Genuine Fractals? Blow up your pictures!

There’s a distinct difference between fractal and raster images. Raster images are the jpeg and gif files you see all over the place. These don’t resize very well. Fractals are made up of mathematical descriptions of the objects in a scene or picture. Using these descriptions it’s possible to resize an image without losing any detail or introducing blocky artifects. (Feel free to comment if I have anything wrong above!)
Apparently Genuine Fractals from Lizardtech, enables you to create resolution-independent images from any size file and lets you print superior quality enlargements without any degradation in image quality. The photos shown in this thread were blown up using that software and they look very impressive! (I don’t think his wife will let him change his camera after seeing those shots! *grin*)
I wondered if anything like that existed in the Unix world, but after a short search, this thread seemed to be the extent of it’s foray into Unix. 🙁

F 16

Wow! Amazing photo of an F16 at an air show in Poland.
At the Chicago Air and Water Show last August I went snap happy but never got anything near as good as this shot. He was lucky the fighter was banking just over his head (see the comments).
I tried in vain to snap 600mph jets as they passed a few hundred feet away but by the time I’d found them in the sky and zoomed back, in the plane was a few miles away..

Memory stick weirdness

This is strange, but I’ve mentioned problems with Memory Sticks and Linux before. When I plug my camera into my PC /var/log/messages sometimes reports errors reading the camera memory:

Sep 16 11:22:52 donncha kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:07.2-2, assigned address 13
Sep 16 11:22:55 donncha /etc/hotplug/usb.agent: Setup usb-storage for USB product 54c/10/440
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: unable to read partition table
Sep 16 11:22:57 donncha devlabel: devlabel service started/restarted

and similar problems have been reported elsewhere!
As you can see, it looks like the camera has been detected on /dev/sda.
For no better reason than “what if?” I tried /dev/sdb instead, and surprise, it worked!
Really strange..