Identifying Colours (revisited)

Today Hobnob and I took a look at the whole colour identification thing and now my application seems to work a lot more sensibly. Discovered the following things:

* That copy-and-paste errors will seemingly always be prevelant in my applications. If I code my application to recognise reds as pink then that's what it'll do even if I did mean to change it to say red after I pasted it.

* That the difference between the RGB values within greys can vary up to around 6% and still look grey.

* That if I return an RGB value between 0 and 1 then checking to see if it's greater than 225 will not generally return true.

Those three combined with adding some extra weighting to the middle section of an image (assuming that most people taking a picture of something will aim to have it in the middle of the picture) seem to have mostly fixed my code!

Books I Read in March

Total: 8 books.

Past Mortem (Ben Elton)
The Chocolate Run (Dorothy Koomson)
Boy A (Jonathan Trigell)
Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix (Susan Winemaker)
Changeling (Melissa Diem)
The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett)
Sushi For Beginners (Marian Keyes)
And God Created the Au Pair (Benedicte Newland & Pascale Smets)

Another library read, I borrowed, read and then returned Past Mortem within 24 hours (28/03). I much preferred this to some of Ben Elton's other recent books - it's witty and clever but I did work out whodunnit around halfway through.

Having enjoyed My Best Friend's Girl and Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Chocolate Run seemed like a good bet when it was one of Waterstones half price offers of the week. I started this at Waddow and finished it a few days after I got back on the 27th. A little more traditional chick-lit than the others, I didn't enjoy it as much as My Best Friend's Girl but it was a light, enjoyable read none-the-less. I put it on BookMooch and it very quickly went to PurpleRosebud (UK).

Boy A (22/03) was (alongside Concertina, The Chocolate Run and many, many others) a Waterstones buy. I was feeling a bit miserable and got quite happy with the 3 for 2's. I really enjoyed this book. It's short but easy to read and thought-provoking. I'm hanging onto it to read once more before I pass it on to someone. Boy A has also been made into a film which I'd be tempted to watch if I got the chance.

Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix (21/03) was another of my reading at Waddow books. I picked this up in Waterstones, Lancaster because it caught my eye and the combination of food alongside domination seemed slightly odd. Odd it may be but there's not quite as much of a combination as the blurb and comments make out - there are some quite graphic descriptions of both but more of one than the other and rarely interleaved. That said, this is a book with some very beautiful bits of descriptive text (whatever it is they're describing) and is generally quite an enjoyable read. I've hung onto this one to reread again and then I'll decide what to do with it.

Changeling was a "Drop of the Irish" read from the library (celebrating St. Patrick's day I assume). This is a short, moving book which I really enjoyed. I read most of it in one go but then had to hold off on it for a week or so (doing coursework) before reading the last few pages on the train up to my Queen's Guide residential at Waddow (20/03).

The Light Fantastic is the second of my very slow movements through the Discworld series. I had to restart this a couple of times because I kept putting it down for weeks at a time but that's no real reflection on this book. Hopefully I can put Equal Rites down as one of my reads for next month...

I picked Sushi For Beginners up from the library having read (on the backs of far too many trashy chick-lit novels) that Marian Keyes is the author of the genre. Unfortunately I wasn't all that impressed by this book. There's nothing wrong with it as such but it's not at all special and felt a little bit formulaic for my liking. Like most novels of its kind it's pretty easy to read but I'd be unlikely to bother with it again.

Borrowed from the library and read in bed on that day when I was too ill to get up, And God Created the Au Pair is a very easy-to-read book. One of an increasing number of novels written entirely as correspondence there's not a lot else to say about this book.

Identifying Colours

I've almost finished my Tamagotchi app. I have something that's alive for a bit getting hungrier, dirtier and older and can be fed, played-with and cleaned by taking pictures. The pet demands that you take a picture of something that is a specified colour to successfully play/clean etc. Unfortunately its colour matching seems slightly flawed - I've just taken pictures as follows:

Took Blue - Identified Blue
Took White - Identified Yellow (but reflection from green wall/shadows?)
Took Red - Identified Blue
Took Green - Identified Green
Took Black/Blue - Identified Red

Clearly something is not so great in my colour matching. I'm currently going through all the pixels in the image and identifying them as one of: black, white, grey, red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. I keep a count of how many pixels are of each colour and say that the picture is whatever the modal colour is. If two or more values are equally common then I return whichever of the most common colours appear first in the list of colours.

I guess I shall have to try a few more methods and see what works best.

Pay It Forward

I've just found this post from Half-Baked Brownie Guider. The idea seems fairly straight-forward: each person who wins recieves a package from the person running the pay it foward. They then put together three packages of their own and allow people to enter a draw for them via. a blog or messageboard. On a specified date three names are drawn and those people are the new set of winners - each receives a package and is expected to run their own pay it forward for others.

Like a chain letter only not so nasty. I came across a chain letter that involved mailing people nice (new) knickers - I never got any :(

(I did wonder when I'd next use the underwear tag)

That Tamagotchi Application

Having taken a break with all the chaos that's come up recently I've now finally got back to my Tamagotchi-style phone application. It's gettting kinda neat now, I persuaded it to take photos which is good so that just menas I need to call my function to work out what colour they are!

London Trip Badge

Back full of Guiding excitement I remembered my idea to design a badge for our upcoming London visit. Having fiddled about with some image searching and a lot of copy/pasting in Teal and Omnigraffle I've got as far as this black and white outline:The top bit that looks a bit funny will be a London eye if I can make some closer resemblance with a pencil. I think the background would be yellow with the rest in blue/black. The complex images (Big Ben and Tutankhamun) will need some simplification too. Not too bad though :)

If Only

If all we lost somehow came back
If all that died again would grow
If only it was so, these are the loneliest words I know

From If Only, Whistle Down the Wind.

I want my keyboard and music books.