

Mix together in an appropriate way. Camera pointing at subject, flash (on 1/2 power) with stofen behind subject at shoulder height. Subject, in this case, holding the cable release. Auto-focus off and focused at the very minimum.

The only post-processing done - added a vignette, image size and saved as jpg!

Minolta AL,
f2, unknown exposure.
Tri-X 400, Tmax Developer 20oC 6mins.

http://www.kianryan.co.uk/

We're now off on our holiday. We're heading to bed, and will be up again in around two hours. We won't be reachable until Thursday earliest, and possibly for a day or two after.

Expect a flood of photos when we get back, and a detailed review of the Minolta XD-7 and the Vivitar Series 1 28-105mm.

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One of the hazards of working from home is having four-legged friends occasionally walk across your keyboard. Once or twice, this has led to having to explain to people that ahjsdgjas is a perfectly valid and reasonable code-comment to make. This morning Walnut wandered across my desk, and instead of completely crossing it, decided to fall flat across my Moleskine and keyboard.

Thus the kitteh enforced tea-break.

As the caption from the images says:-
“Captured with Canon 10D, on camera flash with a home-made “stofen”-like defuser about a foot away from the subject. The defuser is made out of a film reel canister with a cut about a cm wide to accommodate the flash unit.”

For a while I’ve been having to use sheets of paper with any photograph that needed flash (and not using the Vivitar 285HV) with under 5ft between camera and subject (many of my portraits, macro-ish shots, etc) to defuse the on board flash. Well, no more! I now have a defuser and it came free with film!

On top of all that - I’ve not had to edit the file, just convert it to jpg.

Minolta AL
Unrecorded Exposure
Tri-X 400, T-Max Developer 20oC 6 mins

http://www.kianryan.co.uk/

Constructive comments and blatent praise all welcome :-)

The last few days I’ve been playing around with the flashgun and how to use the light on camera. Trying to get my head around how to use this strobe in portraits on the go and with little prep.

The strobe is in the hot-shoe so, about 4inches above lens, pointed straight forwards at the subject(ie, me) on 1/16th power. 75mm, 1/125th sec, f.4. Used a hand trigger - wired clone - and tripod slightly higher than the default height.

This photo is manually focused and for once looks to be spot on..

So what do you think of the colour?? It was meant to be a redy-brown, but it is over my old purple hair.

Just a note to say that I'm in London from the 12th til the 14th of September for the UK ALT.NET Conference. The conference is a two day event from the Friday til Saturday, leaving Saturday evening and Sunday to catch up.

I was thinking drinks Saturday evening. Anyone want to propose time/place? (I don't know Nodnol that well). I'm close to Euston this time.

This idea popped into my head a while back. Photographers is quite a high volume community, and we manage to average 30.7692 posts per day. I wanted to do some analysis on the distribution of posts, who our top posters are and (possibly crucially), the commenting "sweet spot" of the day and the week.

To do this, I wrote a little C# app to fetch all the "back 20 entries" pages LJ makes available and then run a few regular expressions over this data to grab the name of the poster, the date, time of the post and the number of comments received. Unfortunately, LJ only allows you to page back 380 entries in this manner, so that only takes us back to 29/07/2008. At some point in the future, I may work out an alternate mechanism for paging through this data, but for the moment, this is all we can get.

Top Posters and Top Commenters

The graph above shows the "top posters" to Photographers, those people who have posted the most over the last two weeks. Shown against that figure are the average number of comments the poster received per photograph. Pretty easy to see that flooding the community with posts is not the way to be an effective comment whore. However producing interesting work repeatedly (igorlaptev), does seem to sustain a high level of commenting.



Switching it around, those people who received the most comments posted the least. Taking the user-ids of the top commented ten I queried to see when they posted and what kind of distribution occurred. Six out of ten of the top posts happened on 31/07/2008. As far as I can tell, the community wasn't running any kind of event on that day. What were you doing on that day that made you all so comment happy?

Time and Day - The "Sweet Spot"

But if you're reading this, then you're probably interested in finding out when the best time to post is for the optimum comment-whoring effect. Is there a magic spot of time in the day and the week when most people are sat in-front of their machines and feeling the most generous with their comment love? Unfortunately, with only two weeks of data, I can't give you any real conclusions on this, but we can at least have a stab in the dark. I've also just realised that the "date" field shows the time in the time-zone of the poster, not a standard time-zone. Bugger. Well let's press on.



Well, hopefully a day is long enough to not be too badly effected by time-zones. There seems to be a quite obvious spike on Wednesday/Thursdays for posting, possibly photos processed from earlier in the week, or maybe all the household chores are done by this point ready for the weekend? Who knows, but Thursday's crowded. There's not a hell of a lot in it for the comments really, just an odd one here of there. I think it's pretty inconclusive, there's no real deviation for when comments get posted in the week.



But, what ho! There *does* seem to be some interesting results when we break it down hour by hour. Unfortunately, please bear in mind that this lumps 8AM US/Pacific with 8AM GMT, so we're still looking at rough figures here. But if you want maximum comments, make your post at 6AM in the morning. Please bear in mind that this may be offset by the low number of posters at that time. One person supplying an absolutely stunning, praiseworthy image will totally skew the number-crunching (to be honest, that's probably what's happened here). Commenting seems to be pretty uniform throughout the day, with a slump in the wee small hours of the morning. Which I personally find ironic, since it's usually the wee small hours of the morning my work is finally ready to post. Maybe I should hold off until after a good night's sleep and then post? The numbers seem to indicate that would return better numbers of comments.

The fall off for posting is also interesting. It's good to see that whatever time-zone you're in, you appear to be getting reasonable shut-eye between 2 and 9am. 7 hours? That's healthy enough. Keep up the good work there.

Conclusion?

Realistically, based on such little data (380 posts is not a lot for around here), we can't make anything firm. It does appear to be a case of quality does indeed win over quantity, and there is no real sweet-spot to the day, so long as you post to most people's idea of waking hours (probably USA time?). But whatever you read into this, I hope you've found it reasonably interesting and worth your time.

Manchester Victoria Baths

Mamiya C220
Tri-X 400, T-Max Dev 20oC @ 6 mins

http://www.kianryan.co.uk/

More in the series availible by clickling on the image.
Constructive comments and blatent praise all welcome :-)

A couple of weeks ago I was chaperoning Kian’s younger brother with his Dutch girlfriend while she was visiting.

128/365 (BTW)

This was taken after a day out at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. It just so happens to be Kian’s youngest brother’s favourite place to spend an afternoon/whole summer holiday and there’s a Weta exhibition on atm.

This photo started life as a shot out of my Canon 10D. It had a large dirty white door in the centre that has at somepoint been kicked and looked rather unsightly. So I chopped it together.

Now the question is reader - can you see the chop?

So I’ve been rather absent from this blog for a while. I’ve not updated since coming back from Edinbrough in May. Since then I’ve been keeping up with my project 365 - there is a photo per day from the time I’ve not been updating. I’ve broaden my camera use - now using my Polaroid for stuff.

Anything any of you want to know?

83/365 9th June 2008 - one of the few nice days I’ve been able to go out with the camera

88/365 14th June 2008

92/365 18th June 2008

100/365 26th June 2008

102/365 28th June 2008

113/365 9th July 2008

115/365 11th July 2008

127/365 23rd July 2008

130/365 26th July 2008

Random selection of the photos from the collection.

the rest of the gallery

I've been to a few Microsoft events over the past six months, and definitely have more than a passing interest in the development of SQL Server 2008. As a developer, one of the things that had really got me excited was the demonstrations of Intellisense against live databases. This is something that that up until recently was only available using the very excellent tool Red Gate SQL Prompt.

At most of the talks I've been to, it's been made perfectly clear that the Intellisense support was going to be available when connecting to all versions of SQL Server. This sounded fantastic, since I work with lots of different databases on a day to day basis as a contractor, and often have to "feel" my way around. Having to refer to the Object Explorer every five seconds is definitely something of a hindrance.

So, knowing that SQL Server 2008 RC0 had been made available I grabbed it this lunchtime and installed the client tools in the early afternoon. Apart from the fact that it took nearly an hour to complete (just for the client tools), everything went pretty swimmingly. I managed to lose my lovely visual theme again, but never-mind I could always re-apply that later. I fired up SMS, connected to my local SQL2005 Express instance and ... nothing. Didn't work. Zip, nada, no Intellisense anywhere.

Since I was working for a client, I didn't stop to contemplate this too much, I had to simply get on with it. But when I got home I did some digging and found this blog article:

http://blog.magenic.com/blogs/whitneyw/archive/2008/05/04/Backward-compatibility-for-Intellisense-please.aspx

It turns out that the CTP's backwards compatibility for Intellisense was actually a bug, and should never have seen the light of day. SMS wasn't checking the server version before enabling or disabling the Intellisense, and since MS are so worried about us poor little programmers possibly using the wrong syntax, they've pulled the plug on it completely. Having read the blog post and the accompanying details on MS Connect (feedback centre), I am pretty damn sure that no amount of petitioning is going to help.

So, if you're looking for a SQL Intellisense tool, don't bother grabbing the latest SQL Server unless you're wanting to work with only SQL 2008 instances. Keep your SQL 2005 tools and make an investment in Red Gate SQL Prompt. I'll write about how effective a tool it is in another post.

And why if a small company like Red Gate can do it, Redmond can't is beyond me.

Manchester Victoria Baths

Mamiya C220
Tri-X 400, T-Max Dev 20oC @ 6 mins

http://www.kianryan.co.uk/

Mamiya C220
Tri-X 400, T-Max Dev 20oC @ 6 mins

More in the series availible by clickling on the image.
Constructive comments and blatent praise all welcome :-)

Given the following code, what would you expect tagList to contain at the end of this sequence?

string tagString = "First, Post, Please";
List tagList = new List(tagString.Split(','));
tagList.ForEach( delegate(string t){ t = t.Trim().ToLower(); });

For those who said {"first","post","please"} go to the back of the class. Let's go back to lesson one shall we?

Strings are classes, yes?

Good.

But they're not normal classes. They are immutable classes. What's so special about immutable classes? Every time you muck around with them, there's a new copy of them generated on the stack and the old one is simply thrown away. Added to that, ForEach passes byval rather than byref, so even if we switched from string to int or any other primitive type, we're still in trouble.

This is a good thing, since it reduces some significant headaches when it comes to concurrency. However, it does mean that when you do what you *think* are nice little tricks such as the above, in fact what is happening is a new copy of the string is created, a new copy is then created after it's manipulated, and then thrown away before moving onto the next one.

The answer lies in another extension method - ConvertAll. So our line above now becomes:

tagList.ConvertAll( delegate(string t){ t = t.Trim().ToLower(); });

Even better, if we're working in C# 3.0, we can also take advantage of the new lambda notation (a quick Hi to all the Haskell people who suddenly raise their heads) and we can now get:

tagList.ConvertAll( t => t.Trim().ToLower(); );

Now *that* is elegant.

Adam Joshua

This is my nephew, Adam Joshua. He’s 8 and this might just have been the only time during the weekend I was in Edinburgh that he sat still!

Main light (room feature) camera right and flash gun 2 foot above camera with stofen at 45° either 1/16th or 1/4th power.

Gallery

29th May 2008

23rd May 2008

24th May 2008

25th May 2008

26th May 2008

27th May 2008

28th May 2008

14th May 2008

15th May 2008

16th May 2008

17th May 2008

18th May 2008

19th May 2008

20th May 2008

This is my most recent shoot from the Studio at university. It’s main purpose was as a piece to go in my portfolio and to go in the portfolio of a make-up and hairstylist Sarah Spears.

Suzy

The gallery

Nat

Here’s a week’s worth. It’s been a very heavy week getting stuff done and sorted (including two day at Chez Parents). Hope you enjoy.

13th May 2008

12th May 2008

11th May 2008

10th May 2008

9th May 2008

8th May 2008

7th May 2008

6th May 2008

Here in the Republic of Ashton-Ryan has been a very busy week. I’ll point out that I have been doing my photo a day - many with my phone’s camera. I’ll just link to them, rather than give you a weeks worth of images in one post.

48 5th May 2008
47 4th May 2008
46 3rd May 2008
45 2nd May 2008
44 1st May 2008
43 30th April 2008
42 29th April 2008

28th April 2008