HCoder.org

From time to time I like making panorama pictures. When I started several years ago, Autostitch was really popular, but it didn’t have a Linux version, which sucked. Actually, it still doesn’t. However, it worked under wine, so I just used it via emulation. It was very simple and worked ok.

Sometimes I’d look for alternatives under Linux (if possible, free) and I had seen a tool called Hugin. It looked complicated (at least compared to Autostitch’s select-pictures-hit-ok-there-you-go), and for some reason I never really used it. It probably wasn’t packaged for Debian or something like that.

A couple of days ago, though, I arrived from a trip where I took a couple of panoramas, and Autostitch had a quite suboptimal behaviour: it didn’t recognise one of my panoramas, and some others were completely destroyed perspective-wise. So I decided to give Hugin another go. And boy am I happy with it. It’s very easy to install in Debian, and although I had some problem with the path to enblend (apparently I had to specify the absolute path to it in preferences), everything worked fine. Selecting the points to join the pictures is not that hard, and actually has one advantage over Autostitch, namely that if it doesn’t recognise your panoramas automatically, you are giving “hints” about which points are the same in other pictures to Hugin, so it will work. Another advantage is that it has several ways of joining the pictures, which solved my second problem with perspective destruction :-)

Apart from the panorama pictures, I also had some videos... and one of them was recorded as “portrait” instead of “landscape”. So I needed a way to rotate the video. Fortunately, that was easy enough with mencoder (using command-line, though):

mencoder -vop rotate=2 MVI_2352.AVI -ovc lavc -oac copy -o MVI_2352.avi

I found the tip in some thread in Ubuntu forums, and had to look up the values for “rotate” in mencoder’s manpage:

0    Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip (default).
1    Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise.
2    Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise.
3    Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip.

Maybe that’s something you all already knew, and it’s just me that arrived late to the party, but this is hilarious. I hadn’t used Google Translate myself too much (if ever; can’t remember), but the other day someone mentioned some “funny” translations in some internal mailing list at Opera:

The first translation is… not correct, but somewhat close to the original. The Spanish text is “SOY FELIZ PORQUE CONOCI LA VERDADERA AMISTAD” (“I’m happy because I knew true friendship”) and the translation is “I AM HAPPY KNOW WHY THE TRUE FRIENDSHIP”. As I said, not really correct, but at least it’s somewhat close to the original. Check by yourself:

http://translate.google.com/translate_t#es|en|SOY%20FELIZ%20PORQUE%20CONOCI%20LA%20VERDADERA%20AMISTAD

If you add a couple of exclamation marks at the end, some strange things happen (only half of them are shown in the translation, as if they were escape characters or something). But the really hilarious thing is what happens when you add five of those:

http://translate.google.com/translate_t#es|en|SOY%20FELIZ%20PORQUE%20CONOCI%20LA%20VERDADERA%20AMISTAD!!!!!

In that case, Google Translate “translates” the same sentence to “KNOW WHY I AM HAPPY THE REAL MURDER !!!!!”. Maybe that means that for Spanish speaking people, friendship plus an adequate amount of enthusiasm means…. murder. Scary.

Some time ago (probably a couple of years) I learned about a couple of TMNT issues that I wanted to read. Yes, that means “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”. I never thought I would want to read a TMNT comic, let alone paying for it, but there you go. The reason why I wanted to read those issues were some amazing drawings by a very talented artist. Also, that apparently the story was much more “mature”. Presumably it just got the idea of four turtle-like creatures (anthropomorphising them in a somewhat natural way, a bit like Blacksad), and he added some amazing art to support the story.

The problem was, I had forgotten about the title of the comic and the artist name… and I didn’t have the bookmark (if I had had Opera Link at the time, that would not have happened; but I digress). So, a couple of weeks ago I got really obsessed with it, and I decided to look for it again. After a couple of hours to fruitless search, I finally found it. It was Soul’s Winter, by the incredible Michael Zulli (official page, Wikipedia), also author of “Delicate Creatures”, The Puma Blues and some work on The Sandman. Have a look at the art in the issues themselves.

Once I had the title of the comic, I started looking for it. Unfortunately, in the first couple of shops I tried, it was out of stock. Then I found it on Hill City Comics, and I decided to buy two more comics (some weird Indian-God-themed ones). The site doesn’t look completely professional to me, so I decided to pay via PayPal instead of giving my credit card number. However, I didn’t receive any information as to which address should I make the payment to. I waited for a couple of days just in case, and then I sent an e-mail, but it seems that the SPAM problems they talk about are really serious ;-)

I think I’ll pass on the telephone call, so I decided to just go to another shop. I won’t have the indian comics, but what the hell. The second shop I found is called MARSimport, and it looks much more professional than the first one. Also, they have “From Cloud 99: Memories Part One” from Yslaire, so I think that’ll compensate for the indian ones ;-)

I haven’t ordered yet, but I will soon. Wish me luck :-)

The last days I have noticed that most of the spam I receive has some made up news as subject. I imagine it is to make people click on the messages.

The point is that one of those messages was titled “Knol, the Wikipedia killer”, or something along those lines. I didn’t click on the message, and actually I just thought that “Knol” was a made up word… but then I thought “hm, maybe this exists after all”, so I went to the Wikipedia page… and there you go, I just found out about Knol and learned something about Music in Capoeira because of some spam message.

Informative spam. Go figure. Or maybe it means I should read more tech news?

In my recent trip to Copenhagen, I recorded a small video of the subway (it’s really cool, because it’s completely automatic, it doesn’t have drivers or anything). I wanted to edit the video to remove people that were reflected on the window, so I wondered if I could do that on Linux. I imagined it wouldn’t be trivial, but it was more frustrating than I thought. Maybe I’m too old for this.

The first thing I tried was looking in APT’s cache for “video editing”. The most promising was kino. I had tried that some time ago a couple of times, and I never made it to work, but I figured I would try again. Unfortunately, same result: I just can’t figure out how to import my videos. Maybe I’m just hitting the wrong button or whatever, but it’s really frustrating.

Second thing was having a look in the internet. I found the (dead and being rewritten?) Cinelerra, as always, and I didn’t feel like installing the old one from source, only to lose my time and not get it to work, so I just ignored it. Maybe they had it in debian-multimedia and wouldn’t have been a tough install after all. Anyway.

Next thing, I found some program called openmovieeditor. This one apparently worked, but I couldn’t figure out how to crop the image (or almost any other thing for that matter).

Next, some neat program written in Python, called pitivi. When I tried to run it though, it just said Error: Icon 'misc' not present in theme on the console and died. I later figured out that I had to install gnome-icon-theme for it to work (yeah, Debian maintainer’s fault). It’s funny, because on the webpage it says that it has some “advanced view” that you can access via the “View” menu… but I couldn’t find it. My menu only had one entry: “Fullscreen”. Great.

Oh, wait, there’s a gimp-gap. I could just import my animation in Gimp, crop the frames, and convert again to video. Easier said than done. I needed some programs that I didn’t have, and I wasn’t sure if they were so easy/quick/clean to install (sure, I could have exported to GIF animation and probably convert to video, I just didn’t want to lose so much color quality in the GIF step). Forget for now. At least I had the images, so if I could just turn them into a movie…

So, I started wondering if, given that I had decided to just crop, and especially now that I had a lot of images that were the frames, maybe I could just use some command line tool or something. So I found this tiny little program, images2mpg. Long story short, after installing some dependencies from source (that gave compilation errors, but luckily I could compile only the binaries I really needed) that program was completely retarded and didn’t even do what I wanted (it wanted at least one second between images, but I didn’t want a slideshow, just a normal movie from the frames). It looks some simple and it’s so buggy. Gah.

So I started wondering if I could just crop with mplayer... Hmmm… after a couple of problems (like documented switches that were not there and other crap), I ended up with this command line:

mencoder -vf crop=320:200:0:40 MVI_2160.AVI \
         -ovc lavc -nosound -o metro-crop.avi

That was reasonably quick and easy but it was so frustrating after all that lost time.

In any case, I ended up with the video I wanted, so I went to YouTube to upload it. When uploading, I realised that there was some option I had never seen: annotations.

YouTube annotations are really cool. They are like the notes on Flickr, but on a video :-D Actually I kind of wanted to make a note like that on this video, to show the automatic doors on the Metro station, so I was really happy to see that I could actually do it. And the interface is really easy to use and very clear. I really like it! You can see the result here:

EDIT: WTF? The annotations don’t appear on the embedded videos? You’ll have to go to the video page to see them, then…

21 May 2008. Dawn in Austria. A lot of policemen enter in 23 different premises with guns, battering down doors, harassing the people inside. They take 10 people under arrest. Dangerous terrorists? War criminals? Drug dealers?

Animal activists. There haven’t been any concrete charges yet, so they are basically prisoners of conscience. Some of them are in a hunger strike. It’s somewhat amazing that all that can happen in Austria in 2008.

Some more information:

• Petition to make them press charges or release them. Please sign it!
• Who’s being caged?, article in The Guardian
• Statement from Amnesty International in the Association against animal factories website.

Help stop this nonsense!

Some days ago, Arve posted a very interesting link in Twitter: Turn Your Point-and-Shoot into a Super-Camera. It was about something called CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit), which is a non-official firmware enhancement for many Canon cameras.

It sounds pretty scary, but actually it’s really safe and easy to use: you just copy some files into your memory card, and ask the camera to upgrade the firmware via some menu option. The awesome part is that it only “upgrades” a copy in memory, so if you simply turn off the camera, the next time everything is back to normal. Of course there are options to load it on startup if you’re happy with it.

The goodies: saving in RAW format, some new menu options, more information on the OSD, configurable OSD, BASIC scripting, and even games (Sokoban and Reversi). One of the features that caught my attention in the article was a special mode for motion detection, that apparently works well for making pictures of lightning strikes. And it’s actually a user-written script, how awesome is that?

I haven’t played that much with it yet, but I have tried and it works as advertised (YMMV). I can’t wait to use it more, and maybe even try some silly BASIC program.

Thanks a lot Arve! ;-)

Nine Inch Nails released their new album, The Slip, under a Creative Commons license. You are actually encouraged to “remix it share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”. After reading that, I couldn’t resist giving away my e-mail address to download it. There is an MP3 version and two FLAC versions, including a very high quality one.

Kudos to them. I just listened to the album for the first time, I will probably like it when I can make an informed opinion. At least the first impression was better than with Year Zero.

Also, looking around in the Net I was saw that they seem to be good Internet citizens, having at least a YouTube and Flickr users…

I admit I don’t get it. Tons of people are using Git these days, and most of them seem incredibly happy with it. I don’t really have any relevant experience with it (just used a couple of days), but I didn’t like it that much. Feels weird, clunky and complicated (especially, the interface is horrid, but then I’m used to Darcs so I’m biased/spoilt there).

Yeah, yeah. So everyone says that Git’s power lies in the concepts it’s built on, and that they’re different from other VCS, and you have to learn all that to really “get” Git. But at the same time they admit the documentation sucks and doesn’t really help you understand it. So, to be enlightened you have to play a lot with it then. I just don’t feel like it. I’m just afraid that all that power… well, I just won’t give a shit about it, to put it bluntly. Having a quick look at the net, the arguments supporting Git seem to sound really obscure or not that life saving to me.

And yes, I realise that sounds like the Blub Paradox in Beating the averages, but I just can’t see how a revision control system can be so wonderful and make a difference for small and medium projects. I have no doubt Git does make a difference every single day for the Linux kernel, but when most (non free software) projects work “not that bad” even with a centralised VCS like Subversion, is there really any important feature that Git can add vs. any other distributed system (I’m thinking mostly Mercurial here)? Isn’t the interface going to have a much bigger impact in everyday work (and everyone seem to agree that Git’s still sucks)?

Personally, I’m looking forward to certain talk about Git, to see if it will make me see the light ;-)

So, the other day I was reading about Scientology, and I stumble upon the Space opera in Scientology scripture. Apart from the odd article title, I couldn’t help but noticing the picture on the right. It has the following footer: “Hubbard said that the galactic ruler Xenu transported his victims to Earth in interstellar space planes which looked exactly like Douglas DC-8s”.

“Wow”, I thought, “that looks like a picture (and comment) from Uncyclopedia, not Wikipedia”. So, obviously, right after thinking that I just go to Uncyclopedia and check the Scientology page. It’s just hilarious, don’t miss it ;-) Apart from the funny reference to the poor journalist in that BBC documentary, it says things like:

Please be aware that Scientology’s beliefs are so absurd to begin with, that writing an Uncycopedia article about it is a massively difficult undertaking.

Not to mention that their parody of the plane is almost exactly the same :-)