Three exposures aligned, fused and blended with hugin 0.8.0

There is a very good step by step tutorial how to build hugin on Ubuntu which can be applied on debian, too. Although, there are some issues:

• libpano13 is available now in debian unstable. So you don’t have to build it on your own. Just install the pacage libpano13-dev.
• wxwidgets2.8 is also available. But you have to make sure to uninstall all 2.6 versions you might have installed, hugin will not compile the gui components if it 2.6 is found. You will get a cmake output similar to this:

  -- Found wxWidgets: TRUE
  wxWidgets 2.6.x not supported
  wxWidgets was not found, GUI programs (hugin, nona_gui) disabled
  

• libboost_thread.so is not available. The new library file in debian unstable is called libboost_thread-mt.so. It works anyway if you create a symlink:

  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so \
       /usr/lib/libboost_thread.so

That’s it.

Although, there seems to be a bug with libdrm-intel. It crashes while creating the control points.

../../../libdrm/intel/intel_bufmgr_gem.c:712: Error preparing buffer
map -1261963602 ((null)): Invalid argument .
hugin: vbo/vbo_save_api.c:216: map_vertex_store: Assertion
`vertex_store->buffer' failed.
Aborted

This is due to the GL fast preview I assume. Without this preview it works fine anyways, you don’t need this.

Update: And after upgrading some packages (on debian unstable) and recompiling it works without error. Not sure what caused this error.

By the way, if you want install hugin 0.8.0 on Windows, you can use a prerelease installer. It works on Windows XP, too. There is more information in the hugin blog.

We got Microsoft Office 2007 installed on our office computers now. My first impression: “Oh my god… blue! How do I change the color?” I searched half an hour in the MS Office menus and in the help… no way. I tried the MS Office live support… no way. Finally I found it somewhere (especially for Outlook, as this is the application I am used to have opened):

Open a message or create a new one
-> Click on the fancy colorful MS Office button at the upper left
-> Click on the “Editor Properties” button which is on the lower right of the MS Office button dialog
-> Go to “Popular”
-> Change the color scheme.

Purely intuitive. Ah, and be disappointed that there is no “standard style”, just blue, gray or black fancy color schemes.

The MS Outlook option dialogs did not change — the same unusable stuff for about 10 years now. Disappointing. The Signature dialog is still modal and not resizable, although they made it bigger. The task window is also still not resizable. Why? Any reason?

Another issue: How the hell do I turn off antialiasing? My whole system is not antialiased, why MS Office needs to turn it on? I don’t want it. It seems that turning it off is impossible…

What a mess. Really disappointing.

But, to be honest, there are improvements: The search field in Outlook (finally!) for example. And the so called “Ribbon” really makes it easier to find stuff — I didn’t expect this –, but it kills room on your screen.

Update: Incredible, there is a “Copy Hyperlink” entry in the context menu of Outlook!

I was searching for a good note taking tool for Windows since last year. I am using Tomboy under Linux and I love it. There are a few wishes I would liked to be integrated but anyway, it is the best I know.

I did not found anything similar for Windows. Until I lately discovered that there is a Windows version of Tomboy, too!

Great. I followed the instructions of installation and had no problems.

From: Information Services

We wanted to let everyone know that to help improve your PC’s performance and to prepare for the coming upgrade to Office 2007, Information Services is planning to install Windows Search…

No, no kidding. If it wouldn’t be so sad, it would be very funny.

I personally don’t use Windows, I have to use it at work, but for private things, photo related things etc, I don’t, I have my Debian Sid machine and I am happy with it.

I am using F-Spot to manage my photos. But Lately I was searching something similar to F-Spot for Windows for my sister and my father in law. This is frustrating as there is no application which supports keywording or tagging, searching for tags and keywords, displaying all photos recursively in a directory sorted by date taken (EXIF date). Picasa does not. XnView does — almost. At least XnView supports displaying all photos recursively in a directory and all subdirectories and sorting by EXIF date. But it does not support any keywording, tagging or searching.

The frustration brought me to try out Windows Live Photo Gallery (for Windows XP). Well, it is Windows Live. Fancy user interface distracting the user, the UI is not as responsive as I would wish it to be and so on. But at least it supports all the criteria I was searching for. Without having to buy any other expensive Software. So I recommended it. The tags are written into the EXIF data, in the “Subject” and the XMP Keyword EXIF tags. You can change the date taken of your photos and this date is written into the EXIF tags, too. So there does not seem to be any proprietary Microsoft stuff in there.

Trying it out I recognized that it supports automatic face detection. :-) It is interesting that this monkey face is recognized and the face in the same photo but with less of black margin is not.

You can even display Nikon RAW files (NEF) with this application, see this Windows Experience Team Blog entry and this one, too. You just have to download and install the Nikon RAW Codecs.

My D90 RAW files are imported correctly, displayed as thumbnail but not displayed in large view, The application sais that I might have too less memory to display it… don’t think so.