Like I said, I really want one. They look great, and I have been looking to buy a recent mac to test SPi-V development on. Plus, they look great!

But Apple made one crucial error. Contrary to a long-standing tradition, Steve's keynote presentation was not broadcasted live. By the time the presentation was available on the Apple.com website, I had already seen all new stuff that had been presented, including the mini mac. No need to watch the presentation...

Google will always be a bit of a mystery. I know roughly how pages get indexed and ranked: Google looks at body text and page titles for indexing, and ranks pages by the number of individual other pages that link to them. But some of the hits I'm getting from google are baffling.

Before Google launched their new scholar engine (and probably added a lot of scientific pages to their database), this page at the ID-Studiolab was the 7th hit when you searched for assistant professor. How on earth am I the 7th assistant professor? Even now, I'm on the 2nd page of results (though my ranking may change by merely mentioning the page on my blog).

I can't believe I 'missed' this. Back in november, I finally released SPi-V to the world. Here's another fine press release, along with some new demos.

I sold a couple of licenses already. It's pretty exciting to see what other photographers are doing with the engine. Though most use SPi-V just to display panoramic images, some (try to) do more exciting stuff. Greg Downing asked my help in doing a cool super zoom panorama.

Tessa and I have finally moved to our new home. Actually, we had some professional help moving our stuff over to the new appartment on december 17th, but we're still not done painting walls etc.

Before we moved in, I took a panoramic image of all the rooms. I was 'simply' planning to do a before and after transition, like I did before at the ID-Studiolab. Something I hadn't thought of immediately was that I could use the panoramic image to pick and evaluate different paint colors. We finally settled with 'rich' and 'trout' for the living room (how do they come up with these names?)

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.

...and with it, the Era of Great Hamsters has ended.

Hannibal was the last hamster I had in a long series of midget hamsters, named after emporers and kings. He and his twin-brother arrived some 2 and a half years ago to live in the castle of Amersfoort; the bigest house ever for one of my hamster to live in. Yet they probably lived the most confined life of all.

He and his brother were twins - I couldn't come up with a good name for them both (can you name a famous royal twin?) , so I called them Hamster 1 and Hamster 2. Hamster 1 never liked to be confined to his cage; on several occasions he escaped his cage to join his brother (Hamster 2), or play with the cats. Because of these daring achievements, and because the land he thus concurred (against all odds I might say), his posthumous assigned name will be Hannibal Little-one.

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.

So here are the promissed pictures of the Big Healey. By now it is probably even more stripped down, and may already be at the blaster's workshop

The first 2 pictures show the general state of the vehicle. Completely stripped of its body work, and all chrome parts, instruments, wiring and electrics in boxes (details of guts in picture 7).

Picture 3 and 4 show the gearbox and some rotten floorplan parts. Although the gearbox looks nice, it is actually the worst part of the so called previous 'restoration'. It seems to have had a complete overhaul, but was never put together properly, causing a serious misfunctioning of the 2nd gear and heavy oil leaking. The floorplan was not good in general, but this is a common problem of roadsters - at least it looks as if it was mostly original (besides the glass-fiber mattings).

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.