My new pair of Instagram images websites

I posted earlier about a #flyfishing website I launched.  I didn't actually launch one site, I launched two.

Both sites use the same code, use the same database.  Both displays images from Instagram, they each have different topics.

I'm not hosting images, they stay on instagrams servers.  I just read the information and try to make sense of it and display it in a manor where (I hope) it's easier to find the pictures you're looking for.

The homepage shows details of images and video's, these are the very latest that have just been posted.

I'm also reading how many likes a picture gets, so I'm able to work out who's posting the most popular photos each day, or who's most popular.

Then there's the people who just like posting lots of pics, so I'm showing a top 5 of those too.

Coming next will be a picture of the day, the photo with the most likes.

I want to show a history of these too, so I'll add that in.

Instagram only let's you search by one hashtag at a time.  But many images have many tags.  This is what I'm looking forward to adding the most, to be able to search against multiple tags.

Pike on the fly?  Two hashtags?  #flyfishing and #pike? 

Or trout caught on the fly in Colorado?  #flyfishing #trout and #colorado

Take a look and let me know what you think....

www.equestrianpics.com and www.flyfishingpics.co.uk

My new fly fishing website

Tonight I have launched a new #flyfishing website.   It's only a rough initial version, but it's enough to get started.

http://www.flyfishingpics.co.uk/

I simply wanted to be able to make better use of the information in Instagram to help display and search for photographs.

It's really lacking in features right now, but I plan to keep adding things as time goes by.

Bank Security - Card Skimmers

I'm not too impressed with my bank right now.

I went to withdraw some money yesterday and thought the card slot looked a bit suspicious.  So went and withdrew my money inside.  I wasn't convinced it was a skimming device and was in a bit of a rush, so didn't say anything.

But I ended going back at lunchtime, to ask them for confirmation that it wasn't anything suspicious.  The girl I spoke to went and spoke to the manager and came back to tell me that I shouldn't worry.  They check the machines daily and they'd notice if something was attached.

They didn't even come out and have a look.  What if it's removed before they do their daily checks?

I've since done a bit of Googling and found a pictured skimming device from a newspaper article in Malta:

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120729/local/Bank-cash-machines-are-targeted-by-skimmer-gang.430493

It does look very similar to what I saw:

I've since tweeted the bank a few times, but nobody can confirm that this is not a skimming device or not.

Story Points

Estimating the amount of work in a project needn't be difficult. Story Point estimating is quick and can be painless.

We use relational (or affinity) estimating to compare one requirement (story) against another.  Is it larger, smaller or roughly the same size?

So print each story on to a card and then go through one by one comparing the story against those already compared.  

Once you've been through and done the comparison you should have stories in piles.

Apply the Fibonacci sequence to piles.  The smallest getting a 1, the next set getting a 2 and so on.

We tend to then go through each pile and confirm that we are happy that the stories in each pile fit the story point size assigned.

Remember...

• A story point is not a unit of time

• A story point can only correlate against a unit of time when the story point numbers are very low

• The larger the number, the less correlation between time and story points.

• We deliberately use the Fibonacci sequence to show that the bigger the story, the bigger distance between numbers in the sequence, and the less accurate an estimate on a large story will be 

Eg. So, a story with 1 or 2 points should be fairly accurately estimated.  But the larger the number the less accurate our estimating is.

Let’s say we have calculated our velocity 2 story points per day.  It doesn’t mean we’ll deliver a 13 point story in 6.5 days, but we can probably accurately estimate that we can deliver 13 one point stories in 6.5day.

So, if we’ve got an 8 point story, the assumption is that’ll take 4 days, but the reality is that’s not accurate enough.  It could take 3 to 6 days..?

And, if we’ve got an 8 point story, we’re not going to see any burn down on our chart for a while.

So if everyone is working on large stories, our estimating is inaccurate, our project is at risk from the start, and we’re unlikely to see regular burn down in our timebox.

We can probably live with 5 point stories, as we can probably live without burn down for 2 to 3 days.  Hence, I’d say we should break down stories that are 8 points or more.

A few ways to think about it, and it’s always with distance, as it’s easier to visualise.

The accuracy of a story estimate is a bit like throwing a dart.  If it’s a small number, it’s like having the target a few feet away.  You’re going to hit the target and are more than likely to hit it exactly where you aim at.   But a larger number is like getting further away.  The further away you get, your chances of hitting the target decrease.  Get too far away and you’re much less likely to hit the target at all.

Or think about travelling distances.  If you live in the south of England and someone asked you about travelling from Woking to Reading, you might have a good idea about how long it would take. But what if it were Darlington to Durham, York to Leeds,  Manchester to Northwich?

Something you’ve done many times, you can have a good idea of.  But if you haven’t, you have to compare it against something similar.  All these journeys are about 25 miles, do it’d probably be safe to assume that they’d all take the same amount of time.  But I know that my journey from Darlington to Durham is going to be much quicker than your journey from Woking to Reading.

It's quite comparable, but it's still quite a distance.  More factors can take effect and increase journey times.

Change that to a much smaller distance like a walk to your local pub.  If my pub and your pub are both 200yards away, the estimates will be the same.  If there is a difference it's more likely to be seconds, rather than minutes.

Change that to a longer journey, like London to Edinburgh.  Even if you've done it a dozen time before you're still not going to be able to give an accurate figure.

More new stargazing kit has arrived

Thanks to Amazon, the gear I ordered late on Saturday night turned up today at lunchtime.   Coming in a nice aluminium box, I've got a set of filters and eye pieces.

Why do I need these?

My telescope is only really a starting point.  It came with a fairly generic 25mm eyepiece.  It's the eyepiece that provides the magnification.  The smaller the number the larger the magnification.

My telescope has a focal length of 1500mm.  To calculate the available magnification, you divide this value by the eyepiece size.   So, mine works our at 60x magnification.

In the box there's 5 eyepieces

• 6mm (250x)
• 8mm (187x)
• 13mm (115x)
• 17mm (88x)
• 32mm (47x)

And, there's a 2x barlow.  You combine this with an eyepiece and it doubles the magnification of that eyepiece - so I've got 10 combinations, from 47x all the way up to 500x magnification.

And, I've got 7 different filters too:

• Orange (46% light transmission)
• Blue (30% light transmission)
• Deep Yellow (74% light transmission)
• Red (14% light transmission)
• Light Green (53% light transmission)
• Green (24% light transmission)
• A moon filter (13% light transmission)

Personally, I'm looking forward to a clear sky and having a closer look at the moon.

Overworked teachers..?

I've heard plenty of teachers complain about the amount of planning they need to do, and the amount of time they spend marking.

My wife is a teacher, I know it's not the half days and masses of holidays it's generally perceived to be.  It's a job that does actually consume a huge amount of time.  Would I swap my 9 to 5.30pm job, with just 5 weeks holiday?  No, I've got a much better work/life balance.

As a kid at school I was told to work on my own and not copy from others.  Has this mentality continued through in to the teaching profession?

Successful companies can't succeed by paying different members of staff to sit in isolation and repeatedly do the same bit of work as everyone else.  We have one person do one particular job and we all try and benefit from each other.  We're all cogs in a big efficient machine.

Is it like that in education?

How many teachers actually cooperate with other teachers and share the planning?   How many schools have set up a central repository where all the lesson plans can be stored, shared and re-used?

Going up a level, how many schools share their planning with other schools?  

If we're going to have an improved and consistent level of education, isn't this where we need to aim to get to?

Internet Security at its worst..?

Last week I had to renew my car insurance.   Sure, I work for an insurance company, but I'm a customer too, I want to shop about an get the best product/price for me.

I'm not going to name the company, but I will describe the process, then send them details of this blog entry.

So, my renewal comes through.  They kindly send me a link along the lines of...

https://www.[insurance company name].co.uk/renewmotor?policy=[policy number]

Kindly, this quick little link allows be straight in to my policy.  How convenient.  It did show a login screen with my details populated, I just had to click the login button.

Before I proceeded I noticed the password starred out and a toggle switch next to it.  Yup, the toggle switch revealed my password to me.

WTF?   Surely not.

Why is this so bad?

Firstly, emails are not secured.  So anyone could get access to access to it's contents.  Secondly, it was just my policy number in the url.  Anyone could guess this.  Or if I'd had an accident, I'd have had to reveal my policy number to the third party.

So, from my policy number, you've now got access to my account?   I hope not.  I've got personal information in there, like name, address, date of birth and MY PAYMENT INFORMATION.

But to have a pre-populated password that has a toggle switch allowing me to view my actual password?   What's the point in password protecting the site in the first place?

I've thought about how this could be done safely and I can't work out away.

Maybe they've pre-populated the password as I already had an authenticated session on their site?  I don't think I did.  Even so, they shouldn't be releasing my password to me, they should just log me straight in.

Maybe they'd written a cookie to my machine..?  But with my password in clear text in a cookie?  Nope, that's not secure either.

Maybe when I clicked on the link, they've dragged my password out the database and repopulated it server side?   What?!  They're not encrypting my password in their database?   Even if it's encrypted, they must have two way encryption on the go, which is also bad.  What's the point in encrypting a password if it can be decrypted again?

No matter how I think about how they've done this, I can't think of any way it's been made secure.  I just wish I'd taken a few screen shots to show this, as now I'm out of my renewal period, I no longer have access to that functionality on their site.

My new telescope, how I chose my Nexstar 6se

So, i had decided to buy a telescope.  I knew I wanted to be able to find and look at the planets and I love taking pictures (my instagram feed).

So, what do I buy?  There's quite a lot of different types to choose from.  Refractors, newtonians, dobsonians, there's quite a list.

I'm not an expert, but this is how I got to decide what I ended up buying.

I understood the basic idea behind a refractor and a newtonian.  With a refractor, they're a bit like a camera lens, there's a lens at each end.  You're paying for the glass.   If you keep these in the house, you need to leave it a while outside to adjust to the temperature.

A newtonian is open at one end.  They adjust to the temperature changes quicker.  A newtonian is a light collecting device, the wider the better.  It gets its focal length through using mirrors.  You tend to look through the eye piece at the top end of telescope, rather than the opposite end, like you would with a refractor.

Then there are composite telescopes.  These use lenses at each end, and mirrors too.  They tend to be short fat scopes.  Have a look on google for Maksutov & Schmidt Cassegrain for details on how these things work.


I live on the edge of Teesside in north east England.  It's an industrial region with a population of around half a million.  The air is polluted and there's plenty of light pollution too.   We get to see the moon in some very interesting colours thanks to the local industry and air pollution.   But I live on the edge of woodland in this little bubble that feels a million miles away from it all.  I think of it as quite dark at night, but it's not really.

I'm going to need something portable.  Eventually, I'm going to want to pick up my telescope and take it somewhere nice and dark.  I also had to consider where I'm going to store the telescope when I'm not using it.

So, I couldn't get away from one of these short, fat stubby telescopes.

I read a bit about my options, and I kept getting drawn to the Nexstar 4se.  It's small and portable.   The tripod and mount also comes with a wedge, which means that if I do want to get in to astro photography, it'll be more suited.

This was the thing I hadn't realised - even though I'd decided on a computerised telescope, something that could automatically move, and keep track on a planet while the earth turns, there's different solutions to this problem.

An Altazimuth mount has two motors.  One for moving it up and down, another for moving it left and right.  Which is great if all you want to do it look through your telescope.

But, if you want to take pictures of DSO's (deep space objects), you need to keep the exposure open on your camera for quite some time.   Which means you need to keep your scope pinned on the object while the earth moves.  Potentially, the two motors can create a stepped effect, which results in poor pictures.

So, the solution is an equatorial mount.  A mount that's pitched up at the right angle and moves very smoothly.  The wedge that comes with the Nexstar 4se is there to achieve this.

But, I read that the wedge that comes with the 4se is a waste of time.

The Celestron Advanced VX mount was suggested as a decent mount.  But that's about £750, and I'd need optics on top of that.  No way.  Not yet anyway.

I needed to forget about photography.  Maybe photographing the moon and planets and I might get away with a altazi mount for that.  Plus, an Altazimuth mount is much lighter, so more portable.

So, go for a good set of optics and an altazi.

I looked again at the Nexstar 4se, the 5se, the 6se and the 8se.   There's loads online to suggest that if you can find the money for a 6se, you should spend the extra and get the 8se as it collects 78% more light.  Fair point.  But its also over 50% more to buy.   A jump from approx £750 to over £1200.  A bug jump in price.

So I looked at the difference in light collecting ability between the 4se and the 5se.  The 5se is approx 50% better, but it was also another 60% in price too.  It was £419 to £680.

Between the 5se and the 6se, the difference in light was approx 50% again.  The 6se can collect more than twice the light of the 4se, and the price difference between the 5se and 6se?  A reasonable £75, just 11% more.  11% more case, for 50% more light?   And the tripod/mount with the 6se is the same as comes with the 8se, so if I wanted to upgrade in future, then I could.

So, the 6se it was.   A good decision?

Beginners astronomy

After years of wandering about in the dark and looking up at the stars, I decided to buy myself a telescope.  I've had a bit of an interest ever since I was a kid.  I remember having a low powered refractor that allowed me to look at the moon.

Since then the extent of my astronomy interest has been tuning in to #stargazinglive, watching the odd Brian Cox documentary and installing the starwalk app on my iphone.  My interest has been building over the past year or so.  I follow @virtualastro on twitter and Chris Hadfield when he was whizzing about the earth in the ISS.

So I now tend to know what planets are visible and where the are in the sky.   I though it was about time I had a closer look.  Sure, I can go to an observatory, but I really want to do this myself and see what I can see from my own little piece of England.

So I bought a telescope, and I've had nothing but cloudy skies since.