Blogs

One of my last activities before I switched jobs was to attend the 3AD conference, the 3rd conference for Appliance Design. At 3AD I presented some of the aesthetic interaction features of SPi-V. The conference also included a design competition, and the entry by dear friend and ex-collegue Ianus Keller, cowritten by myself and Aadjan van der Helm, won first place.

It's been over a month since I returned from my odyssee. I have finally put some of the panoramas I took during the first leg online; the Portsmouth International Kite Festival 2005.

Just in time for the festival, Tessa finished the new, spinaker nylon version of our Edo (the previous version of this kite was made of Tyvek). The kite made its maiden flight on the Portsmouth festival, like it's Tyvek predecessor before it at the 2003 festival. And like the Tyvek version, we had a lot of "fun" with the 17 bridle lines (each more than 30 meters), much to the amusement of some of the other kiters. Normally we have the bridles down, we can do this, but just not in Portsmouth, it seems. Anyway, the edo flew nicely, even in very low winds. And when an edo is not in the sky, it makes a very nice sunscreen (pano) ;-)

If, in my next weblog entries, I am talking about my oddysee, this is what I refer to...

On august 26th at around 5 am, Tessa and I set off to Hoek of Holland, to catch a ferry. We were  going to Portsmouth, to attend the annual International Kite Festival. We returned in the night from monday to tuesday at around 2 in the morning.

The ... er ... same morning at 7 am, I left for Schiphol airport to take a plane to Dublin, to attend and present on Eurographics (missing Tessa's birthday, sorry Tessa). EG was nice to have experienced, though at times it was hard to relate to the hardcore GPU programmers there ('yes, I make and look at bare environment maps, all day long'). Friday morning, 3 am I took a cab to Dublin airport to return to Schiphol, the Netherlands.

Since a couple of weeks, SPi-V is now available as an option to view the panoramas of the Sziget 2005 festival Media Farm. The site employs my server-side quicktime parser to parse the quicktime vr files and create a SPi-V XML file from it. The image data is harvested from the original quicktime file on the fly.

Quicktime version and SPi-V version of the same panorama. The scripts working in the background will remember your last viewer choice, so once you have selected SPi-V for viewing all the fullscreen panoramas from the panorama page will use SPi-V, untill you select quicktime.

Tessa is not the only one at Hoeben.net who's enjoying a fresh new job. Around november last year, my "company" studioPKO (note the quotes) contracted a big job at the Digital Home group at Conexant in Bilthoven. When the group started to spin off, I was asked to join the technology startup 'Avinity'.

Admin notice: Since the hoeben.net was being hit by trackback spam bots, I disabled trackbacks for the time being.

Something's very wrong with either my site or googlebot. I am currently getting over 20.000 hits a day from googlebot on the forums of SPi-V dev, the (drupal based) developers resource for all thing SPi-V.

The urls that are getting hammered like this all have a strange double PHPSESSID, eg:

66.249.65.43 - - [24/Aug/2005:03:43:09 +0200] " 
GET /spv-dev/forum/21?sort=asc&order=Created&from=25& 
PHPSESSID=d189b62c250d354a12fb509a2769592a&  
PHPSESSID=a8be7921586fa24d59fc9f352379e8c9   
HTTP/1.1" 200 7523 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;  
Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Very odd..

After an intense weekend in Budapest, the first batch of panoramas of the Sziget 2005 festival are up.

I have uploaded 10 panoramas to the panoramic images page. These panoramas are the result of three afternoons and nights shooting, and late nights and mornings stitching (Sleep? Who needs sleep?). Today was the last day of the festival (though I returned home on monday), so the panoramic coverage is/was sort of 'live'.

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.