I’d seen Autostitch when it was first announced - as a research project by a couple of students at UBC. It’s a really cool app that takes in an arbitrary set of photos that were taken of the same scene, and stitches them together automagically without user intervention.
Very cool software, and it does an amazing job.
But, it’s Windows only. It runs OK in Virtual PC, but it’s slow (as expected). I would really love it if this was somehow included in iPhoto 5 - imagine being able to select a set of photos and say “stitch these together for me” - and have it actually do it…
The Norman family got back into town yesterday afternoon, after what felt like a 24-hour journey home. Checked out of the hotel at 10am Sunday, returned home 3pm Monday… It was sunny and warm in Honolulu, cold and shitty and rainy in Calgary. I want to go back… :-)
There’s a whole bunch I want to blog about, including rants/raves about spending 2 weeks in Honolulu (and some tips for anyone else planning on doing the same).
Apple and the NECC are doing some serious podcasting from this year’s NECC conference. I’m blissfully unaware of details, being stranded in Honolulu for another week ;-) but I’m sure I’ll have a lot of podcasty goodness to catch up on when I get back into town next week…
PS. I know this breaks my self-imposed blogging vacation. Evan’s sitting on the counter at the Ala Moana Apple Store, grooving to the Fly Guy while Janice is in Williams Sonoma getting her fix…
Josh, King and myself put on a session this morning called “Creative Action at a Distance” - where we outlined the tools that we use to collaborate while building the Pachyderm 2.0 software.
King iChatAVed in after 28 hours of sleep deprivation, shortly after landing at the Calgary International Airport - apparently there’s wireless in the food court now…
It was surprisingly well attended - we had a full house (even if nobody wanted to sit in the front row…)
Thanks to a pointer from Sameer D’Costa, I just used a handy shell script to export all of my Safari RSS subscriptions to an OPML file that can be imported into Wordpress to update my links/blogroll. Easy peasy.
I hadn’t realized how much my subscription list had grown… It’s now up to 469 feeds, and I didn’t even realize it - that’s 100 new feeds since switching to Safari RSS.
Update: Almost forgot - had to modify the .opml export slightly. Out of the box, the script exports urls as “xmlUrl”, but Wordpress expects “htmlUrl” - easy to change using a batch find/replace, and easy to fix the script, too.
The opening reception last night was pretty cool. Got to touch base with a bunch of folks that I hadn’t seen since last year’s conference, and got to meet a whole bunch of new folks. I didn’t win the iPod Shuffle, but that’s OK… :-)
I had one of the coolest experiences though. I just had a picture taken with Tim Wang, and as I look up, there is someone standing in front of me, noticing my nametag badge. All of a sudden, she breaks into this gorgeous smile, and says “Are you D’Arcy Norman?”
Evan was absofreaking amazing on the flights from Calgary –> Phoenix –> Honolulu. Wow. I mean, I would have bet a million bajillion dollars against the poor lad. And I would have lost. He was the Perfect Child. Amazing.
Honolulu is pretty nice. Awfully busy, and quite touristy. But, what did I expect? I’ve posted some quick photos to my Flickr Account.
Thanks to everyone who sent positive karma/whuffie/wishes our way. Totally worked!
I intentionally refuse to set an email autoreply (those annoying “I’m out of the office, but your email is very important to me” messages that get spewed onto mailing lists).
Autorepliers are too dump to not spam lists, and I generally check email regardless of where I am, so it’s not like important messages get dropped. Sure, less important messages might get neglected, but that should be the rule rather than an exception…
Since I’ve moved to Safari as my RSS reader, I’ve lost the easy way of updating the blogroll/links section of my blog. I used to just export my subscriptions from NetNewsWire as OPML, which was then easily ingested by WordPress.
I’m realizing that my blogroll/links are now woefully out of date, and would like to bring them into sync with my current subscriptions - but am not about to start manually syncing them.
I just got back from the Apple Campus Bash. Wow. The band this year was The Wallflowers. The freaking WALLFLOWERS played the Apple Campus Bash! Awesome. They did a full set, too, not just a cheap 20-minute gig. A full hour-long set. And I think they were having fun, too… Questions thrown to the audience about how to get blackberries working… Heckling jugglers… Very cool.
Update: Added some details of the build settings for converting an existing WebObjects Application project to a tidy servlet deployment package.
King, Josh and I spent the morning in the WebObjects lab trying to figure out a way to get Pachyderm deployed on non-MacOSX boxes under the new regime. We’ve now got a spanky new Tomcat-enabled build, that sucks in all of the supporting WebObjects, APOLLO, and Pachyderm jars into a single .war - topping 112MB of compiled goodness.
