Aldo's blog

The Panorama Mesdag museum is currently hosting an exhibition of panoramic photos by members of the IVRPA (International VR Photographers Association, formerly the IQTVRA). The exhibit includes 4 images by myself, including a hyperbolic view of the Widnmills of Kinderdijk. That particular image was chosen to represent the exhibition to the public, so it will appear in some tourist magazines etc.

My mac mini finally arrived last friday. First impressions: man, that's mini!

I convinced myself I'ld need a mac mini to testdrive my panoramic viewing engine. Unfortunately the 32 Mb of video RAM is really the lower end of the range of what's acceptable on OS X for my stuff. OS X also takes up quite some video memory to achieve it's spiffy Exposé etc tricks. However, other hardware accellerated panorama engines are starting to appear for OS X, and they have a bit better performance even on this mac mini, so I should be able to squeeze a bit more out of it myself...

I thought it may be a good idea for future reference to use my favourable Google status to tell the world about my experiences flashing the BIOS on my Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard.

Note: this post is a bit long and windy, but there's an hilarious tech support reply in the end...

A couple of weeks back I bought a new computer. Nice and fast, nice and cheap. In an effort to make the computer as up to date as possible, I decided to upgrade the BIOS. Using Asus (ugly-as-sin) Windows based flash utility, I upgraded to the latest non-beta BIOS. Unfortunately that resulted in a problem with my CPU fan, so I wanted to use the same utility to get me back to my original BIOS version. Turns out that it can't downgrade your bios. So instead I decided to try to see if the fan-problem was fixed in the available beta BIOS. Not only didn't that bios fix the problem, it also made my floppy drive inaccessible. 'A floppy drive?' you would say, 'what do you need that for?'. Well, for flashing your bios outside of windows...

Just got word VRMag has launched their article about SPi-V and an interview with yours truly. Just in time for an update to version 1.2.

Like I said, I really want one. They look great, and I have been looking to buy a recent mac to test SPi-V development on. Plus, they look great!

But Apple made one crucial error. Contrary to a long-standing tradition, Steve's keynote presentation was not broadcasted live. By the time the presentation was available on the Apple.com website, I had already seen all new stuff that had been presented, including the mini mac. No need to watch the presentation...

Google will always be a bit of a mystery. I know roughly how pages get indexed and ranked: Google looks at body text and page titles for indexing, and ranks pages by the number of individual other pages that link to them. But some of the hits I'm getting from google are baffling.

Before Google launched their new scholar engine (and probably added a lot of scientific pages to their database), this page at the ID-Studiolab was the 7th hit when you searched for assistant professor. How on earth am I the 7th assistant professor? Even now, I'm on the 2nd page of results (though my ranking may change by merely mentioning the page on my blog).

I can't believe I 'missed' this. Back in november, I finally released SPi-V to the world. Here's another fine press release, along with some new demos.

I sold a couple of licenses already. It's pretty exciting to see what other photographers are doing with the engine. Though most use SPi-V just to display panoramic images, some (try to) do more exciting stuff. Greg Downing asked my help in doing a cool super zoom panorama.

Tessa and I have finally moved to our new home. Actually, we had some professional help moving our stuff over to the new appartment on december 17th, but we're still not done painting walls etc.

Before we moved in, I took a panoramic image of all the rooms. I was 'simply' planning to do a before and after transition, like I did before at the ID-Studiolab. Something I hadn't thought of immediately was that I could use the panoramic image to pick and evaluate different paint colors. We finally settled with 'rich' and 'trout' for the living room (how do they come up with these names?)