For the third year, I joined Andras Frenyo shooting panoramas at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary.

I arrived at the third day (the Panotools meeting in Lucerne coincided with the festival), so I missed out on Within Temptation, the only Dutch act of the festival; Even with only one Dutch act, I was somewhat surprised at the number of Dutch people at the festival.

If you're looking at the site now - instead of reading it through a feedreader - you will notice that the site looks... different. Otherwise, you might have noticed that the feed, along with the rest of the site has been offline multiple times this weekend.

Some serverside problems allegedly caused by 'scripts' on hoeben.net prodded me to bite the bullet and update to Drupal 5.x. The update did not go as smooth as I have come accustomed with Drupal updates, but things seem to be working ok now. I hope to reintroduce the subthemes for different sections of the site soon(ish).

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).

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...

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.

I am currently in Copenhagen attending Reboot 8.0. During the two day conference I'll be posting panoramas here. Since the conference is all about the social web 2.0 thing, I'm using Flickr and my new SPi-V for Flickr tool.

fieldOfView.com/flickr/?page=photos/aldo/tags/reboot8
(requires shockwave and 32 mb of Video Ram or more)

Now that I am self employed, I'ld better look busy, right? I have finally updated the panoramic print gallery on fieldOfView.com with images from the 'van 4 kanten' exhibition, and some others I had not yet published.

Not only are there lots more images to enjoy, there's also the - er... - spiffy lightbox.js-inspired thickbox effect. Irony has it that thickbox is actually lots lighter than lightbox; I really like the lightness jquery as opposed to prototype/scr.ipta.culo.us (if only because of the punctuation of the latter). This was the first time I was really 'bitten' by the difference of quirks mode versus standards mode in Internet Explorer though... Oh well, another day well spent.

It's always fun to discover people using the SPi-V engine. When the Flickr blog featured an equirectangular photo by hangglide, I found out that Flickr has a small but loyal following of SPi-V in the equirectangular group. They are using SPi-V to display their panoramas, directly off the fieldOfView site.

Cool as that might be, there's a security limitation in Shockwave that pops up a dialog box when a Shockwave movie (such as SPi-V) tries to access files from a different domain than the one the movie itself is hosted on. To work around this, I have implemented a make-shift php-based proxy, that maskerades images on Flickr servers as a local image on the same server as the SPi-V movie.