Gotland

Last weekend I went to Gotland. It is a beautiful island with breathtaking nature and many interesting historical buildings in the old town of Visby. We had so much fun thanks to the great organisation by VIS.

Convert rectilinear panoramas to cubic with erect2cubic

When creating panoramatical images most programs will probably output a rectilinear or cylindrical projection as a result. Unfortunately some viewers only accept a cubic projection (6 different images of the sides of a cube).

There is a simple way how to convert a rectilinear panorama to a cubic one with use of free software. The following instructions were tested on (K)ubuntu 9.04, but should also work on other Linux distributions. Note that must be connected to the internet during these installations steps.

1) Install nona - in Ubuntu is is part of the hugin-tools package
2) Install the libgraphviz-perl package
3) Start CPAN as root: open a terminal (e.g. Konsole, xterm, Terminal) and start "sudo cpan". If it is the first time you start CPAN you will be asked whether you want to use the automatic configuration. In that case just say yes (press Enter).
4) Once in CPAN, execute the command "install Panotools::Script" (without the quotes). If you get any warnings about YAML, just ignore them.

Now we have the necessary software tools to do the conversion. Now you can do the conversion. Open a terminal and go to the directory where you rectilinear panorama file is. Suppose it is called rect.tiff then execute:

erect2cubic --erect=rect.tif --ptofile=cubic.pto

This will generate the file cubic.pto which we need to generate the 6 images of the cubic projection:

nona -v -o cubic cubic.pto

This might take some time (~few minutes). After that you will see cubic0000.tif, cubic0001.tif ... cubic0005.tif in your directory. These are the six sides of the cubic projection.

Bicycles in Växjö

You really need a bicycle in Växjö. Especially if you live on the campus and need to go to the city which is about 3-4km away. But it's not just the students who ride bikes. I Växjö everybody has a bicycle and there are special paths for bikes everywhere. It's almost like in the Netherlands.

I bought myself a used bike for 500kr (=50€). It's good enough to go from A to B but that's about it ;-)

The campus of the Växjö university

The campus is outside the city. I like it because all the university buildings and the housing for students are within walking distance. Another nice thing is that there is almost no traffic at the campus. Most of the people walk or ride a bike. Bicycles are an essential part of Växjö but I'll write more about that later on.


This is the building where my room is. It's not very nice but it's quiet ok on the inside.

There are some green areas between the buildings.

Some more green. In the background you can see the building of the student union (similar to ÖH in Austria)

This is the main building of the university:
Another building with class rooms:

Sivans - one of the student pubs on the campus:

The library:

First impressions at Växjö

I want to share my first impressions of Växjö university with you. I really like it here. The organisation is really great. The international office of the Växjö University made a good job. There was a pick-up service at the train station where we arrived and then they brought us to the university campus where we got some basic information and the keys to our rooms.
I live at a dorm room on the campus. I have a small room with one bed and a bathroom and I share the kitchen with other students on the corridor.
Hopefully I'll have some time to make some photos and post them here tomorrow.

Long exposure photos at Traunsee

I've been experimenting with long exposure photography at Traunsee. I found a place that was dark enough to actually see the Milky Way.

7min


17min 30s


The same picture as above but de-fished and cropped.

Google Chrome 3 Beta

Google has released a new version of their browser Chrome. The new beta version adds support for HTML5 >video< tag. This feature is also included in the somewhat unstable Linux build. If you have the Chrome repository in your software sources list then you can try it out. Just install it / run the update using your favorite software package manager.

You can try the feature at Youtube HTML5 demo page. The video rendering is working but some other features still don't:

• Full screen playback


• Seeking


• Right click -> open video in new tab - crashes the browser


• Sometimes the sound is missing

I hope that Google will target all these issues for the stable release. Maybe one day I can ditch the crappy flashplayer once for all.