Everyone else is doing it, so here’s mine. Nice low ping, decent download speed, but wildly assymetrical Download vs Upload, even by the (low) standards of the ISP.
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Tag: ubuntu
All things Ubuntu here.
Disclaimer, because they seem to be popular when posting UbuntuOne commentary to Planet Ubuntu right now: These are my opinions. I don’t work for Canonical, I don’t program, I’m just an Ubuntu user, Ubuntu Member, and opinionated SOB. End stupid attempt at disclaimer.
When you go to log in to the new, shiny & controversial Ubuntu One, you find it uses Launchpad’s authentication service to login. The closed beta currently means that everyone using it already has an LP account, of course, but they’re obviously planning for the future over on UbuntuOne – there’s a little blurb called “What is Launchpad and a Launchpad Account?”
It says, in part: “Launchpad is the central point where we gather all sorts of interactions around Ubuntu, Canonical and free software generally.”
Free software generally? Really? In which universe? Big chunks of Launchpad are still non-Free, and of course about half the mess with Ubuntu One is the fact that it’s only half-free – the client is Free, the whole server side is totally proprietary.
Another, even larger and more awesome irony: The proprietary nature of Ubuntu One’s server-side code has, so far, mostly produced controversy and a nifty but not ground-breaking web app. The open-source client side has already produced parts of a nifty new UI for encrypted directories that will (hopefully) be in the next release of Nautilus.
All the closed-source server code for Ubuntu One has produced in the past week is controversy. The power of open source shows once again…
If Canonical can swallow it’s pride, this is a really easy problem to solve: 1. Change the name. 2. Produce the source for the server side. 3. There is no point 3. Good night and good luck.
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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:
I also did a second pass (with Hugin instead of Pandora, which I used earlier) on the previous set of images:
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:
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!
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.
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?
