Software Consultancy and Concert Photography
Welcome to the site of Askew Software Consultancy and Concert Photography. The former grew from a childhood hobby into a career that has spanned many decades and seen many technologies come and go. Projects have been diverse and been for some very well known household names.
The concert photography grew not just from a passion for music but also for a desire to somehow capture the moment. Any concert goer will have had that moment when they whip out the camera phone to capture that special moment so I suspect that more people now understand why I get such a thrill from photographing a gig than when I first started.
Renewed web site
It has been long overdue but the website has needed a cleanup for some years. The old site was simply not modern and not compatible with modern mobile devices. But with a busy workload for clients it is going to take time to completely replace the old site and, for a while at least, some links will take you back to the old pages.
Maps using OpenLayers
A long time ago I created a web based application as a demo. That demo needed updating so I've created a
newer version that uses updated libraries to demonstrate some of the features of that now out of date
web application. You can see the demo here here.
This is using OpenLayers and while it is free, it is also extremely capable.
Maps using Plotly
Plotly has some great services if you wish to create charts but they also have some basic offerings
for mapping too. I'm not going to say they are going to take the mapping world by storm but they do
offering basic raster based maps with the possibility to overlay some vector layers. If you are using
Plotly already then possibly using their mapping offering makes some sense but if you are after advanced
mapping capabilities then you'll probably want to keep looking.
A very basic example can be seen here
Charting
A large part of a past project was building charts and for that task we used a free web based open source
library from Plotly. Their system meant that we
could focus more on the important stuff like gathering and processing the data and then could leave the
chart rendering to them.
For clarity, I'm not employed by them, I just found their product made achieving the end result so much easier and I like their product. See more here including a demonstration.
Traffic control
The traffic light you set see here was purchased from Cleware
in Germany. We then hooked it up to some software that we wrote that monitors the
continuous integration build and test system. If those tests fail we'd like the
developer whose changes caused the failure to be aware as soon as possible and this
seemed like a fun solution to a practical problem.
On the radar
The technology radar has been created as a visual representation of the expected timeline of
new technologies. You can see a working version here. The page is primarily
designed for full sized browsers but it will work on a mobile with some restrictions.
Who is that guy?
What
the guy in the background? That's Steve Hogarth lead singer of only the best band in the world,
Marillion. That night, the 29th of November 2011, they were playing
the 013 in Tilburg. It is good that the virus is generally behind us and that the band is touring again.