Monthly Archives: October 2005

Panoramia!

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Recently, my work was gracious enough to purchase additional monitors for my workstation. I guess all my ranting about increasing productivity with multiple monitors payed off! Now I feel obligated to get more work done, but first I have to waste time by looking for panoramic wallpaper!

You’d think there’d be lots of tri-monitor wallpapers out there, something 4800×1200, but after an extensive search the results were entirely disappointing. It turns out I wasn’t searching with the right keywords. Don’t bother searching for anything with the word “wallpaper” or “multi-monitor”, instead just simply google “autostitch”.

That’s right, autostitch. Autostitch is a small program created by Mathew Brown, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Autostitch is based on research by Brown and his supervisor Professor David Lowe. The program automatically recognizes similar images and “stitches” them together to form a seamless panoramic. Despite the stigma of being “academic software”, autostitch is a revolution in creating panoramic images.

I have always avoided the desire to take dozens of pictures in a wide panoramic. Think of those idiots on top of the Eiffel Tower taking a series of photos in a slow rotation. I never thought there was a point to that activity, not without expensive cameras capable of capturing a real panoramic image. Autostitch proves that even cheap digital cameras can produce amazing panaormic images, perfect for my multi-monitor display!

Here is my first attempt with Autostitch:

Solana Beach – near my house

What’s more, I even managed to produce a great image of a simple street corner:

I’ve linked to the full-size images for those of you with tri-monitor displays looking for a 4800×1200 pixel wallpaper!

Overall, I am in awe of the quality of autostitch. Photography often fails to capture the simple beauty of an ocean, or a mountain, or even a street corner. Beauty is often found in the full breadth of view, the vastness of contrast between a simple street and an ethereal sky. Autostitch enables anyone with a camera to better capture the experience of a breathtaking ocean, or even a breathtaking walk around the neighborhood.

And now back to my multi-monitors!

Throwing Away Your Hipster PDA

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On my flight back to San Diego from a short business trip to Corvallis, Oregon, I added a few more pages of notes and a dozen or so unchecked tasks in my Hipster PDA. Yes, I too have been following the latest life hack trend from 43 Folders. This was my effort at increasing productivity and organizing the seemingly impossible amount of work I am forever faced with. Unfortunately, I left my Hipster PDA on the plane. All my notes and unfished tasks left on some random flight. I lost my todo list!

For about five seconds this morning I freaked! “Oh crap, what am I suppose to do?” My only choice was to count on my own memory to piece things together. But I can only remember a few of the important tasks. My feeble human brain can’t handle the full details left in my Hipster PDA! How am I suppose to accomplish all those tasks?

And then the epiphany: I remember only a few of the important tasks, the few tasks that were interesting or important enough that my brain decided to keep. I have no choice but to ignore everything but the few tasks that persisted in my feedble human brain! This is the ultimate life hack, put everything in your Hipster PDA… and then throw it away!!

Technically, this wasn’t an official Hipster PDA. Not that there’s anything official about the Hipster PDA, but mine predates the invention of the Hipster. I’ve been using an old-fashion Mead Composition Book, hard cover with grid-lined graphing paper. Extremely organized, from software and data architecture, this is definitely the most flexible and scalable modelling tool I’ve ever used! I’m definitely going to get another one, and then lose it all over again! With that said, here’s my recommended life hack for anyone needing to prioritize an impossibly long list of tasks.

Step 1: Get a Hipster PDA

Step 2: Write down all of your tasks, along with detailed notes about everything you want to accomplish. This includes models, drawings, everything! Keep doing this until you become overwhelmed.

Step 3: Throw the Hipster PDA away! Better yet, light it on fire to make sure you don’t go looking for the damn thing later!

That’s it, now you just need to remember what you were suppose to do. You’re left with only the tasks that are worth remembering!

Walking in the Foreign Lands of Web 2.0

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You ever wonder how to monetize the long tail? Or how to realize cyberinfrastructure? Hopefully you have no idea what I’m talking about, which means you’re thankfully naive to the politics of academic supercomputing and the hyper-fluff of over-paid business leaders “revving the web” at this years Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

I realized from day one I was out of my element, talk of business models and ad placement left me wondering whether academic politics aren’t such a bad thing after all. But are these worlds really that far apart?

Amidst the pretenders and the venture capital monkeys the Web 2.0 conference brought together a collection of like-minded individuals with one cohesive idea: the web as an application platform.

Academics have been pushing this idea for years, albeit in a backwards and borderline retarded method of grid portals and high-latency web services. User experience is an almost alien concept in academia, leaving would-be web portals in a state of chaos and such poor usability that they’re… well… unusable.

Based on my completely unscientific and haphazard estimate, the private sector has been pushing further and faster than academia that it’s at least a few years ahead of academic research projects (especially when it comes to deploying web services and web applications). The idea of REST, RSS, ATOM, AJAX or even CSS are strangely missing from academic projects who are currently pushing such hot new technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, and the ever successful JSR-168.

Hopefully, you’re spending your thoughts on more important topics such as the flying spaghetti monster, but I’ve been up at night wondering why academic web applications are so disparate from their private sector counterparts.

The industry leaders at Web 2.0 may be motivated by money, but they’re inventing their way to successful business models based on technological innovation; building and integrating web services in novel applications creating new levels of connectedness and information sharing; something sorely lacking in mainstream academia.

So what do we do about it? We do what everyone (including Microsoft) is doing: we watch Google and copy everything they do!