Blackmail is such an ugly word...

Photographs

I am still a bit hesitant about putting pictures up for anyone to see. For one thing, there are pictures of many of my friends here, and I have not explicitly requested permission from each person for each picture (however I will honour requests to have photographs removed, whether it is a specific one, or all the ones where you make an appearance).

On the other hand, having a website is not unlike exposing one's life to the public, and there are probably people out there who will find some of the pictures interesting and enlightening (especially the various travel ones since they are often interspersed with my experiences from the trips).

An option that I'm considering is restricting access to the photos with passwords and anyone wanting to see them will need to obtain one from me. For the time being, I will leave them up unprotected. If you have an opinion about this matter, please contact me.

Go see some of my pictures. I'm (slowly) trying to catch up. Really...

Tools

I used to create my panorama pictures using gimp from a sequence of slightly overlapping photographs. The process of manually lining up the individual pictures then adjusting the colour, brightness, and contrast of each was a bit time consuming (especially on a PII box), but I felt that it produced better results than some of the software that I have seen. However, that was before Greg told me about autostitch, the result of some research by a friend of his. It reprojects each image (thus accounting for distortion) whilst determining the orientation and position of each image automatically. It is a windows executable, but does run under wine.

Most of my index pages are generated with my modified version of AutoThumb II, originally written by Roland Berger. It consists of two parts: a scheme script for gimp that creates thumbnails (with optional shadow effects too!), and a shell script which calls the first script and then produces the pretty looking HTML pages. I eventually found the shell script too slow and too difficult to maintain, so I have rewritten it as a perl script. If there is sufficient interest in my version, I may even get around to completing the user documentation.