Tomorrow sees the opening of the 29th Summer Olympiad in China. It also sees Flickr attempt another social experiment, encouraging users to take a snapshot of life on 8-8-08.

Despite having some sympathies to the commericalism of Flickr, I still have a pro account and will be taking part (even though it is open to free accounts too).

No doubt Flickr and Yahoo will be hoping for many photos from China, and the rules for Flickr 888 basically give them the right to sell your photos for profit if they want to. Tomorrow my life won’t be as interesting but I’ve been spending the past week trying to spot potential photographs, and while I know one shot I’m intending to take, I have no inspiration for the rest of them. I’m going to have the camera with me all day, so I’ll see what comes out.

I am an existing, very happy iPhone customer, having bought one on the afternoon the original was launched last November. It is truly a fantastic device (calling it a ‘phone’ does not really do justice to it, but it is not really a ’smartphone’ either - despite being branded as one). When the 3G model was announced, I put my name down for further information, but was not too impressed with the features - I was waiting to see what O2 would offer existing customers.

The truth is that all existing customers of O2 get is the ability to end their 18 month tie-in to start a new 18-month contract. The cost of the phone is the same for new and upgrading customers.

Based on this, I decided it was not worth upgrading. I was perfectly happy with my iPhone, and while 3G is nice, I’m happy to wait for the few websites I do visit on the phone to download over EDGE. 16 gigabytes of storage would be nice, but I’m reasonably frugal with what I put on my iPhone anyway - I’ve yet to fill it even with 341 songs, 831 photos and 18 videos (two of the videos being over 30 mins long).

Where Apple and O2 have really messed up is that once again they have underestimated demand. O2 stores have been given a small amount of the stock, and their online store is still not selling them after it crashed following the first hour of sales. Existing customers can only upgrade through O2, while Apple stores have the greater amount of stock.

The problem is that as you can only upgrade through O2 stores, you are forced down the route with the lower availability. This leads to O2 having to serve both new and existing customers. Once the stock is gone for new customers, then customers are redirected to the Apple shop.

This leads to the second biggest problem: the apple shop does not have the capacity to handle the amount of new customers with the in-store activation policy.

I visited there last night in order to make an enquiry about purchasing a new iMac, and all the advisors were busy activating iPhones and couldn’t help me. From a business perspective, what is more important to Apple - a £89 sale, or a £1,200 sale?

I appreciate that Apple and O2 want to cut down on the black market for iPhones, but I’m sure their advisors and managers would rather be spending their time serving customers as opposed to waiting for the O2 website to perform credit checks.

The original iPhone launch was incredibly smooth, mainly due to the fact that customers simply purchased their phone and activated at home. Granted, there were some people who encountered a problem activating on launch night, but the majority of customers were able to activate on the night, and within a couple of days those who couldn’t activate were sorted.

Unfortunately for Apple and O2, those people who were able to order a 3G iPhone on the internet have already put them up for sale on eBay, with prices currently around the £400 mark. While the in-store activation policy might have ensured more customers get tied into their contracts, those who always intended to put the phones on eBay have already done it, so has the in-store activation worked? ‘Honest’ customers (those who are activating in-store) were always intending to activate their phones, those who didn’t want to activate are still buying on the black market, and those Apple customers who have no real interest in buying the iPhone are being neglected in store.

Apple stores should go back to the core of the business, being computer and entertainment stores, and leave the mobile phone contract activations to the mobile phone stores.

Hard Rock Memorabilia

(Requires Silverlight Beta 2 installation)

From what I’ve learned so far, the easiest way to alter depth of field is to switch the camera to Aperture Priority (Av), which allows you to manually set the Aperture.

My EOS 450D with the 18-55mm kit lens allows me to set apertures between F3.5 and F22. To see what the effect is of the different apertures, I set up a simple shoot and altered the aperture to see the results.

Firstly, I took a ‘Control’ shot - this was with the camera in full auto mode - the camera picked the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and also controled the autofocus. In this case I set it to a single-point autofocus on the centre.

The resulting image shows the background slightly blurred, as the camera has focused on the Beetle in the foreground. With the full 9 autofocus points active, the background would have been sharper, but that was not the point of the shot.

Looking at the statistics for the above image, the camera calculated the following was best for the shot:

Shutter: 1/160
Aperture: F10
ISO: 200

Next, I took a second ‘control’ shot. This is the camera in Macro mode. This should focus more on the subject and isolate it. Again, a single point of Autofocus was used.

We can see already that the colour balance of the shot has changed, and the grain on the table is more pronounced. The background is more blurred - you cannot make out the grouting on the wall, nor can you easily see the palm near the back of the garden.

So what did the camera say?

Shutter: 1/500
Aperture: 4.5
ISO: 125

This makes sense - with a larger aperture, the shutter speed is higher, and also the film speed.

So, what happens when we take control of the Aperture?

In order to get the maximum aperture, I had to alter the focal length from the subject - I can only get the largest aperture when fully zoomed out, so I moved the camera slightly closer to the subject. In some ways, this nullifies the control shots, but this was never meant to be a serious experiment!

Shutter: 1/1000
Aperture: 3.5
ISO: 200

This shot is only subtly different from the Macro mode one. Without any scientific basis, the background is about the same level of burredness, but on close inspection between the two images, the rear wheelarch of the beetle has just started to lose focus. The faster shutter speed reflects the fact that there is more light getting through the aperture, but interestingly, the camera has reverted to an ISO of 200.

I then took a series of shots, reducing the aperture (or increasing the F value, depends on how you want to look at it) and recording the results:

Shutter: 1/500
Aperture: 4.5
ISO: 200

Shutter: 1/250
Aperture: 6.3
ISO: 200

Shutter: 1/200
Aperture: 8.0
ISO: 200

Shutter: 1/100
Aperture: 11.0
ISO: 200

Shutter: 1/25
Aperture: 22.0
ISO: 250

We can see that by the last photo, the entire image is in shaper focus than the autofocus shot. This is possibly partly due to the slight change in angle, but individual bricks on the wall are clearly discernable.

Interestingly, the 4.5 aperture shot, which is comparable to the macro control shot, uses a different ISO when I controlled the aperture rather than the camera. Again, this is partly down to the change of angle, but also with the change of lighting conditions.

As the aperture size decreases, the shutter speed increases. I’m not sure how the aperture rating works, but when I halve the aperture size from F11 to F22, the shutter speed increases by a scale of four - not half as one might expect.

More to come as I start to learn more about aperture - Weather permitting, I will be taking some photos up Snowdon, which from my findings here should ideally be taken with a small aperture.

When my Canon Powershot A75 bit the dust after five years of happy service, I decided to take the plunge into the arcane, and expensive world of SLR photography and purchased a Canon EOS 450D.

In many ways, digital photography has made SLR cameras much better value for money. No longer do you have to spend money on individual films and processing is instant, so there is no wait to see if the picture will come out as intended. I certainly would have been put off if I’d spent the money and waited the time for a film to be processed only for all the photographs to turn out blurred.

A DSLR allows you to be free to experiment. Whereas once I would have been tempted to play it safe and stick with an autofocus every time - I can now spend the time to compose a shot and experiment with different settings.

I’m still only at the very beginnings, and I’ve not ventured as far as completely manual operation of the aperture and shutter speeds - despite the camera being very intuitive, some of the advanced settings will take a read of the manual.

However, for the first time, I was able to construct a shot and control the depth of field to get the effect I was after. So I present to you, my (almost) first ever SLR photograph:

A very simple photograph of my dog in the back garden. It’s not the most complicated photograph to take, but I’m pleased with how I’ve been able to get Oscar’s head in sharp focus, drawing attention to the subject, while placing the weeds in the garden out of focus.

I say almost first ever SLR photograph, as the first photo I took I used the autofocus, which placed the entire photograph in sharp focus, losing Oscar in the busy background.

Last night, I took the opportunity to take some more photographs and attempt to control depth of field further:

The 18-55mm lens that comes with the EOS 450D does not seem to allow me to create extreme depth of field, but I’m quite pleased with the mixing deck, in that the focal point (yep - learning the jargon!) is somewhere around the third slider up from the bottom, placing the foreground and the background out of focus.

I’ve set myself a few challenges - partly to justify the purchase of a SLR camera over a compact, but also as mini projects. Next weekend I’m off to Snowdon so I hope to practice taking landscapes and getting creative outdoors, but my big challenge to myself is to take a good photograph of my dog’s mum. She is a jet black dog, and previous attempts to photograph her have been very difficult as a compact camera overcompensates for the darkness of her fur - placing her completely in shadow.

I’ve been reading a few articles about white balance, and how the camera is automatically trying to balance the colour to a mid-grey, so hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll attempt to take some shots of Skye.

private SQLCommand _cmd = new SQLCommand();

public void ExecuteStoredProcedure(string procedureName SQLParameter[] parms)
{
  _cmd.Connection = _dbConn;
  _cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
  _cmd.CommandText = procedureName;
  _cmd.Parameters.AddRange(parms);
  _cmd.ExecuteScalar();
}

Looks OK on the surface - we have our command object, give it a connection to play with, set it as a stored procedure and then supply the stored procedure name.

However, when this code is run, a “Syntax error near [Stored Procedure Name]” is thrown.

You double check your procedure name is correct, that your parameter array is OK, but still you get the error.

Why?

The problem is that I am setting the .CommandText property after setting the .CommandType property. Setting the CommandText property overwrites the value of .CommandType to ‘text’.

This is a demonstration that even the professionals can get it wrong. The inside of the SQLCommand object probably looks something like:

public string CommandText
{
  set
    {
     this.commandText = value;
     this.commandType = text;
    }
   …
}

or something similar - the point is that the one property is resetting another. This is bad practice - the person using your code does not have any indication of what they are doing. At worst, a compilation warning should be shown or a note in the intellisense summary of the property.

In the MSDN reference for the CommandText property, there are no notes to suggest that the CommandType is overwritten. Although in fairness, the examples do show the properties being set in a particular order.

The correct order to set up a Stored Procedure is:

public void ExecuteStoredProcedure(string procedureName SQLParameter[] parms)
{
  _cmd.Connection = _dbConn;
  _cmd.CommandText = procedureName;
  _cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
  _cmd.Parameters.AddRange(parms);
  _cmd.ExecuteScalar();
}

It could quite easily be argued that my approach to creating the object was wrong, in that I should be setting the text of my command before setting the type, but my mind does not work in that order - I think “I want to create a Stored Procedure Command and this is the Procedure I want to call”. The fluidity of Object Oriented programming should allow the coder to code in a logical way to them.

Today, they claim that Bruce Willis is set to play commentating legend Murray Walker in a film about the life of Michael Schumacher - inventively titled “The Michael Schumacher Story”.

I don’t know what is more laughable - the thought of Bruce Willis donning spectacles and getting overexcited everytime a puff of smoke appears at the rear of a car (even if it is tyre smoke)… or the prospect of a film about the life of Michael Schumacher.

While Schumacher is without doubt one of the greatest drivers F1 has known, his career wasn’t always the most exciting - and given the fact that Schumacher is purported to be involved, it is unlikely that the more controversial aspects of his career will be highlighted.

Schumacher drove in a period in F1 where his superiority was rarely challenged. If you were to make a true life film about “modern” F1, you’d probably make it during the 1980’s, where you had Senna, Prost, Mansell, Rosberg (Sr), and Piquet (Sr) all fighting for wins, and some of the real characters such as Gerhard Berger.

None of this will come to fruition, except possibly as a made for TV film, and while Murray did comment for the whole of Schumacher’s career, he was not always the greatest supporter of the German.

The main reason Willis has been linked to the role, is simply that he is probably the most famous aging bald actor in Hollywood. Apparently “an insider” claims that in glasses, Willis looks very much like a young Murray Walker. This is forgetting the fact that Walker was not a young man during the Schumacher period.

The League of Gentlemen was one of my favourite TV series, and its dark humour still makes me laugh. The problem with the TV series was the risk that it would become a parody of itself, with catchphrases and recurring characters who essentially had a limited lifespan.

Many of the characters were one-joke characters, similar to those in shows such as The Fast Show. The difference being that in The Fast Show, the  intention was to produce one-joke, instantly quotable characters, placing them in different situations, delivering a few humorous lines before wrapping up with their punchline catchphrases. In 30 second to 2 minute sketches, this is easy to do, but when you have created a whole world (well, village) that these characters live in and interact in, the characters become harder to write for, and less believable as a result.

The first two series of The League of Gentlemen centred around the characters of Tubbs and Edward, the Local Shopkeepers, their plans to disrupt the building of a new road that would bring strangers to their village, and their attempts to find a mate for their son, David (ironically the developer who was building the road from the first series). By the end of the second series, the characters of Tubbs and Edward had got a little worn, and were killed off. The writers took a bold decision here, as they could have easily took the easy route for a few more series with their ‘Local Shop, for Local People’. For the third series, they tried a new approach with a single story that was told from different angles, introducing new characters while reducing of some of the older characters. Series 3 wasn’t as well received as previous series, but it was obvious that the writers wanted to take a step away from their creations.

The announcement of a League of Gentlemen movie genuinely excited me, but could you turn a half-hour show into a full length movie?

When I saw the movie for the first time, I thought it was terrible. The characters escape from the fictional world of Royston Vasey and enter our world in a ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ way, the humour coming from the fact that these cartoonish characters were interacting with normal people.

The low budget was particularly evident, and the diversion into a story-within-a-story-within-a-story seemed nonsensical, and not relevant to the plot at the time.

I suppose my initial reaction was also coloured by the fact  that two of the main characters were two of my least favourite - Herr Lipp and Geoff Tipps.

Lipp I’ve always found too creepy and his innuendos the least funny. Geoff just rude and not very funny (which I suppose is the point of his character.) However, on second viewing, these were possibly the best selection of characters to use for the movie.

The opening sequence where Tubbs, Edward and Papa Lazarou confront writer Jeremy Dyson (the unseen gentleman, and again, played by someone else) sums up the fact that most of the characters are too bizarre to exist in the ‘real’ world. While the murderous butcher Briss is possibly the most extreme character of the bunch, he is also the most intelligent and perfect as a leader.

Lipp is a one-joke character, and actually has quite a good story arc in the movie, where he comes to realise that he is a one-dimensional character, and craves to be seen as more than a stereotype. His final rant filled with his trademark innuendos is not meant to be humourous, and draws another parallel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he is almost like Jessica Rabbit - “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way…”

The premise that the actors are fed up with playing the characters they have played for the last 10 years and want to go on to other things, is believable - As parodied in the excellent episode of Father Ted ‘The Mainland’, Richard Wilson (a respected Shakespearean actor) is constantly being taunted by Ted saying his catchphrase from ‘One foot in the Grave’: ‘I Don’t believe it!’. The League of Gentlemen are actors and want to be remembered more than ‘Are you Local?’ or ‘Okey-cokey-pig-in-a-pokey! Good Morning Jobseekers!’.

The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse is a tribute to those characters - a fond farewell.

Since this film, the actors have all gone on to do other projects, from Dr. Who to Lassie.

The final twist in the film that it is all in the mind of Jeremy, the one who is not prepared to let go of Royston Vasey is particularly poignant, as well as being amusing in that his original plan for everyone to have tails. The idea that the writers have not all perished leaves the village of Royston Vasey alive as long as the writers stay alive, and we have the possibility to return there one day.

Electronic Arts has already announced that they are developing a new version of their ‘battlefield’ series: Battlefield Heroes. In a way that has worked out well for them in the asian markets, this version of the game will be free to download, and will generate money both through in game advertising and ‘micropayments’ for items. The indication is that Blizzard (or Activision Blizzard) are looking to do the same in their products.

Naturally, people are worried that they will soon be seeing ‘Coca Cola’ potions in World of Warcraft.

A strong argument against in-game advertising is that it feels out of kilter with the world in which the game is set. Granted, in a fantasy roleplaying game, an advert for a computer manufacturer would look out of place - but what about a game based on Blade Runner - would anyone even notice the glowing neon Atari signs? What if they were Apple iPod logos? The two companies are not that dissimilar in the view that they are household names, albeit 20 years apart.

In-Game advertising and sponsorship is not a new idea, we have seen more and more licensed products in computer games as the push towards realism continues. The first version of Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix featured the coloured liveries of the F1 cars, albeit without any logos or names on them. Despite this, the distinctive Marlboro McLaren was easily recognisable with it’s Marlboro Flash on the nose and wings. By the time Grand Prix 2 was released, graphics had improved to the point where actual sponsors logos were displayed on the cars. Game modders even took this one stage further, replacing the censored cigarette logos with the real logos to make the game more authentic.

Sports games have probably pushed in-game sponsorship the furthest, as their real-life counterparts also rely heavily on sponsorship. From John Madden NFL to Tiger Woods Golf, where you can even play with Nike balls (complete with Nike swish).

However, sports games are not the only genre to feature commercial tie-ins. In the UK, The original Theme Park game was sold with a tie-in with Midland Bank (Now HSBC) and their LiveCash accounts, aimed at the teenage customers that would also buy the computer game. In-game branding included the Midland logo on the title screens and the year-end statements displayed as “LiveCash” statements.

Quite how successful this was in attracting new customers to Midland Bank is hard to measure, but it is interesting to note that the branding was missing from the port to the Nintendo DS.

EA have stated that in addition to displaying advertising (although apparently not during gameplay) they will allow players to purchase cosmetic upgrades to their characters. These upgrades would apparently not provide any advantage to players.

It is a fine line that game manufacturers tread, particularly in online multiplayer titles. If players are allowed to purchase upgrades to their online presence, there is a risk that a game will get dominated by the rich. MMORPGs have been plagued by ‘gold sellers’, who allow the purchase of virtual gold and items by paying real-world cash for them. Ignoring the ethical arguments around this, it places players with more disposable income in a position where they can gain an advantage over their peers. The only reason gold sellers exist, is because there are at least some people who are willing to take this advantage.

If the only upgrades I could get for my avatar were cosmetic, why would I be tempted to purchase them? If we don’t purchase them, then the profitability of a title goes down, EA will seek to gain more revenue through advertising, and advertising becomes more intrusive, which again puts people off.

If in-game advertising is to work, its success would be in its non-intrusive nature. If all of a sudden the reward for completing a level was a ‘mission complete’ screen with gaudy sponsorship plastered all over it, you would be less than impressed, and the game reviewers would slam the game, accusing  the developers of selling out.

However, what if you had completed a tricky song on Guitar Hero, what if there was a web link where you could download that song directly to your XBox, DRM free, so you could copy it to your iPod? What if after completing a movie-tie-in game, you could download that movie to your Media Centre? What if a discount was offered over the standard DVD or download price? At that moment of elation, you are more susceptible. That is when the advertisers want to pounce. Once you leave the game environment, your attention starts to waver, and you lose interest.

I’m not saying that model will work for everything - a musician in the World of Warcraft Brewfest event would probably not be able to entice you to pay to download an album’s worth of music, and perhaps there are some game genres that could never be seamlessly integrated with advertisements, but do we not already have in-game advertising, and the next step is to make it interactive?

The ITV theme tunes have been mixed to say the least. The theme for the first couple of seasons was written by Jay Kay, better known as ‘Jamiroquai’. As a huge motorsport fan, I’m sure he jumped at the chance - however his theme tunes did not have the excitement of the bass riff from ‘The Chain’. The tune they’ve been using in more recent years, a kind of tribal chanting theme was an improvement, but still doesn’t have the build-up that ‘The Chain’ has - from the opening Bass Riff to the guitars.

Another strong debate is why F1 should even be shown on the BBC, when they have lost the majority of football, and the cricket. Given Bernie Ecclestone’s notorious business strategies, Formula One would not come cheap.

F1 is not as popular in the UK as football, cricket, and at the moment, possibly even rugby, but I do wonder if the fact that we now have a British driver who is a consistent winner, and probable future champion has influenced the BBC’s decision to get back into the F1 game…

My only hopes are that:

1. They do actually use ‘The Chain’ as the theme tune
2. They keep Steve Ryder as the anchor (Jim ‘The Football’s on in a minute’ Rosenthal really showed how much better Steve Ryder actually was!)
3. They manage to keep Martin Brundle (The best pundit in F1)
4. THEY LEAVE JAMES ALLEN AT ITV!