Verdict: totally awesome.

Pros:
– Very fast, reliable stitching of images together
– Excellent colour and exposure correction, even if you don’t lock your exposures
– Supports HDR imaging! Create panoramas out of raw format files and then use tone mapping software like Qtpfsgui
– Excellent barrel distortion compensation on wide angled shots
– Qt4! (and cross platform)

Cons:
– It’s not free software
– Expensive
– User interface could use some work

Example:
Panorama created out of 8 individual raw images, then tone-mapped with Qtpfsgui. I can’t get a larger version because Qtpfsgui runs out of memory – the resultant panoramic raw image is over 130MB!

I’ve discovered that my fingers can hit the keys faster and in stranger patterns than I’ve ever thought possible. I think that I should slow down a bit on the axe-grinding since my vision becomes distorted after playing it – a frequency modulated effect as objects quickly drift up and down in front of my eyes!

Eric Clapton – I challenge you to a duel!

Sunday morning I went for a surf with Tony and Dani – great fun at Bondi beach until disaster struck and Tony has his board snapped in two . In the afternoon I found some time to fix my KDE4 build and got into some Amarok hacking again, working on the new-and-totally-cool context view. We’re using QGraphicsView which is so yummy and fun to work with.

Yesterday I spent the day at work and was totally surprised when the Tomcat/J2EE application that I’m working on “just worked” when I threw it onto Linux. I was shocked that it worked since the webapp was compiled under Windows, and with a different version of Java. Still very slow, but it worked.

Finally, last night I went to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, which was fantastic. Great music, and a much greater ‘funk’ in their live versions of the newer song releases. The only really terrible thing was the support act, Har Mar Superstar, an overweight hairy man who is convinced of his “sexiness” and did a striptease down to his underwear. I thought it was hilarious however, and was laughing the entire set .

taste-o-meter
The taste-o-meter shows a correlation between yourself and the particular user which you are viewing.

concert calendars
In my opinion one of the strongest features to come to last.fm is the ability to add concerts to global and user calendars. Users are able to create events, announce their attendance, submit reviews, pictures and videos too! Next, imagine a page which lists a whole set of upcoming events within x kilometers from where you live! Amazing!!!

Seriously cool. I’m imagining browsing my Amarok context browser and listening to RHCP and a little box is shown: “Hey, seb! the RHCP are playing in Sydney in April!”

I think i’m in web 2.0 heaven.

I love uni!

Since we like a fair amount of the same genres of music, it can be difficult to locate tracks which I don’t have in my collection already. I decided that it would be cool if Amarok would show me only the files which I did not have already in my local library, and it has become really quite useful.

Notice how many of the albums I already have are filtered out by the daap client. Neat! Whilst it isn’t working to my complete satisfaction (it does an exact match on tags in the database, and can be a little slow for large daap shares), I think it’s a cool feature that will be really neat to have. The next feature will be a “Copy to collection” option.

The other thing I really like about DAAP is that it isn’t limited to the local network. I can connect to a server on the other side of the world and stream music like it were a pick-your-own radio station.

Woo, so excited.

I bought the tickets on the internet, so it came to no surprise when there was an additional charge for processing and administration, and postage costs for sending tickets. However what struck me as odd was an option to do all the work myself, and still have to pay:

I also indulged in some retail therapy this weekend, buying a wetsuit to go with my surfboard! It’s been quite warm lately in Sydney, and work has caused me to become jaded about ever being able to be in the sun with some free time. Today was a good day, so I went for a surf after leaving uni early for . Seriously though, I feel so unfit as I could barely hold myself amongst the waves after thirty minutes in the water. Then I walked home and it hailed. Hilarious stuff, this city!

Tomorrow I’m going to cheer for the Socceroos as we play against Kuwait for the Asian Cup qualifiers, and then on Thursday I’m off to see the All-American Rejects – looking forward to the game and the concert!

I’ve been pushing the notion of web services integration into amaroK for the last couple of days, and I’ll explain why now. With the introduction of web 2.0 not long ago, the internet has become much more than just a content provider – and now has a main functionality of providing a service to the user. Not what it can provide, but how, and with what value and benefits.

Last.fm is a social music network which has many hundreds of thousands of users. Services which they provide include statistics of personal listening habits, neighbours, which are people with similar music habits, music tags, and ponies which recommend new music to bored and inquisitive listeners. Imagine the possibilities of providing such services directly from within amaroK. I’ll provide a small example. The audioscrobbler web services provide such as favourite and newest songs, by tag/user/group and more. By downloading the playlist containing the best rock songs, I can import it straight into my playlistbrowser. Some clever work and the playlist will only show the songs which I have in my collection that are also tagged favourites by last.fm users. This is really cool, because now I don’t ever need to browser my music and create playlists, since thousands of last.fm users know more than I do.

The real power in importing playlists, however, isn’t particularly in showing the user what they already have in the collection, but rather what they may be missing. By importing the favourite rock songs, we can show the listener that there are another X amount of songs which they might like. Since last.fm provides perfectly legal radio streaming, we can offer the user a listen of the song. Awesome!

This is just a small insight into some of the great services which are provided. Imagine more – automatic tagging of songs, labels, playlist generation, radio streaming, similar songs etc

The future is promising!