Status-Q

Spotted in Krakow last weekend.

I was most honoured to make the acquaintance of Piotr Fuglewicz on my recent trip to Poland. Piotr is a very smart chap, with a long history in IT and particularly in the computational linguistics world. He's also a good dinner companion.

Anyway, today, out of the blue, he sent me a photo:

(click for a larger version)

What's intriguing about this is that I took it, but I had never seen it before. Piotr assembled this panorama from three of my Krakow photos, which I hadn't even taken with the idea they might be stitched together! He used an amazing bit of software called Autopano Pro - you don't even have to give it a hint as to what goes where. Quite superb.

The user interface is complex - the basics are reasonably straightforward but there's then an infinite amount of tweaking you can do - but I can see I'm going to have to find time to play with this. Photoshop CS3 has some good panorama stuff built in, but it looks as if Autopano is to panoramas what Photomatix is to HDR... a dedicated tool which goes just that bit further.

If you have an existing Linux machine (already running GRUB) and you want to install a fresh version of Ubuntu on it, this page may be handy. All you need to do is download a kernel and an initrd file, reboot and issue a couple of GRUB command lines, and you can install everything else over the network from the Ubuntu repositories.

I've just got a new hosted server which came with 6.06 installed, and I wanted to wipe it and start with a clean 8.04. This was a very quick and easy way to do it, especially since I didn't have easy access to the machine's CD/DVD drive.

Rose at Krakow castle. I'll post another picture or two over the next couple of days, but you can see more of Krakow here if you're feeling keen.

In 2001 at the AT&T Labs in Cambridge, we created a system we called the Broadband Phone:

Basically, it was a Linux-based VOIP phone with a VNC viewer and touch screen built in to it, and we built a GUI toolkit which rendered directly over the network in VNC. A standard Dell PC operated as the phone exchange (I wish we'd had Asterisk then!) and also provided the graphics for a variety of specially-written applications. It drove about 100 phones without any trouble, and we used this as our internal phone system in the lab for some time. The plan was to spin out a company based around the technology, but this was 2001, and you couldn't get funding for new companies, whatever you did!

Anyway, at one point I created a cordless version based around a Compaq iPaq. I came across a publicity photo of it recently, and it took me a moment to realise why it looked so familiar:

Perhaps we were just too far ahead of the curve... :-)