Imagegen use notes

• Webconfig: <config sections> must be first node in <configuration>
• Reset the file permissions on the /data folder and any folders with images you process with ImageGen to allow your site's application pool owner to create, read, update, and delete folders and files.
• Use AppPool 036too (identity – Network Services)
• /data permissions: Network Services = full

Hot pocket

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly became aware that my 1020 was getting uncomfortably warm in my front jeans pocket.

Yikes

When I took it out, it was surprisingly hot... and the camera was on.

As I have the phone set to wake into camera mode if the camera button is held down - I suspect that my pocket managed to turn on the camera. 

Continued pressure on the button probably caused it to keep trying to focus - using the focus-assist light.  Which in turn caused it to heat up.

The whole experience reminded me of a rental car in Iceland and my first experience with in-seat electrical heating.

WP8 top tip: copy PDF to phone and view

.pdf on my computer - how to view it on my phone?

Copy pdf to phone

1. connect phone to computer via usb
2. Copy pdf
3. Browse to PhoneName: Phone: Documents
4.  Paste

View pdf on phone

1. Open "Office" app
2. Swipe to "places" screen
3. Tap "Phone" item
4. You should see your pdf, tap to open. It will open in adobe pdf viewer (if installed).

Umbraco and Azure - state of play early 2014

In researching the suitability of Umbraco as a new cms platform, I was looking into cloud services & scalability.

Is Azure currently a viable host for Umbraco?

The current definitive answers

...can be found in a Nov 2013 talk by Darren Ferguson on integrating Umbraco and Azure.

If you don't have 37:02 to watch, here's the super-simplified executive summary:

Even with the latest Azure Websites, while hosting a single machine instance of Umbraco is not rocket science, hosting a scalable solution is not straightforward.  A major hindrance is the back office - it is difficult (impossible?) to keep edits/updates synced across several servers.  One work-around is to keep one instance of Umbraco running as the back end, which then publishes a frontend (public facing) to the scalable Azure Website.  Darren ends with support for this separation to be a focus of Umbraco 8.

TL;DR

Azure ready for Umbraco, Umbraco not ready for Azure (or seemingly any other scalable solution).

Lumia 1020 RAW (DNG) - day 1

To date, I'd not been overly impressed by the Lumia 1020's hyped pureview camera.  The results seemed oversharpened, oversaturated, and not completely great.  A bit of research, a few tweaks, and I am now much happier.

Moving from Standard JPG to RAW

I'm now much happier with the output, but I had to do a bit of research to get here.  I didn't make note of the sources which got me to this point, but I'll try to do a better job of documentation next time.

Step 1- Camera settings

I went into the settings menu from Nokia Pro Cam.  (Tap the ... in the lower right, then tap settings.) I switched from JPEG (5 MP) to JPEG+DNG (34 MP).  NB: unless you have the so called "Black" Nokia update, this option may not be available to you.

Job done, I thought.  I took a few test shots, waited for them to appear in my SkyDrive : Camera Roll folder, then imported them into LightRoom 5.  And had no joy.  All I was seeing was the same old 718x1277 jpg files.  More research.

Step 2 - Tethered import 

It turns out that the 1020 only syncs the 5MP images to SkyDrive.  The large 34 MP .dng files stay on the phone.

I plugged the phone into my desktop (Windows 8.1) and after a brief automated install was able to browse to the camera roll straight from the LightRoom import dialogue.

Step 3 - LightRoom 1020 profiles

Once I could view the images in LightRoom at the pixel level, I gained a much better feeling for what the camera is capable of (and also its limitations).  But I think that's for another post.

However, I had discovered that staff at Nokia have come up with 3 camera profiles for LightRoom.  This page explains their purpose, how to install them, and where to get them: http://conversations.nokia.com/2014/01/15/available-now-dng-color-profiles-adobe-lightroom/

The results

Default JPEG (5 MP) SOOC (Straight off of Camera)

 DNG post-processed in LightRoom