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A Fine Flying Day

Up early this morning for the second flight of my Flight Instructor training – a very good flight, overall, with a bunch of stuff I hadn’t seen since the very early days of my Private Pilot training (six years and 300+ hrs ago…). It was clear, cold and very, very frosty this morning, though!

Frosty Morning

This evening I got to fly again, just as a passenger this time. This is actually a bit of a treat; I’m usually in one of the front seats, too busy with flying the plane to indulge in much sightseeing. Being cargo meant I could exercise the limits of my little digital camera, and get some very cool, rather impressionistic night shots from the back seat.

Vancouver After Dark
Downtown Vancouver After Dark, III
Downtown Vancouver After Dark, I

More, as always, at my Flickr stream – enjoy!

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Panoramas & Snow, Round 2

As a followup to my previous post on Hugin troubles (many thanks for the feedback there, everyone) I’ve done some more fiddling, and discovered the main issue: Hugin will export completed panoramas happily in TIFF, but not in other formats (JPG, PNG, etc) despite those options appearing in Hugin’s dropdown menus. It crashes or freezes every time when asked to do non-TIFF output.

That’s an irritation rather than a huge issue, though, as the GIMP quite happily converts TIFF into other formats. As witness this pano of Sunday’s lovely weather:

It Never Snows In Victoria

I also did a second pass (with Hugin instead of Pandora, which I used earlier) on the previous set of images:

CYYJ Snow Panorama, Take 2

And just to prove it wasn’t all a fluke, I dug out some year-old images I’d always intended to create a panorama of:

Wurzburg, Germany, Aug. 2007

So, Hugin works, within limits. Native non-TIFF output would be nice, but it’s not a showstopper. And panoramas are great fun – neat to give a super-wide-angle view with a very ordinary camera!

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Snow, Panorama Apps, and other Irritations

We might just have a white Christmas here – bleh. The white stuff started falling on Saturday, has started up again today, and temps that refuse to rise above 1šC look set to keep the snow around for a while yet.

Victoria Int'l Under Snow

The above was created in GIMP with the Pandora panorama plugin, which works after a fashion but is a very basic way of munging together panoramas from multiple photographs.

The theoretically more elegant, complete & automated way of creating panoramas, Hugin, freezes, crashes or throws errors nearly every time I try it. I can get the two-image tutorial to work some of the time, but anything else screws up … This is Hugin 0.7.0 in Ubuntu 8.10 — does anyone know if this thing actually works at all, or is it just hard-drive clutter at this stage in it’s development?

Error Screen in Hugin

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Biking to Democracy

Although it’s much overshadowed by the clown show to the south of us, there is in fact a federal election going on here in the Great White North. Thanks to some oddness of the Election Canada database, I was no longer registered in the riding I’ve been living in for the last five or so years, so I had to go to my local riding office to re-register — best to do that now instead of election day, the chap at Election Canada’s call centre said.

It’s about 24km by road, round trip, a nice easy bikeride for my day off assuming the damn rain held off. Re-registering took all of two minutes after a nice ride; asking the clerk about voting lead to him mentioning that there was, in fact, an absentee/advance polling station open right there, if I was sure I knew who I was voting for…

Remembering my ABCs, I decided to vote then and there… so I’ve done my bit, now I get to watch the show (ours and the Yanks) and complain about whoever wins!

As a bonus, it didn’t start drizzling until I was nearly home, too…

Are You Registered?