Today I received a package containing no less than 4 cameras with fisheye lenses. "Business must be going well" you might think... Not that it isn't, but if I tell you the cameras are from Lomo, you might start to realise it's not actually all that impressive price-wise ;-)

The art of Lomography is to 'shoot from the hip'. From wikipedia:

Lomography emphasizes shoot-from-the-hip photography. Over-saturated colors, lens artifacts, and exposure defects are used to produce artistic, abstract effects and are prized by practitioners. Others use the technique to document everyday life because the small camera size and ability to shoot in low light encourages candid photography, photo reportage and photo vérité

My short paper on using shift lens perspective to improve the experience of looking around in panoramic images in SPi-V is accepted to the Eurographics 2005 conference, organised in Dublin in august.

I'll be presenting my concept and implementation in a session along with other neat sounding papers. I hope I'll be able to impress people with some good looking demos ('if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit').

Tessa and I were invited to the 2005 edition of the Oostende Kite Festival. I was asked to bring panoramic prints of kite festivals to show in the Kite Expo. The panoramas were met with great enthusiasm, and I ended up winning a medal! Apparently, the city of Oostende was/is interested in purchasing some prints for their new city hall... Picture me very proud, and very tired in the train on the way back.

The Oostende Kite festival was great. The first day there was way too much wind, but the second day was brilliant. Tessa's new kite 'Garu' (Pucca's boyfriend) made it's maiden flight. Pictures to follow.

The page getting by far the most hits on the Hoeben.net site is my entry about HTC components in Windows XP SP2, due mostly thanks to a mention on Peter Nederlof's page about the csshover component (which I am currently using in the Hoeben.net site, thanks!).

I got a couple of questions on how to change the mime type of HTC files, especially if you don't have access to some server settings, and/or you are not that .htaccess saffy. On Hoeben.net I'm missing some override permissions, so I needed a workaround myself. Here's what I did...

Emmy Huang points us at a long overdue technote about the infamous Shockwave 3d offset bug. For those of you who are blissfuly unaware about the bug, here's the thing:

Safari, or indeed any other browser using the Apple's WebCore framework for OS X, renders hardware accellerated (OpenGL) content 20 pixels too heigh, even over browser window elements such as toolbars or the title bar of a bare popup.

I replaced the Drupal install of hoeben.net with the local copy I was working on. Enjoy the new WYSIWYG editor, powered by TinyMCE, as that should be about the only noticable change...

This post was made on a local copy of the Hoeben.net website. I am trying to upgrade Drupal to version 4.6 (up from version 4.4.3)

So far, things are going ok-ish. What kept me back before was that I did some customisation to the menu module that isn't even available for Drupal 4.5 and up because parts of its functionality are now in a core Drupal module. As a result, the menu system will need some work to get it back to where it was.

One of the neater modules available in Drupal 4.6 is the tinyMCE WYSIWYG module. It's a pretty dramatic improvement over typing HTML code into a standard text area. Unfortunately it conflicts with the linewrap filter in Drupal, so I am turning that off for new content. But then again, posts made through other interfaces such as XMLRPC should ideally still use this filter so users don't have to add <p> tags manually...

My camera breaking was especially irritating since last weekend was the IVRPA Panoramic Flower Power Weekend; A gathering of a small number of IVRPA members, visiting the Panorama Mesdag exhibit and several flowery events. Fortunately, Jan van der Woning lent me his D70 body so I could make some panos anyway.

I have probably seen enough flowers to last me the rest of the summer, but this is what it feels like to be a yellow tulip.

Last friday night, I found out that the camera I use for my panoramic images (Fuji S2 Pro) had ceased to work. Or rather, it works fine but only records black images. After only 22 months of use and about 5000 shots, it struck me by surprise (I rather like the camera).

It turns out that it is a common with S2's in my serial nr range, judging from this dramatic list of S2 failures. Fortunately, word on the proverbial street is that Fuji is replacing the dead CCD at no charge.

After attending a couple of kite festivals for a couple of years, last year Tessa and I were officially invited to attend the Oostende Kite Festival 2004. That was our first invitation, based on how some of our kites looked... We had a great time!