Stitched photos of a Christmas tree in Dubai
A friend of mine recently took a trip to Dubai where he apparently ran across this gigantic Christmas tree in the mall. He took a series of pictures I assume to show off both its grand size and its mad fiber optic color changing skills.
The set just screamed to me that it needed to be stitched together as a panorama, both do see the whole thing at once and just to see what Hugin would do with the color changes. I assume the entire tree changes colors at once so the different levels just show the passage of time between the frames.
Its not up to my normal standards for panoramas but considering there’s no way he had this sort of thing in mind when he took the originals I think it turned out pretty well. Especially for only a few minutes of work.
FUDCon flickr group
I just wanted to remind all the flickr users that took pictures at FUDCon last week that we started a flickr group durring FUDCon 9. It would be nice to keep that pool going so if you have some pictures you can add to the pool from any FUDCon past or pressent please do. Those of us that couldn’t make it this time 😦 would love to see what everyone was up to.
First geek to identify where they’ve seen this picture before wins
I took this picture on my honeymoon. You’ve seen it before, but where?
Update: No Google searches, its cheating.
History bandwagon
OK fine I’ll jump on…
[rusharri@rusharri-lnx-t61p ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
207 ls
168 cd
66 more
63 sudo
36 ssh
29 evolution
29 emacs
28 for
24 rpm
23 rm
Yes that evolution in there is from having to do a evolution --force-shutdown all the time because the exchange connector feels much hatred.
[rusharri@rusharri-lnx ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
216 ls
164 cd
120 ssh
66 sudo
49 more
40 man
30 ll
29 rm
23 df
18 ps
Linux Foundation 2007 Desktop Survey Responses Mapped
Late last year the Linux Foundation‘s Desktop Working Group posted the results of their 2007 Linux Desktop/Client Survey. I finally got around to trying to take a little bit closer look at the data. I was pretty taken with the work Jef Spaleta has been doing producing maps for various Fedora Project statistics. I wanted to see if I could apply the same tools to the IPs from the responses to the desktop Linux survey. It was surprisingly easy given that Jef had already done all the heavy lifting.
Here they are broken down by survey language and finally all of the responses together.
Which candidate wants your money most?
Tonight I was replying to an email from a friend of mine who wanted to know why I didn’t support Hillary Clinton’s bid for president. That’s a topic for a different post but while looking at each of the candidate’s sites I was struck by something. How important money is to each of them? I grabbed a screen shot of the first screen you’d see on each of their sites.
Lets start with Barack Obama, who’s breaking all kinds of fund raising records.
A donate button and a store link. Seems reasonable, especially considering campaigns these days live and die on fund raising.
On to John McCain:
McCain adds a “Contribute” button to his site. Again seems appropriate, especially considering he has his party’s nomination locked up. He won’t need serious cash for a few months now.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton‘s site:
Wow, it seems that 75% of the first screen you see on her site is dedicated to ways to send her money. This is totally unscientific but I do think it says something about what’s important to them. You make the call.
Dear Lazy Web, Blog Search Engine
Dear Lazy Web,
We have a bunch of internal blogs at work, or we will soon. Problem is that we have many different ways for people to blog. We’re working on an official solution but there are other ways to blog. For example, some of the wiki’s have blog like features, some groups have set up their own servers, and many of the “collaboration” products out there have similar features. It would be really nice to allow people to post in the solution they like best, yet still have a central location for people to see what’s going on in our “blogosphere” so to speak.
A traditional aggregation solution like planet or Feedjack isn’t going to work because they won’t scale to the number of feeds we’d need to track. After a certain number of feeds are configured in the system its going to spend almost as much time (if not more) crawling the feeds as it would displaying them. Especially when you consider most of those feeds won’t have been updated, crawling all of them each time isn’t very efficient. Its become very clear that a solution more like Technorati is the direction we’d want to go. By only indexing sites when they “ping” it to tell it they have been updated the content can remain up to date without wasting time crawling pages that haven’t been updated.
I’m somewhat surprised that I wasn’t able to just find something to accomplish this task very quickly. It seems like it should already exist and a simple search over a freshmeat should have turned up several options.. I think I’m looking for the wrong things though because I haven’t found anything yet that does what I’d like it to. So dear lazy web what should I be looking for instead? I know it must be out there…
Planet parsing WordPress.com feeds wrong?
I’ve noticed that my post to this blog are showing up in the planet feeds I’m included in with the caption to the pictures I’ve included in the posts as the title for the post instead of the acutal title. Since I’m frequently using pictures from flickr with Creative Commons licenses my captions usually have nothing to do with the actual posts. Seems like it might be a touch confusing for readers. I’m not really sure what would be causing this or what I might need to do to fix it. Has anyone else with a WordPress.com blog noticed the same thing or is it just me?
Good Job Vista
My wife’s work computer has Windows Vista installed on it. Mainly because the board didn’t want to be “going backwards”, and Vista is shiny or something. This morning it was helpful enough to move her clock for her automatically for daylight savings time. Something any modern OS should do. Problem is it moved her clock forward two hours instead of the customary one. Now it keeps telling her that she doesn’t have permission to change the time to fix it. Yep they certainty aren’t moving backwards.
Microsoft Windows Vista moving the world forward! One extra hour at a time!
Citations and Wikipedia
![[citation needed]](https://i0.wp.com/farm2.static.flickr.com/1057/1429295017_a6ed486b72_m.jpg)
I’ve been playing around with the excellent zotero Firefox extension lately. Which has me thinking about my sources and what is the proper way to cite them. Because I work with Open Source software every day I’m very conscious about giving credit for the work of others. Especially ever since I learned about the Creative Commons.
I’ve been doing a bunch of research at work lately, and even though I’m only posting it on internal wiki pages I wanted to make sure I was doing things correctly. I’d hate for something like this to happen to me. Whenever I need to learn how to do something properly I go look at what the “pros” are doing. So when I asked myself “What is the correct way to cite sources on a wiki page?” I went straight to the biggest wiki in the world. I knew they’d most likely have already tackled this question, and already had a policy to address it. I wasn’t disappointed.
The first thing I found was a new link in the toolbox section of the left column. Its been there for years, I just hadn’t noticed it before. “Wikipedia – Cite this page” which takes me to a page that I guarantee will save many a school student’s paper grade. At the very top is a disclaimer warning that tertiary sources, such as encyclopedia articles and Wikipedia pages, aren’t considered as acceptable sources by most teachers. The Bibliographic details of the article are listed next. zotero detects these and imports them with a single click. Finally, ready for cutting and pasting, is the proper formating of the bibliography entry of the article for eight of the major style guides, BibTeX, and LaTeX. Now that’s helpful!
Oh, by the way, I did find what I was looking for. There’s extensive information on the proper way to cite sources. There’s a beginners guide, citation templates, examples, and much more. While there isn’t a set standard it apears the most popular method is to use APA style entries in the contents of footnotes.
Wikipedia gets better and better on every visit! Its an excellent research tool as a jumping off point, and I learn so much every time. Just be very carful to stay on topic or this might happen.
Important Projects
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This blog by Russell Harrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Russell Harrison 
