Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7

Just installed it. Funny because it asked for a restart. A web brwoser. It seems Microsoft still integrating their browser a bit too deep into the operating system.

I'm a Chrome user but due to web dev, I have to keep IE and other browsers for testing purposes. 

This update also caused some issue in Desktop Gadgets. We using "DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient()" to render UI in the gadget and it seems this isn't working properly now. Thanks MS, time to debug :P

The browser looks like IE9, so far. I hope they did not make any other problems because IE browsers getting better and better since IE7 or IE8...  I remember that IE6/7 caused some sleepless nights to tweak the HTML/CSS for web pages.

Update: I've found the answer for the problem. If you ran into the same problem then here is the info about the change: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh801215(v=vs.85).aspx

Walking Dead, really?

I know I know, long time, no new post... So, here is one. Just another Walking Dead season is over and I started to think about it. There will be spoiler below, so do not read below if you did not see the season finale episode yet. So the first episodes of this series was pretty nice and good and I started to like it, but then there was a long-long-long part when they stuck in that farm. I'll think about this farm now.
As a fan of strategic games, one thing bugged me when they settled in the farm for the first time... It was pretty much clear that protecting such a place is difficult without making some changes. As the story continued they basically didn't do anything about this. I was sure about they will suck there, big time. According to the last version, I was right. They were basically no protection at all, so the walkers ran them in no time.
According to the story line there were there for a few weeks/months I guess so they had enough time to make major changes without just fighting with each other. So in the bad bad future if we may stuck in such a farm with zombies around, think guys, think.

yikes

I found a nice satellite map on Google with the farm, it is a pretty nice place but a bit difficult to protect from zombies, lol. So on the very first day I'd chop the trees in the area, as I marked on the map with red. With this amount of wood and with wire fence it is possible to start building a strong fence around the place. I guess a lot of resource available for free in the towns around, so with a truck it is possible to gather all tools and wires and other stuffs required in a few days. So I imagine a fence around the cleaned area, marked in light blue and one more fence as additional safety with dark blue. The purple spots are possible location of watchtowers. Of course it is still possible to get crowded with walkers but this double fence system will give a lot more time than waking up in the bed with a walker eating our legs, right? :)  So the system needs a way to exit, and this is the yellow drawing. It is a small underground tunnel from below the house to a location outside the blue fence, with a hidden trap door or something, locked from the inside to keep walkers and other people outside. Of course it is good to keep weapons, ammo and cans of food, fresh water in the case the area is too dangerous to stay. This yellow location also needs a few cars filled up with gas with enough seats for everybody inside the house.

red = area needs cleanup, no trees, bushes..etc

dark blue = outer fence

light blue = inner fence

purple spots = watchtowers

yellow = escape tunnel

With such a setup I think people have much more options to survive and to keep the place safer. Also I really like the idea at the end, the woman with sword. Sword is good, much usable in close combat and it is virtually silent. So swords for everyone.

Lights of Budapest

Happy New Year to everyone!

I just wanted to drop a few photos I just made before the christmas lights will be removed from the city. So this is how Budapest looks like during this period of each year.

Andrassy street, Budapest, Hungary

Andrassy street, Budapest, Hungary

Andrassy street, Budapest, Hungary

Oktogon, Budapest, Hungary

Andrassy street, Budapest, Hungary

Merry Christmas & How it's made

Merry Christmas to everyone! I've created a photo today for this opportunity and thought it would be interesting to share a little tutorial about how to use a simple photographic effect to achieve this result.

The name of the effect is the bokeh. You need to setup the scene in the following way:

As you can see the drawing above, you need a relatively long distance between the camera and the lights (little bulbs, LEDs, whatever) and you have to place the glass close to the camera. You need to setup some soft light to lit the glass. I've used a softbox with a studio flash, but I just needed the model light, not the flash. 

As for the camera, you will need a fast lens, at least f2.8 to have good results and of course a tripod is needed.

Set the focus on the glass and watch the lights on the background and position if necessary. Play a bit with the softbox light intensity to find the right balance on the scene, you will need a bit brighter fill light to avoid the background spots to burn in. Thats all. Easy effect, and no need any graphics work, photoshop..etc. This is a pure photographic trick. Enjoy.

Night photography with iPhone?

It is possible, but of course we should not expect professional photos, though...   I had the idea to write this little tutorial for ones are new to photography or just to show that we can capture some nice photos to our family album even in the night when we left the camera at home. I always saying a nicely captured low quality photo is much better than a missed one.

So the most important is the right timing, as you know the iPhone (and other phones and cheaper point and shoot cameras) are not the kings of the night. So we need to take these photos during the first half of the blue hour to have enough ambient light and colors to capture.

As you may know, there are two blue hours a day, in the morning and in the night. You can find out this time frame at your location using www.bluehoursite.com or the iPhone app, available here. The blue hour effect is stronger during the beginning so try to make the photos early. Later the sky will be too dark for the phone and the little dynamic range will result of burned out light spots, lots of dark areas and high noise.

Noise is the biggest issue with the photos currently. I did not test the iPhone 4S yet, but the iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 has relatively high noise. The iPhone 4 higher resolution helps a bit to reduce this though.

During the capture try to frame the scene as you wish and then tap on the screen to adjust focus and light meter to a relatively darker part to keep the balance on the image. If you taking image of some brighter lights then it may need to tap on this, to prevent burning in. If the lights are too bright you will lose all the details around it.

tap on a darker area before shoot. Sorry for the blur, not easy to hold steady while taking a screen shot :)

According to my experience the white balance and other settings are just right as you take the photo, no adjustments needed. The noise will be high so you may want to reduce it with a noise reduction software. There is an option to this right in iPhoto on Mac, it has a relatively good results. You need to pick some higher values but always check the results and fine tune if needed.

Adjust Sharpness and De-noise sliders.

Results from iPhoto

There are other alternatives, like Noise Ninja (trial, win+mac), NDNoise (free, win+mac), Neat Image (trial, win+mac). These softwares can produce nice results but of course it is not magic. 

untouched, taken with iPhone 4

Good bye Steve, and thanks for everything!

A sad day, this is. I woke up in the morning, grabbed my iPad and started reading the news but it took my breath away immediately when I read the about Steve Jobs. He was one of the biggest mind in the IT industry, a real pirate from the Silicon Valley.

We can thank him a lot of things, not just iPhone and Mac, but the basic fundamentals of the today's computers.

One brand to rule them all

This week when I watched the Keynote event, on the first few minutes I saw an empty chair with a reserved sign in the center of the first line. I noted that who is that person who has a reserved chair in such an event and misses it. Now I know it. I missed Steve from the event, he was the best in these presentations. I enjoyed all of them. I think in the next few days I'll watch previous Keynotes to remember.

We all knew this will happen, Steve was not in a good shape recently but this was way too early.
Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

Blue Hour Site, behind the scenes

What is all about?

I have a website, it is called Blue Hour Site. This site is able to help by calculating the best time frame for taking stunning blue hour pictures. Blue hour refers to the time after the sun goes below the horizon and the sky goes into deep blue for a while. Below you can see a photo took during this time:

Blue hour at Budapest, Hungary

So where it began?

The idea came in 2008 when I was in Dresden, Germany. It was only a one night stay and I wanted to shoot some blue hour photos. I was not sure about when this time frame starts so during the day I looked for some nice vantage points in the city to get prepared but later that day at the hotel when I realized it is getting dark I did not have enough time to get back to my spots, it was totally dark when I was ready to take the photos. So I missed my one and only opportunity to take some photos there. I was not happy and as a developer I decided to create some code that tells me when blue hour will start on a given day and location. Later I thought more on this idea and got a new idea to create a website to this, it will be a good help to other photographers as well and also we living in the internet era, so why not doing this online.

Later that year I was ready with the website, it was much simpler than the current site, but it already worked well and it was accurate enough to put it online.

I sent the URL to my friends, shared it on web2 sites, wrote about it in photography forums and watched my statistics. More and more visitors came from different part of the world, but the traffic was really low during these weeks/months... I had days with only 1-2 visits.