Is it better to burn out, or to fade away?
Last week we, the Mapbuilder PSC, have decided to gracefully terminate Mapbuilder. We found that other webmapping projects (notably OpenLayers) had passed us in userbase, developbase and finally also in features. We decided that the answer of the ageold question is to burn out. We’ve sent out an announcement that we have reached the end of life of Mapbuilder. It is a sad day…
Dark skies are looming over me
But in general I think this is a good thing and OpenLayers will grow even faster, it is a great package after all.
New camera
My shiny new Nikon D60 with extra lens has arrived, woohoo!! Since I’m still at work I can’t play with it yet, but here is my first shot with and of the camera.
More to follow
Panoramas
I found an incredibly easy to use panaroma stitcher tool for OS X; DoubleTake. It is shareware, but worth all the few euri it asks for a license. Just drop in the photos of your panorama and 9 out of 10 times it creates the correct panorama. It works with both photos shot in ‘Panorama mode’ and series of photos shot in series without fixed lighting and white balance settings.
As a result my Panorama gallery is growing fast, working my way through my backlog.
Insanely high mountains
… paint it black
I finally finished painting all the doors and jambs. I managed to squeeze in one black door, although it was not originally red. My bathroom door is now painted with chalkboard-paint and since it is visible from both the living room and the kitchen it serves very well as a todo list. (and no I haven’t found Maartens book yet 
)
Finished painting
A rift in the internet
the evidence is finally there that Google is building its own version of the internet. If you search for images in the Dutch version of Google you have the option to search for images or search “The ‘The internet‘” (het het internet). Not to be mistaken for the common internet, currently in use by billions of peasants. Apparently this is a specific subset of the Internet, probably only with content that Google has approved and/or cached. This might be the new internet without the flaws of the current one, like freedom of speech.
Finally it has arrived the ‘The Internet‘
Wii-mote readings
We are asked to develop a short game which is controlled with the Wii-controller. Since it is expensive and not too easy to develop for the Wii itself (you require a SDK from Nintendo and permissions once the game is finished) we decided to develop it on the PC. It is possible to connect your Wii-mote with the PC using bluetooth. There are multiple libraries to do so.
I was curious what kind of feedback you get from the Wii-mote and where it fails (in light of the news about the Wii motion plus). There are some issues around getting your Wii-mote connected to a PC by bluetooth, not every stack is good, nor areall bluetooth chipsets, however the MacBook supports the Wii-mote out of the box. So I connected the Wii-mote to my MacBook instead and used the DarwiinRemote application to get a reading from the sensors.
DarwiinRemote sensor readings.
The wii-mote is equiped with an accelerometer, which does not record the position of the wii-mote. What is does is that it records the different forces (accelerations) that are applied to the controller. So in rest it will record a force of 1G down (z= -1). If you hold the controller upside down it will record a force of 1G up (z = 1) (seen from the point of view of the controller). If you hold it on its side the reading will be x=1 or x=-1 or y=1 or y= -1, depending on the side. The other axis will be 0 in rest. Actually since in rest the only force acting on the controller is earth gravitation, which is 1, the absolute sum of the forces on x, y and z will be 1.
Wii sensor reading in three orientations.
With this knowledge you can deduce the orientation of the Wii-mote from the readings above. In the beginning the Wii-mote is held horizontal pointing forward (blue line at -1). Then the Wii-mote is rotated along its body, the left side is pointing up (red line at 1). Finally the Wii-mote is pointing downward (green line at 1). Note that we do not know how the Wii-mote is pointing downwards (whether the buttons facing forward or sideways). When you start moving the Wii-mote the forces applied on the Wii-mote easily surpass the 1G and when that happens it is much more difficult to deduce the orientation. The new Wii-motion Plus extension is supposed to solve this problem. From what I’ve seen and read it most likely will use a gyroscope to calculate the orientation of the Wii-mote regardless of the forces applied to it.
Using blend
For various projects I’ve been using Microsoft Expression Blend to do the interface design while Paul and/or Van Exel were coding. Blend is part of a bigger set of tools, called Microsoft Expression Studio. As the experienced Visual Studio people can see, it is using the same .sln files as Visual Studio. However, there’s a major bug in Blend involving multiple projects within a solution. It automatically takes the first project in the solution file as the startup project, regardless whether or not you set that as startup project in VS.
‘Onderwater scherm’ of the PlectraeMenu
I see a red door …
… and want to paint it white. Actually the red door is they only door that I did not paint white. Everything is now in white primer and I’ve to figure out what color to paint the doors and the jambs of the front door. Suggestions are welcome.
