I've had a fascination with photography and capturing the moment for a long time. Back in November, I realized that the world of panoramas was within my grasp when hugin, a panorama stitching program popped up on Reddit. Since then I've learned quite a few of the finer points of hugin based panorama stitching and made 4 panoramas in total.

The White Mountains

Every Thanksgiving my Dad's side of the family makes a pilgrimage to Pinkham Notch in the White Mountains for a weekend of family, hiking, board games, and eating too much.

From Square Ledge

I took this shot from Square Ledge, overlooking the pass:


White Mountains Full Size Panorama

Lion's Head

That Saturday my cousin Jacob and I climbed up to Lion's head (foolishly without enough gear, but we survived). I got this view:


Lion's Head Full Size Panorama

Vermont Weekend

Last weekend I went up to my friend Jack's Uncle's Friend Dave's house. I got these shots while there:

Sledding Hill

We decided to go sledding on Saturday. I got this one from the bottom of the hill.


Sledding Hill Full Size Panorama

Dave's House

As we were figuring out what to do with the day on Sunday, I stood in the corner and took a lot of photos of the inside of the house... here are the results!


Dave's House Full Size Panorama

Panoramas are Great

I hope you liked my work. If you like photography, you'll love panorama-ing, or whatever the verb for making panoramas is.

Cake. Everyone likes cake. I recently found my mini bundt pans.. so what to bake except mini bundt cakes? I found this recipe at cooks.com but it was not complete.. I found some general figures for bundts and fleshed it out.



Looks tasty eh? Here's...

The Recipe

Prep time: 20 minutes
Bake time: 45 minutes

Ingedients

• 2/3 cup butter
• 2/3 cup confectioners' sugar
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt
• 2/3 cup milk

Nothing fancy there. You don't need yak milk or anything weird and hard to find like that.

Steps

• Cream butter and both sugars until light and fluffy.
• Separate eggs.
• Add egg yolks, separately, beating well after each.
• Mix in extracts.
• Mix together flour, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture and milk alternately to creamed mixture.
• Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Pour into greased and floured mini bundt pans or cup cake pans.
• Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

Mmm, tasty. It's been suggested that I try chocolate drizzle next time. I'm thinking of either doing that, or lemon glaze next time.

I can't say I'm surprised. Any time Andrew and I are part of the same group going somewhere, we turn it into a photo opportunity and whatever was going to happen is co-opted by our photographic endeavors. Originally, we were going to see Much Ado About Nothing on Boston Common. When we got there, we were coldly surprised with the fact that As You Like It was playing instead.

Given the controversial and opposite opinions that we all held about this lower work of Shakespeare, it was decided that the best course of action was to wander off with no particular purpose in mind.

The expected occurred. We took a lot of photos.








A good time was had by all. More photos at the album.

Here at HOPE the current talk is discussing various methods for communicating without using corpoorate and government controlled and monitored infrastucture that we're all accustomed to.

As a licensed HAM, much of the info about how radio can be used to do long range comms isn't new to me. However, there have been some interesting tidbits: morse transmission over CW is very narrow band and uses very little power.

Software for encoding and decoding morse code is available which makes long range packet radio a good method for sending text communications. Some questionably legal methods for transmitting crytologically secured messages come to mind.

It is legal to use cryptography on MURS frequencies, but the long range low power capabilities are lost. I'm looking forward to finding an inexpensive set of equipment that can be used in combination with GNU radio to exchange messages long range. Perhaps the unlicensed bands will be hospitable.

I'm at The Last Hope right now with Rachel, Mike, and Andrew. Rob should be showing up later. If you're here too, catch me on IRC or call me, I'd love to catch up.

The Attendee Metadata project is quite interesting. It's a voluntary, participatory location system for sharing your location with other people attending an event. It's been deployed here at HOPE, and I hope to see a lot of interesting results come out of the ability to find people who are near me or have similar interests. It's not fully deployed yet, but they're working on it.

More posts to follow.

Sometimes developers toss a few little amusing strings and commands into their programs. VIM is no exception. There are some useful and amusing command in VIM which are real gems.
Hard to remember? Yup. Long? Sure. Gives you the suspicion that VIM has some sort of compressed bytecode command system? Definitely. But what really takes the cake is the command to browse files.
That's definitely not a coincidence. Can't be. Somebody wanted this to be in VIM, and made it so. Unknown coder, you've really got what it takes to say what you mean. I salute you.

If you're too spontaneous, people will just find you unreliable.
If you're not spontaneous enough, you're boring.

How many unreliable, boring people do you know?

This Sunday, I released a short little project I made called PyFBUploader. It went from idea to release in a few hours, and as is wont to happen when little thought goes into a plan, a problem arose. I realized last night that the session storage code for keeping a Facebook platform session open for extended periods of time was insecure; a malicious user with read access to the user's home directory could read the stored session and potentially insert arbitrary photos into the legitimate user's photo approval queue.

This isn't a serious problem, but it highlights something not everyone thinks of when building an application - file security. It is important to make sure files are created in such a way that information that is not supposed to be available to anyone else remains secure.

I've been remarkably averse to uploading pictures to facebook for a long time now. As I haven't ever got around to getting Java applets to work in Firefox on my machine, I quite dislike the interface facebook presents for adding pictures. I'm relegated to using the 5-pictures-at-a-time laborious HTTP uploader. Today I wanted to upload a whole lot of pictures from my brother's graduation, so I spent a couple hours building something to do it, rather than spend 15 minutes doing it manually.

The result, PyFBUploader, is a command line program - it's very fast for me to upload things now. I'm satisfied.

And so it begins. I'm home for the summer, and mostly caught up on sleep, if not caught up on anything else - I think I slep about 20 hours today. Now I get to unpack all my hastily packed things, clean everything, and get some consulting work done. I'll probably be releasing Psyched 0.1.3 within a week or so, as well.

Radio License!

A few days ago the paperwork finally went through at the FCC - I'm now a licensed HAM, callsign KB1QLE. I don't have a radio yet, but I'm on the lookout for one - preferably a dual band portable, but I might make do with a single band that scans.

MQP

I've recently signed on with an MQP advisor, Craig Wills. For those no familiar with the MQP, it's a project drawing heavily on one's major that WPI undergraduates must complete to graduate.

We're still thinking about what exactly my project will be; several ideas have been put out there but there is nothing definite yet. I'm probably going to be doing my project alone, as I've heard plenty of horror stories about MQP partners being incompetent, not being motivated, or just plain not doing any serious work.