First, since it seems to be a common thread on my blog, my latest gadget: A safe!

This may seem frivolous, especially at a time when rent + motgage repayments are strangling me, but it has three redeeming features:

1. The safe will be primarily for storing valuable Jewellers supplies, with which I can get myself some much needed craft time, and maybe even an alternative means of income.
2. The safe was on an insane (see ~75%!) discount.
3. E helped me with finance until settlement on Elmwood.

It is a most magnificent device, weighing ~70kg and requiring two keys and a combination to open.
In other news, and again a common topic hereon, I have updated the Trouble front-page http://www.trouble.net.au to use a nice new css-driven navigation bar. If it gives you grief, please feed back.
Lastly, a straightforward recipe and method for wok-cooked chicken which worked resoundingly well last night:

• ~500g boneless chicken meat, cut into stir-frying strips
• 1tbsp of seasame oil
• 2-3tbsp of soy sauce
• 2tsp of lemon grass (I used the stuff out of a tube)
• 1 or 2 fresh chillies, chopped
• 1/4cup of chopped fresh coriander
• ~100ml of peanut oil
• 1tsp of salt
• 1tbsp of minced garlic
• 1 brown onion, coarsely chopped
• 2 spring onions

Mix coriander, chillies, lemon grass, soy and seasame oil in a bowl. Marinate the chicken strips in this for at least an hour. Make sure you have all ingredients lined up and ready because the next bit is farily quick: Heat up your wok with the peanut oil in it until the oil starts to smoke. Add the salt, then the garlic, stir until brown (this takes less than three seconds) then add the onion. Stir for a few more seconds, then add the chicken and all marinade.
Cook until the ckicken is browned and firm. Serve topped with chopped spring onions, with noodles or steamed rice.

New thing du jour: My new bag!

It has too many zips, compartments and features to mention (without becoming unspeakably boring). Suffice to say that it’s a laptop-carrying-backpack and it’s nifty. Expensive but not on the Crumpler or Booqpack scales of things.
This last week has brought whole new vistas of emotional ups and downs: E went away to her dad’s timeshare in NSW for a week, and I was genuinely alone in my own place without housemates for the first time in years. It wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be… in fact it was profoundly depressing. Time to reflect can be very bad when you can’t stand your own reflection…
E came back full of renewed life and joy on Friday last though, and we had a fairly good weekend, even though E is siiick. The magnificent E went quite mad buying me presents! including this very fine rock tumbler, which is currently making 8oz of rocks into slightly less than 8oz of very shiny rocks in my spare room.

Thank you O wonderful E!

Finally, just a note to those who read my blog directly through the Wiki, or through RSS (apologies for the very broken RSS!), or who read the blog and ignore all the frilly bits. My home page has bars down either side of it. These are no longer contentless links to nothing. They now really link to interesting and functional stuff. In particular, the links down the right side of the page (except the Resume page) are to stuff I have found so nifty, amusing, or cute that I want to share them with everyone else. Unless these links vanish at their source, I will try to archive all of them in the old crazy area, so that you won’t miss anything if you don’t check in very often. I mention this here, now, because I’ve been updating Crazy much more often than my blog lately. Blogging requires a brain. Surfing does not.

My brother’s housemate sent me this, via my brother. At first I thought it was cute but only semi-relevant, but then I was swayed by the power of video. Check it out for yourself: Multi-Touch Interaction Research

The premise is that they can now make a touch-screen with a much greater degree of sensitivity and sophistication in how it registers the different possible kinds of touch, and which can handle an arbitrary number of simultaneous points of contact. They would also appear to have spent some time examining applications for the technology… Wow.

I’m convinced. This outdoes the mouse and the keyboard in so many ways… if you could make an FTIR surface which could give slightly with some kind of reactive ‘click’, or even just a suitably soft surface, why would you need a keyboard?

I’m visualising a workstation which throws away the existing desk paradigm and opts for something like the lovely ergonomics of the architects drafting desk: a raised slanted desktop which you sit at on a high stool, rather than on a chair. This makes a lot of sense if the surface you’re applying your hands to is the same one that you look at, and I speak from experience when I say it’s damn comfortable.

At request from Korny, the details of what I used to stitch the panoramas:

1. I used autopano-sift to build the initial pto file. It seems to want the pictures to be rotated correctly, but apart from that it hasn’t failed me yet. This requires C#, which means installing mono. This is somewhat large and heavy, even if you happen to have a nice clean installer for it. Command line:

   autopano-complete.sh -o hugin.pto DSCF00*

   (Where DSCF00 is the common prefix of all my images)

2. I used hugin to fine-tune and preview the Panorama. It is a very cool tool if used patiently: It offers sensible tips which lead to me getting the result I wanted in the end. Unfortunately, at the time, there wasn’t an Ubuntu package for it, so I had to satisfy its myriad dependencies and build it myself. This was painful.
3. Rather than using the built-in hugin stitching engine nona for the stitching, I used the panotools PTStitcher to do the final join-up, because it supports colour and exposure correction. I’m sure the clean way to do things would have been to fix the exposure while taking the shots, but this is fiendishly difficult to do with my digicam.

The resuts so far have been about 75% satisfactory:
New Zealand 1:

New Zealand 2:

Buckland Valley:

I have had mixed success with the colour-correction aspect of PTStitcher. It keeps giving me images with a greenish tinge at the edges, or lush rainforests which look like they could burst into flame at any moment.I need to do a bit more work with this… there may be a fix to be achieved by using the right kind of anchor points.

There is a huge amount of potential in this stuff. Witness, for example, The Giga-Pixel Image. And for the benefit of Dave, yes, this can all be done under Windows with the same tools, although as Damien points out, there are plenty of alternatives.

I just wrote something terribly enlightened and cathartic about anxiety attacks and depression, but the reality is that I’m just bored here. The illusion of tension wells up from the fact that I am constrained to look busy, and the companion fact that I feel horribly guilty for doing so little.
No… that’s actually not an illusion. I am really stressed by all of that. What a waste! I could be labouring stressfully at some task which was actually useful to someone. Or I could be doing nothing much more efficiently asleep in my bed. I could even be doing something constructive and pleasant, like exercising, or doing some task that I actually enjoy, like tinkering with images or building a Linux box…
No, I think I’ll just sit here and freak out some more, to no purpose. Yep, uh-huh.

Very very not well today., much as yesterday. It is the standard irony: On Tuesday I take a day off sick, because I feel somewhat unwell, then on Wednesday and Thursday (and probably Friday, given how I’m feeling) I get to be so sick I can barely even pretend to function.
Still, much has been achieved.

• Trouble is now moved, with minimal grievous outage, and only one night of pain and misery.
• My house is one room closer to functional: it now has a bathroom which is entirely satisfactory, featuring a non-broken showerhead which you can adjust, a funtional extractor fan, a toilet-paper holder, a towel-rail which doesn’t dip your towel in the toilet, and no dead spiders (That I know of).
• (Through very little effort on my part) Elmwood is now On The Market! Wheee!

None of this makes up for the fact that I feel awful… like I’ve been practising amateur sword-swallowing, getting trampled by mobs, and sanding my eyeballs. Like I weigh a million tons, especially my hands and eyelids, and have never, ever slept.

Just a quick off-topicitude: I was just browsing back over the comments that people have left on my blog, and wanted to say: THANK YOU!!! I really appreciate that people bother to read my blog, let alone comment on the inanities I post here.

Thank you all very very much!

Oh. My. God… That . Was. HARD!

There are a great many tools out there for making panoramas (big, long photos, covering a large number of degrees of field of view). So many, in fact, that I won’t even bother trying to link to them, not even the (very large number) of ones that I used in the end.

Suffice to say that getting a complete set of free tools with which to make panoramas is anything but simple. Getting such tools for Linux and making them work is so hard that it beggars belief.

But it works! Quite niftily, actually:

My friend Dave has just offered be a writing challenge. It’s wonderful! Than you so much Dave: I feel like I haven’t used this part of my brain in years and years. I’ve missed it.

The challenge, to quote Dave’s email, is this:

This seems like it is best addressed in blog form…

If I had read Arcadia in late 2001, I would have seen it very differently than I did in 2004.

I can see where you worry about holism and not doing justice to the work, but I also know that I’m an incurable reductionist: I would have approached it the same way I always would have, and always will: take the strongest, clearest single thread and analyse the f*ck out of it, to the exclusion of all else.

In late 2001, in the wake of the WTC disaster, with the USA knee-jerking Afghanistan into tiny pieces (nothing to do with oil, oh nonono!) I was completely immersed in a magnificent, terrible, fascinating process: The Bursting of the Dot Com Bubble. I was watching in horrified fascination as the unspeakable wealth which had very nearly been mine became pitiful, worthless, eventually laughable.

In late 2001, I would have read Arcadia as a treatise on economics. The political/economic bent of the work is very simple and clear: it’s all about Anarchy versus Control.

Dane is the unenlightened man who is given a guided tour of the real underlying stupidity of the world so that he might be able to see through it and be freed of it. He might be learning the deeper secrets of the world and thus attaining immense power, but he might just be getting a crash-course in self-sustaining hype. Either way, he winds up powerfully freed from his old life. I could have identified with that in 2001, very much.

The team though, especially King Mob, are clearly Terrorists in the light of late 2001, whatever you understood that label to mean. They are the righteous butt-kicking that The Establishment has needed so badly for so long, but they’re also brutal, merciless killers.

I remember very clearly from Arcadia the reprisal of the life of the anonymous security guard, as he is gunned down by King Mob. Morrison plays on this quite heavily and deliberately: Are the Invisibles noble freedom fighters or pointless derganged killers? Is their cause just? Are their actions justifiable, let alone justified?

Since September 11, 2001, much of the western world has been helplessly viewing the past through the pinhole lens of a single event, but this was even more the case at the time, so I would have had to ask Mr Morrison:

It’s an ambiguous, double-edged question, in knowing anticipation of Morrison’s inevitably ambiguous, double-edged reply.

This last weekend was meteorologically special for those of us lucky enough to live in Melbourne.
For those of you who don’t, the weather was as follows:

Saturday

Top of 41c (105.8f)

Saturday night

overnight low of 27c (80.6f)

Sunday

Top of 43c (109.4f)

So, naturally, I chose this weekend to move house!!! Naturally, I failed dismally, but didn’t I have fun trying…