Archive for the ‘tech’ Category
Friday, June 27th, 2008
My last couple of weeks has been spent focusing on getting cover art back up to scratch in Amarok 2. Cover art really adds a lot of spice and colour into the UI of the application, especially now that we are showing the artwork in the collection browser, context view and playlist. For those of you who are supremely organised, the collection scanner will now trawl through directories and try to pick up images it thinks are relevant to the songs which are being scanned. Embedded artwork is not implemented currently but it is certainly on the todo list.
Most of the relevant actions can now be executed for artwork: fetching from amazon, setting a custom image, removal and full size display. Music lovers with non English songs can now rejoice because we’ve also fixed some problems fetching artwork for album/artists that have accented characters, which Amazon seemed to have problems with. Another cool feature that we’ve experimented with is automatic cover fetching if there is an album with no artwork. Keep in mind that this is entirely tentative, as we are not sure that the false-positive rate from Amazon is low enough to justify polluting your database with random covers (although this will improve with our recent fix to non English tags). Maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we won’t, but it certainly is a cool feature which I’m loving at the moment - I am really lazy and hate having to explicitly fetch a cover, even though artwork is great to have.
Here you can see albums with artwork as well as a full size cover display
In other news, I did some more work migrating statistics from Amarok 1.4 databases to the new and improved A2 schema. Here you can see how the play count, score and first/last played date for this track. Migration of lyrics and actual cover art isn’t yet implemented but that, like everything else is also on the cards.
Oh - one more thing:
My tickets are finalised, see you in Belgium in August!
Posted in tech | 7 Comments »
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
What: Autopano (registered version @ 99 euro)
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!
Posted in music, photos, tech | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
The Google-AU blog reports that Google is going to be holding another one of it’s brain busting adventures soon. The post is ended with the following text/clue:
Arrrrrrrr you ready? Onward to the first puzzle, matey! And good luck!
aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=
Soon :). 1210550400
Warning: links below contain spoilers.
Shouldn’t take long to figure out. The 10 digits of the final number is a dead giveaway that it’s a unix timestamp, and maps to a particular time. That’s soon.
The seemingly random string is a base64 encoding of a particular website.
Posted in random, tech | No Comments »
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
I’d just like to wish everyone a hearty and happy star wars day.
May the fourth be with you!
Icon credit: everaldo
Posted in random, tech | 2 Comments »
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
I never really got to say much about sightseeing in Taiwan after the conference since everything got so busy. After our wonderful post-conference dinner in Danshui, we crashed back the hostel and woke up to a disappointingly drizzly morning. It was a silly idea considering the cloudy skies, but we headed straight to the Taipei 101 - the tallest tower in the world at 101 floors. It is impressively huge. So huge that the tower poked through the clouds and we wouldn’t have been able to have seen anything from the top so we decided to come back later after visiting the Sun-Yat Sen (who forced the Empress out of power) memorial around the corner.
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)
Posted in photos, tech, travels | No Comments »
