For several years I was fascinated with QTVR and even investigated working as a service provider to real estate agents producing panoramas of houses going on the market. I’m glad I didn’t get seriously into that business, as ultimately I would have failed as the products worked their way down into the consumer market, but I still have more than a passing interest in the production of qtvr. We also use them at work occasionally. One of the impediments to production of qtvr’s is how time consuming the process is. You have to shoot multiple images and then stitch them together in specialized software, very little of which has been particularly easy to use. In response to this vendors produced lenses that can shot 180 and 360 degree panoramas, but they suffered from the barrel distortion wide angle lenses introduce, leading to very odd looking panoramas. The prices are also very high and the 360 degree solution is too bulky to be carried around on a regular basis.

Sony is trying to take the process another step forward with a new lense system that aims to be small , less susceptible to distortion, and inexpensive. I hope this leads other vendors produce cheaper higher quality lense systems. It’s unlikely I would buy a Sony camera to shoot VR’s, but I would definitely buy a lense for my canon that operated like the system Sony is producing.

I actually never played around with them when I was young, I think I was one generation too old for them, but I remember my brother having a few of them around when I was in college. Many of the different series that were available have gone out of print and now some of the original authors have agreed to let them be republished online. To that end developers have created and xml schema and tools to allow you to publish your own works online. You can check out some of the finished books or if you’re more interested in creating your own, the toolset is a free download.

…work around them. It’s well known that Bush has interfered with stem cell research. Clever scientists have managed to coerce white blood cells into becoming stem cells recently, theoretically managing to get around the restrictions on stem cell use. This has potentially huge ramifications for disease treatment, including my own diabetes. Keep your fingers crossed that this pans out.

Check out wolfenstein in 5k, a clone of the seminal 3d shooter written in under 5k to run in your webrowser. Impressive, even if the graphics do err…well, they suck. Mind, you need a reasonably standards compliant browser, ie, mozilla, etc etc.

…the new worry when going on vacation is how much of your automatically recorded tv will your tivo eat. I have a 20 hour partition on my home-built tivo clone. I came back from a week’s vacation to discover that Mean Streets, the latest Harry Potter Movie, several episodes of Law and Order and Survivor, and a smattering of other stuff had all been eaten to make room for the new. HBO ran a Larry David Show marathon over the Thanksgiving week and that seems to be the culprit. Time to scrape together some cash for a large drive to hold all this stuff.

Grew up hanging around arcades in the early 80’s like me? Feel the occasional jones for some twitch action? these enterprising fellows have put Xevious, one of the classics from the early 80’s, online for you to play. Go play, says I.

Years ago I used to subscribe to a foreign press review journal so I could get a handle on how the rest of the world saw things. Today I stumbled across this piece and it reminded me of how completely different viewpoints can be, and how important it can be to have a balanced view of things. The citizens of our strongest allies have come to see us as the second greatest threat to world peace behind Israel. Is there any clearer proof that the Bush junta needs to be overthrown? Good lord, it’s going to take us a decade or so to rebuild the trust we used to have with our putative allies. Cross your finger/pray/sacrifice a chicken to your pagan gods in the hope that the US wakes up to this disaster and gets these clowns out of office poste haste.