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Camera Physics & Ribald Verse
Carpentry & Coffee
Poetry & Photography
National Folk Festival
Web Site Is Up!
The Final Hurdle
HTML
A Brand New Year
Camera Physics & Ribald Verse
3:00pm, Friday, December 4, 2009
Current mood: numb 
I've finally finished my theoretical analysis of camera physics and uploaded the result, more than a year after I commenced work on it. Of course, most of that time I was doing other things, but it shows how much longer it can take than you expect!
I thought I understood the theoretical foundations of Digicams years ago when I put up my original exposé on resolution, but I found when I went to quantify it all that I was completely wrong. The true explanation, interestingly enough, was not to be found on the net and I had to deduce it all from first principles. It was a fascinating journey as my results were so far from what was needed to make a camera work, and I had to continually find new ways to reduce the deficit until the numbers finally added up. It was like designing the whole of digital photography from scratch!
It is a highly scientific piece of work and contains a lot of maths, mainly dealing with probability distributions and I am pleased to see that I can still do it! Yes! I still rate as a scientist! I doubt that my analysis is original, even though I had to think it up for myself, because one would expect that the major Manufacturers would have figured it all out years ago, just they kept it to themselves. Nevertheless, there is at least one part that IS original and that is The Martian Digital Camera Categorisation Scheme which provides a framework for the Digital Camera Industry to plan their products and get back onto the right track! Will they utilise it? Will they follow the Prophet Mars? Can pigs fly? Still, you never know...
Also using up much of my work time recently has been my writing and uploading Ribald Verse! I confess, I was loath at first to publish smut in my own name, but people of a literary bent to whom I spoke on the matter invariably said: "Publish and be damned!" and so I did, and so I am.
For some reason, all 4 of the poems I have put up were inspired by other people, and in each case I am really piggy-backing on their work, using their metre and rhyming scheme and often their thematic idea as well. Ah well, we take inspiration where we find it. I have given them credit for their ideas and should these poems ever make money they will be entitled to their fair share. It sounds like I've stolen everything, but one must remember that the words themselves are mine!
The beauty of being a Man Of Many Talents is that when inspiration flags in one discipline it burns brightly in another. Sure, I have done little music this year, but I have churned out a lot of HTML and Poetry has been running hot!
I've also played and enjoyed a bunch of new computer games this year. I can heartily recommend: Plants vs Zombies, Bookworm Adventures and Torchlight, as well as Facebook games like Scrabble and Bejewelled Blitz. For lovers of ARPGs who are hanging out for Diablo 3, I really can't praise Torchlight too highly. It really does hit the spot!
Derzog the Alchemist in action in the Ember Dungeons of Torchlight!
Currently reading:
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Currently listening to:
Shine On by Jet
Carpentry & Coffee
6:00pm, Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Current mood: virtuous 
Almost all my time in the last month has been taken up with carpentry at The Arts Company. The Portland Artists' Society of which I am a member, determined that they needed shelf space and cupboards and I volunteered to design and build the desired items. Custom built cupboards 6.6m wide by 2m high take a long time to construct, especially when the floor isn't level, the wall isn't regular and the walls aren't quite at right angles... Still, with patience and the assistance of Kevin Deacon the job was eventually finished!
Kevin & I at work on the construction and the finished job before painting. Click on the thumbnail for the full image.
It may seem like a lot of time devote to a volunteer cause when I have work of my own that I should be attending to but I do feel that it is important to give something back to the community that has supported me over the years. It also gave me an excuse to get away from the computer for a while.
On a totally different matter: I have been a coffee snob for many years and have sent back many double shot caffé lattes, not only in Portland but across the Western District. It continues to amaze me how difficult it is to get a satisfactory coffee. Considering most proper cafés these days send their baristas off to do the coffee course, one would think they would know how to pull a good double shot - but alas, generally they don't. I put my chances of getting a satisfactory coffee from an unknown barista at 5%. This is especially true if the barista is an anglo female. So hopeless is the situation that I have now completely given up on asking for coffee at any cafe, it's just not worth the disappointment. 
I have been using a stove-top caffétiera for years, and by experimenting with grind, packing density and water level have been able to obtain a reasonable coffee on demand. However, I have been conscious that a richer, stronger, fuller flavour can be obtained from a proper café on the rare occasion that one finds a barista who knows what he's doing. Fortunately I read an article in The Age a few months back on the subject of stove-top machines, where the writer talked about a new machine with a patented coffee outlet pressure valve that produced a better quality brew. I knew I would have to try it!
Last week I took delivery of a new Bialetti Brikka which promised to deliver crema from a stove-top! I followed the instructions and the first cup I drank from it was one of the best cups of my life; I swear I could taste butterscotch, so rich and creamy was the brew. Perhaps that was just the enthusiasm of new love but it certainly is a step up from the normal caffétiera. I wouldn't put it quite in the best café quality but it is not far behind. Well done to the folks at Bialetti would appear to have worked it out. 
The Bialetti Brikka in action, note the crema.
Currently reading:
War & Peace by Lev Tolstoy
Currently listening to:
The Resistance by Muse
Poetry & Photography
3:30pm, Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Current mood: bored
This really hasn't been one of my most productive years. I know last year wasn't either but at least I had some good reasons... No such excuse this year.
I was intending to arrange and record my "Backgammon" album this year, but I just don't feel inspired to get stuck in. In fact I don't feel inspired to do much musically at all. This doesn't mean I'm not doing ANY music, I'm still playing and singing, but not nearly as much as I was. Sorry to anyone who may have been hoping to hear some new stuff from The Martian Way, hopefully I'll rediscover some musical desire in the near future.
As was the case last year, most of my creative energies have gone into photography: not only in taking and processing pictures, but in getting to the bottom of the physics of digital cameras and how that is translated into reality. I have done a great deal of research and analysis and have uncovered some results that will surely surprise a great number of people who think they understand digital cameras.
One of the more unexpected results is that in many cases a properly designed compact can actually outperform an SLR! Of course this is a theoretical result and certainly today's compacts are not designed to achieve this, but some of the cameras of yesteryear came close, in theory at least. To test my results I purchased the camera that in specs at least, is the best compact ever made: the Canon G5 from 2003. It's taken some time to master this little beast, and I certainly wouldn't advise anyone who isn't an expert to buy it, as it has numerous flaws that make it difficult to get the best out of it. I haven't yet decided whether it is an SLR beater, but it is certainly capable of some exceptional results. You can examine my current portfolio of instructive shots here.
If you subscribe to my Martian Content RSS feed you will know that I have been churning out some poetry recently. I've enjoyed writing these pieces and I hope you've enjoyed reading them. It takes me the best part of a day to write a poem, put it into web form and upload it. Anyone can write a piece of doggerel but it takes an inventive spirit, a deep familiarity with language and a meticulous devotion to a sound plan to produce a perfect gem.
I've also been continuing to paint portraits, most recently of some of the Portland Lifeboat Crew as part of an installation for the Admella 150th anniversary. I'll post some more information on this later. In the future I hope to put shots of all my paintings on my website, but not now; I'm busy writing a blog.
Currently listening to:
Goodbye Jumbo by World Party
National Folk Festival
9:30pm, Monday, April 20, 2009
Current mood: up and down 
It has been many years since I had proper holiday, so when the opportunity arose recently I spent the week of the Easter holidays in Canberra, participating in the annual Australian National Folk Festival. I felt the build up as significant and the event did prove to be momentous for me at least. It was good and it was bad and it took a week to get over!
It was my main objective to play some ripper sessions, meet new people, drink lots of beer and have a great time. This was certainly achieved, and in spades, and I would like to thank Butch (guitar & vocals) and Gerry (violin) for welcoming me into their circle and being such responsive and fun loving musos. It wasn't only them of course and together with Bob Ballantyne the ever reliable (whistle), Peter (accordion), the Martyns (accordion), Joffa (vocals), Tony (whistle), Ray (guitar), Alastair (harmonica), Phil (violin), Kevin (banjo), Rick (bodran), Barney (accordion) and many others we produced some sessions for the years.
Here are pics from our sessions on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Butch and Gerry in the first, the full session in the second and I am flanked by Alastair and Phil in the last. Click on the thumbnail for the full image.
I have many wonderful memories of these sessions including singing "Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" to the assembled crowd, (largely unaccompanied), Tony (the blind whistle player) singing "My eyes are dim, I cannot see" in his verse of "The Quartermaster's Store", Butch doing "Rolling in my Sweet Baby's arms", singing harmony to a woman singing "The Fields of Athenry", standing up and doing the "diddlyaydees" in "The Dingle Regatta" with the others, doing "The Irish Rover" with Joffa in D, (a key I wouldn't normally attempt), Joffa doing a lovely version of "The Wild Colonial Boy", ... the list just goes on and on...
There were far too many tunes and songs to list all of them here but some were: "Flower of Scotland", "Skye Boat Song", "The Minstrel Boy", "The Blackthorn Stick set", "Flowers of Edinburgh set", "Clare Jig set", "The Cumberland Reel", "Smash the Windows set", "Billy of Tea", "the Springtime it Brings on the Shearing", "The Wild Rover", "Comin' thro the Rye", "Horo My Nut-Brown Maiden", "Merry Blacksmith" set, "Atholl Highlanders" set, "Mountains of Mourne", "The Irish Washerwoman", goddamn I can't possibly remember them all!
Many of these tunes are popular, and to the snobs of the session world, to play these might be seen as slumming it, but let me tell you: these tunes are popular because they are good! and to play what people want can be a good thing. Who cares if you've heard these things a hundred times, they are as fresh as you want to make them, the tune is no better or worse than the day it was written. personally I loved playing and singing these old favourites and feeling the joy as everyone in the session joined in!!!
I don't know why this festival and its sessions should feel so much bigger for me that all the others I've been to but they did. The Nationals is the Nationals! It wasn't all plain sailing for me however and I feel that a price was levied upon me beyond the cash. I don't want to go into details here, except to say that I was still paying for it 5 days later. Such prices are not levied for peanuts, and it is this, in addition to the joyful memories, that leads me to believe that this festival was important for me beyond what one can see.
This event was something of an endurance event with more concerts and workshops than one could possibly attend, and more cuisines than one could sample. There was a feeling of friendliness and helpfulness not only from the volunteers but from all the attendees that went a long way to restoring my faith in humanity. It was a large event but beautifully organised and I offer kudos to the management and staff who made it run like clockwork. Well done to all concerned!
For what it's worth, the act that left the deepest impression on me was Johnny Huckle. I found his honesty, musicality and conviction compelling and exploration of his dreaming path fascinating and moving, a journey that all Australians must take one day.
Currently reading:
Ludmila's Broken English by DBC Pierre
Web Site Is Up!
5:30pm, Monday, March 9, 2009
Current mood: calm 
Yes folks, at last it is up: the guts of my rewritten website, uploaded and running smoothly.
I was making slow progress with the analysis of camera maths, although progress nonetheless, but the pressure was building to get the main game out there. Eventually I decided to take my brother Robin's advice and just leave the photon analysis out of it for the time being and get the rest up. No worries, and in the early hours of Tuesday, March 3, I had it all ready to go, so I set FileZilla to upload and went to bed.
In the morning I woke to find it was all done and running fine. Well, mostly fine. James McComb kindly pointed out a few inconsistencies between Firefox and Chrome, so I fixed them and uploaded the changes... nothing happened! Man I was furious! Damn rubbish software! I guess the pressure that had built up over the past 2 years had to go somewhere and I'm afraid I really lost it for a while there. 
Kudos to James for calming me down and diagnosing the fault (mine). Oh the shame!
Ah well, a little humiliation is good for the soul, and all's well that ends well.
I used a navigation scheme making buttons out of table cells with a nice mouse-over effect, all done with HTML and CSS, but it has the minor flaw that you must click on the word itself to activate the link, rather than just the cell. James has pointed out a way to solve that issue by formatting the navigation as a list, displaying as a table. Will I change all the navigation in my websites to gain this minor benefit? Stay tuned for the answer.
I am in the middle of designing a Blog section within my site, into which I will copy all these past blogs. That will then become my main blog. Most likely I will then shut down this MySpace Blog, so this may well be the last blog entry here. I will provide an RSS feed one way or another, in the short term at least, this will be done by maintaining a database of blog stubs at
http://martianmisery.blogspot.com, go and get your feed from there.
OK folks, here's to the glorious future!
Excelsior!
Currently reading:
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Final Hurdle
12:30pm, Thursday, February 26, 2009
Current mood: calm
OK, so I've been working my arse off, destroying my body, drinking espresso and working till 2 in the morning trying to finish the damn web site, so's I can upload the bastard. I finished all the new photo galleries and just had to reformat my Photography Technical pages and the job would be done. I reread the resolution page and made some corrections, added a new resolution page with up-to-date camera information, added some photos and then thought: You know, I should really check those figures about Poisson distribution...
Well, I had known that the Poisson distribution was very random at the low end with a mean of 1 event per time slice and then tightened up as you increase that. I had assumed that it tightened quite quickly as you get past a mean of 10 events and by 20 your actual number of events would be a close match for the mean. WRONG!
Man, it came as a shock. My intuitive grasp of mathematical concepts is normally very good, so this lack of understanding really rocked me. Furthermore, the more I looked into it, the further removed from my expectation it became. The fact is that Poisson distribution tightens up VERY slowly. I just couldn't believe it. I checked and rechecked my figures. I read stuff on the net. Those damn figures just gotta be right. But they can't be right, or cameras just wouldn't work! More mental stress and confusion.
Well, perhaps they might still work, just not nearly as well as we are being told though...
Hmmm, a problem. Obviously the compacts don't work properly any more, but SLRs do produce good pics... But then you only see the 8 bit per channel jpg, you never actually see the full 14 bit RAW. Yes maybe that's it. Maybe the RAW is full of crap and we don't see it because it's cut down and gamma curved.
Maybe...
Well that would explain the crazy figures, perhaps...
Anyway I'm still working on it.
This is something you can't find on the net. At least I can't find anything like this. And it's fundamental to any understanding of the functioning of digital cameras, well all cameras really. It will be a feather in my cap if I can pull it off but it will make me look a fool if I get it wrong.
It's taking a lot of time and brain power.
I'll let you know how it ends.
Soon...
Currently reading:
Tales from the Perilous Realm by JRR Tolkien
HTML
10:20am, Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Current mood: determined 
Just a quick update before I get back to the grind of churning out Photo Galleries in HTML.
Yes I have knuckled down to the task of rewriting my websites again after the Christmas break and at last the end is in sight!
I'm redoing my photographic section (which is the last section remaining) and I'm about halfway through it. Most of the work is in the galleries, which I have rethought and redesigned and of which there are now 14! Each photo has to appear in 2 sizes at a predefined compression with EXIF. Each thumbnail has to be cropped, resized and compressed manually. These files must be renamed to a consistent scheme and copied into the target directory. They then have to be inserted into the web page code manually, the primary EXIF data transcribed for the screen and some meaningful comments added for each image, hopefully that will be of use to the browsing photographer. Man so much work!
Sure there are gallery generators that take most of this work away from you but you lose control. Will your gallery generator produce 2 different sizes of image, and can you control the size, the compression and the filename? I think not!
Yes, I am now producing the code in plain text. Believe it or not this is not much slower than using a web-page generator. Once you have HTML and CSS pretty well nutted out and know how to do everything you want to do, you can then generate your own templates, title graphics and CSSs and launch forth! Sure, it's a significant learning curve, but so is learning an web-page generator. The beauty is that once you are on top of it, your page behaves the way you expect. No nasty unpredictable bugs to make you lose your hair! Your code is clean (unlike the rubbish that you see behind most webs) and you can be fairly confident that it will continue to work for a long time without any further maintenance.
Perhaps your web will lack some of the flashy elements of today's pages that rely on Javascript or plugins but perhaps that is a good thing! Anyway you can always add in your own Javascript code if you want. Personally I have been bitten by the excess technology bug once too often and I'm keeping my code clean! Yes, my code is validated W3C "Strict" and the CSS too.
Sure, HTML is piece of crap, built on the back of a primitive markup language that was never designed to withstand such a structure, where competing interests (such as Microsoft) have sought to advance their market share by sabotaging the standard, but at least it IS an independent standard, and if you have a good look at the crippled structure and avoid the dodgy bits, it will pretty much do the job.
Textpad Now!!!
Currently listening to:
I, Flathead by Ry Cooder
A Brand New Year
12:41pm, Friday, January 02, 2009
Current mood: peaceful 
Well 2008 was not much of a year for Wazzo as far as his fans are concerned. It appeared to the outside world as though he were simply marking time, feckless under welkin. However, this was not so. Secretly he led a tortured existence of research, hard work and battles with the welfare system of this nation.
Along the way I am glad to say I managed to master SLR photography, defeat the evil Canon, write a small amount of music and songs, paint and draw a number of pictures and finally leave the Dole behind, a constant thorn in my side for most of my adult life.
Taking the next few steps in Photography, (apart from the steep learning curve), has meant a lot of time spent processing RAW images, this is time that would otherwise have been spent writing music, however the results speak for themselves. Admittedly most of these images will not be available for fans to view, so for them this time is wasted. I appreciate this and hope to shift the balance away from photography and back to music at least somewhat this year.
Musically I did manage a collaborative piece of Gypsy Jazz with Richard Morgan entitled "Heavy Pockets", (a state we know nothing about), which I hope to record this year. Other than that I wrote a number of songs to flesh out the album that will one day be called "Rude, Crude and Disgusting". To give you an idea, two of the songs are called "Fuck Youse All" and "Let Me Stick My Dick In Your Vagina".
My painting and drawing developed again this year and I think I produced more pieces than the year before. I hope to put them up on the new website this year.
Speaking of the new website. Yes I have been talking about it for years and was supposed to finish it last year, but cameras got in the way. However! I did make a big start and sorted out the problems that were befogging my path. I am now coding it in HTML direct, and all is going steadily. It is my highest priority and I promise that I will have it uploaded ASAP!
Finally, standing my ground with the emissaries of Centrelink and asserting my rights as a free thinker have finally borne fruit and I have been moved off the Dole and onto Disability Support. It would appear that qualities that make me what I am, also make me unemployable. Such is the nature of the incompetent and self interested society that we inhabit. At last my minders have accepted it. Hurrah!
The reduction in personal stress levels has been most welcome as has the removal of pointless hoop jumping. I hope that this will lead to greater productivity and greater happiness for all concerned.
To sum up: 2008 was a significant year for me although not as visibly productive as recent ones. Nevertheless a lot of work went on beneath the surface which will form the foundation of a great deal of productivity in the years to come. (I hope). I am not dead, nor is my muse exhausted. Look out for a raft of new things this year following the release of my new website. Soon, soon, soon...
Peace Lunatics!
Currently watching:
Hot Fuzz by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright