Last night after our first day of hacking a group of intrepid developers had tapas.

We ate way too much and followed with some great ice-cream. Try the dulce de leche.

As most of our event destinations have been within walking distance, we figured we could also walk to the Collabora sponsored party.

Map: check.
GPS: check.
Location close: check.
Sugar induced enthusiasm: check.

It soon became obvious that walking to the golf course wasn’t as simple as we’d first hoped. We had to jump a few highway barriers.

And we clambered along dirt shoulders.

We played frogger with Spanish traffic, and then decided it was time to head back to find a taxi.

We made it and went straight the the bar where the fun was flowing.

Danimo and Chani in serious conversation.

And Thiago decided to recite some shakespeare to us.

And Markey was eyeing off the bar.

Más fotos

The Grote Markt in Mechelen (HDR).

The HDR which I’ve posted here proves that you can indeed create impressive shots only using free software, as long as you have a little perseverance and know how. Maybe Uga’s blogs will get there eventually .

The rest of the images are on flickr.

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!

The Taipei 101 is also really cool because it has the fastest elevator in the world, going from top to bottom in an incredible 36 seconds! That’s 1000m per minute! Charlie and his glass elevator really need to upgrade. We also managed to find some Taiwanese fried chicken with mixed vegies for lunch in some back alley behind the world trade center (which we casually strolled through, thongs, singlets and cameras in hand) before discovering a totally awesome suburb of Taipei which only sold computer and camera gear. Seriously, it was streets and streets worth, probably bigger than my university campus (and that’s big, folks!).

The Confucius temple was lots of fun and very colourful, with red and gold decorations and pagoda rooftops adorned with intricate dragons. Seeing as our hostel was close to one of the most famous landmarks, the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, we visited this enormous plaza at the end of the day so that we had a quick getaway back to the hostel for feet resting time. I could not believe the magnitude of this place. It is probably possible to fit over 100 football fields in the space. My camera couldn’t capture the entire space, so here’s a panorama. If you want to get a feel for JUST HOW FREAKING HUGE it is, click on the photo.

Another grand attraction of Taipei is the Shilin night market where you can experience things such as:
– Stinky tofu (it smells worse than gtk+)
– Asian Elvis impersonators with awesome gold pants
– Never-ending arcades stacked full of Dance-Dance-Revolution machines
– Random old Taiwanese men giving random hints on life
– Buying “pets” as close to being Bonsai as you can get without shoving them into a jar
– Awesome fruits, like durian, dragon fruit and rose apple

And then there is the Grand Palace Museum, which true to it’s name is both very grand, palatial and is host to the finest collection of Chinese art in the world.

That’s a lot of links in one post. Here’s another one for good measure:linkety clinkety (completely factual)

Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun . Here’s most of the team in a group photo:

Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.

The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.

In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.

It’s a little hard to tell thanks to the crappy camera on my mobile phone, but with some squinting you can see the camera mounted on a 1.5-ish metre support bracket on the hood of the car. You can also see the Google decal on the side, providing awesome aerodynamic characteristics to the car.

Now that daylight savings has kicked in I can get home from work during daylight hours. A recently southerly picked up the surf swell and I got some excellent photos of a well known big wave surfer and Bra Boy, Richie Vaculik surfing a normally rather insignificant break at Lurline Bay.

Qtpfsgui is one of the finer HDR/tone-mapping pieces of software available for Linux, despite the abhorrent name choice. With a bit of tweaking I managed to get a few nice images out of my raw images. I’m looking forward to improved HDR support for KDE in Krita.

According to this article, viewing this spinning image can tell you which side of your brain dominates your cranial activity. Do you see the image spinning clockwise or anticlockwise?

I see the image spinning clockwise, but I can’t say that the “functions” which I am prone to are all so accurate for my day-to-day activities. See if you can convince your brain to view the image spinning in the opposite direction.