Blogs

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!

The Panorama Mesdag museum is currently hosting an exhibition of panoramic photos by members of the IVRPA (International VR Photographers Association, formerly the IQTVRA). The exhibit includes 4 images by myself, including a hyperbolic view of the Widnmills of Kinderdijk. That particular image was chosen to represent the exhibition to the public, so it will appear in some tourist magazines etc.

My mac mini finally arrived last friday. First impressions: man, that's mini!

I convinced myself I'ld need a mac mini to testdrive my panoramic viewing engine. Unfortunately the 32 Mb of video RAM is really the lower end of the range of what's acceptable on OS X for my stuff. OS X also takes up quite some video memory to achieve it's spiffy Exposé etc tricks. However, other hardware accellerated panorama engines are starting to appear for OS X, and they have a bit better performance even on this mac mini, so I should be able to squeeze a bit more out of it myself...

I thought it may be a good idea for future reference to use my favourable Google status to tell the world about my experiences flashing the BIOS on my Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard.

Note: this post is a bit long and windy, but there's an hilarious tech support reply in the end...

A couple of weeks back I bought a new computer. Nice and fast, nice and cheap. In an effort to make the computer as up to date as possible, I decided to upgrade the BIOS. Using Asus (ugly-as-sin) Windows based flash utility, I upgraded to the latest non-beta BIOS. Unfortunately that resulted in a problem with my CPU fan, so I wanted to use the same utility to get me back to my original BIOS version. Turns out that it can't downgrade your bios. So instead I decided to try to see if the fan-problem was fixed in the available beta BIOS. Not only didn't that bios fix the problem, it also made my floppy drive inaccessible. 'A floppy drive?' you would say, 'what do you need that for?'. Well, for flashing your bios outside of windows...

Just got word VRMag has launched their article about SPi-V and an interview with yours truly. Just in time for an update to version 1.2.