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March 30, 2007

Home Again

I'm back in Baltimore after a whirlwind tour of San Francisco. My internal time clock, which has never really been that accurate, woke me up at 7:45 EST after being forced backwards all week.

I didn't really get the chance to take a lot of pictures this time around, because much of my time was spent working, commuting, eating, or sleeping. The job itself is new and challenging, and I like the people a lot. While I was out there I was able to catch up with a bunch of friends, which made the trip twice as valuable to me—a lot of good people are out on the Left Coast now, and my work schedule has made it possible to visit with them and get paid for it, something I appreciate greatly.

Meanwhile, I've taken over some additional responsibility on a current project which should make April a very frantic month, something I view with a mixture of excitement and dread. There are a lot of balls to juggle in the upcoming weeks, and I hope I have the ability to do so.

Posted on March 30, 2007 11:00 AM | link to this entry

March 27, 2007

Next Exit

On the way to work this morning, I snapped this shot of a highway overpass sign. I thought it was funny.

Posted on March 27, 2007 6:27 PM | link to this entry

Danger

The peeling wall of a gun battery in Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This place reminded me of the old batteries on the North Jersey shore by my grandmother's house, and the photos I've seen of the prewar fortifications in the Philippines. This kind of stuff fascinates me for reasons I can't explain; I like the idea of modern concrete castles and huge guns on disappearing carriages guarding the city from attack by sea.

Posted on March 27, 2007 2:02 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

March 26, 2007

Calla Lilies

Another shot from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Posted on March 26, 2007 8:23 PM | link to this entry

March 25, 2007

Point Bonita Lighthouse

Through the fog.

Posted on March 25, 2007 6:11 PM | link to this entry

March 23, 2007

The Clock Is Ticking...

I have one more day (today) to prepare for my trip west, and I'm no further along than I was last Tuesday. This week has been spent putting out fires, taking care of current work, and fitting in the odd moment of personal time where I can—but mainly, it's been a series of twelve to fourteen hour days set up like dominoes, each crashing into the next.

I have a pile of junk on my desk (the "take with me" file) and another pile of stuff on the floor (the "might take it with me" pile) which is making it difficult to use the new Bluetooth mouse I bought at the Apple Store yesterday (yes, they had Apple TV there, but no, I didn't get to see it or buy one). It's a Logitech V270 optical mouse, and I'm probably going to take it back for an exchange. The buttons are too hard to press—I don't need to exacerbate my carpal tunnel here—and the scroll wheel does that annoying thing where it's slow to start and then speeds up too fast, like selecting text in MS Word in Windows: just when I get to the thing I want, suddenly I'm seventy-three pages past it. So it's back to the junk mouse for now.

I haven't been taking too many pictures these days, both because I don't have a lot of good subject matter and because time is at a premium. I'm hoping to change that when I'm in Cali, because I need a change of scenery to get some creative juices flowing. I was hoping to bring some illustration work with me to work on, but it's looking more like I'm going to be reading a new book in preparation for a project that's taken a completely different turn while I'm out there, as well as trying out some new software to help the process along.

Crap. It's 5:30 already, I owe two proposals this afternoon and I haven't packed anything yet.

Posted on March 23, 2007 5:14 PM | link to this entry

March 20, 2007

What a Colossal Waste Of Time

The Netgear FVS114 router is a small little box, but don't let it fool you: It's the biggest pile of shit I've ever had the displeasure of trying to configure. VPN on the whole seems to be some kind of smoke-and-mirrors, propellerhead handjob involving IP addresses (check), shared keys, certificates (uh...), authentications, policies (WTF?), and seventy-three other acronyms that make my eyeballs bleed. This product is billed as an easy-to-configure product for the average homeowner, but this is LIES. The only homeowner doing any configuring on this thing is that guy who ran the computer lab in college who smelled like cheese.

Buying the box and configuring it is pretty straightforward, I guess. I say "I guess" because it could be continually pinging every server in the Czech Republic and I wouldn't know; after I stepped through their wizard, there was a pretty simple little screen that came up and connected with the Netgear website, and I could see the internets, and so I figured it was working OK.

Attempting to connect using the built-in VPN client in XP met with a big zero: Netgear wanted to read a menu in Mandarin Chinese and XP wanted to recite times tables in Swahili. After looking around for open-source help (hint: don't bother), I found that Netgear sells VPN client software which is supposed to work seamlessly with the box, and come with pre-configured setup files that I could use to connect to the router. Not wishing to waste any more of my client's time, I ordered it, and it arrived this afternoon.

My installation process went something like this:

1. Install the software.


2. Use the "wizard", which misconfigured my client software so badly that I had to uninstall and reinstall it.


3. Follow the PDF "Manual," which was written for the entire family of VPN routers but mainly focused on the more expensive FVS318 VPN router, and includes multiple menu items that our router doesn't have, making configuration impossible.


4. Folow the software "Help" files, which recommend a THIRD, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT METHOD OF CONFIGURING THE SOFTWARE. Which doesn't work. And results in another uninstall/reinstall cycle.


5. Research the downloadable profiles, and find that there are only two files written for routers that I don't have.


6. Realize there is no online help, and that support via Netgear is fee-based.


7. Uninstall the software for the last time.
   

Netgear's documentation is the most poorly written, incomprehensible mess I've ever been forced to read: each of the manuals were written on different continents by different engineers about different products. And none of them worked; if I'd been able to get one of them to function properly, I'd be happy.

Consider yourself warned: This is crap. Stay away.

Posted on March 20, 2007 10:50 AM | link to this entry

March 19, 2007

The Score.

The Idiot: 0
Technology: 5

Posted on March 19, 2007 6:40 PM | link to this entry

March 15, 2007

Going Back To Cali.

It's not quite official yet, but OK, it's official. The word on the street is that I'm headed back out to San Francisco at the end of this month for a project kickoff meeting with a new client (I'm keeping names and places confidential). I will be spending the next two weeks brushing up on several new technologies, a content management system, and my sparkling personality.

* * *

In other news, a brief interruption in Movable Type service here at Idiot Central was traced back to a botched install of MT-Akismet in hopes of stemming the tide of comment spam. I was about to freak out yesterday when all I got after logging in to the management section was a blank page, but I walked away from it for half a day and remembered what things I'd monkeyed with when the site started to go south. So, to sum up: When the manual says that MT-Akismet doesn't work with MT 3.1, it's not kidding.

* * *

I'm finding that installing and configuring a private VPN is about as easy as assembling a nuclear reactor underwater with directions in Chinese. I'm not a stupid man, but do they make this shit impossible to understand on purpose? Seriously, I haven't had to deal with this many acronyms at one time in my life! And it seems like the vendors all have different acronyms for the same thing. Just call it one word and be done with it, you dorks.

* * *

After a good bit of time in development, I've posted a replacement for (what I considered) one of the weaker illustrations at the Alphabet Project, the letter Q. I was trying something different, but I wasn't ever really happy with the solution. The new solution is in the form of a concert poster for a show I didn't attend, and it stars a lady I figured I'd find much more about here on the internets-but didn't. I wound up using screen grabs from a video I found online for photo reference.

I'm also working furiously on new art for a larger project, something I've been threatening to do for years, and something it took a well-timed and much appreciated push from my wife to actually begin: I made a down payment for an advertisement at the Directory of Illustration last week. The Directory is a combination of marketing tools which include a searchable website, a hardback book which gets distributed in the fall, and a pile of other resources for promotion. This means that my work will be seen by a ton of new people very quickly. This also means I need to have a page layout for the book by the beginning of May, and I have space reserved for 20 illustrations on their website right now. Part of my revisit to the Alphabet Project is to clean up the work I'm not entirely happy with, which means that Paul Bremer will get a rework. Mark Felt will probably get looked at (or maybe replaced). And Interpol will probably get cleaned up too. Once I've got that stuff looking tight, I'm going to post a handful on the other site and see if anything happens.

I don't think I'm going to be sleeping much in the near future...

Posted on March 15, 2007 10:30 PM | link to this entry

March 14, 2007

Possibly the funniest thing I've seen so far this year.

This is oh, so not safe for work, but good goddamn, it's funny. I laughed so hard my stomach hurts.

Posted on March 14, 2007 12:46 PM | link to this entry

March 13, 2007

From The Consumer Affairs Desk

A few months ago, Jen and I bought a Pur water filter from Sam's Club, the kind that screws onto the end of the faucet and hangs over the sink. For $40, I figured it was better than buying another stupid Pur filter for the pitcher in our fridge. Installation was pretty easy, and when I turned the water on, it flowed through the tap smoothly. When I turned the filter on, however, water began shooting from each seam in the plastic housing, bypassing the filter and spraying the entire sink. No amount of tinkering fixed the problem, and I gave up on it in disgust.

The second contestant is pictured here:

It's a Whirlpool WHCF-SUF under sink main faucet filtration system. Theoretically, it's supposed to sit in between the cold water supply valve and your kitchen faucet, and filter out all sorts of harmful impurities from your cold water. In reality, it's a waste of money and time.

See the little blue hoses there? Some genius engineer at Whirlpool decided to substitute them in place of normal $.50 threaded hoses, the kind that are easily obtainable at any hardware store. This is a halfassed plastic hose and pressure clamp attachment that does not stand up to normal water pressure. This means that after one has spent fifteen backbreaking minutes under the kitchen sink, disconnecting the old hoses, screwing the filter head into the cabinet wall, and attaching the plastic hoses, water will spray all over the underside of the cabinet when the pressure is turned back on. No attempt to correct the situation will result in success, and only result in soaked frustration.

I'm no plumber, but I've run a couple hundred feet of PVC tubing and sweated my share of copper joints. I should have realized this was a bullshit product when I opened the box, but I chose to give it a try. Don't make the same mistake I did.

We're going to have a real plumber come in and give us a quote on installing a whole-house filtration system, something that goes in with copper tubing, pressure relief valves, and a warranty. Enough of the mickey mouse bullshit.

Posted on March 13, 2007 9:38 AM | link to this entry

March 8, 2007

On Shiny Things: Automobile Edition.

Would it be completely assinine of me to even consider purchasing this beauty of a vehicle? Something this large, expensive, improbable, unwieldy, and impractical? Because that bumper is about a mile wide, and I'd swear to Dog it's smiling at me.

I need a real garage...

Posted on March 8, 2007 10:24 PM | link to this entry

March 7, 2007

Reward

Posted on March 7, 2007 2:36 PM | link to this entry

March 6, 2007

Separated At Birth.

Waaaaay back in march of last year I wrote about a book I was reading called Imperial Grunts, a current tour of various known and not-so-known US military adventures overseas. As part of my self-assigned illustration series, I did a cover illustration for the book in April of 2006, mocked it up based on the cover of the existing book, then filed it away until I was finished with the Alphabet Project.

Last night, while assembling the next version of my portfolio, I dusted off the image and set it up in my Photoshop template. While Googling for the book so that I could pull a quote for the text of the page, I noticed they'd changed the cover from the first printing:

I don't believe I ever posted this picture to the web (correct me if you think I may be wrong here.) The coincidence made me laugh out loud, although I can't use the image in my portfolio. I've been struggling to get my conceptual brain back into gear for the last couple of months, and seeing this other solution made me believe that I might not be doing so badly after all.

* * *

In other news: Scooter Libby is guilty. Ha ha indeed!

Posted on March 6, 2007 11:41 AM | link to this entry

March 5, 2007

Panoramic Research.

I'm doing some in-depth research to figure out how to do panoramic photography for the web this morning, and it seems like there's a lot of information out there but not a lot of clear direction.

I should back up and mention that I got my Panosaurus rig in the mail on Friday, and I'm very happy with it. Setup took a bit of time, but the included directions were clear and informative. The materials are all very good quality, and the only problem I had with the whole thing was due to the fact that my tripod head is too weak to support the weight of the rig and the camera. Borrowing Jen's 18-55mm lens, I shot the entire living room and uploaded the images (37 total) to my laptop for working.

Now, to the software: Apple led the way back in the day with Quicktime VR, a technology that seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years. The only source for a copy of the VR Authoring Studio is Amazon, and it looks like it's still a Classic application (!?!) as far as I can tell—the design of the box pictured is vintage 1996. Apple has a number of cryptic and oblique little apps that handle some of the specialized tricks the larger suite does, including a Classic app called QTVR Make Panorama that will convert a stitched panoramic photo into a QTVR movie embeddable in a webpage.

This is a preliminary test, so I didn't lock the exposure or light the back of the room, makng it uneven and blown out. I believe SHIFT and CTRL are the zoom controls.

There seem to be a number of applications that have come along to challenge QTVR and work with their own proprietary Java applets, including one I've used in the past, PhotoVista. PhotoVista is a decent application, doing a good job of stitching images and creating a Java applet viewer to show the final product. Unfortunately, due to the way iseemedia has written their applet code, I can't deep-link to a source file as per the standard methods, so all I can do is link to a separate page, which is a lousy, inelegant solution.

About the best resource for other applications I found was this site, Panoguide.com, which has some helpful articles and links to various vendors. Unfortunately, some of the information is years out of date, as are some of the linked applications. The always excellent Steves Digicams has a small page dedicated to photostitching software where I was able to find some applications that did a pretty reasonable job with what I'd shot, most notably The Panorama Factory. PhotoVista and The Panorama Factory won't (as far as I can tell) stitch images shot on more than one plane automatically, which limits them to circular panoramics only.

RealViz Stitcher also did an excellent job of putting together panoramics and made the process very easy, up until the stitching was done. While it got points for its output of clean, crisp images and being available for OS X, Stitcher has some rough edges to polish. The interface, which starts out looking clean, becomes a nightmare when the images are stitched together:

This is the main view window. It's not resizable either, as far as I can tell.

The great thing about Stitcher is that it recognizes photos shot on multiple planes automatically, so when I added all 37 images I was rewarded with a stitched file that included the floor and cieling elements. Additionally, the output options in Stitcher are very robust—I had a choice of standalone Java applets, QTVR movies, or simple rendered images I could import into other programs for final output.

What I wanted to end up with is a cubic view, meaning a complete 360° panoramic shot including the floor and cieling, or at least more than the field of view I'm dealing with now. Initially, I couldn't find anything that would stitch the photos I shot in a way that didn't induce vomiting when they were viewed. The end product of the stitch needed to be something other than a wide image file that went into an applet viewer, either a six-face or equirectangular image:

An equirectangular image

One of the problems I found with the process is that I had to have a glossary for the specific terms each vendor, programmer, and developer used, because some of them are the same thing and some of them are not. For example, I was pretty sure I had the ability to save a file from Stitcher that I could then import into a handy Apple utility called MakeCubic. But it took me some time to dive in and figure out which export option under which menu I needed to select to get the right file type in Stitcher.

This is a full-blown 360° panorama. The stupid yellow flags are there because I'm using a demo of the software. Note the gaps in the cieling.

So, to recap, I have to do some tweaking of the panoramic head to get rid of the parallax and other ghosting errors and be sure to shoot more photos in each series. I can make a circular panorama with PhotoVista, which is simple and available in QTVR or Java formats. Stitcher ($119 US) will allow me to put the photos together and output an equirectangular image I can then import into MakeCubic and output a QTVR file for the web.

As I continue refining the process and doing more research, I'll add it here, as well as share my examples.

Bibliography:

• HTML Scripting for QTVR-includes some handy links for hotlinking movies together.
  
• Panocube-creates QTVR movies from equirectangular panoramas much like MakeCubic.
  
• Apple's QTVR tools-Most are still Classic apps. Have fun.
  
• How to set up the camera-good info here.
  

Posted on March 5, 2007 11:35 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

March 3, 2007

Swine

Posted on March 3, 2007 4:29 PM | link to this entry

March 1, 2007

Fire Caddy

I saw this warhorse in a parking lot on my way out to a client's this morning, and stopped to take some shots of it. It's a two-door convertible, tricked out with flames, hood scoops, and old-skool lettered wheels. Somebody's parents were afraid of this car, for sure.

Posted on March 1, 2007 12:05 AM | link to this entry