Website updated!

It would appear hell must have frozen over because I have finally managed to update www.jamesfitzsimons.com with our last few trips worth of travel photos!

While I was at it I decided to pretty it up a little bit, and add slightly more functionality around viewing the photos. I also tried reducing the size and quality of the "large" versions of the photos in an effort to get the pages a little lighter for those on slow connections. It's still not flash but it works ;-)

Any comments or suggestions let me know!

Cause I'm impatient

I thought I'd post a few links to some panoramic photos I have made of our trip to Seville. I haven't had the time to update the traveling section on www.jamesfitzsimons.com yet, so these are just a bit of a teaser.

I'm actually pretty impressed by how well these panoramas turned out. There are some bad color matches which are due to the source photos being taken in automatic mode on our camera. I have since learned you need to take the source photos in manual mode so you can get consistent lighting across all the images. I had to manually re-color them for these panoramas so that's why they aren't matched very well.

Anyway, here they are (click on the image below for the full size version)

It's the debugging that's the killer

I've tons of fun over the last few days trying to debug my vision system. To be fair I haven't really spent that much time on it yet, but it is a fairly complicated system and trying to guess which features in the image the computer is interested in and why is a bit of a challenge. To make things easier I have been trying to annotate the images as the feature detection process runs and save them to disk so I can analyse them later. It's required the wrapping of more functionality of the opencv library so yet more fun with marshalling and P/Invoke!

The other thing that maybe complicating matters is that I'm not sure how well the SIFT detection works in low light conditions and since I do all my hacking in the evening...

Maybe a bit of dedicated hacking this weekend will help.

In other news I am off to see Billy Corgan tomorrow night so am getting really amped for that!

Adiós Gentoo... Hello Ubuntu!

Well, I my computers are now a gentoo free zone. I had an epiphany of sorts a week or two ago when I did an emerge sync and saw a million updates (amongst which was kde for about the billionth time in only a few weeks) and I found myself letting out a rather large sigh. I suddenly realised I was spending far longer on administrative tasks on my computer than I was actually using them! This could not go on, it was time for action and so I decided to try out a new distro with a binary update mechanism - no more compiling everything from source for me!

I looked at Novel Linux Desktop, and if it hadn't been for the 50USD price tag I would have tried it, but instead I decided to give Ubuntu a go. I thought I would try installing the new distro on my laptop first, as the laptop install is the acid test of any distro, and I didn't want to nuke my desktop (my primary machine) until I was really sure about my choice.

While trying to backup my gentoo install for my laptop I accidentally deleted /etc ...well no going back now! I stuck in the Ubuntu cd and in about 1/2 an hour I had a beautiful new ubuntu/gnome desktop. Within one evening of use I realised I had to make the upgrade to my desktop as soon as possible.

The upgrade to my desktop went pretty smoothly. I was trying to be too smart for my own good to start off with, fearing that because of my complicated software RAID setup the installer wouldn't cope, but after messing round for a couple of hours I finally gave up and in frustration just stuck the install cd in and the ubuntu installer sailed through, auto detecting all my RAID partitions correctly and the install was very straight forward.

I can't recommend Ubuntu enough. Everything just works, installing new software is a snap, and most ironically of all even when packages aren't available installing software from source seems to be less problematic than Gentoo!

Don't get me wrong now. I'm not bashing Gentoo here. I like that distro, and have learnt so much about linux in the last couple of years while using it, but now I am basking in the happy glow that my ubuntu is giving me and I won't be looking back!