photo Archives - The Story of David Kaspar

Bankside – London

(~35mm, Sony DSC-FX77) – click for larger version)
Every time I venture down town London I get reminded that I should do so more often. London is a breath taking city but this fact is easily forgotten during the every day working life.
This splendid view was from a Greek restaurant, just by the Shakespeare Globe Theatre.
In the foreground you can see the (controversial) Millennium bridge and in the background the magnificent St. Paul’s cathedral.
PS Brownie point if you can guess what the light/item in the top left corner is…

Hello J2ME World

With my recent upgrade to SonyEricsson T630, a new geek opportunity presented it self: to develop Java applications for my very own mobile. Priceless.
Because I am fairly familiar with Java and the fantastic, open source, IDE NetBeans it was easy to develop and deploy my first HelloJ2MEWorld application.
NetBeans has an extension module focused on J2ME development. Download it and NetBeans will be able to help you with your Midlets, JARs and obfuscation.
NetBeans is using the Sun J2ME SDK. If you want to be more device specific, I’d recommend you to download an SDK directly from the mobile maker you are interested in. Two obvious choices are SonyEricsson and Nokia.
Try out and debug your application on one of the supplied emulators.
The last step is to transfer your application to your mobile. You have a choice between infrared, bluetooth, USB cable and Over-the-air (OTA). Since I am developing on a IR enabled laptop, ir was the best option for me.
First application that came to mind for developing was of course a mobile blogging tool. A quick search on Google returned the just started open source project MIDLog. So instead of starting from scratch and probably duplicating all work done in MIDLog, I am hoping to contribute to MIDLog.
The J2ME world is crowded with two main MIDP versions, WTK versions and various JSRs (Java Specification Requests). While many exciting features are planned for future version of J2ME, todays devices are very limited.
Example, the T630 supports the “new” multimedia API (MMAPI – JSR 135) but Sony has chosen to support the sound part only. This means that there is no support for image capturing and I suspect this will make it very difficult to develop a mobile blog tool capable of posting images.

Love Actually (2003)

What a sweet, sweet movie from the writer of such classics like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and more.
The main theme of Love Actually is that love is actually all around us despite all the negative vibes lately (wars, terrorism, natural catastrophes). We follow a group of people in their search for love.
There is the Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) who falls in love with one of his staff. At first he is confused because of this but later he succumbs to love.
Funniest character is definitely the old rocker Billy Mack (Bill Nighy). He is determined to get a #1 with his song “xmas is around…” despite admitting how crap it is.
All these characters have seemingly one thing common, which is the search for love. Later it turns out that all character are somehow related
Of all the character, I could relate the most with Jamie (Colin Firth). He falls in love with a Portuguese woman (~~Sienna Guillory~~ Lucia Moniz) without speaking a word with each other. Later he learns to speak Portuguese in evening class just to be able to ask her father for her hand. His charming words include the phrase: “I would like you to inhabit England with me”.
All in all a feel-good movie that I am looking forward to seeing again.
“When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love.”

Evil Baby

I friend (Pedro) pointed me in the direction of a photography manipulating tool called FaceFilter. It lets you change the facial expressions of a subject fairly easily by using a set of default templates.

While you would be able to do most of the tricks in your favorite photo editing software, FaceFilter will let you do the manipulations much quicker.

You can also discover some things about facial expressions that you might have realised before.

I tried the 7-day trial and had loads of fun with the “evil baby” below, see for your self.