Panogaea App for Mac

Kevin Gross, the mind behind Panogaea, has just released an App for the mac that performs sophisticated panoramic image manipulation. His App, available here, gives you control to manipulate and distort your panoramas to create fantastic new images.

It's fast image processing is enabled by a combination of leveraging the computational power of the computers graphics card and by employing multithreaded algorithms. This allows Panogaea to enable realtime manipulation of large panoramic images and the interface lets you cascade an arbitrary number of distortion mappings together while you see the results live as you interactively vary their parameters.

Here's an example of what Panogaea can produce:

This is a picture of Walter, who we met on our trip through Africa, standing on a rock ledge at the Mowani Lodge in Namibia watching the sunset.

This image above was generated from this equirectangular image I built for a presentation in a Panorama viewer:

File dimensions 6,000 x 3,000 pixels

Here's a quick screenview of how fast it is to manipulate an image:

Note: you don't have to have panoramic images, the app will work with any images.

Featured on the IndochinaJunk website

During a recent holiday trip to Vietnam our final destination was a fantastic 4 day 3 night trip with IndochinaJunk to Bai Tu Long Bay and beyond. Thanks to a great crew and the most wonderful guide it was the highlight of our trip.

A friend of mine tweeted me the other day that he'd been researching holidays in Vietnam and to his astonishment my picture came up on this particular website Indochinajunk

It turned out that on our return to Halong Bay, the company had arranged for a photographer to shoot the junk with the images to be used in promotional publications. Rather than shoot an empty junk they asked if we would like to sit in on some shots. The girls promptly hid away but Michael (Leigh's partner) and myself obliged and took our postions and posed as well as we could. Michael looks completely relaxed but I'm not quite sure what I'm doing.

Update: I think I'm trying to do the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" hand sign but failing dismally.

On top of the world - World Trade Towers 1978

An old and dear friend of mine, Rita Rivera,  recently sent me this color scan of an old photo she'd taken of me on the top deck of the World Trade Towers in 1978 (as close as I can recall). I can't imagine the horror visited upon those caught in that dreadful day of the 11th September 2001.

My bowling partner got a 300 game!!

1/July/2010 Update

In a stunning night of bowling, my partner Ronnie, just missed out on another 300 striking all the way to the final frame where he bowled a 9 leaving him with a 299!!! I bowled a 229 to give us the best in the league scratch 3 game record.

4/June/2010

In the third game, of our 3 game series, Ronnie (that's him in the third picture) bowled a perfect game. What is even more amazing is that the previous game he had already bowled 8 strikes in a row. That means by the end of this game he had bowled 20 strikes in a row!!!!

Pictures after the break....

Thrill City by Leigh Redhead

Leigh Redhead, my daughter, has just had her fourth novel in the Simone Kirsch series released and I've just picked up a copy at the local bookstore.  Yes, it's hard to believe, my own daughter didn't send me a freeby, instead I have to buy my own! It also looks like they have re-released the three earlier books in the series "Peepshow", "Rubdown" and "Cherry Pie"

In Thrill City, Simone Kirsch, ex-stripper, sleuth and bad girl, is back in business - and before she has time to crack a bottle of cheap champagne to celebrate the opening of her very own detective agency, she's up to her neck in lethal fun and games.

It all starts off quite innocently, when a best-selling crime novelist, Nick Austin, wants to follow her around for a few days as background research for his next novel. But the day after he, his ex-wife and her new lover all appear on the same panel at a writers festival, his ex-wife is found brutally murdered and Nick disappears, leaving Simone with more trouble than she can handle.

While she can take murderous bikies, desperate publishers, poetry slams and a crystal meth-addicted psycho killer with literary ambitions in her stride, Simone is also juggling her very pregnant and possibly hormonally unbalanced best friend, Chloe; her ongoing attraction to ex-cop, Alex; and her boyfriend, Sean, who wants her to give up her agency and move to Vietnam.

All up, life is complicated - not to mention the fact that she's facing the toughest, most dangerous case of her career.

In case you want to buy it here's some links...

Allen & Unwin

Angus & Robertson

eBay

[Notice her books sit right between Ian Rankin and Kathy Reichs!]