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Archive for September, 2007

New lens – AF Nikkor 70-300mm 4-5.6 G

Sep 25

Posted by Lachlan in Uncategorized | No Comments

Yesterday I succumbed to the special that Ted’s had on the cheap Nikon 70-300 long zoom. Normally $300, this is not at all a professional lens. However, it does have quite respectable Nikon optics and for the reduced price of $200 it was just too tempting.

I’ve already pointed it at the moon, and here is an un-cropped frame. It certainly brings things close, and would have been very useful during the recent lunar eclipse.

I’ll be back here to add more about this lens when I’ve had a bit of a play with it.

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A day in Sydney

Sep 25

Posted by Lachlan in News | 1 Comment

trip to Manly Clansi and I spent Sunday in Sydney. Our primary appointment was going to see Miss Saigon in the Lyric Theatre at Star City Casino, but this left the first chunk of the day up to us. We relived various childhood experiences by taking a ferry across the harbour to Manly. Unfortunately, time got away and we didn’t end up buying a Royal Copenhagen ice-cream. Read the rest of this entry »

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Burning some rubber

Sep 25

Posted by Lachlan in News | No Comments

go-karting Our youth group at Canberra National church turned some rubber into smoke on Saturday night. We went to the go-kart track at Hume, and enjoyed some friendly competition. Photography was made difficult by the moving targets and reasonably poor lighting, but I put my D70′s flash to the test and managed to get a few shots. Read the rest of this entry »

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People just don’t understand the Commons

Sep 21

Posted by Lachlan in Free as in Speech | 2 Comments

Virgin Mobile Australia is being sued by a family in Texas that claims the corporation used a photo of their teenage daughter Alison on billboards and website advertisements without consent. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on this today, but it was reported in Australian IT months ago.

It turns out the photo was taken by Alison’s youth counsellor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who shares his photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons Atribution license.  It quickly becomes obvious how little people actually understand about Creative Commons. Read the rest of this entry »

Colours of the captial – floriade begins

Sep 17

Posted by Lachlan in News | 3 Comments

Floriade Floriade, the annual flower festival in Canberra, has started. Whether it is for this reason or not, Old Parliament House and the National Carillon are lit with pink light in the evenings. This morning Clansi and I went to see what Floriade looks like to start with, since the growing displays could change a lot over the next weeks.

Here are a few photos of the colours currently showing in Canberra. Read the rest of this entry »

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Fighting light pollution

Sep 13

Posted by Lachlan in Changing the World | 2 Comments

My good friend Luke Webster recently pointed me to an article in The New Yorker about the problem of light pollution. Its a well-written and enjoyable read that not only informs about the issue, but also manages to inspire a sense of loss and nostalgia over the disappearance of darkness.

Light pollution is a serious issue on many fronts, but suffers a fairly low profile. Read the rest of this entry »

Top points for Bob McMullan

Sep 12

Posted by Lachlan in News | 1 Comment

A while ago I added Kevin Rudd and my own federal MP, Bob McMullan, as friends on my MySpace profile.  This morning I went to see what Bob McMullan was up to, and was quite interested to discover that he is quite actively blogging.  I read through a fair bit of his latest post, which is a transcript of his recent speech about the war between federal and state politics.

I was genuinely impressed to see a politician so keenly using a medium which is rarely natural or intuitive for his generation.  Bob McMullan seems honestly trying to harness Web 2.0 technology to improve the process of democracy, and I left a comment of congratulations and encouragement on his space.

Within a few hours I had a new message on my own MySpace:

  Thanks, Lachlan.

I find that blogging is a great way to communicate about political issues to complex for a soundbite, and it’s great that it’s more than a one-way conversation, too.

Bob

The two-way (or read-write, or participatory) nature of Web 2.0 is something that I have explored at length while following the masterful thoughts of Lawrence Lessig.  Well done, Bob, for stepping beyond the comfortable and facilitating informed and intelligent discussion of issues that are, admittedly, complex.  This attitude, far more even than policy, makes me proud to be represented by the Member for Fraser.

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“Wiki City Rome” tests real-time mapping

Sep 10

Posted by Lachlan in Changing the World, Tech | No Comments

A recent post on the OpenStreetMap Talk mailing list pointed to an article in MIT news about an interesting experiment called “Wiki City Rome“. The project, developed at MIT, started two days ago and uses anonymous data from mobile phones and other wireless devices to “illustrate the city’s pulse in real time”. The MIT news article explains:

By looking at a city using a “real-time control system” as a working analogy, the Wiki City project studies tools that enable people to become prime actors themselves in improving the efficiency of urban systems. In coming years, the Wiki City project will develop as an open platform where anybody can download and upload data that are location and time sensitive.

This is a superbly exciting experiment, and it echoes a dream that I have had ever since I began contributing to the OpenStreetMap (OSM). Read the rest of this entry »

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Perfect graph integration using psfrag

Sep 4

Posted by Lachlan in Hacks and Tricks | No Comments

One of the things that frustrated me last year as I edited my honours thesis was text elements in inserted graphs. Axis and tick labels were unavoidable, but making them look consistent with the document text was not easy. I wish that I had found this article about making plots using Octave, gnuplot, and LaTeX, because the psfrag package provides a perfect solution.

It replaces text in an eps file with its own LaTeX formatted text. This allows, for instance, elaborate mathematical formulae to be displayed anywhere on the graph. It also allows axis and tick labels to be replaced with text that exactly matches the font and size used throughout the document – even if document wide settings are changed after the graph has been created. Read the rest of this entry »

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