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PhotoSynth
· 2008-08-22 12:16 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

I've been waiting a long time for this to be released to the public. I've seen demos of this almost two years ago. A not so long time ago SeaDragon was released under the name of "DeepZoom" and now we can enjoy PhotoSynth.

What is Photosynth?
Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.

I used a tool named FlickrDown to grab a collection of pictures from Flickr.com and then put them through PhotoSynth. The result is amazing!

 

How does it work?
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.
Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.
Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

In plain simple English: It looks at the pictures, finds the similarities and places the pictures in a 3d environment.

Cool!

Tip:
Post your cool Synths in the comments!

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New hosting provider
· 2008-07-19 17:10 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

I'm happy to announce that this site is now hosted on a decent server ;-).

The old Pentium II 450 MHz with 192mb ram can now finally retire! And I'm no longer dependant on the goodwill of the UPC DHCP-gods to keep a static IP. The pages are now served by a (shared) server that has a lot more horsepower and is located in a proper data center, with a nice uplink. W00t w00t?.

All this is thanks to Kumina, a small company run by several ex-schoolmates. They are specialized in managed operations and technical services, and I know they are the best in what they do!

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A NASty device
· 2008-04-05 21:09 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

As of today I am the proud owner of a 1TB network attached storage device.

It’s name is "CH3SNAS". I’ve used two 500 gb Western Digital GP harddisks. These disks are made to be energy efficient. I thought that would be a good thing for a device that will be always-on. And the disks won’t be stressed out much because all data has to travel through the network before hitting the disk. So speed is not an issue. Besides that: more power more heat, more heat more cooling and more cooling == more noise and dying disks.

I’ve also upgrade the network switch to gigabit because the old switch was dying and its not a lot of fun to reset your switch every few minutes while trying to download something. Now the CH3SNAS is the only 1000mbit device connected but now I can upgrade the others gradually.

This device also has an UPnP AV Media server on board, so I can easily browse through all my movies, music and pictures. I’ve also found a nice UPnP compatible music/movie player for my IPaq (but it’s not free so better suggestions are welcome!).

It also has a scheduled download option, which means that the NAS can download stuff while your PC is off.

Maybe the most important thing this device can do: it has support for so called "funplugs" (the hardware is almost identical to the D-Link DNS-323 NAS, only the CH3SNAS is cheaper). Which means that you can add your own software to it. The thing actually runs Linux and has quite a decent CPU so there’s all kind of fun things to run on there. I’m thinking bittorrent, hellanzb, slimserver, ssh, nfs-server… a lot to play with ;-) Oh and there’s a new firmware out soon as well.

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Come work with me!
· 2008-04-05 20:33 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Let me ask you a few questions. Do you like:

If you said yes to on ore more of the above items, please stay where you are. You are probably happy with your job and we all know good things will happen if you wait long enough!

But... If you disagree with all of this, take a look at this opportunity I have for you! This might be the moment for you to decide that your career needs an upgrade! And even if you are satisfied with your current job, you can always take a look. (The grass is greener on this side... it is)

So, if you:

Then you're the one we are looking for! Click the blue banner to go to a form where you can leave your information. "Don't call us, we will call you!" :)
By clicking you can also see a lot more about the company and the people. (That site is written in Dutch... but that makes sense...)

No, that's not us on the picture, we are really cool :-)

If you want to see more, here is a list of weblogs maintained by some of my colleagues:

Dick Dijkstra
Jan Kieftenbeld
José Carballosa Coré
Leon Meijer
Mathieu Diepman
Paul Deen
Ruben D'Arco

And maybe we can welcome you in our "family" soon as well!

Remember, most of the (technical) stuff I write on this blog is just part of my every day life. I get to work with latest technologies and I have the opportunity to study (getting certified & visiting conferences (in Barcelona) is just part of that).

(Yes I know, this blog post is a shameless job offering. More tech stuff blog posts are being worked on, I promise! I Do! And if you're one of my colleagues and you want a link to your blog, send me an email and I'll fix it)

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More fun with feeds
· 2008-04-01 20:51 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

I was already having a lot of fun with feeds today. But there is even more fun ahead!

This is how it works, in three easy steps:

Step 1: Send email. I’ve set up this special email address rss@nietniks.net wich is willing to receive your sense and non-sense.

Step 2: Subcribe to feed. http://feeds.brokenwire.net/nietniks

Step 3: Have fun!

Slow-chat-ahead! Share cool links, tips, tricks, lunch-invitations, downloads, links to nzb’s or whatever you want (as long as it’s SFW, legal and not evil!)

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New feed - stuff to read!
· 2008-04-01 10:21 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

I’ve set up a new RSS feed with items/articles/stuff that I’ve read and that I think are worth sharing with the world.

This feed contains both "serious" items about software engineering as well as "cool geek stuff".

The feed’s url is http://feeds.brokenwire.net/brokenwire-reading (subscribe now!)

Enjoy!

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