autopano-sift: making panoramas fun

autopano-sift Looks like a great program for lining up panoramas. You need to use it alongside Hugin, Panotools and Enblend to stitch your photos together.
It’s a .net application written in C# so I’m glad I installed Mono last week!! There’s a great tutorial written by Rob Park that I’ll look over this weekend. I have a panorama of Kylemore Abbey to stitch together!

ATI Cards and Corrupted Text

This is new to me, but according to these setup tips my “Fixed Frequency Monitor” can’t handle the frequencies bandied about by my new ATI graphics card. It’s mildly annoying and sounds like a bit of a cop out as I haven’t seen anything similar on lower end cards!
When you’re in DOS mode or text mode and If you notice slight flickering around some characters, particularly “r”, then this could be the problem. The only solution is to upgrade your monitor or shut your eyes until you boot into a graphical GUI!
I wonder if that explains the following strange character corruption that appears during bootup:

Oh, Debian testing detects SATA drives without a hitch. 🙂

Later… Even in the GUI there’s corruption. Does this happen to other Radeon 9×00 users? The multi-colour lines in the image below appear randomly but seems to be worse when high-contrast web pages are displayed. This happens when using either the proprietary driver from ATI or the open source one in XFree86. Time to get on to Elara again.

Later Still… Opinion on on irc.linux.ie is that the graphics card is damaged as 6 others who have ATI Radeon 9000 series cards have had no problems. I faxed them a return form 20 minutes ago and am waiting a response now.

A9.com -Yellow Pages – Copyrighted Buildings?

Nice, the Yellow Pages on a9.com have photos of the places you’re looking for, as long as you live in the good ol’ US of A!
I wonder if they got the permission of all building owners to take their photos. The images of all buildings built after 19xx are proteced by copyright.
Ah, here’s the details. It’s all buildings built after December 1st, 1990. In general any building viewable from a public place is ok to photograph.
The a9 search engine is nice too!

Can I run Windows viruses in Linux?

It’s almost possible, but the results in this article on running Windows viruses with Wine are disappointing. There are problems but things are improving so Linux users can enjoy all the benefits of Windows!

It just isn’t fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn’t Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well… thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can “catch the virus bug” too — sort of.