Category Archives for Photography

Flower Power & Instant Messaging

Busy busy bee, that’s me 🙂

Chelsea Flower Show ’06

Recently I attended the Chelsea Flower Show for the second time and it didn’t disappoint, I took plenty of eye candy for all to enjoy and you can find it at the usual hot spot (http://www.curlybeast.net). One of my favourites has to be this aqualegia, most spectacular:

Gossip 0.11.1

Over the last 2 or 3 weeks Gossip has really had some work put into it and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Eitan Isaacson for the patches he sent in to get avatar support up and running – it r0cks! Looking good Jeff 😉


During this time we have also spent time fixing some of the little things and adding general polish to make it sparkle, this has meant that Richard has upgraded his status from party hacker to real hacker!

Thanks again to all that has helped with the latest release, it is appreciated and your patches most welcome!

Oh – and I am in the middle of moving house at the moment too, woohoo, busy busy busy!

Anglesey Abbey

Anglesey Abbey


Last weekend, as well as relesing Gossip 0.10 I also managed to get out of the house to see Anglesey Abbey winter gardens which Sue said is quite beautiful this time of year. Of course we had to wait a couple of weekends for some good weather, since it isn’t on tap here in Britain. So my gallery has more aesthetics for all to enjoy 🙂

Browser Thumbnails, Site Change & Updated Gallery

Browser Thumbnails

Recently I decided to try IE7, since I was so pissed off with IE not supporting PNG transparency and the CSS problems compared to other browsers. The reason was to see if I should be bothered about making my home page fully compatible with IE7 or not.

In the process, I discovered that IE7’s beta 2 has support for thumbnailing pages you are currently visiting (which is pretty cool) and then I read an announcement regarding Opera’s latest and greatest supporting it too. After trying out IE’s new feature, I thought it was superb, until I found out about Reveal (a Firefox extension) which does exactly the same thing. The best thing about the Revel is that it is overlayed onto the current page you are on, instead of having to switch to another tab (as you would in IE). Plus it allows you to search all pages so you can quickly find the one you want to switch to! Well impressed!

Site Change

It is time to renew my site http://www.bytejunky.net and I decided that the name was pretty crap, so came up with another one http://www.curlybeast.net/ 🙂

Updated Gallery

Not a great deal of new stuff really, and mostly family related due to the high number of birthdays this time of year and of course we have just had Christmas, but there are some scenic shots:

I think Sue is getting tired of me taking pictures of her with the new camera though:

Glib Threadpools & Canon EOS 350D

GLib Threadpools

I have spent some time working on Glib recently to get sorting functionality working in async queues so that thread pools can be sorted by a user specified function. The main reason for this work was to remove the *very* old thread pool code that GnomeVFS was using (which was duplicated to some extent in gthreadpool.c).

I also added support threads to exit when they have been idle in the thread pool for a duration customisable by the application. This is an optimisation that was wanted to save resources on the Nokia 770.

Canon EOS 350D

OK, so for a while now I have been using an Olympus C460ZdelSol which is nothing special and I wanted to upgrade it to something more powerful, so I decided to get the Canon EOS 350D. I spent most the holidays with the laptop, manual and camera playing with the settings and understanding how it works. Now I think I will read it again 🙂

Updated Photo Gallery

Gallery Update – I updated my gallery to include images from recent trips to Bressingham Steam & Gardens and todays trip to Framlingham Castle. Considering the weather on the trip to Bressingham was a little dull, I am surprised the photos came out so well.

Google Maps API – I saw some of the potential of this with what Ross did here. I love it. Someone pointed out to me the other day that Multimap show the ordinance survey over the top of an aerial view when moving the mouse over an area. – That is quite impressive too.

Weddings & Chelsea flower show

Nokia Work – Great news about the Nokia 770 work. I hope to be in it to win it since Tim says they are raffling a few off at GUADEC.

Weddings – There are a lot of weddings happening at the moment. Went to one of Sue’s old work colleague’s wedding, a couple of week-ends back, and this week-end gone was the wedding for one of Sue’s brides maids to be. Soon it will be our wedding!

Chelsea flower show

Tomorrow Sue and I are going down to London to see the Chelsea flower show. Looking forward to it since I found a new interest in botanic photography in New Zealand.

Taking about New Zealand, Jakub seems to have similar images in his gallery – a couple of times: his/mine and his/mine.

After all that – on to GUADEC 🙂

GUADEC & New Zealand Photos

Images: Ah… the memories, I had a chance to put my New Zealand images up tonight: http://bytejunky.net/photos/

I agree with Glynn, New Zealand is a comfortable place to be. If I had to move anywhere, NZ would be my first choice.

GUADEC: Well I am a GUADEC virgin and this year will be my debut visit. Flights are booked and I believe there is a botanical garden that might be worth a visit in Stuttgart too.