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...

This was our second  joint tyvek project. A 2 ½ by 1 ½ meters Edo.

This is my first home build kite, a Sanyo Rokaku Hakaku. Which is basically a "double Sanyo Rokaku. Rokaku means 6 sided, hakaku means 8 sided. It was built by Aldo, painted by me. It depicts a "Dragon Ball Z" dragon holding a dragon ball (left claw). We used to love watching that show on Sunday mornings. 2 hours (!) of sweet mind numbing entertainment. Untill the cable company cancelled the Cartoon Network channel. Grrr...

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

Finally, finally I'm blogging, so lets keep going!

Ofcourse Pucca and Garu weren't my first kites. Although they were my first "experimental" kites. As in no traditional kite shape or building plan. They are my invention and they love showing this by flying... eh, enthousiastically energetic :-/. Let's just say they need a watchfull eye at all times.

Although they are not nearly as bad as my attempt at a Fuga kite, a traditional but rare japanese kite shape, gee, I wonder why. This one resulted in a black eye and a split lip. 

As promised by Aldo a couple of days ago; the presentation of Garu "the kite". Pucca is finally reunited with her beloved. He usually isn't to happy when this happens but we are!

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.