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415 days ago

I’ve used the tagging feature in the original Windows Vista Photo Gallery and the Windows Live Photo Gallery versions for tagging people in photos and the location of the photo. The latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery now includes a specific ‘People’ category separate from the generic tags category for identifying people in photos. In addition it includes a feature to automatically identify faces in photos and to associate the ‘People’ tags with specific faces in the photo. The sample below taken from the Windows Live Photo blog shows the new face tagging features. You can also manually draw a rectangle over a face and tag it if the Photo Gallery doesn’t automatically detect the face. One issue I’ve noticed is that the new people tags aren’t indexed by Windows Search. I often use Windows Search to search for photos based on my people and location tags and the new people tags aren’t found. So at the moment you have to search or filter photos based on the new ...

Bitmap snapshots of WPF Visuals

416 days ago

Recently I needed to create a bitmap of some WPF controls to be used in another program. Doing a quick search turned up references to the RenderTargetBitmap class in WPF with sample code along the lines of: RenderTargetBitmap bmp = new RenderTargetBitmap (( int )element.Width, ( int )element.Height, 96, 96, PixelFormats .Pbgra32); bmp.Render(element); However if the WPF control had a margin then the rendered bitmap had transparent pixels for the margin area. As an example here is a button inside a StackPanel with a margin applied. And the following is the bitmap that is created via the sample code above: Doing some more searching turned up the following code which creates a VisualBrush from the target Visual and then renders that into a DrawingVisual and then finally uses RenderTargetBitmap to take a snapshot of the DrawingVisual . Using this approach the margins are ignored and the bitmap only consists of the target WPF control/visual as ...

Geeks and Fast Jets

536 days ago

I was approached recently to help develop some Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) for a Hawker Hunter jet to be used during a test pilot course involving high angle of attack manoeuvres and spinning. The following data needed to be recorded: Angle of Attack (AoA) Sideslip angle Attitude (pitch, roll and heading) Indicated airspeed and altitude Stick and rudder position GPS Video In addition to recording all the data listed above they also wanted to display a subset of the data in the cockpit as an aid for spin recovery. Sensors AoA and sideslip - basically small weather vanes that act as potentiometers were ordered and then physically mounted on a pitot/static boom which was then mounted on the front of the Hawker Hunter's nose. One minor issue was finding a route for the wires from the vanes to the PC in the avionics bay that didn't have to pass through the cockpit's pressure capsule. Attitude - ordered an Attitude and Heading Reference System ...

MapReduce implementation using C# generics

674 days ago

I came across the Google paper on MapReduce again the other day and decided to try a simple implementation using C# generics allowing you to specify specific types for the keys and values as opposed to being forced to use strings for all keys and values. The initial version doesn't include any automatic parallelism across multiple CPUs or clusters of machines. The core implementation below is only about 50-60 lines of code. I've also included sample map and reduce functions making use of this library and mirroring some of the sample applications mentioned in the Google paper. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; // Common shortcut where both keys and both values are strings using MapReduceAllStrings = MapReduce.MapReduce < string , string , string , string > ; namespace MapReduce { // Map delegate public delegate IEnumerable < KeyValuePair < K2,V2 >> Map < K,V,K2,V2 > ( ...

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photo Test

697 days ago

I started playing around with generating HDR photos. Here is one of my first attempts using our Pentax DSLR. I'm using a trial version of Photomatix to perform the HDR processing and tone mapping which is why you'll notice their watermark in the HDR image below. I set the auto-bracketing option on the camera to shoot a normal exposure, a -2 stop exposure and a +2 stop exposure. This is the resultant HDR image. Next up is the camera's normal exposure, so effectively what you would end up with if you weren't doing any HDR processing. Camera selected f/9.5 and 1/60 sec. Now the -2 stop image, so f/9.5 1/250 sec. And lastly the +2 stop image, so f/9.5 1/15 sec.