Aldo's blog

Andras Frenyo invited me to join him and Daniel Maurer to cover the Sziget 2005 festival with panoramic photography.

I am flying to Hungary in a couple of hours, with a new makeshift panohead. Though I am a firm believer in handheld panorama photography, sunday's Monaco aan de Maas event proved once more that if I want to get panoramas out quickly, I'ld better swallow my pride and use a tripod on some occasions. 

Last sunday I attended the 'Monaco aan de Maas' event; a Formula 1 demo in the streets of Rotterdam. After my somewhat disappointing results at the Redbull Airrace where I photographed mainly spectators heads, I had decided to go for it this time and buy myself an expensive grandstand seat. I bought my ticket on friday, and there were still tickets left (which to me was not a good sign).

Soon after I bought my ticket I found out about the much cheaper paddock tickets that would allow acces to the pitstop/exhibition area. Knowing that a fisheye lens makes anything but the really large/close objects very small very quickly, I was really much more interested in the paddock area.

Tessa and I will be attending both Portsmouth and Bristol kite festivals, and Tessa didn't think one new kite would be impressive enough. So she set to work, doing a remake of our Tyvek Edo. The paint was blistering off, because the acrylic she used was too expensive (too much pigment vs not enough glue). But this time, instead of using Tyvek and paint, Tessa is using spinaker nylon and applique techniques.

You might have noticed that Hoeben.net now feels downright zippy. And you're about right too. After reading this article and this comment, pages served from hoeben.net are now zipped before they are sent over, and your browser unzips them automatically.

Now, apparently, not every browser supports gzipped pages. So anyone who can't read this post, just leave a comment ;-)

So as it's turning out, after some initial getting used to, it seems that Hoeben.net moving to a new server may not have been such a bad thing afterall (though I still have to find me a new way to upload and include images etc)...

Last week, Thomas Higgins posted a note about Quicktime 7 preview for Windows breaking support for Quicktime video in Shockwave. The artcle reads:

At this time we believe that we've identified the underlying cause of this issue as a bug in the QuickTime Player code itself but are working with Apple in order to confirm that fact and to see what type of fix will be required (...)

More than a year ago I outlined some grand plans for the Hoeben.net theme. One of the ideas was that I wanted to be able to give each family member/blog and each topic a sub-theme. IE: mostly the same theme as the rest, but subtle (or not so subtle) changes to reflect the content of that section of the site.

This is now finally somewhat possible, and I have subthemed the kites topic as a showcase. If you're reading this message on its own page, you should already see the subtheme. If not, head on over! Do scroll down for an additional nice touch...

As of this morning, there's an actual bit of code in the CVS version of the core of Drupal. 4 lines of code in 4 different files. Woohoo! I have submitted a patch here and there before, but this is the first time a patch of mine is accepted into the core of Drupal.

So what's this patch about you might wonder? In the admin area of drupal - which most of you will never see - you can now see the referrer of a page that caused an error (such as a 'file not found' error). Exciting stuff.

It looks like they picked my version of the patch too...

Hoeben.net was migrated to a new server by our ISP. Apparently, it is all for the best, but I am not 100% impressed with the process; I had to get a bit too nitty gritty with .htaccess to my liking to get things to work, and they 'forgot' to migrate our images (sorry Tessa). I hope I can get them back... 

Perhaps I am spoiled by speedy response of the new Drupal server park, but I think hoeben.net currently feels quite sluggish (and I am getting intermittent DNS hickups it seems). Anyhow, we'll see how this progresses.

PS: Drupal.org itself had a nervous breakdown, but I made it to the thank-you poster. Woot!

You know, once you know what it feels like to be a yellow tulip, being packed in a crows of 700.000 people watching the Red Bull Airrace doesn't feel all that different ;-)

Here's a panorama I took this afternoon near the Erasmusbrug.

An 8mm fisheye lens isn't the most ideal lens to capture tiny aircraft whizzing by at 300+ kph, but the panorama illustrates the huge number of people present.

So my S2 Pro died on friday April 22nd. I handed it in for repair on wednesday, April 27th. I finally received it back this morning, friday June 3rd, more than 6 weeks later!

What strikes me as odd, other than the fact that it took so much longer than some other repairs who quoted as little as 36 hours, is that Fuji in the Netherlands seems to be the only ones charging for the repair; Sure, Fuji NL didn't charge me for the replaced CCD, but it still cost me ~180 euro labour, whereas Fuji US, Fuji Canada and Fuji Germany are doing the same repair free of charge. I even phoned Fuji NL to inquire if they had more cameras with the same problem in the Netherlands, and they answered to the extend of  'yeah, we've quite a couple coming in'. Nice way to earn money for what looks suspiciously like a production flaw...