Archive for the ‘photos’ Category
Monday, November 5th, 2007
I’ve had the pleasure of owning a Nikon d80 for the last two months and have only recently started playing around with the advanced image post-processing techniques like HDR which have interested me for so long. Unsurprisingly, HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging is appealing to so many people because it can make images look larger than life and surreal with the colours and contrast which are shown.
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.
Posted in photos, random, sport, tech | 6 Comments »
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
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.
| Left Brain Functions |
Right Brain Functions |
| uses logic |
uses feeling |
| detail oriented |
“big picture” oriented |
| facts rule |
imagination rules |
| words and language |
symbols and images |
| present and past |
present and future |
| maths and science |
philosophy & religion |
| can comprehend |
can “get it” (i.e. meaning) |
| knowing |
believes |
| acknowledges |
appreciates |
| order/pattern perception |
spatial perception |
| knows object name |
knows object function |
| reality based |
fantasy based |
| forms strategies |
presents possibilities |
| practical |
impetuous |
| safe |
risk taking |
Posted in photos, random, tech | 38 Comments »
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
Google’s warm reception for all of the summer of code mentors ended a few days ago, and I’ve found some time to get back down under and sort through the piles of emails and rss feeds which have accumulated over the past week. The summit was, in my opinion, much better than last year. Those of us who were returning had experience and knew what to expect and how to make the most of the day. The newbies brought fresh faces and new exciting stories. Not only was the summit better, but the entire summer of code program improved. Efficiency, organisation and stress levels all improved substantially from previous years - and we can only expect it to get better in the upcoming years. This is especially true to KDE, because we hope to play an ever more important role in the program. Maybe you didn’t know, but KDE was the group with the largest student allocations, with 40 students. With more confident and experienced mentors we can strive to recruit more students and mentors to improve KDE and grow our community. Of course, we shouldn’t be just trying to grow our own communities with the summer of code program, but everyones. This was partly the reason for the summit - to share our experiences not only with Google but also with the other organisations. For the most part, KDE successfully managed 40 students, 50 odd mentors and over 200 student applications, and Thiago and I took the opportunity to discuss dealing with scalability issues in the program with some of the other large organisations. Of course, there were many more interesting sessions than our own, and including methods to turn students into long term contributors and cross platform considerations.
Here you can see us (Thiago, Jason and me), the Gnome guys, Leslie Hawthorn (Google SoC organiser) and a random (on the right).
Astutely, one of the attendees noted that the mentor summit has the highest concentration of open source developers at any single event during the year - with nearly 200 representatives and nearly 80 organisations, even more than FOSDEM. This is probably true and really impressed upon me how important this event is. Let’s do even better next year.
Posted in photos, tech, travels | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2007
I just wrote that I was too tired to upload the photos, but I did anyway.
Click here to see some more. More coming soon.
Posted in photos, travels | No Comments »
Friday, September 14th, 2007
It’s good to be subscribed to lots of different mailing lists, just for the absolutely wonderful pockets of air which exist around all the traffic. On the kde-imaging mailing list there was a thread about image resizing algorithms. My interest was piked and it paid off - the video explains a dynamic image resizing technique by removing paths of least enery. This is probably done by some complicated Fourier transform, and the results are phenomenal. Resize an image by removing redundant parts of the image, not by making everything smaller. Furthermore, this technique can be also used to remove particular elements of an image by applying negative energy weights to an area. Fascinating!
Planet KDE readers: The embedded video doesn’t show on p.k.o, so you can just watch the video here
Update: The original work is done by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan from the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel.
Posted in photos, random, tech | 13 Comments »
