Author: Jim Young

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Fresnel lens removed from the lighthouse at St. Marks NWR

On November 20, 2014 the Fresnel lens was removed from the historic St Marks Refuge lighthouse for the first time in 147 years for cleaning and preservation.

The lens was extracted from the lighthouse by the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association and staff and volunteers from the Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge.

Thanks to “Ring Power” for providing the “man lift”, personnel, and all their support on this project!

I recorded this event with a Canon DSLR and a GoPro Hero4 camera and created two YouTube videos: Part 1 and Part 2

Most of the images in this post are frames taken from the GoPro video.
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Prescribed fire at St. Marks NWR

On a recent visit to St. Marks National Wildlife refuge we got a chance to witness this impressive prescribed burn.

Wide view of prescribed burn near Stoney Bayou - St Marks NWR.

These controlled fires are essential to maintain a healthy forest ecosystem, especially here in Florida.

Fires help maintain the open woodlands that are needed by many of the local plants and animals, and by reducing the dead wood and undergrowth they lessen the likelihood of deadly wildfires.
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The overlooked Dragonfly

When people think of things to see at the Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge they usually think of the lighthouse, alligators, and birds. In the fall of the year butterfly viewing is quite popular.

Although very common on the refuge, most people don’t think about the dragonfly as a subject of observation or photography.  This is partly due to the fact that the dragonfly seems to always be “darting” around quickly in the sky overhead and is difficult view through binoculars or with a camera.
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Saint Marks NWR Monarch Festival

The 26th Annual Monarch Butterfly Festival will be held  10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m on October 25th this year.

This is a great event and there are lots of activities for adults and children!

Call the refuge at 850-925-6121 for more information.

As you probably know the monarchs are having a tough time due to a variety of factors and we all hope the monarchs will show up this year.

In any event there will be a lot of beautiful pollinators to see.

There is always something to see at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. For more info check the Calendar of events.

Male Monarch butterfly on Baccharis halimifolia - St Marks NWR.

Jim

 

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Source code for “Designing Screen Interfaces in C”

The book “Designing Screen Interfaces in C” was written back in the days of DOS to allow applications to have pop-up windows and  modern looking menus in text only displays.

I was approached by a publisher to write the book after my article “Pull-down menus in C” appeared in Byte magazine.

Since I am occasionally contacted by programmers looking for the source code I thought I would post it here.

I was contacted a few years ago by a company that wanted to use the code in a product scanner designed to take grocery store inventories. Since the code was written to write directly to the  display buffer and could be configured to run on almost any size screen it was ideal for that application.  The fact the code took only 10K of memory made it ideal for small devices

Please don’t contact me with questions about the code since it has been a long time since I looked at it.

Here is  zip file with the C source code updated to also compile under c++ compilers. DSIIC-UPDATE.ZIP

Regards,
Jim

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The One-time Pad: Unbreakable encryption

One of the biggest issues with data encryption is that almost all encryption can be decrypted by a determined “enemy” with enough computer resources and sufficient time.

Ciphers that are based on a password can be broken by brute force techniques such as trying every every single password. Longer passwords help but at best they simply buy you some time.

The rapid development of quantum computers may soon allow much faster factoring of prime numbers and threaten ciphers such as RSA which exploit the difficulty factoring large prime numbers.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cipher that couldn’t be broken by any modern computer? Would you like a cipher that could NEVER be broken? Continue reading “The One-time Pad: Unbreakable encryption”

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Old tree stump

This tree stump is located on our side yard. I’ve always found it interesting and finally got around to actually taking a photo.

I used a very shallow focus to blur the background so the subject would stand out.

Looking at old trees and rocks is like looking at a Rorschach inkblot, you can see all kinds of animals or faces. Here I see an animal head, perhaps a bull.
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Add a label and frame to an image

Today we discuss how to use ImageMagick to add a frame and label to an image without obscuring any detail.

Most the image descriptions seen on web sites are written in HTML and are lost when the images are downloaded by a visitor.

You can add descriptions to the metadata stored in an image but some sites remove the metadata when the image is uploaded to reduce the file size. Even when the metadata remains intact many users don’t know how to access it.
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