Aldo's blog

Due to someone not paying their bills (...), hoeben.net was offline for a few days. Sorry for that.

Good thing the friendly folks at ashosting don't hold a grudge, since they kept the database intact. So we're back. Gotta look into that thing I hear a lot of people talking about, making backups...

On a more personal note, I hope to be doing some retroblogging soon, since a LOT has happened lately. I have to keep google happy.

It's a shame to see director3d.de go down. Guess there must be more to that story than meet the obvious eye... Good luck Christophe, I wish you'ld stay.

In the wake of Photokina 2004, fieldOfView announced the anticipated first release of the SPi-V engine.

The SPi-V engine (short for Shockwave Panorama Viewer, pronounced 'spiffy') is fieldOfView's hardware accelerated panorama viewing engine.

Frank sent me an email with a link to Scott Haefner's kite born panoramic images. That must mean Scot's site made it to the blogosphere once more. I thought this would make a good first entry for the kite topic...

The first kite panoramas I saw are by Philippe Hurbain. Scott's panoramas may look better (lower position, more interesting locations), but Philo really is a genius. Apart from kiteborn panoramas he also invented the virtual tripod or 'Philopod', which I use exclusively for my panoramic photography.

This morning I conducted a quick experiment installing the newly released Drupal 4.5 release candidate. It breaks some modules (most notably for Hoeben.net the menu system is superceeded) and the theming system got a makeover, so the transfer won't be made with the flick of a button... Some hacking will be involved, and I don;t have time for that now.

But if - in the near future - the site looks funny or goes totally off-the-air, you know why: I have found some time to tinker with the software running the site ;-)

I'm generally loving my TabletPC. It's just such a great tool to do one-to-one presentations on: you can just hold it in your hands while discussing, hand the whole machine over and let the other party see/experience what you want them to see and they can in turn show you what THEY mean...

This weekend however, for the second time in a row, I had problems using my TC 1100 tablet with a projector (one-to-many presentation...). It works for half a minute, and then the projector will seem to loose the signal. I had to continue my presentation on an external monitor instead of off a projecor... Bummer.

With Shockwave 10.1 released a couple of weeks ago, there's a whole lot of new and updated stuff. Not all of this stuff is well documented though (even if it is listed in the releasenotes).

For example, would you know what exactly changed when reading this?

174047 using importFileInto to import a 32 bit image, it is remapped to the stage depth, removing alpha-information on 16 bit desktops

Before 10.1, importFileInto would always remap the imported image to the current screen depth. This often makes sense, as it is cheaper to do the conversion once than to have to do it each time the image member is used. However, it also meant that the alpha-channel in 32 bit images would get thrown away if the system was running in 16 bit or lower color setting; no nice 8 bit transparencies in PNGs or TIFs, or even 1 bit transparencies in GIFs.

I slightly changed how the menus.module displays menu blocks. menus.module allows you to add custom menu blocks to Drupal's navigation system, based on taxonomy vocabularies.

Specifically, I added the possibility to make the title of the menu block a link. You can see this in action in the top menu bar, as requested demanded by Ianus.

The CSS dropdowns now work on IE under XP SP2 too! Unfortunately I could not change the mime-type of .htc files on this server, so I had to switch to a javascript solution. I am now using Dean Edward's excellent set of scripts that solves not only the hover problem that disabled the menu system, but also many other CSS related bugs as well as support for transparent PNGs.

On to more important stuff...

PS: Known issues in the current theme:

So what's taking so long with the all new and spiffy Hoeben.net theme that I have been promising, apart from the ever-popular excuse of not having the time?

Basically, CSS is. I want to change the two menus on the left to be nice hierarchical dropdowns at the top of the page. That shouldn't be too hard (even with some IE specific CSS deficiencies), but I want to do as little hacking into Drupal's xtemplate theming system as possible, which makes it just that bit harder to accomplish.