Old Blog Post

I have been writing Notes applications since late 1996/early 1997, and been a full time Notes developer since December 1997. But I still find out new things. I have been using lists for several years now, and as you may know, the easiest way to loop though a list is to use the ForAll statement:Dim mylist List As String mylist("1st") = "First list item" mylist("2nd") = "Second list item" ForAll m In mylist  Print ListTag(m) & " is " & m End ForAll  Sometimes I have to loop through an array of unknown size, and in the past I would have done something like this:Dim myarray(1) As String Dim i As integer myarray(0) = "First array item"myarray(1) = "Second array item" For i = LBound(myarray) To UBound(myarray)  Print i & " is " & myarray(i) Next  But just a couple of weeks ago, I was wondering if perhaps I could use ForAll statement to koop through an array as well. I looked in the online help, and sure think, the help indicated that it was indeed possible:Dim myarray(1) As String myarray(0) = "First array item" myarray(1) = "Second array item" ForAll m In myarray  Print m End ForAll Shorter and you save a variable and a couple of function calls. I doubt it does much for actual code execution, but the code is cleaner and easier to read. Hope this little tip can help someone! 

Recently I blogged about using N2PDF to create PDF documents in the background from Notes documents. I mentioned that Softvision does not have a developer license, forcing me to either pay 5,200 ($7,000) for another server license (which my employer will not do), or to download the demo version every 30 days and register with a new email account (which costs me time and aggravation). It would have been so easy to create a special non-expiring version, but which still display the water mark that prevent you from using it in production. Or why could the water mark not display "N2PDF Developer License" and the company name instead of just "N2PDF Demo Version"? I think my company would even been willing to pay $500 for a developer license like that. The second example of a bad license is from NotesMedic from Cassetica. It's a good tool (if somewhat bloated in the latest version), and it is free for home users. If I would use it at work, I need a Enterprise license. There are no single license for corporate customers, I have to pay the full $15,999 (yes, almost 16 thousand dollar!) to be allowed to put it on my work computer. If we would install it for every single user at my work, that's about $50/user, which is not too bad. But we only need it on a handful computers. Why not have an inexpensive license for corporate single users, without support, that can be purchased using a credit card or PayPal?In both cases, the customer get hurt (can't get the functionality needed) as well as the manufacturer (who is missing out on a sale). I just don't get it. 

On several blogs there have been postings and discussions about Notes development and if someone not embracing Xpages is "Amish". I know there are some people in the Lotus community who work with several different technologies, and even some who have switched to other platforms for different reasons. Personally I echo what Eric Mack said. Lotus Notes is just a tool. It is what you make of it. But from what I have seen, Notes is an extremely powerful tool in comparison with other development tools. The other evening I sat down with a good friend of mine. She is a web and graphics designer (working with Flash, PHP, MySQL, etc), and she have developed her fair share of websites. I pulled up Domino Designer and created a very quick and simple application. Just one form with a few fields, then three views, categorized on different fields in the documents. I added Save and Close buttons to the form, a New button in the view, and then created a couple of sample documents. I then showed her how I could modify the design of the form, and all existing documents now had that change. Fin ally I opened a web browser, navigated to the database and showed her how it worked in two different clients with no additional changes. Things that we Notes developers take for granted and use every day. She was very impressed. It took me about 6-7 minutes to do everything above (I did it slow and explained all the steps to her, and answered some questions along the way). I then challenged her to do the same simple application using any tools of her choice in less than 60 minutes (ten times what I needed in Notes). She will make an attempt later this week, she said. So Notes makes me very efficient as a developer. It is truly a RAD tool. Both as in "Rapid Application Development" and as in the slang expression. But as Volker writes: "It's all about the people, not the software". This is very true. Over the years I have met a large number of great people from the Lotus community, mostly at Lotusphere, but also at IamLUG. I consider many of them my friends, even if we just meet once a year in Orlando. During the year I keep up with them by reading their blogs, following them on twitter and Facebook and occasionally message them on Sametime if I have some question. Lotus Notes and Domino would simply not be the same thing without the community. I am the only Notes developer in my organization, and it is hard. I don't really have any peers to talk to, something I think is true for many Notes developers in small or medium size companies. Because we are so efficient at building applications using Domino Designer, there is not a need for huge staffs of Notes developers. So Lotusphere is the time of year I can talk shop with people who…

I just watched a video from CBS (see below) about Facebook Messages (formerly "Project Titan"), which was presented yesterday. From the description it sounds very much like what IBM said about "Project Vulcan" back in January at Lotusphere. One single stream where all your email, IM, SMS and other communication shows up. Perhaps they will support RSS feeds as well? Just hopeFarmville and all those other games and annoying tests can be filtered out...What do you think? Sounds like Project Vulcan to you? More links:Mashable's walkthrough with screenshotsGizmondo article 

This panorama of central London is most impressive. The amount of detail is astounding!360cities.net have more panoramas like this, if not as big. 

For several years, we wanted to create PDF documents from documents stored in several Notes databases/applications. I created a solution using a PDF printer driver, but as Lotusscript can only print using the frontend classes, this required the printing agent to be launched manually by a user. Several of the agents also had to print to a physical printer in addition to creating a PDF, meaning that my agent had to switch printers. I was using Win32 API calls to do this, as the clients were on 5.0.12 initially, then 7.0.2. Specifying a printer in uidoc.Print() did not come until 7.0.3...This system worked, but took a lot of time, and required some spare desktops to be setup just to process all those documents. For several years I had been researching products that could help us, and the only one I found that looked really promising was N2PDF from SoftVision in Germany. The only issue was the price, EUR 5,200 ($7,100) per server. We only needed this on one server, and eventually we were able to get approval for this, after I calculated that we would save about 80 hours of work/waiting each month by getting this product.I downloaded the 30 day trial version of N2PDF and tested it, and I was amazed at how easy it was. Just a few lines of code added to my agents and the PDF files were created. The documentation shipped with the product (in PDF format, of course) is good. We purchased the software and I started rewriting a number of agents designed to run using frontend classes on the client to run using backend classes on the server. I created a simple class as a wrapper around the N2PDF functionality I needed. I also added code in that class to print a PDF file directly to a physical printer. I will do a write-up of this here later today. I ran into some issues with the product, though. N2PDF supposedly read the Notes document and convert it into RTF format (according to SoftVision tech support), and items that are invisible in the Notes client (e.g. the space before and after a table) are rendered by N2PDF. Also things like having a small centered table inside a table cell in another table will not work, the centering will not be honored. Therefore I had to modify several forms to produce identical results in N2PDF and in Notes.SoftVision seems to have a very competent tech support, I talked to Marcus there, and he was on the issue, did his investigations and got back to me very quickly when he had to find something out.  I know there are other ways to create PDF files, but those involve writing your own code, using Java libraries, etc. But N2PDF was perfect for our purpose. The only issues were the rendering problems mentioned above, and that they do not have a developer license. In order to avoid having to purchase a full EUR 5,200 license for my development server,…

Yesterday I took a walk along a nature trail close to where I live. I brought my camera, and here are a couple of the pictures. The color as not as great as in New England or in my native Sweden, but it was still nice to see the bright yellow leaves. 

To make it easy to implement N2PDF in my applications/agents, I created a simple class, which I put in a script library called Class.PDF. Most of the code for teh actual PDF generation was taken straight from the example provided with the product. In addition to the actual PDF creation, I also added functions to send the PDF file to a physical printer, and to send the PDF file to our internal document imaging system. I have removed the code for the latter, as it is very specialized code, calling a custom COM object we built, etc. To send the PDF file to the printer, Acrobat Reader 9.0 is installed on the server (or client, depending on where the code is being executed). Due to limitations in AcroRD32.exe (it is not closing after it finish printing), I am using Acrobat Wrapper (AcroWrap.exe) from bioPDF. You may also notice that I check two environment variables, this is to detect if the code is running on a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows. I can not take credit for the ShellAndWait() function, I downloaded the code long ago from somewhere. It is used instead of the LotusScript Shell() function, and it will sit and wait until the called program finished executing before it continues. Option Public Option Declare %INCLUDE "N2PDFDEF.SCR" ' *** Used for ShellAndWait() Type STARTUPINFO cb As Long lpReserved As String lpDesktop As String lpTitle As String dwX As Long dwY As Long dwXSize As Long dwYSize As Long dwXCountChars As Long dwYCountChars As Long dwFillAttribute As Long dwFlags As Long wShowWindow As Integer cbReserved2 As Integer lpReserved2 As Long hStdInput As Long hStdOutput As Long hStdError As Long End Type ' *** Used for ShellAndWait() Type PROCESS_INFORMATION hProcess As Long hThread As Long dwProcessID As Long dwThreadID As Long End Type ' *** Used for ShellAndWait() Declare Function WaitForSingleObject Lib "kernel32" _ (Byval hHandle As Long, Byval dwMilliseconds As Long) As Long Declare Function CreateProcessA Lib "kernel32" _ (Byval lpApplicationName As Long, Byval lpCommandLine As String, _ Byval lpProcessAttributes As Long, Byval lpThreadAttributes As Long, _ Byval bInheritHandles As Long, Byval dwCreationFlags As Long, _ Byval lpEnvironment As Long, Byval lpCurrentDirectory As Long, _ lpStartupInfo As STARTUPINFO, _ lpProcessInformation As PROCESS_INFORMATION) As Long Declare Function CloseHandle Lib "kernel32" _ (Byval hObject As Long) As Long Const NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS = &H20& Const INFINITE = -1& Const tmpPath = "C:\N2PDF\" ' Directory to store files in ' *** Main class to create and print PDF files Class PDF Private JobID As Long Private IsOnServer As Integer Public PrinterName As String Public testmode As Integer Public Sub New() Dim session As New NotesSession Dim txtrow As String Dim cmd As String Dim res As Integer ' *** Fix registry settings for Acrobat 9.0 to not shrink/fit page Open tmpPath & "AcrobatSettings.reg" For Output As #1 Print #1, "Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00" Print #1, "" Print #1, "[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0\AVGeneral]" Print #1, |"bprintExpandToFit"=dword:00000000| Print #1, |"iprintScaling"=dword:00000001| Close #1 cmd = |regedit /s | &…

Earlier this week, Peter Presnell compared Notes/Domino developers who are not embracing Xpages as being Amish.I don´t agree. Sure, Xpages have been around for about 2 years, but it was not until recently (8.5.2 released back in September) that they were supported in the client and actually useful. I think that most enterprise customers who are using Notes/Domino actually use the Notes client to a large extent. At least my network admin and CIO want to wait about 4-6 months from a release until even thinking about putting it in production. Especially now with the 8.0 and 8.5 code streams, where we seen all kinds of strange bugs. Code that used to work is suddenly not returning the expected information, etc. My company is currently migrating the last few users off Notes 5.0.12 and onto 7.0.2. Yes, you read it right. It was not until about a year ago I was allowed to install Domino Designer 7.0 and start using any new functionality from that version. All our servers are on 7.0.2 now, and we have one 8.5 server, and that only because of Traveller. I think the plan is to move the servers to 8.5 sometime during the first half of next year, and the users perhaps towards the end of 2011. So why not install 8.5.2 everywhere? Because the standard machine only got 512 MB memory. Two memory slots, with now two 256 MB memory sticks. And they are not going to upgrade the memory on 400 computers. So what we do is migrating all users to Citrix, and then it will be easy to upgrade and run 8.5. But it won't happen overnight.  All our applications are for the Notes client, so until Notes 8.5.2 is installed everywhere, Xpages is not useful to me (at work). I have enough other things to do at work, I don´t have the time to play with Xpages there. I don´t even have Domino Designer 8.5 installed there. At home I have the latest version installed, but I have had limited time to play around and learn Xpages. That does not make me "Domish", as Peter calls it. I focus on technologies I currently can use. I will look at Xpages if I have the spare time, but it is not high priority.  

Back when I was a journalist for Computer Sweden, I got to interview some very interesting people from the IT industry. One time, I think it was in 1996 around the time Windows NT 4.0 was released, Microsoft had a press meeting at their Stockholm office. We were perhaps 8-10 journalists total who got to meet Jim Allchin, then in charge of the development of NT.After the regular PR fluff, slides and presentations, there was time for questions. I eventually asked about a feature in the the then newly released OS/2 Warp 4.0, namely that you could run virtual DOS sessions in OS/2. I think you could even set different sessions to emulate different versions of DOS (I am old enough to remember when certain programs needed particular DOS versions to work). You could even run Windows 3.0 in a virtual session in OS/2.Today we are all doing this, using tools like Parallels and VMware. But Jim Allchin was not impressed: "Circus acts of a dying operating system" was his comment. For the rest of the interview he glared at me every time he mentioned Windows NT in comparison with OS/2... 

This morningI blogged about processing a photo to look like a painting, and I mentioned Picture Publisher, a graphics program from Micrografx (later purchased by Corel).I started using Picture Publisher sometime around 1993-94, and I was using it until a little over a year ago, when I finally switched from Picture Publisher 10 (released in 2001, if I recall correctly) to Photoshop CS2. So why did I use such an old product? Perhaps because Picture Publisher did it´s job, and it did it well. It had all the functions I could ask for at that time, and I could do pretty much anything The program also did use few resources and very little memory, it was fast and also was easy to use. What it was lacking was layers and other features that the competing programs eventually got. In the lat 90´s, Micrografx stopped developing the product, and it was not until 2000/2001 the two final versions (9.0 and 10) came out. If Picture Publisher would have had layers and a couple of other features, I would probably still been using it. I wonder what it would have looked like if Corel had not stopped developing it"..."  The second "old" program I am using is Cam2PC from NaboCorp. Version 4.6.1 came out in October 2007. It is a very competent program, and as the name indicates, it is used to transfer pictures from a digital camera to the PC. This it is doing better than any other program I found. The pictures are organized by date, and during download you can enter a description to be included in the folder name. Simple editing is built in, like cropping, sharpening, red-eye removal and levels/color. In the paid version (there is a limited shareware/trial version) you can burn pictures to CD/DVD, provided you have Nero Burning ROM installed, and you can mail pictures directly from the program. Well worth the $20 it cost. I have not found any program to replace it, including Picasa, F-Spotor Shotwell. So did they simply make better programs a few years ago? Perhaps. Or am I just in my comfort zone and don´t want to learn new things? I don´t think so. I love getting new software, but they have to add something. If they have less functionality than an older program, why should I switch? It´s a little bit like the switch from Notes to Exchange. If it is working and doing the job, why switch to a product that have less functionality, just because it is newer? It is not until the current program is lacking functionality that you need you start thinking about switching. 

In my Notes and Domino applications I have standardized on one icon set. That one is the FamFamFam Silk web icons. They have a muted and nice look that match the Notes client (especially Notes 8.x), and they are free.Here are some sample icons: Go take a look if you haven't done so already! 

A few months ago, I talked to someone about printing photos in large format on canvas. When I got home, I located a packet of "canvas inkjet paper" I purchased many years ago, but never used up. It is a pretty cool paper, it is thick and has a structure like a painting but is of course blank. At first I though about just printing a photo, but then I remembered something. Back in my pre-Photoshop days when I used Picture Publisher from Micrografx, the software had filters that emulated a few different drawing styles, including charcoal, water color and oil painting. However, there is nothing native in Photoshop giving the same capability.I did some searching, looking for oil painting actions, plugins or filters. Finally if found Dynamic Auto Painter (DAP), a $49.95 program that sounded promising. I downloaded the demo version and tested it. I was amazed, this was a really neat program. Perhaps a narrow niche, but worth the money. What the program does is to analyze the picture and then redraw it from scratch, using different brushes and tools, in many layers. Just like I imagine a real painter would do it. There are about a dozen or so different filters, and the user can change parameters like color palette, detail level, how fine brushes to use, etc.I picked a few photos and ran them through Dynamic Auto Painter, and below is the result. The photo of the Waxholm ferry is not the same as the one I processed (I don't have access to it at the moment), but they were taken just a few seconds apart.      I printed the picture of the ferry on the 11" x 8.5" canvas paper, and it turned out really good. My biggest issue now is to find more paper like that, as the manufacturer seems to have closed business.More examples of pictures I processed using Dynamic Auto Painter can be found here. 

Last Sunday I downloaded the latest version of Ubunu, 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). I then decided to use the Update Manager in Ubuntu to upgrade the version I was running (10.04) in-place. The download was nice and fast, I was asked a few questions, and then it was time to restart the computer. Instead of the GRUB menu, I was met by a message that some file was missing and I ended up at a rescue prompt. Nice. The boot loaded had been nuked/damaged. Seems like I am not the only one"..."Finally, after some Google searches and some other tricks (including using a bootable CD with Clonezilla and Gparted I happened to have laying around), I was able to boot on my Windows XP partition. I got the Ubuntu CD burned, as I had been foolish enough to just download the ISO file but not burn it, as I assumed the install would work.Eventually I got GRUB restored on my computer. Then I proceeded with copying the few files I had on my Ubuntu partition to one of my other drives, and reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch, so I had a nice new install. I actually first installed on top of the existing version, juts to try that out. That worked, but none of the new software in 10.10 were installed, so I opted to start all over.I had less problems with this version compared with previous version. Perhaps it is that i am getting used to Ubuntu, or perhaps the distribution is becoming easier to use, My network card, a Netgear WG311, is still not supported natively in Ubuntu, but by installing ndiswrapper (which comes on the CD but is not installed by default) I would use the Windows XP drivers for the card. Very slick, took just a few minutes.I had to install the Nvidia graphics drivers separately, but again, that was easy. The tricky part was to get my left monitor (I have two older CRT monitors connected to my system) to run in a higher resolution than 640x480. After some searching through Google and editing the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf file I was able to get 1200x1024 on that screen as well.What about Notes 8.5.2 then? I am happy to report that it was extremely simple. I downloaded the compressed .tar file from the IBM Passport Advantage site, unpacked the contents (half a dozen .deb files) to the desktop and simply right-clicked on one file at a time and opened them in the Ubuntu Software Manager, Answered a question or two, and after just a few minutes I was all set. Actually much faster than installing it on a Windows XP PC at work, which I did today. Well, a small disclaimer, my system at home got a faster processor, 3 GB memory (vs. 768 MB at work) and probably faster hard disks"..." Over the last year, I estimate that I have been in Ubuntu about 80% of the time, and in Windows just 20%. Perhaps even less. And after…

The other day I noticed a posting on LinkedIn, in the Lotus Notes/Domino Technology group by a Joseph Roblee asking "Does anyone know of a talented offshore Domino 8.5 development group you can put me in contact with?"I find it interesting that Mr. Roblee, who happens to live in Austin, TX, is looking at India when there are so many US developers looking for jobs"..." I wonder what his neighbors (a simple google search for his name reveals an address in Cedar Park, a suburb of Austin) would say if they were told that their nice neighbor is exporting jobs away from the US, while the country has record high unemployment.Perhaps I will see him at Lotusphere, because surely "one of the leading Lotus Notes developers in the United States" will be there"..."I notice that Mr. Roblee proudly tells that he got an MBA (as well as MCSE). I know a CEO who went back to school to get his MBA, and he came back with the "knowledge" that one can hire brilliant developers in India, with MBA and higher degrees, for $5/hr or similar. Is that is what is being taught in MBA trainings across the US?There are a number of responses/comments to his posting from people who either have Indian sounding names or identify themselves as from India (as well as a few from Latvia, South Africa and some other countries). What I heard from people who actually been involved in offshore development is that the culture is very different in India. You have to be aware of that. Not oly is the actual development process different, other cultural differences also comes into play. If you are not aware of those, and have a very strong project leader, the project can easily get larger/longer/more expensive that projected.Also, from judging at what I been reading in the past in the (now pretty dead) usenet newsgroup comp.groupware.lotus-notes.programmer (and to some lesser extent in the DeveloperWorks forums), it seems like many of the most basic questions came from people with Indian sounding names, or identifying themselves as from India. Often the question is extremely basic, or showing that the person has no clue about what Notes is or how it works. There is often a comments saying "I never programmed Notes before, but I was put in this project for a client"..."" or similar, the proceeding how to do relational lookups or similar. To me that sounds like they took on a project, and now want the very same people they just put out of a job to do the training or actual work for them"..."I also found it very interesting that Kirankumar Nellore from Bengalure [sic!] is commenting and trying to get the business from Mr Roblee. In another Lotus-related group on LinkedIn, he asks What is difference between lotus notes normal application and composite application??. Shouldn´t a certified Notes developer and administartor (as he claim he is) know that? Or am I just setting the bar too high for…

My son, Erik, has taken up soccer (or football as it is known in the world outside the United States) this year. After 5 years of playing baseball, I am happy that he choose a sport where he get to move more. At first he wanted to try football (the American version, where they hold the oval shaped "ball" and run, wearing heavy padding), but his mom was not too thrilled about that. Erik quickly changed his mind and wanted to do soccer instead, as heliked watching the 2010 FIFA World Cup tournament.He loves playing soccer, andalso likesto go to the home games of FC Dallas.His team lost the first 3 games, but won the fourth one last Sunday and tied the fifth one this past Thursday. As he and his mom lives over an hour away, I was not able to attend the first couple of games, but I went last weekend and brought my camera. I ended up taking quite a few pictures and here are a couple, mostly of Erik (number 10), I wanted to share. 

It´s an appropriate day to release the latest version of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, called "Maverick Meerkat". or 10.10 as the official version number is. The version numbers in Ubuntu is, as you already may know, the year and month of the release.I will shortly try to install the new version from within my existing 10.04 installation. This should be as easy as to go to the update manager and click on a button to install the new version. However, last time I tried it, going from 9.10 to 10.04 back in April, the download and install took many hours, so I opted to just download the ISO file and install from there from scratch.I am currently downloading the ISO file, just in case I will need it. But hopefully the online installation will be smoother than last time. It will also be interesting to see how Notes 8.5.2 is working in the new version of Ubuntu.Here are some links I want to share to anyone else who want to try Ubuntu, or is planning to upgrade. How to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat from ubuntu 10.04 lucid, karmic| Desktop & ServerTop things to do after installing Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick MeerkatCustom Compiz Effects configuration in Ubuntu10.10 Maverick MeerkatGreat themes for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (this one was originally written for 9.04 but has been updated for the 10.04 and 10.10 releases.) 

I have not done many product reviews on this blog, but in a previous life I was reviewing 2-3 products/week as a journalist/test editor at IDG. I plan to start to review some products I been coming across, in all different categories.Today I will be looking at the 3M Filtrate Water Station. I have been seeing the ads on TV for a few weeks, and since I already own a Brita water pitcher, I was curious to see if the claims of much shorter filtering time was true, and how that affected the taste. The Brita pitcher consists of two chambers, a top one which is filled with water, and a lower one where the filtered water ends up. Between the two chambers, there is a cylindrical carbon filter. The end result of the Brita pitcher is nice clean water, and I usually keep it in the fridge to make sure the water is cold. The two main issues with the pitcher is that it requires the top chamber to be filled up twice to fill up the lower chamber (which can hold 64 oz of water), and that the filtration time is fairly lengthy. The MSRP for the model I have is $31.99 and the filters are $7.99 for one, $20.99 for 3. Each filter lasts 40 gallons according the the manufactures website.What about the new 3M Filtrate Water Station? It filters straight into four 16,9oz (0.5 liter) bottles attached to the station. The bottles are made in hard plastic, with a special lid that can pop on and off. You can fill any number of bottles, there is a valve for each bottle that automatically close when no bottle is attached. The filter is circular and flat. 3M claim that each filter can process 100 gallons before being replaced. It does filter much faster than the Brita pitcher, and it is convenient to fill straight into bottles. It takes less than a minute to fill all 4 bottles. The top section of the bottle can be unscrewed, to allow for easy cleaning (they are dishwasher safe, but 3M recommend washing by hand). However, there are a couple of issues with the product. The bottles are somewhat hard to open and close. Could be because they are new, but the mechanism is not perfect. A screw lid attached with a chain would been a much better solution. The time I spend trying to open and close the pop-lid is as long as it would take to screw/unscrew a cap.3M Filtrate Water StationManufacturer: 3M  Price: $37,44 (unit), $9.99 (100 gal. replacement filter), $14.99 (two extra bottles)  Pros: Fast filtering, water stored directly in bottles, low cost per filtered gallon, dishwasher safe, convenient,saving moneyby buying lessbottled water.  Cons: Expensive extra bottles, hard to open/close bottles, does not filter as good as a thicker/slower filter.  Summary: A good alternative to water pitchers, but need some debugging/tweaking to be a killer product. I am not fully satisfied with the quality of the water.…

This week I started looking into High Dynamic Range imaging. This is a technique that can be used by a photographer to make pictures look better by taking three pictures of the same motive, but with one image over exposed, one under exposed and one with normal exposure. The pictures are then combined, using software like Photomatix and Dynamic Photo-HDR.Yesterday I was taking pictures at a birthday party in Ft Worth. The venue (The Petroleum Club) was a fairly dark room on the 39th floor, with big windows giving a panoramic view of downtown Ft Worth. So I decided to try some HDR pictures, and for a first attempt I think it turned out pretty good.Here are the three original pictures, unedited:   In the first, darker image you can actually see some of the landscape outside the windows, while in the last, brighter image you can see the interior but not the outside, as that part is over exposed. Below is the result, without really any tweaking, of Photomatix: You can see that the outside is still visible, as well as is the interior.The pictures were all shot using a Nikon D90, in regular JPG (fine) mode. No flash was used, but I used a tripod.If you like photography, and end up taking pictures of (for example) buildings against a bight sky or inside shots with windows or bright outside light, I would recommend looking at HDR as a method to improve your pictures.