The mobile phone revolution really is sweeping across Africa.
Story here.
Elephant sends text message
October 13th, 2008
If the world could vote…
October 13th, 2008
Martin sent me a link to this quite interesting site – if the world could vote for the US president, whom would you pick?
Now, this is a cute idea, though of course the rest of us won’t have to live with the domestic decisions, the tax burden, the healthcare system etc. of whomever gets chosen. And I wish it had been done by somebody inside the country rather than an outsider.
None the less, it’s valuable data, so as long as you can say with a clear conscience that you wouldn’t mind Americans making suggestions about your next leader, cast your vote!
Quote of the day
October 12th, 2008
“Be who you are, and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as ‘Dr Seuss’
From Concepts to Companies
October 11th, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk entitled ‘From Concepts to Companies’ at a conference in Katowice, Poland, organised by the Polish Information Processing Society (PIPS) and sponsored by DisplayLink. The talks are now online here – mine is below, in case you’re interested.
You can right-click here to download a smallish MPEG4 (H.264) version.
One-way ticket
October 10th, 2008
If you visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, the thing that strikes you is the scale. You start at Auschwitz I, just down the road, where you hear about the various horrors. And then you visit Birkenau, and you realise that most of what you’ve just seen and heard about was really experimentation – they were just getting the small-scale process right so it could be expanded to an industrial scale.
It’s almost impossible to capture this in a photograph. Most of the original buildings were wooden and only their chimneys remain as evidence. Have a look at this close-up of the right hand side to get a feel for the size of just a portion of the site. I’d visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem before, but this is something completely different.
Here’s the full-size version of the above panorama.
A tour of Auschwitz is not an easy experience. But it’s something everybody should do if they get a chance.
The landscape keyboard is mightier than… the portrait one
October 9th, 2008
TouchType is a handy little iPhone/iTouch utility if you compose many email messages on your phone. That’s all it does – lets you compose or reply to emails – but it does it with a landscape-format keyboard.
By default, the standard keyboard will only switch into landscape mode in the web browser. (It’s well worth rotating your phone before typing into a web form field.) This utility can’t quite add that facility to other apps, but it creates a separate app into which you can enter larger quantities of text and then tap a button to fire them into the main mail program. If you rotate your phone and then put it down on the desk, you can just about type with two fingers.
Worthwhile, I think, considering it’s only 59p.
Incoming…
October 8th, 2008
An asteroid hit earth yesterday. Actually, it mostly broke up as it entered the atmosphere so there was nothing very Hollywoodish about it, but it was notable because it was a decent size – around 2-5m – but more significantly, it was the first earth-impacting rock to have been tracked before it hit us. It was discovered about a day in advance of the impact.
This story, in comparison, was discovered by me about a day after it happened. But no doubt, with a comparable rate of progress, I’ll soon be able to bring you news stories before they actually occur.
Spiral
October 7th, 2008
I liked the lack of anything very rectilinear in this one! Rose is in the tower of the church in Krakow market square. This is what is looks like from the outside:
Open Source as a strategy for the future
October 6th, 2008
One of the most interesting discussions I’ve heard on the subject of Open Source for some time is the interview with Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun, on the FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Open Source – this goes beyond the level of the usual debates.
Krakow Castle
October 6th, 2008
One of my first HDR experiments.
Autopano Pro
October 5th, 2008
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.
Windows Users
October 5th, 2008
Spotted in Krakow last weekend.
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