October 2005

There were 15 posts published in October 2005 (this is page 1 of 1).

bollocks! my design is b0rked.

i’ve updated my blog to MT 3.2 [1] and now i lost all my customizations to the sidebar and stuff like that [2]. good that i documented the odds and ends, so i might be able to rebuild it rather fast. in the moment you must bear with the rather terrible view on /blog when you visit in the browser. if you access my blog through the feed, you shouldn’t notice a thing.

oh, and this is also a good opportunity to add some more plugins and bits and pieces here and there. for example, i updated the root index.html a bit [3] and deleted some unnecessary directories that were just lying around.

[1] mostly to get rid of the ever-increasing comment spam. lately not even the now deceased MT-Blacklist was able to cope with it..,

[2] i shouldn’t have “refreshed” the templates without thinking twice.

[3] no matter how you resize your browser window, the text is centered in it. done with some css-tweakery

i’m on uncluttering mission

i’ve officially killed my two moblogs [1]. from now on, all my (seldom) moblogging is going to happen here: http://flickr.com/photos/habi/tags/moblog/. regarding that, i’ve also uncluttered my sidebar a bit. the latest images-section now shows the five latest images i posted to flickr. on top there’s the latest moblog, then the four latest “normal” images.

i achieved this with a mashup of the code of two flickr-badges. the first one is pulling just the “moblog” tag, the second one is pulling the last 4 images.

the full code looks like this, nothing too fancy really:



the code is really straight-forward.

i just cleaned out the css and merged the two javascript parts. if you want to adopt it for your page, you just have to change the user-number and/or tag [2].

[1]: they’ve been clinically dead anyway…

[2]: a simple google search yielded this: “To get your NSID from Flickr, go to your photos page, view source, find global_nsid, and note the value. That’s it.”

back street boys rule! (or so…)

click on the image on the left to check out this really hilarious viral back street boys video that xeni jardin linked on boingboing. it shows two basketball dorks in a chinese dorm performing a video of the back street boys (while their roommate silently frags away…). xeni is gonna talk about viral videos on NBC TODAY tonight (see here) and this video is gonna be the centerpiece of the show:

The centerpiece of Wednesday’s segment is a fan-made music video for the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way. The homage is credited to “Two Chinese Students,” according to Google Video, and was uploaded there in July, 2005, after having been spotted on the China portal Sina.com.cn. Like AYBABTU, Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid, and the rest of its predecessors, this video now inhabits gazillions of otherwise productive desktops worldwide.

if you have major time to spare, you can check out some other funny videos on video.google.com, just search for “viral” and see your timeschedule melt!

[via boingboing]

flickr/groups/swiss-meeting @ 29.10.05

samstag in einer woche, am 29.10 treffen sich schweizer flickr-user um 14.00 auf dem bundesplatz in bern. wer auch kommen will, soll sich hier anmelden, wer sich den werdegang des meetings zu gemüte führen will, kann diesen diskussions-thread durchlesen.

bis denn.

english: swiss flickereebies are gonna meet at the 29th of october at 2 pm on the bundesplatz in bern. signup is here, discussion is here.

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my upcoming.org events in the sidebar

Upcoming Eventsi’m starting to really dig those social web-apps.

one the last discoveries of mine is upcoming.org [1]. upcoming. org is a social event calendar driven by people like you and me. people can manage their events there and i have a neat way of showing some of my upcoming stuff i’m planning to attend or just got in my date book.

in addition to that, i can subscribe to events for a certain city i like (as in “bern“, “zürich“, “tashkent” or “trachselwald“). or subscribe to events of a certain person, no matter city they take place. the subscription is possible as an rss-feed or as as a ical-calendar-file. so if you like, you can add the calendars of your buddies to your ical and see what events they go to and take part or start to stalk them :-)

i’ve started to add some venues and events in bern and hope this starts to catch up in my ‘hood :-)

and i also thought this might be a nice way of “collecting” the people that want to come to certain meetings. let’s see if it starts to take off a bit more. if you add yourself to upcoming.org, send me a note and we can start to share our events…

which leads me to the title of this post: “… in the sidebar” [2]. since the events can be shown to any site with the upcoming.org badge, i’ve added my next 5 events to the sidebar. with some css-tinkering it also looks like it belongs in the sidebar. so if you want to see what i plan to to in the next few weeks, then you can now peek there (but i’m not gonna tell you stuff that i plan to visit the einstein exhibit with nina this weekend, so no stalking me…).

[1] which got bought by yahoo yesterday, which made every news-site post about that, which made me tinker around with it a bit more. so it’s actually a re-discovery, i can’t remember when i first encountered it. what i know is, that i encountered it much later than b. (just look at my or his user number…).

[2] time for all you rss-feed-readers to visit my site

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trusted computing

no matter how you think about trusted computing, you should take a look at that really nice street-art-styled movie [1] from lutz vogel [2] and benjamin stephan. you can either watch it directly on the movie-site or download it here in different formats and sizes or (maybe preferred to all the people involved) leech it with your desired bittorrent-client through this file.

definitely worth those three and a half minutes!

[via pia] [3]

[1] cc-licensed

[2] check out lutz vogels other other short films and projects, they’re all rather brilliant!

[3] i’ve wanted to write that, since we first met :-)

underwater panorama

Almajaneuntil some hours ago i believed that maybe i made the first ever underwater panorama photograph, while on the philippines. a simple google search proved me wrong, there is already much more impressive work available online (see here, for the first ever published underwater panorama [1]). nonetheless i’m gonna tell you the story of the panorama of my alma jane shot in this post.

while we resurfaced from the alma jane i shot 7 images of the wreck and then tried to reconnect them later on with the excellent hugin for osx. as i mentioned before i started to use makecubic from apple to convert the .tiff-files from hugin to quicktime vr .mov files which are sometimes more pleasant to view.

this particular panorama was the first for me to notice something special:

Almajane1when i generated the panorama the resulting image was much more pleasing when i added a horizontal guideline along the railing of the ship. this resulted in the image seen on the top left. when i didn’t add that guideline the resulting image was not so pleasing to the eye, mostly because the ship looks really crooked, as seen on the bottom right.

so i uploaded the uncrooked version to flickr, for all of you to see. then i converted the images with makecubic, ’cause i wanted to see how the panoramas look when converted to a quicktime vr. that’s when the difference comes in. the first, uncrooked version looks a bit weird when viewing as a qtvr as you can see in the movie on the left below (760 kb .mov-file).

Mov Almajane-1Mov Almajane1

the second image looks much more like it was in the water, where the movement was a swaying from left to down to right. see for yourself in the movie on the left (769 kb .mov-file).

just so you can see what bonds me to my computer on those long, lazy and rainy sunday afternoons.

have a good week!

[1]: i still might be second :-)

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picture of the week 39

i didn’t shoot any pictures this week, so i’m picking another one from our holidays on the philippines. although the nudibranch is not in focus i quite like the image below, mostly because of its vibrant colors. you can see some more images from our holidays in the pictures section or on flickr (which is better for the panoramas, ’cause you can see them in a bigger size…).

Dsc01902

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