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That's right, I've got a new hobby! Like if I didn't have enough already.. :P Actually, I can explain it. Everything started when Marc (a very good friend of mine here in Finland) proposed me to travel to Australia. Taking into account the magnitude of such a trip, I have decided that it is time to buy a new camera, since my old Pentax S4i is quite lousy.
Besides, a few days ago I celebrated my graduation party at home with my friends, and they got me the book Creative Shutter Speed, by Derek Doeffinger. The book is so interesting, that I have almost finished it already, and I have learned many techniques that I would like to put into practice with my new camera.
This book explains, not only the necessary things to know about the shutter speed of the camera but also, basic stuff about the exposure for different picture compositions, including basic techniques such as panning, depth of field, etcetera.
For this purpose, and for my "new hobby", I decided to check out the Canon EOS 500D, which is a good camera and doesn't have the cost of a Nikon nor the price of the newest "EOS 7D". I think I will buy it with the default lens kit (the EF-S 18-55mm IS included in the standard package) and, maybe with the time, I will acquire better lenses with the time, when I have the money again and the expertise to fully squeeze the power of the camera.
The decision is not 100% taken yet, but I will check the camera on Wednesday and let's see. Maybe many of you are wondering why I skipped the subject about traveling to Australia. Well, this will go in another blog entry, and it is not fully decided yet, but it seems that finally I will step out of the European continent (except for the time I visited Egypt with CaZ). But let's talk about that in another entry, now I'm going to read my precious book ;)
I just finished a couple of patches for pyBudget and it is now on its version 0.2.2. This version removes the infrastructure for preferences, since I decided to not to complicate the application more. It also brings a couple of important fixes:
On the other line, Chess0 seems to many people like forgotten, but that is not true. I just didn't have enough time to put back my strengths and start coding again. At least, the main point is to reach v0.4 during the present year (2010), which should include a couple of speed improvements (making it about a 400% faster in searches) and several tactical improvements when playing middle-games and end-games. Version v0.5 (if any) would then include static learning and book, whereas version v0.6 (if any, and which I really doubt) would include adaptive learning techniques.
Finally, there is another thing I have been thinking for several months already. As I got my Python book as a birthday present, I though I could develop some application for practicing. Moreover, I had (already for more than a year) the idea of programming a family-tree program, where one could add as many persons as he or she wanted, and then the program would calculate how one person is related to another (apparently unrelated). This program is not yet started, but I have started they design, and it will be programmed in Python for sure.
The last concern is that, nowadays, it is important to make user-friendly programs, and hence I think I will develop this program using a graphical interface. This should, of course, be portable to non-Linux platforms, and so my choice will be most likely pyQt, wxPython or Tkinter. Any suggestion?
This year, I was attending the International Travel Fair 2010 at Helsinki, working for the Finnish Ministry of Employment and Economy, in the project VisitFinland. VisitFinland is the brand-name for MEK (Matkailun edistämiskeskus), which is the public firm behind the Ministry. I was working on Thursday and Friday (January 21 and 22), offering technical support for those entrepreneurs who were willing to acquire the
The promotion logo for the campaign talks about being in Finland and all the "benefits" of spending a holiday in this country. I think the idea was way original, and we managed to receive very constructive critics from all the customers. Another thing that made me proud was that every single customer sitting in the workshop with me, decided to buy the system, and hence we got plenty of contracts in only a few hours.
This week is quite tedious now, since all these contracts that we received during the travel fair must be served and put into production before February. However, is nice to see that a project that didn't have many high expectations in the beginning is doing well and most companies in Finland are starting to rely on this service, for which I work.
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