I've been putting lots of time in the IVRPA site. Most of it is behind the scenes work to keep things running, and I fairly often get to contribute changes to Drupal modules back to the Drupal project. But now for the first time, I have contributed 2 new modules to the Drupal project, which I will maintain myself.

'me aliases'
Provides shortcut paths to current user's pages, eg user/me, blog/me, user/me/edit, tracker/me etc.

This means logged in users no longer have to know/remember their uid, and it makes it easier to link to user-specific pages from a site help page (without resorting to using php to put $user->uid in the link).

On the IVRPA sites (among other sites), I am using floated divs to create a gallery 'table'.

One of the known caveats of the floated thumbnail gallery is that all the thumbnails need to have the same dimensions, otherwise the floats break (see demo below). Having the thumbnails all be the same dimensions is one, but what if you want to have a (user submittable) caption to go with the thumbnail? There's no good way to influence the vertical dimension of that caption (or title, description, etc). So here's what goes wrong:

Last week I visited Photokina, the largest photography tradefair in the world. The IVRPA was offered a booth at the fair, and part of the deal that got us the booth was us covering the event in interactive, fullscreen panoramas. I set up a special site for this event, and to this date we have about 60 panoramas up (50 of which were posted during the event).

To celebrate our upcoming vacation, Tessa and I went to see the movie 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'. Having had great laughs watching Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow in the first movie, both of us found the sequel disappointing.

The evening was not a total loss though; after the movie I had a spare few minutes waiting for Tessa, and was attracted to one of those Playstation stands we have in our cinemas. It turned out not to have a PS2, but a PSP instead. The PSP was running a game with cute yellow blobs rolling around, and I was sold in an instant. Everything from the intuitive controls, to the convincing physics based animation and the ever so cute music made perfect sense.

Like last year, I will be joining Andras Frenyo (and friends), capturing the Sziget festival in fullscreen panoramas. Sziget in Budapest, Hungary, is probably the largest pop festival in Europe.

The festival started today, but I won't be joining the gang until saturday... There are already some fullscreen pre-festival panoramas up on the Sziget 2006 page. Hang in there guys! And keep some venues for me to cover ;-) But even if you beat me to all the nice spots, I'll bring my IR lens and have another view on things anyway. And I'm bringing a surprise!

If you've wondered why I have been so quiet, that's because I have been far too busy doing far too many things.
One of those things is building a new site for the IVRPA, which I just released to the world!

The new IVRPA website project started - ahem - more than a year back. Since then, I joined the IVRPA Board of Directors, and the new website has been my brainchild since. Like hoeben.net, and the SPi-V developers' site before, I based the IVRPA website on Drupal. But for the IVRPA site, I've had to take my Drupal knowledge to a whole new level. From advanced theming to lots of smaller and bigger patches contributed to the Drupal projects/modules that make the IVRPA site tick and even a small module of my own... To keep up with developments of the site, I recommend keeping an eye on my developer blog over at the new site.

Hoeben.net is now running Drupal 4.7.2, the latest production release.

Still some things left to upgrade (most notably TinyMCE) and there's also some CSS tweaking left to do, but the good news is that search is back in working order. Anonymous comments are back (yes, they were gone for a while), but I'll have to see how well the 4.7 spam module works...

Yesterday, Tessa and I joined some of her colleagues at a very enjoyable 'Parade'. 'De Parade' marks the start of the theatre season in the Netherlands. A group of theatre performers travels from city to city in a couple of weeks to try out their new theatre programmes.

Since I'm still somewhat in love with my IR fisheye lens, I decided to do an IR shot of the sunset (pano). The IR filter blocks out most light, so with the waning light of the setting sun and at ISO 100, I ended up with an exposure of more than a second. I like the ghosting of the people in motion, while the rest of the image is sharp. The version above is what's called a 'false color' version; I have altered the colors so the sky is blue again, even though most blue light is blocked by the filter. For comparisson, here's the 'true color' version, which is more like what the camera saw.

The search facility is currently not returning any results. Sorry 'bout that.

I hope to be upgrading to Drupal 4.7 'soonish', but there's another big Drupal project in my way. More about that in a few days (I hope).

Update: The search facility has long since been restored.

Microsoft released beta 2 of Windows Vista to the public. Curious as I am, I decided to see if I could download the 3.12 GB DVD image. I got a decent 200-180 Kb/s (hey, the whole world is downloading the file), but look at the progress I am making:

Negative 22 percent? The number actually went down when the download progressed (ie: it started at -1%). Internet Explorer must be cleaning up my computer before I can download Vista. Or someone's using a 'signed long' for the filesize and download that should be unsigned... A signed long can represents a maximum number of 2 'giga' (2*1024*1024*1024). Values above that are represented as negative. Ofcourse, the really interesting question is, what happens in IE if you try to download a file larger than 4 GB?