kontrawize

Bees in Trees

Here it is, the long awaited sequel to my post on "Ants on Plants".

It's a week later, and the ants have gone. Bees, wasps, and even flies are in their place. OK, so they are still in the same plant as last time, not really a tree, but it would have been a shame not to use this title, right?

Big Wasp #1 (well, bigger than the small wasp)

Bumblebee #1

Big Wasp #2

To see the rest of this series, visit my "Bees on Trees" page at Fotki.

Ants on Plants

I was looking at a plant in our backyard, which has just started going into its full summer bloom:

I can't tell you what type of plant this is (I'm not a botanist, nor even much of a gardener), but what I did notice is that the open flowers (and not the unopen flowers) had ants crawling over them, which is something I hadn't ever noticed on a plant before.

Having trouble spotting the ant?  Here's a zoomed-in version to help:

For the photographically curious, I took these photos using a Fuji S1 Pro digital SLR that I bought recently (second-hand) on eBay.  The body and a Sigma 17-35mm  f2.8-4 lens were £200 together, which was not a bad deal.  The S1 Pro is basically a Nikon F60 body with a Fuji sensor and electronics.  This allows me to use the lenses from my Nikon F601 film SLR (which I bought in 1993).  I took the photos here with the 35-70mm zoom that came with my F601.

The S1 Pro has a 3 Mpixel diagonal array sensor that produces 6 Mpixel images in TIFF or JPEG format (no RAW).  The photos here are unprocessed; I simply converted the TIFFs to JPEGs using Corel Paintshop Pro, and added a drop shadow.

Live Earth Concert, this weekend, around the globe

The Live Earth Concert is on this weekend (7th July); the whole event runs for 24 hours via concerts in cities around the globe. It's purpose is to raise awareness of the need for commitment and change to save the environment.

I mentioned previously that Terra Naomi is playing at the London concert at Wembley. That made me interested to go, but the London concert was listed as already sold out.

However, serendipitiously, the "What Car?" web site had a contest where you could win tickets, so I entered; there was nothing to lose. In fact, I won two tickets, so huge thanks to "What Car?" for giving me the chance to attend. I'm really looking forwards to it.

So yes, I will be attending an environmental concert with tickets won from a web site about cars. Go figure, as they say in the classics.

Mono bug - W3C XML Schema Validation

To support the OASIS genericode XML format for code lists (version 1.0 is currently on public review), I have started writing an open-source validator (called "gcv") for genericode XML files. Part of the validation is XML Schema validation.

I'm starting with a C# implementation for .NET and Mono, and I currently plan to port the code to Java once I'm happy with the C# implementation. For those of you who aren't aware of Mono, it is an open-source, cross-platform implementation of the .NET technologies that Microsoft has standardised via ECMA. Mono gives .NET some much-needed cross-platform credibility.

Unfortunately, the Mono XML libraries appear to have some bugs around Schema validation. Today I posted bug #82010, which demonstrates that Mono 1.1.18.1 and 1.2.4 both give different Schema validation results to .NET 2.0 (and other Schema validators) when validating a genericode example. What this means is that my genericode validator won't run under Mono until such time as this bug is resolved. That's a pity; we'll just have to see how long it takes to get it resolved.

Google Desktop Search for Linux, part 2

I installed Google Desktop for Linux last week, and it continues to impress. As an example, today I downloaded the ISO Schematron specification. I immediately unzipped it and opened the PDF. Before starting to read the PDF, I typed "Ctrl-Ctrl" to bring up the Google Desktop search box, and typed in some of the keywords from the opening titles of the specification. The PDF was already in the search results, which I guess means that Google Desktop is monitoring file/directory updates rather than continually performing searches of the filesystem.

That's good - it keeps the CPU load down, while keeping the search indices (indexes) up to date. I have no idea whether this is the approach taken by other search tools (like Beagle) or not.