Just don’t ask it about me ok? It doesn’t know anything about me! It does know a bit about Cork City!
(via Angie)
Author Archives: Donncha
Sneem Sunset – 3 photo panorama
The picture above is a panorama made up of 3 hand-held shots taken in Sneem, Co. Kerry.
Stitching them together in the GIMP was fairly easy – adjust colours and brightness, line them up using semi-transparent layers and then use a layer mask and a gradient to make the joins mostly invisible. The tree branches were a bother though – I had to clone out some of them!
I really should document some of this stuff as this was a good example – because of the sunset each photo had very different light qualities and it was important to fine tune and match those colours.
F-Spot mini review
I like F-Spot. It’s useful, it does tagging that no gqview and gthumb don’t. It has organisation features that they don’t have either, but it’s a little too buggy for widespread use yet.
It was really easy to use however. Just “import” a few directories of photos, create a few tags, and then select a few photos, right click and add a tag to those photos.
Unfortunately it crashed a few times after an import, and exif reading seemed to be completely broken but then I never checked if the proper library was installed. Except for rotating, I *never* use a simple photo viewer to manipulate images so I didn’t try out those features of the app. IMO that’s a job for the GIMP and I save modified files to a new directory.
I’m going to keep a close eye on it to track how it progresses. It’s shaping up to be a great desktop application!
A hint for Gnome users – if you haven’t got much room in your home directory move the “~/.thumbnails” folder out of the way somewhere else with plenty of space and symlink it back. Mine’s at 171MB and growing fast!
While we’re on the mono theme, a mono developer, zbowlin1 on #wordpress attracted my attention when he said..
<zbowlin1> I just did something really really cool. I have a much better version of php+gtk by calling the GTK and System.Windows.Forms (SWF/MWF) classes using PHP as a runtime and using the .NET/Mono invoking classes in PHP 🙂 <zbowlin1> I just made php as runtime and used GTK# like a runtime, and used my Gecko# port and opened a stream and used PHP methods like calendar and Smarty and stuff to generate the content for the page.. most php scripts should work and you can run them and render tables and stuff in gecko#/gtkhtml windows and the rest in lables and menus <zbowlin1> its like a much much better, cross platform (thanks to mono), PHP+GTK that kills the crap out of the need to make stubs and makes it gtk2 compatible and opens up billions and billions of possibilities for people who only write PHP or people who want to code one set of common functions for like an application version and web page version.. and it can work on the fly <zbowlin1> humm… i’m on the mono team and i’ve working on my C# based offline wordpress blog writer with a WYSIWYG interface and spell check.. this just made that idea like 3923501235 * better <zbowlin1> i don’t have to rewrite interfaces. I can use built in php xml-rpc support. AAAAH man it boggles the mind the amount of possiblities.. <zbowlin1> you can gain access to xpcom in mozilla so you can automate XUL with PHP… you could write Mozilla extensions php.. you can call anything, or do anything, on mac, windows, linux, freebsd, etc.. <zbowlin1> holly crap <zbowlin1> i’m mind boggled <Firas> XUL and GTK are pretty different toolkits? <Firas> * aren’t <zbowlin1> they are very different <zbowlin1> but xul will render with gtk and gtk2 if you have them <Firas> oh, right <zbowlin1> but it also render with QT, Win32, Cocoa, BeOS, etc <Navid> XUL is nuts. I need to pick up on that. <zbowlin1> you write everything mostly in javascript and xml <zbowlin1> you could write the blogging interfaces and menus into my interfaces… if you have local access to the database it should work that way but you could automate it with some work and make it work with XML-RPC
zbowlin1 is at zacbowling.com and go-mono.net
I always want to create cross-platform applications, if .net and mono can do that I need to look more closely at them!
Fat Dutch Man – Funny guy dancing
Here’s a video of a fat Dutch man – dancing and singing along to “Ozone’s Dragostea Din Tei”.
It’s a wonder what some people get up to. *shudder*
(Thanks Martin for the link!)
Edit (2016-12-07): added a Youtube version since the link above is now broken. Thanks Reddit. Apparently today is the twelfth anniversary of the video which is actually called Numa Numa.
Cinema Access for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Petition
Deaf culture doesn’t get much of a look-in here in Ireland but here’s a petition asking for “subtitles on cinema screens for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Ireland”.
The UGC on Parnell Square in Dublin has 2 subtitled showings a week so there’s obviously a market out there for it. If you are deaf, or know anyone who is, please sign this petition!
The Sunday Times ran an article on deaf culture a few weeks back which I meant to link to. Read it, it’ll surprise you!
Megan Alexander looks like any other cool 15-year-old girl… Without trying, she embodies the values of the self-styled deaf community, proud to be who she is, saying she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I have never wished that I can hear,” she says. “Why would I?”
Photojournalist Student Kicked Out Of Dorm
A student at San Francisco State University has been kicked out of his dorm for taking “pictures of partying, binge drinking, oral sex and, in particular, an alleged car burglary”. Here’s the latimes story and a thread started by Omar Vega himself.
What would you do if you saw someone breaking into a car? Take their photo or stop them?
Can you fool the drink driving test?
I wish I had sound on this PC but I can guess what’s going in this movie. hehe.
F-Spot – Picasa like application for .net, mono and Linux
Liam’s going on again about how great the combination of “picasa + hello + blogger + ftp” are on IRC but unfortunately Picasa is a Win32 application so it’s not something on my radar.
He says that F-Spot is a similar application, developed using Mono so it’ll probably make it’s way to Windows .net too.
If you want to install it on Debian Testing you’ll need to install the unstable port using the following:
Add “unstable” to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.somehost.com/debian/ unstable main
Then edit /etc/apt/preferences and set the “pin priority” of unstable lower than testing. This means that “testing” packages will be installed before “unstable” ones.
Add these lines to /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600
Thanks Niall for that last bit!
Now, install f-spot:
# apt-get -t unstable install f-spot
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
binfmt-support libgconf-cil libglade-cil
libglib-cil libgnome-cil libgnomedb2-3
libgnomedb2-common libgtk-cil
libicu28 libmono0 libsqlite0
mono-assemblies-base mono-common mono-jit
Recommended packages:
icu mono-assemblies-arch
The following NEW packages will be installed:
binfmt-support f-spot libgconf-cil
libglade-cil libglib-cil libgnome-cil
libgnomedb2-3 libgnomedb2-common
libgtk-cil libicu28 libmono0 libsqlite0
mono-assemblies-base mono-common mono-jit
0 upgraded, 15 newly installed, 0 to remove and 377 not upgraded.
Need to get 20.7MB of archives.
After unpacking 59.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
F-Spot is an application designed to provide personal photo management to the GNOME desktop. Features include import, export, printing and advanced sorting of digital images.
Winter's Day at Iniscarra
The sun set slowly last Sunday. It was a cold but glorious day!
Battlestar Galactica – Finishes Tonight!
It’s been a rollercoaster of a ride, but Battlestar Galactica comes to an end on Sky 1 tonight. I think my favourite episode was just 3 weeks ago when *muffle* *struggle* “argh! let me go!” Oh, alright, I won’t say a word. it’s a good ‘un though!
Anyway, here’s the Battlestar Galactica Blog if you need more of a fix.
Later… Oh My God! What a finale! Wow! Please tell me they got funding for further episodes?