David Forster

Received this in my Download Squad RSS feed this morning. Norwegian developer Haakon Bertheussen has implemented an algorithm that colorises black and white photos in his own program called Recolored. The Windows beta is available to play with for free.

I downloaded and tested it with a desaturated photo and the results were amazing – on the first try! With practice I think this tool has real potential! My grandparents had a collection of old sepia toned photos that I have scanned and I can’t wait to try this out on them.

I’ve always used SharpReader for aggregating RSS feeds, but after a recent debate at work I’m finding myself trying two new programs. Problem is, I can’t decide between them

The two that I’m trialling are RSSOwl and RSS Bandit (A somewhat dubious name, which I’m sure is no mistake!). I love Owl’s look and feel, but wish it had the unread news and newspaper view format of Bandit. Both are free and OSS.

Searching on Google, RSS Bandit seems to be the most used/recommended, but I just wish it didn’t have that Office 2003 look compared to RSSOwl’s clean, stylish, FireFoxy interface.

Update: Well, I’ve ditched RSSOwl in favour of RSS Bandit. Bandit is a bit more polished in terms of it’s functionality, even though I’m not keen on it’s UI.

The lifts (elevators for the americans) at work need reprogramming. Their strategy is clearly wrong.

We have three lifts at work, they all service the above ground floors, but only two go down to the basement. However, when I press the ‘Up’ button to call a lift from the ground floor, the program will bring one of the two ‘basement enabled’ lifts to me, even if the other one is already at ground level! This is clearly wrong, as the system knows I am going up and therefore letting me use the ‘above ground only’ lift, which is already at my level, is by far a better option than:

1. making me wait for another one
2. making me use a lift that could restrict other’s movements around the building if they want to go to the basement

The only time that I have ever got the ‘above ground only’ lift to open it’s doors is when there has been more than one lift already at ground level which, again, is wrong. the system should only offer me the ‘above ground only’ lift as it suits my known purpose of going upwards and would keep the others for people who may want to go to the basement.

The lifts are made by Kone – I wonder if it’s possible to download and patch the firmware

I went to the Nielsen Norman Group User Experience 2005 Conference with Rob on Sunday and Monday, and attended the Information Architecture tutorials given by Peter Morville from Semantic Studios, author of the Polar Bear and Lemur O’reilly books.

While the tutorials were interesting, I found that the content was mainly stuff that I already knew. Perhaps it was because when I worked on the redesign of MFI.co.uk I was quite heavily involved in the information architecture stage (even though I did not know it was called that at the time).

The conference served as a good refresher though, considering that I will need to dig up my IA skills as part of another redesign project that I’m working on now.

Via the official Google blog. Google has launched Google Base. Can’t quite get my head around how useful this will be at the moment. Any ideas?

Google have launched their free analytics service (following their purchase of Urchin a little while ago). Seems to work similarly to the Webtrends On-Demand service (previously WebTrends live)

I’ll be at the Nielsen Norman Group User Experience 2005 Conference on Sunday and Monday with Rob, in the Information Architecture 1 & 2 presentations.

I’ve been getting a few messages here and there via LondonBikers.com about my R1 from people who have seen similar bikes, or suspicious characters etc. Some people have actually gone as far as to take a photo of the bike and call the police to check the registration number! It’s good to know that some people in the world have a sense of decency still. To be honest, I doubt that any trace of the bike will ever be found. I had a 6 month old R6 stolen about 3 years ago and I never heard anything about that.

I still miss my R1 badly, even though I have the KTM now. Every other night I get flashbacks of what happened and I kick myself for not having had the presence of mind to do more. I could have knocked the guy off the bike when I chased him, I could have hit him harder, I could have remembered some of the martial arts I learnt and fought back to protect my pride and joy. I know it was just a bike, but it seemed more than that. As I mentioned in a previous post, if I have to explain how I felt about it, you wouldn’t understand.

It saddens me to know that there are people in this world who seem to think that it’s their god-given right to take things that don’t belong to them; Things that people have worked hard and made sacrifices for. Then, to add insult to injury, when others try to bring these people to account for what they’ve done, more often than not, they get away with it (and think it’s funny).

Still, in the messages that I receive from time to time saying, “Sorry about what happened” or, “I spotted a bike like yours last night…” there’s a glimmer of hope that decent people still exist and society isn’t going to run itself into the ground completely.

I believe in karma. Not because of some natural force or all powerful deity, but simply because of the fact that if you have no respect for anybody, then in turn nobody will have any respect for you, and I believe that somewhere, sometime, the scum that took my bike will get their comeuppance, and I will probably be enjoying life riding around on my brand new R1 at the time.

Microsoft has released the slimmed down versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 for free! Go grab your copy from here now!
Thanks to Owen for the info!

P.S. If you want a full install, not a network one, try looking here

So, first impressions after a weekend of KTM ownership.

It’s very, er, agricultural. Having always owned japanese, inline four cylinder sports and superbikes this 625cc single seems very lumpy! For me, it definitely lacks something.

Having said that, it is a very good bike for the daily commute – quite narrow, more than capable of bumping up a kerb here and there if necessary and quick and nimble enough deal with rush hour traffic queues. I wouldn’t like to go on a long ride out or tour on one due to the vibration from the motor, but as a cheap winter hack and second bike it’s probably just right.

Also, as I don’t find it particularly inspiring I’m not so worried about it getting the odd bump – I accidentally clipped a car mirror with the hand guard this morning on the way in to work and I wasn’t concerned about it. If it had been the R1 I would have been very upset and thinking about buying new mirrors (at ?Ǭ£60 each!)