Shaft the tilt-shift lenses

Why do you still need tilt-shit lenses with digital cameras ?


The first image was shot "as is" of the Saint Ambroise church in Paris with a wide-angle lens. The second one is the same one, but corrected for perspective distortion with hugin.

Equirectangular obsession

Bois de Vincennes (3)
Originally uploaded by Seb Przd.

I've been going through a full immersive panorama phase recently that has me going shooting many pictures from one spot in all directions. I've even bought a new ultra-wide-angle lens (Canon EF-S 10-22mm) so that I have to take fewer pictures. I'm waiting for my spherical tripod head to arrive (Nodal Ninja). You can see more of my pictures here.

The European Google has no .com website

The european answer to Google? it's called Quaero (I search, in Latin). Quaero will be unveiled in January. I have the awful impression that it's full of hot air ("Say goodbye to text-based search, and welcome multimedia search"). Anyway, the funniest part is that they don't even have the domain name http://www.quaero.com ("High Performance Marketing !"), registered to QUAERO CORP., a North-Carolina company... I think Google may not be really scared by the competition. quaero.net is registered to someone not far from my house. quaero.org redirects to the official website of Quaero, the search engine. It is registered to Vecsys-Research, leading edge speech processing technology.

What do you do when your wine gets old?

The answer, if the wine is from one of the best years of the past century, if it is from a reputed château, if it costs between $1500 and $2000 a bottle, and if you have 500 bottles of it, seems to be that you have to change the cork every 40 years or so to prevent the cork from going mouldy. This is what Stanley Ho, a casino magnate in Macau, has just done.
According to this AFP story (in French, sorry), wine experts from Château Palmer travelled to Macau to open, taste and change the corks in 490 bottles of the 1961 Médoc, a grand cru classé. 1961 is one of the best years (as the drought reduced the output of wine to about a third of the normal years). This operation increases the remaining lifespan of the bottles. With a $1,000,000 collection, it is probably worth it...
In the specially weather controlled room of the Lisboa hotel and casino, the French wine experts delicately opened the bottles, fished out with a small net the small cork pieces that tend to fell out as the cork ages, tasted the wine to determine if the wine matured correctly, and recork it with the special machine Château Palmer has used for the past 50 years. The new corks will be labelled "Rebouché en 2005".
It was estimated that as much as 25 bottles would have to be discarded, but after the event only 5 bottles were deemed to have gone bad.

Acid2: Safari goes hunting & more browsers

Following up on my previous post on Acid2 rendering in most browsers, David Hyatt has started cramming for this exam and will blog as progress happens:

I started work today on making Safari pass the test, and I thought I'd blog my progress as I fix bugs in the test. This will be a fairly slow process as whole features may have to be added simply to make one row of the test render correctly.

Thanks to several comments in the previous post, I've managed to complete the collection of snapshots:
Here's how the test looks in Omniweb (Mac browser, thanks to Yoji Hirabayashi for this and other screenshots)

This is Netscape 7.2 for Macintosh (image courtesy of Kristen):

And Camino (a Mac native Gecko based browser) 0.8 nightly, not surprisingly, is identical to Firefox-trunk (image also courtesy of Kristen):

This is Safari as it is now (version 1.2 125.12, if those are enough version numbers for you! thanks William Wu)

On Yoji's computer it looks like this:

This is Safari 1.3 (dev version available when the Acid2 test was published, thanks to Kristen)

And here is what Hyatt has managed to do in just a few days: the red background is gone, the top and the mouth are better now. It will be interesting to see how Gecko tries to do the same.

So is YOUR browser ANY good at CSS2?

Seen on the Standblog (fr), the new Acid2 test page for browsers, "written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products". I tend to agree with Tristan that the test doesn't readily tell you what your browser is lacking in support, but then you can read the guide for that.
Here are some screenshots of the test page under different browsers. If you have other browsers, leave a message with a link to the image in the comments. It seems full CSS2 support is not here yet !
Update (2005/04/08 9:40): David Naylor has sent a link to some other screen shots; below (Netscape 6.1, Opera 7.54, and Firefox 1.0+ nightly).
I'm still missing Macintosh-based browsers: Safari, IE/mac, and Camino, though it will probably look like Firefox).

Here is how the test page should look:

These are under Links and Lynx ;-) (click for full size image)...

The different versions of Internet Explorer are pretty broken, but hell, you didn't need this fancy test to know that:
IE 5.01

IE 5.5

IE 6

What is funny though is that IE6 doesn't behave in the same way if it's running in Wine or in Windows 98:

With Konqueror 3.2.3 we're getting more supported features of CSS2: you know that because you can see more stuff from the happy face. Seeing how Konqueror 3.4 is touted as being CSS2.1 compliant, I'd be interested if somebody could post a screenshot !

Update 2005/04/11: Doug Wright has put a screenshot of Konqueror 3.4. Well, full support for CSS2.1 is a bit of an exageration, as it's only marginally better than 3.2.

Opera 8.0 (beta) is also not bad, except for the ugly looking red background (red means broken in the Acid2 test).

Opera 7.54 (courtesy of David Naylor) is only marginally worst than Opera 8.

If you compare Netscape 6.1 below (also courtesy of David Naylor) with the images farther down the page, you will see how Gecko (the rendering engine behind Netscape and Mozilla browsers) has matured in CSS2 support:

Firefox 1.0.2 is also not very far from that, but then it's still not the correct image !

Firefox 1.0+, nightly (ie, Gecko 1.8), image courtesy of David Naylor

We are no longer the knights who say: Ni!

It's official: Mandrakesoft (makers of a very fine linux distribution) has changed name and will now be called Mandriva (pronounced man-DREE-vah according to a post on the mailing-list). Mandrakesotf gives two reasons: the merger with Conectiva and the lawsuit about the "Mandrake the magician" name. This follows shortly after the roadmap for 2005 and the version naming scheme were modified. So the next version (what used to be called Mandrakelinux 10.2) will now be called Mandriva limited Edition 2005.
According to the press release:

After spending weeks balancing pros and cons, Mandrakesoft has decided to change its name!

The name change will apply worldwide to both the company and its products. The management team sees two good reasons for this change:

1. The recent Mandrakesoft - Conectiva merger calls for a new identity that better represents the combination of two key companies and their global presence.

2. The long-winding trademark lawsuit with Hearst Corporation has reached a point where we decided it is more reasonable for us to move forward. By adopting a new name, we eliminate the liability attached to the Mandrakesoft name and we can focus on what is important to us: developing and delivering great technology and solutions to both our customers and our user community.