onfocus

If Google Smackdown is any sort of scientific predictor (and it isn't), Gray Davis should retain his governorship.

1. Gray Davis (596,000)
   
2. Arnold Schwarzenegger (525,000)
   

You heard it here first.

Like many others, I got slammed by the SoBig.F email virus. But not because my system was infected (my server filters out many potentially virus-laden attachments). I got hit because the virus forged the from address as one of my addresses. Like the Cnet article says, "The address is also spoofed and may not indicate the true identity of the sender." So I got hit with bounces from systems that think I sent the virus. I noticed that many of the bounces were coming from the same IP address, so I blocked it from my mail server. But other systems sent bounce-messages, and there's really no way to prevent this from happening. So even though I follow fairly good virus-protection practices—and my system isn't infected in any way—I still have to deal with the effects.

Amazon has changed the status of Amazon Hacks from "pre-order" to "Usually ships within 24 hours". If you order right now you could be reading all 100 Amazon tips & tools in just a few days. (You can read a few of the hacks earlier at the hacks site.) I think this means you should be able to pick up Amazon Hacks at your local bookstore later this week. I'm anxious to see the book in its final form!

In fact, I can't wait for my copy so I just ordered one from Amazon. That's probably the fastest way to get the book right now.

Here's a great look at the human side of an Oregon state bill (pdf) that would require state agencies to consider open source software when making software decisions: Open Source in Oregon Fight Reaches Critical Juncture. The introduction to the bill is worth reading because it makes the business case for using open source software; explaining that it's all about self-interest and saving money. The article in Linux Today is by a primary backer of the bill, and he outlines the work he's done to get the bill where it is. It's now at a critical point, and needs support from the public to get passed. [via Slashdot]

My obsession with panoramics continues. A friend recommended Realviz Stitcher to help put them together, and I've been having fun trying it out. Today I walked up to the top of Chip Ross park and carefully took a series of photos using my camera's panoramic mode. (This mode freezes the initial exposure settings so all of the shots in the "panoramic" series have the same basic look. Panoramic mode on my camera also puts up some extra guidelines on the display to help line-up the shots.) Here's the end result after putting together the shots with Stitcher:

• The Big Pan (215 kb)
• Corvallis Detail (206 kb)

(If you're familiar with Corvallis you can see a lot of the town in that second picture. From left to right: downtown, the courthouse, OSU campus, 29th ST, and the Timber Hill area. If you're not familiar with the landmarks, it's not too exciting.)

Realviz Stitcher is a bit cumbersome to use, but if you lined up the shots carefully and then fiddle with the program properties quite a bit, it does a great job of blending the photos together. These two pictures have some points of distortion, but I think it's better than I would have been able to do in Photoshop "by hand". I'm sure there are ways I can optimize the photos as I take them to minimize the distortion—a tripod would help.

The little "also" box that used to be on the right side of this page was getting out of control. So I split up its contents into a couple of new pages: tools and sites. And I added a couple of buttons that link to these pages to the already-ridiculous vertical navigation menu. (I'll redesign one of these days.)

I'd just like to note that a certain book about a certain boy at a certain wizard's school has had the top spot of the Weblog Bookwatch since that book was released. Today, after months (seemingly years) of reigning supreme, Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards has claimed the top spot. (And I'm linking to it just for good measure.)

In learning more about Victoria, I stumbled across pioneer Hannah Maynard. She was a photographer in early Victoria (late 1800's) doing the normal work of portraits and police file photos. But she also took her photographs of children and combined them into elaborate collages she called "Gems of British Columbia". They're disturbing (though I'm sure that has to do with the passage of time more than anything). Take a look at some in the BC Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And here's a surreal self-portrait she made using a similar montage technique. The artist in her home (1890).

sk and I went to a reading tonight at Grassroots Bookstore by David Cruise & Alison Griffiths. They're husband and wife, Canadian, non-fiction authors, and they've just finished their first joint work of historic fiction called Vancouver. (It's so new it's not even available in Canada yet.) Of course the reading piqued our interest since we were just there. The turnout for the reading was small, and ended up being more of a conversation than a presentation. They talked about some of their methods for writing, and their painstaking research. The novel is made up of 12 different characters, spanning from pre-history to current day, that all encounter the area that is now Vancouver. We ended up talking about present-day Vancouver—comparing and contrasting with other cities in the US and Canada. They're going to be at Annie Blooms in Portland tomorrow. And here's a review of the book in the Seattle Times.

Here's a blog covering flash mob activity. [via Erik Benson]

Just what you've been waiting for...more vacation photos! We had a great time in British Columbia. We brushed up on metric, learned how to drop a toonie at the car park, and walked along several harbours near town centres. We visited Seattle, Victoria, the Cowichan Valley, Salt Spring Island, and Vancouver—which took quite a bit of driving and four ferry rides. There are 35 snapshots from the trip here...


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And here are two more stitched panoramics.

• Vancouver's Stanley Park Harbor (108 kb)
• A valley near Sidney, BC (106 kb)

If you stand back a few feet from the monitor and squint, you can almost pretend the seams aren't there.

I stitched together some panoramic photos from the trip so far:

• Seattle from waterfront park (184 kb)
• The ferry terminal at Anacortes (86 kb)
• Victoria's Harbor (126 kb)