Eat Your Carrots

PicLens

There are loads of useful plug-ins for Firefox but my personal favourite, simply as something that make you go "wow", is PicLens. This plug-in is designed for viewing web images, and turns image views into a 3-D wonderwall. It's like having banks of TV screens each showing a thumbnail of an image, and as you pan left and right through those images the wall accelerates and banks to give a real dizzying impression of speed and movement. You can "flick" the images left and right a-la-iPod Touch/iPhone and see them smoothly accelerate and decelerate. Clicking a thumbnail makes it a bit larger, double clicking makes it full screen and clicking a screen icon takes you to the web page that image comes from. Using the scroll-wheel on your mouse zooms the whole wall in and out.

Use it with a large image set and you get a wall that seems to fade into infinity.

Piclens only really works with sites for which it has been enabled - amongst these are Google image searches, Picasa web albums and Facebook albums.
I love it, it's my favourite way to view images no and I wish it could be adapted as a way to look at images on disk. Maybe they'll come up with that at a later date.

New Toy

I've got a new toy - a Garmin eTrex Venture HC. It's a hand held GPS unit with full colour screen and high sensitivity GPS receiver. It has on-screen mapping of topographical features - roads and tracks, contours, streams & rivers, forests - the stuff you need for being out in open country as opposed to navigating by road as you do when in a car.

I bought it for mountain biking, for three main reasons;

1. So I know where I've been. Strange as this may sound, after many rides where someone else is leading I have absolutely NO idea where I've been!
2. So I can follow those routes (and others) again. The unit has route guidance built into it, though it's not the "get me to there" type of guidance that you get with car-based sat nav units.
3. 3 So I know where I am if I happen to get lost.

It's a lovely little device. Coupled with Memory Map mapping software it lets you see in great detail exactly where you've been - it's actually been a surprise to me how accurate not only this device but Ordnance Survey maps are. The routes we follow on moorland tracks and bridleways tie up with the maps almost to the inch. It's comforting to know that this degree of accuracy is achieved.

Being a bit of a stats whore the features that the Garmin/Memory Map combo provide are fantastic. Speed, times and altitude profiles of your route are shown, with a nice little "dot" that moves around the route and the profiles at the same time so you can tie them together.

I'm a bit obsessed with it at the moment though, and take it with us when we walk to the shops, then analyse our performance when we get back.

Wife really needs to pick the pace up a bit!

AutoStitch

I often take panoramic photos when I'm away and then use software to stitch them back together when I get home. I tended to use Photoshop because that's what I use for everything else, and it has automatic panorama stitching built into it. The results are a bit variable and you can usually see joins in the blending. Sometimes they're really obvious and even manual intervention can't get them perfect (see below).

In search of something better I stumbled across AutoStitch. Not only is it way better than Photoshop, it's also totally free! It claims to be fully automatic and that it can stitch together a whole jumble of pictures, so long as they can actually form a panorama. I tried it with a bunch of pictures that were of the same basic scene, but not an actual panorama, and it told me there was no match. Well done.

Below is the result of the same panorama when produced using AutoStitch.

No visible blend lines. It's amazing. You can adjust image output size to be anything you like. I've set it so that the output height is the same as the input height, the width then autoscales to match. At that resolution (about 13,000 x 2000) it took 5 or 6 minutes to do its work, but the result is worth the wait. Smaller resolutions give in a quicker result, which may be useful for just seeing how the photo is going to turn out.

For the money, I doubt there's a better stitcher on the market.

P.S. The photo is of Vittoriosa (or Birgu) as seen from Senglea (or L'Isla) in Malta.

Spell Checker

Call me slow but I've just discovered that you can download a spelling checker plug-in for Firefox! Wow, how useful is that! I often type stuff into Word(tm) first just to spell-check it and then paste it into whatever it is I'm doing. Now I won't need to do that anymore, and I find point-of-entry spell-checking more convenient than having to use Word first as I often go back and rehash stuff.
If you want it and haven't got it it's here.

Interesting Maps

Take a look at the maps that are available on WorldMapper.org. They're strange, quirky maps where the size of each country is scaled up or down depending on how they rank by whatever criterion the map is displaying. Take this map of Fruit Exports - notice Britain doesn't even show on the map.

Compare that to Fruit Imports in which we're pretty huge, and where conversely South America has all but vanished.

They have hundreds if not thousands of categories and you can play forever. Take a look at the "Nuclear Weapons" map and wonder, like me, what some of the little blips are, particularly those around South America, and the little yellow island in the bottom right!!

Like A Virgin

I'm totally Virgin now. NTL/Telewest has re-branded itself as "Virgin Media" and since I already got landline, TV and broadband via NTL that only really left my mobile phone unaccounted for. Since Virgin now offer me, as a customer of their other services, a mobile contract for only £10 per month that gives 300 minutes of any time/any network calls plus 300 texts I thought it would be churlish to decline. Especially since my current T-Mobile contract gives a paltry 200 minutes + 100 texts for a whopping great £35 a month! I was already a bit peed off with that contract and had already been looking for something better. The Virgin thing came along at just the right time, and I doubt there's anything better out there.
I'm not quite so impressed with the other deals they offer - well, I'd be impressed if I didn't take everything already. All their deals are for "new customers, or existing customers taking and extra service", which rules me out. If I was a new customer though I could get "3 for £30", which is cable TV, broadband and landline. Again, I doubt that package could be beaten by anyone (well, there's only Sky who could compete at all now, I guess).
To rival Sky+ Virgin have their own equivalent, the imaginatively titled V+. I don't think it's something I'll be wanting, not at the price it is (it's priced to match Sky+, which is also over priced IMO).
I hope Virgin Media proves to be a good company and brings out some good innovative services. Certainly their website is a cut above what NTL's was, and given how little time they've had to put it together. If they put that much care and attention into everything else it should be OK.

Playing With Vista

I've been "playing" with Windows Vista this week. The purpose was two fold, firstly just to see what it's like and to gain an opinion on it, and secondly to see what it would mean for the products we produce here at work (I won't go into that second matter).

There's a lot of talk about how Vista won't work very well on older hardware, and to an extent that's true, but it really depends on what your "older hardware" is like. My own PC is a few years old now, but to run Vista all that I absolutely needed was a suitable graphics card that set me back £30. In fact, if I didn't want to use the "Aero" interface I wouldn't even have needed that.

So what's it like? Well it looks very nice, especially when using Aero. I like the way windows are semi-transparent; I like the way they fade in and out rather than just "popping" up; I like the new menuing style; basically I like all of the visuals. The way you can switch between you active programs by selecting them from a 3-D "flying" set of scaled-down representations of them is pretty, but IMO gimmicky. I'll never use it.

I don't like the way I'm constantly being asked "are you sure you want to do that", which is Vista's way of ensuring that virus and malware writers don't play merry hell with your system. Software isn't supposed to be able to do anything to the system without you OKing it first. Fine, but it gets really tedious and I'm always looking for the "never ask me this again" tick-box (there isn't one). I suppose once I stop fiddling with settings for this and that and just settle down to using software I won't get asked that anymore, or not so often at least.

The standard applications are OK; The Mail/Newsgroup reader is much like Outlook Express; Microsoft Calendar is much like Google Calendar but without the convenience of being web-based; Photo Gallery is, in essence, similar to Google's Picasa, with some features that Picasa has and with some that Picasa lacks (I'd stick with Picasa, if only for it's "straighten the horizon" tool, essential to those of us with a sloping eye!); The SideBar and the Search options are once again nice, but reminiscent of Google products, in this case Google Desktop (I filled in a questionnaire from Microsoft recently; one of the questions was "do you think Microsoft is an innovator?". I gave that an unequivocal "No", since all that I see in Vista I've already seen in other products).

So would I buy Vista for home use? Probably, but only because I like to have the latest thing. I really can't see that it gives me very much more than I have already, given that there are already very good (and free) products out there (from Google primarily) that do all of the tasks I regularly need to do. Vista is touted as being a step forward in security, and yet I've never once been compromised by a virus, spyware, or any other type of malware, but then I'm careful. I suppose Vista may be good for the careless (are you watching, Baby Niece?).

Error!

I was reminded today of some of the rather stupid and unhelpful error messages you can get when your PC finds some kind of fault. The one today was "No keyboard detected - press F11 to continue". Another favourite used to be "An unknown application has produced an unspecified error", a helpful warning message if there ever was one but one that I don't seem to see any more.

Both of those pale into insignificance though, when compared to the message you get if you don't have a monitor attached to your PC!

Greedy Firefox

Much as I love Firefox and still use in preference to IE7, even though the latter now has the tabbed browsing that makes Firefox so good, I do find it has some major flaws in it. Some web pages I try to look at just make my machine come to a total standstill. This one for instance causes Firefox to use 60% of my available cpu power - constantly, not just as the page is loading and even when Firefox is minimised! In IE7 that same page uses a whopping 0% of cpu time. What the hell is Firefox doing wrong?
Bah!

Virtual Earth

In the course of building my new website for Mountain Bike Routes in Cleveland & North Yorkshire I discovered Microsoft Virtual Earth (or Local.Live as it's public face seems to be known). It's just like Google Maps only better - the aerial photography goes to much better levels of detail over areas of relative unimportance, i.e. most of the country outside of places of strategic military interest. For that reason the detailing of major port facilities is much the same, but my house is shown in much greater detail. And for my biking site - well, you can almost pick out people walking on the trails, and you can certainly see the trails, which is a big score over the Google maps. They also do "birds-eye views" which is really close-in aerial photography, so good that you all better watch what you're doing in public places! Only a small fraction of places are covered by this as yet, but it's set to grow and grow. To see what it's like type "Trent bridge" into the location search on the Live Local page from the link above to see parts of Nottingham. Or try "millennium dome" to see parts of London. I find it all quite exciting.
So I'm currently working on using Virtual Earth instead of Google Maps on my site. It's meant that I've learned JavaScript, so that I can create myself a mechanism for easily entering the routes, and for fine tuning the point locations so that they tie up with digital images (the digital images and the Ordnance Survey maps don't tally, usually. Not sure who's fault that is).
All of that has kept me too busy for blogging this last week, and is liable to keep me that way for a couple of weeks more. I'm still here though...