Endlich gibts wieder Bilder in allen Posts. Da ich das Verzeichnis von Wordpress auf meinem Webspace geändert hatte, musste ich in allen Posts die Links zu Bildern korrigieren. Glücklicherweise hat mir dieses Plugin diese Arbeit denkbar einfach gemacht!
The hugin panorama creator is a great tool for photographers who use Linux. It has great abilities to merge photos into a nice panorama image. Hugin, The Panorama photo stitcher is absolutely great. I just tried it with two photos I took some time ago and jumped on my terrace to make a series of 6 I could merge to a single image. It worked outstandingly.
This shows how you can connect the different images with points where the same object or same pattern appears. (I know these images are horrible, I should have taken 2-3 more of that building. Btw, this is the town hall of Flensburg.
The hugin website offers a lot of tutorials which I definetly going to have a look at. Puzzling images together in GIMP can really consume a lot of time. *sigh*
Here my first results:
Hello all you command line lovers out there and all you people who may find this post very very strange. CLI stands for command line interface (you type instead of clicking). My most recent discovery for Firefox is Vimperator, an addon which gives you ~1 ton of key bindings and commands to use your webbrowser. Of course it specifically aims at people who already are familiar with the famous command line text editor vi or vim which I’ve already written about here.
Very useful key bindings:
Hey, I’m just giving a short introduction to cygwin, to give Windows users :> the possibility to use ruby, python and all other kinds of scripts.
Download Cygwin from cygwin.com
Start installing Cygwin and choose a server and after that, choose the packages you want to install:
After installing cygwin, you can use it like pretty much every shell, navigate to the place where your script is placed or download the script/program directly into your cygwin directory. You can run a python script with for example typing: “python scriptname.py”.
Parted Magic is a distribution focussed on, guess what? Partitioning! Exactly! Recently (some month ago) I had the problem that none of the distribution I actually liked to install on the machine were able to edit the partition table properly. I looked around and found Parted Magic! which really is great and should be a part of every IT-lovers mobile toolbox. This small and handy gui tool is really worth downloading and a smart solution to partitioning problems. Nice to have, really. Especially if you’re often confronted with partitioning in general.
Yes, finally during my time working on an article for a german webmaster community, I felt that I really had to go through the functions of vi. Vi is a legendary editor that is one of the standard editors in most Unix Systems. I actually understand the hate- and lovestories about this editor. People might say: “Come on, it’s just an editor!“, but if you ever had to configure a config file on a server, far far away and the only tool you have is vi, this can be a very disturbing situation. Vi works different from most text-editors existing I guess. The keys you press in vi have functions, they don’t make you write text, if you don’t put vi in the “insert mode” with the i key. And it handles a lot of additional commands and you actually work with vi through them a lot. Like saving a file is “:w” and exiting without saving “:q!”. So we see, it’s not very intuitive. On the other hand, vi can give you excellent workflows through the intelligent use and placement of hotkeys and if you remember all the commands right of course.
my favourite quote from wikipedia about vi: Sure vi is user-friendly; it’s just peculiar about who it makes friends with.
I don’t think I’ll use vi or vim (improved version) for productivity reasons, because I like the KISS principe (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I don’t want to get used to all the key bindings, at least not for now. Maybe vi will seem more attractive when I’m handling code daily or at my job. Currently I’m only using it on smaller scripts I’m working on right now, so, welcome my new friend vi 
so long… keep typing
Flock is a very friendly piece of software, based on Firefox, that aims at the blogging and 24/7 connected generation. It comes with a lot of so called social-computing gadgets. My favourites are the Web-Clipboard, the Blog-Poster and the Photo-Uploader. You can add nearly any account (Blogger, Livejournal, Wordpress) and blog from within your browser. The Photo-Uploader is a very good tool for sharing photos on the fly. You select a couple of pictures, give them a comment or just batch comment them all, select size and rotation and upload them into an album on Photobucket or Piczo with a click. I think even my mom could overlook the simple features.
The editor for blog entries can still be improved in my opinion with features for image upload and a function to save something as a draft on your blog and not only on your computer, but maybe that will be integrated later.
So, I’ve been flogging this.. Don’t confuse that with a flogger whip 
Screenshots:
<-The blog-posting addon with web-clipboard sidebar
<- and the photo uploader
<-you can watch flickr or photobucket accounts with the media bar
Links:
(new splash screen by Paul Davey)
With great exitement I can announce, that version 2.4 of the famous Gnu Image Manipulation Program is worth a download. I’ve been using it since version 1.2.3 and it has improved a lot. In the current version the interface got more intuitive and it finally supports colour profiles, which are pretty essential for printing.
Links:
The Team around the Linux Distribution Sidux, has released a new preview of the Eros release. This release, however, seems to support my mainboard fully, so my Linux-Box here at home is online again! It was a big pain in the ss to be unconnected for so long and be forced to use Windows on this precious hardware. The team who maintains Sidux is mainly the old Kanotix team. Sidux is a stable Operating System based on Debian Sid. They have a lot of scripts, that make it very valueable for beginners. If you want to try Linux, this could be your Live-cd or first installation. Give it a try
Good old Microsoft just bought a lot of their partners to vote YES for their OOXML format which they try to make a standard. The OpenOffice.org Format, ODF has already become a standard. The problem with Microsofts “standard” is that it is only designed for their expensive products. Luckly the vote was cancelled after the fact, that nearly all the voter were partners of Mircrosoft was revealed.
More info: os2world.com
