Jonny’s Blog
Just another weblogFrom Monday I will be away in Moscow with little internet connectivity. I get back next Sunday.
I’m heading off to Norway tomorrow on the university orchestra tour, so will be away from the internet for a week.
So, I’ve been getting into this photography lark recently, and today I tried out a panoramic shot for the first time. I used hugin to stitch the photos together, and quickly found that more control points = better stitching. This is my first attempt and have learnt that taking the photos at 4pm in a really windy day, is not a great idea. Although I am really pleased about the stitching, the differing colours of photos makes it obvious where the stitches have taken place. The wind blowing the trees also didn’t help.
So, tomorrow I’m going to attempt to have another go in perhaps a few other places at 12pm, or whenever the Sun is directly above, and hopefully I can patch together a seamless shot. Fingers crossed.
Update: The photo uploaded to flickr is a little small and horrible. Here is a link to a 1.3MB JPEG file of the same thing. The original is 10MB or so, but I don’t think I’ll put that on the web as it isn’t actually any good as a panoramic shot — I’m just really pleased the stitching is good!
Everyone seems to be blogging about it, so I thought I’d join the crowd.
I’ve already been to some talks on Hildon, Xul, Telepathy, memory usage, accessibility and collaborative document editing. There has been a mixed amount of interestingness throughout the talks, but generally it’s great!
Tomorrow starts the core schedule and there are some great talks planned, including lots of Maemo/embedded ones.
Last weekend was Lugradio Live. It wasn’t exactly the greatest of events ever, but was satisfactory! The Debian stand was a little quiet as we had nothing to sell, and we only had a laptop and TFT on the table. I don’t think many knew what we were exhibiting. Although, I doubt LRL is really the place for a Debian stand.
However, the main purpose of my presence was to meet up with fellow Bongoers. It was an interesting time and was nice to meet the others. Alex has written a report about it.
To prove that I was there, I’ve found a photo on flickr. Although, even before I could blog about the event, this photo has been vandalised.
GUADEC starts on Sunday. Should be good! I’ve noticed a number of interesting talks there, mainly about Hildon/Maemo.
On Tuesday to Wednesday, I was in Durham. This was primarily for a departmental open day, but there was a chance to know the university and some people better.
I stayed in Grey college and it was nice. I met some nice people and am enthusiastic about going there. I was knackered when I got back though. Not really ready for school the next day, and I was truly rubbish and lazy at squash the following day! That’s about all there is to say here about it.
So a few days ago I turned 18. This doesn’t mean too much, but I suppose now officially an adult. I’m finally getting a provisional driving license in preparation for lessons, looking at student bank accounts, and more fun stuff!
Bongo Update: It looks like the folks after the first batch of Bongo Polos have all submitted their interest. I’ll email my contact soon asking about prices, and stuff.
- I saw some quartet play in Cambridge- Beethoven, Shostakovich and Ravel.
- I went to London to see some friends, and while I was there,
- I went to a talk by Simon Phipps about open-sourcing Java.
- UCAS is finished for now as I have heard from all the institutions I applied to.
- Started reading the K&R C book.
This will be expanded on in time, when I have time.
I went to LinuxWorld Expo on Wednesday. It was really interesting and I enjoyed it, although I did spend a little too much time there. The emDebian stand was interesting and I chatted about HTC phones running Linux for a while. The Hula stand showed me a nice installation of Hula. I was impressed with this and have tried getting it working on my server, failing so far on the fact that I need to use apache2 and this is broken at the moment. There were other interesting stands, but you know ‘em. I listened to Jono Bacon’s talk on Ubuntu in the community, or something like that. It was alright, but a little tedious as I already knew about Ubuntu! In fact, this week has made me appreciate Ubuntu a lot more. Another thing that I thought was interesting at the expo was the fact that some stands had people who didn’t really know much about the project, or direct competitors, which was a little odd. An amusing thing was the corporate stands- as soon as they saw I was representing no company they realised I must be a student and promptly ignored me!
I got several bits of free stuff, including:
A few things to ponder over:
- This new theme for Wordpress is lovely! I edited it a little to remove the left sidebar, add the description to directly under the header and to remove all tag support. I love it!
- My UCAS form is totally complete and now out of my life. Well, I lie- I still need to decide what college to apply to at Durham- any suggestions?!
- Half term is coming up and a few things on the card: Linuxworld Expo (yay) and visiting people…
- I watched Revolution OS which was a bit of a laugh to listen to Stallman, Perens, Eric Raymond, etc. but was informative at the same time! Pointed out my ignorance of the actual roots of the GNU project.
- Funny- my sixth form tutor is learning LaTeX!
- Got the Old Dispensary Concert after half term in which I’ve playing the first movement of Brandenburg 4 and Meditation from Thais by Massenet- I should really do some practice soon.
- Oh, and on the music front- the House Music Competition is this Thursday! It is bound to be a laugh with School House singing Feeling Good, a version by Michael Buble, in the ensemble; and as a whole house singing “Masachism Tango” by Tom Lehrer!
That is all, for now.