On Friday night/Saturday morning one of our two cats died. Lil was ten years old. We suspect she had a heart problem. She was found by one of our neighbours dead in their garden.

We still have her sister Phil. Phil and Lil were completely different cats. Lil had short hair, very active, and very friendly. She loved to sit out the front and wait for all the school children passing by so that she would get lots of strokes. Phil has long hair, is fat, sleeps all day and is very shy.

The girls were upset at the news of Lil dying, and there were lots of tears especially when we buried her in the garden yesterday. Thet seem to be getting over it now. I find that I am missing Lil more than I expected. Mainly because she was always on my lap as I watched TV.

Obviously the death of a pet does not compare at all to the death of a friend or relative. I’ve been planning to blog on death (jolly chap that I am) sometime in the future when I’ve managed to get by thoughts together on the subject. This has been prompted by my experience as a Christian vs non-Christian friends of mine that have recently been bereaved. How do you comfort those who mourn, both Christian and non-Christian? And how do you do it without being patronising and with genuine compassion? More when I’ve brave enough to seek the answers….

Just been playing with 360 degrees panoramas at CleVR:

Not a very pretty garden, but you get the idea. Link if you can’t see it.

Sadly the end of the macro course, but lots to practice at home.

And next term back for another course. More about that in due time. Also to keep my busy there is the Lighting 102 on the Strobist blog starting in June, and preparation for the Swallowfield Show in August.

There is a lot of excitement/noise/fud/heat about Web 2.0 and RIA these days.

Life on the web used to be simple. (Order of events that follows is probably incorrect).

There was HTML. HTML was good. Web browsers on may different platforms (Un*x, Windows, Mac, VMS, etc) could display the information.

Then (a long time ago) someone added forms capability to HTML - this meant that you could interact with a web site and send it data. HTML became standardised - it wasn’t owned by any particular profit making organisation. Anyone could use it.

Then someone added Applets - little applications that could run inside your web browser. These were slow and required proprietary software (now open source), but the software was free and could run on lots of different platforms.

Then someone added security - your communication with the web server could be encrypted. E-commerce was born.

Then someone re-invented Applets and called them ActiveX. These required propriety software and only really worked on the Windows platform.

Then someone added Javascript allowing simple programs to be embedded in web pages. This because a standard and was called ECMAscript. It could run on lots of platforms.

Then someone invented style sheets. HTML got more complicated, but could do more and looked prettier and still could run on lots of platforms.

Then someone invented XML and XSLT - allowing data to be represented as structured text and viewed in different ways. Things started to get more complicated, but sill was free to run on lots of platforms.

Then someone allowed Javascript to make asynchronous calls back to the web server. AJAX was born, and so was Web 2.0 and RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Then people saw dollar signs and threw away standards that run on lots of platforms, and now we have three competing technologies to take Web 2.0 on to the next level:

• Microsoft’s Silverlight - runs on Windows and Mac
• Adobe’s Flash/Flex - mixture of proprietary and open source, runs on lots of platforms
• Sun’s JavaFX - open source and runs of lots of platforms, including mobile phones

It looks like the web is no longer going to be based on standards, but on competing proprietary technologies.

Time will tell where we end up. I expect eventually someone will see how complex things have got and re-invent the wheel HTML claiming it to be a great new idea.

This week playing with a light box and also doing some experiments with a studio flash and a softbox.

The light box was “daylight” balanced, however there were fluorescent and tungsten lights around the room that may have interfered now and then. I generally used an exposure that was 2 stops overexposed judging by the camera’s light meter.

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This picture I did hand-held without a flash:

These used the studio flash and softbox:

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Yesterday I got a suprise parcel at work. I’ve won an iPod nano! I don’t often (i.e. ever) win anything. I got this pod by dropping off my business card at the Citrix stand at Infosec last week. So the day at the trade show was worth it, although I’m now expecting hundreds of calls from sales people trying to get me to buy products that I’m not interested in.

I also entered a competition to win a Nintendo Wii. Still haven’t heard about that one. Must be stuck in the post.

More playing with liquids and food colouring this week. This one was a bit hit-and-miss.

The set up was a camera on a tripod with a Speedlite flash set on “multi” or “strobe” setting. Camera was ISO 100, 125th second, and f/16. Shutter was set to continuous shoot. My camera only manages 3 frames per second, and doesn’t have a very big buffer before it has to write to the memory card.

The liquid was milk with food colouring in it. Drips were allowed to fall by turning a tap on some glass equipment that looked liked it came out of a school’s chemistry lab.

I took nearly 300 photos but still not satisfied with the results.

Later on a played around with a studio light and softbox to take some pictures of shells. I’ll try and get a bit more arty next week.