Colin's Journal

I intended to update the design of my web pages for the winter, but I’ve not got around to doing it. At this rate it will be spring before I do it, and then I’ll be six months out of sync with the world (or rather the bit of it that I’m in). It took a long time and a fair amount of effort to design and implement the current look, so maybe I should start now in preparation for next winter.

This week has mostly been dominated by work. I’m off to Mexico again on Sunday, this time for a week, and there has been a lot of preparation work to do. I expect a good but challenging trip, and very little if any free time.

I spent Sunday afternoon wading through snow in High Park trying to take good pictures. I took a few nice ones, including this one of the reeds (click for larger version). By the time I got home I was thoroughly soaked and frozen, the combination of darkness and wind more than making up for warm clothing.

I would like to make large prints of some of my photos, but given the cost involved, I decided I would start with some small sizes first. My first set look OK, but the colours are rather washed out compared to the view on my screen. Of course my screen could be showing things better than they really are, but I’m still hoping that I can get better prints. I took one of the prints to Blacks to try their “Vivid print challenge”, and frankly they failed. Their picture was very different from both the original print and the screen image, with yellows being printed as reds.

My current hope lies in Henry’s, who claim to make no adjustments to the photos before printing them out. This should hopefully mean a faithful reproduction of the original image file with just colour space conversions. It’ll be interesting to see the results, which should be available in 1.5 weeks.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Design, fly, and print.

To use SimpleTAL with non-ASCII characters in a Context object you need to convert them into Unicode first. I’ve had a few emails regarding the UnicodeError that is thrown if you fail to do this, so I need a better solution. In the next release of SimpleTAL I’m going to catch the UnicodeError, log out an error message describing the solution, and then raise it again. Which should help people resolve the issue more quickly.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Note on SimpleTAL