Kampkoder

So yesterday afternoon I was out taking some pictures in Paris, having been inspired by a number of interesting groups on flicker (among other this and this). I prefer Googles PicasaWeb for my own pictures, but fickers groups are cool if you are looking for a specific style of pictures (let me know when someone digs this feature out of picasa).

So here is one I quite like:

From Night view

Anyway, I decided to try to spiff some of the pictures up, by converting them to blank and white. It tuns out that the default B&W magic in iPhoto was a bit disappointing, so I decided to try and give photoshop a spin.

Not being an expert in photoshop, googleing for tricks, made things all the more frustrating, since creating black & white versions of ones photos in photoshop seems to be a jungle.

Long story short, I found this place where the author, provides handy cheatsheet for trying out the best way of converting the photo at hand.

So here are the versions I prefer:

From Paris B&W

From Paris B&W

Now if you read the comments on the page I linked to there are several alternatives listed, so this is by no means the end of the story. Hmm..

I just got this nice tip from a friend of mine, about adding effects to photos. So I decided to try it out.

From Fun with new Camera

The effect which showed me is called the lomo look. And luckely for me he knew of a nice guide at the Digital Photography School. So here is the end result, personally i think its pretty ok for a first try.

I recently started attending a PhD course in category theory, given by Uli Fahrenberg and Rene R. Hansen at our department at AAU.

Although the two lecturers does an execellent job, I can’t help to relate my initial feeling to the picture above.

To all of you, who did and didn’t remember, I hope you had a nice “talk like a pirate day“ 

This summer I attended ICALP 2009 and the QUANTLOG workshop, which was located on the Greek island Rhodes. The conference and workshop was as expected extremely interesting, but that’s not the topic of this post. During my stay there I was fortunatly enough to find time to go diving. I was lucky to run into a local travel agency which recomended Trident Diving School. Although the dives I joined them on was not very technical, it was very enjoyable. This was to no small extend due to the fact that a danish divemaster was temporarily working there. Here is a few pictures:

From Diving Rhodos

A physician, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The physician remarked, “Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly  required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The civil engineer interrupted, and said, “But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong : mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, “Ah, but who do you think created the chaos ?”

– Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the author, but I cannot take credit for this joke either.

Recently I decided to put my old, otherwise unused, workstation to good use, by reinventing it as a mediacenter. The idea would be to install some sort of Linux on the old hardware, before going out buying something new (just to see if it would be worth it). This is however, where trouble began. Not only am I getting old an lazy – especially since my move to OS X, where everything just seems to magically work – but it turns out that mixing Xorg and HDTVs isn’t really something you would want to do in anything else but theory.

Moreover, it turns out that (almost) no references to my Samsung LE-32N71B HDTV (720p) exist on Google, and therefor it must not exist – but I quite like watching it anyway.

Even less information is available on how to make it work properly in Linux. Having spent quite some time in the jungle of Nvidias proprietary drivers and compilation of kernel modules, I entered the real hell of Modelines and over/under scan which comes with the “non-standard” resolutions which is HDTV.

After a lot of reading, configuring, reconfiguring and some more reading, I finally ended up with a working modeline for my Samsung LE32N71B tv – that is, it works for me. It seems that Modelines are just as personal as ones underwear, but this one fits my configuration:

Modeline "1360x768" 84.750 1360 1448 1565 1776 768 771 776 798 -hsync +vsync

Feel free to use it. It works fine with my old GeForce FX 5700LE and Kubuntu.

also i added the following, to the same “Monitor” section of my xorg.conf

HorizSync 29.0 - 75.0
VertRefresh 0.0 - 61.0


Yesterday, I returned from Estonia, or more precisely Tallinn. While attending the 20th Nordic workshop on programming theory, I has the pleasure of experiencing Tallinn – or at least some of it. To those of you who forgot, this is the place where, during the Battle of Valdemar, we (the Danes) got our flag, which myth says fell from the sky.

Although I didn’t have too much time to explore Tallinn, it really has a lot of interesting things to offer. Along with its medieval history it of cause has a lot of history w.r.t. the Russian occupation from the 1940 to 1991 (or 94) which still today has a lot of consequences.

In lack of any real news, here is a small story about a little spir-of-the-moment kitchen experiment, which turned out quite nice.

I as probably reinventing the wheel, but hey, who doesn’t like wheels?

I was making my usual, oven baked mix of chopped root vegetable, when I discovered that I actually had the ingredients in my fridge for a, suddenly, much more desirable omelette. Having cooked the vegetables in the oven for 45 minutes, I was too greedy to simply discard them, so I decided to fry some of the baked roots and pour the omelette on top. After a few minutes it seemed that the bottom roots would get burned before the omelette had cooked. In a panic, I decided to through everything (skillet included) in the oven, which was hot, in order to let it bake from both sides. Alternatively, in case it failed, I could probably manage to forget it was in there, and run off to get a pizza.

Luckily it didn’t fail, and I accurately managed to reproduce the experiment this evening. It turned out as you can se in the picture above.

I assume its actually vegematerian, or whatever “they” (who ever they are) call it

So there you have it – or not.

Cheers,

Close to a year ago, I posted a note on the Samsung U600, which at that time was my favorit thing to hate.

Although I eventually god the hang of it, and stopped calling people in my phone book in the midle of the night by accident, it was about the same time as the hardware began tiring. Today I retired the U600 in favor of the new IPhone 3G.

As I’m already a member of the Pod people (I can’t seem to find a referrence here, but ofcause I’m referring to people who worship Apple products) it shouldn’t be much of a surpise that the IPhone, already is much more appreciated than U600 ever was :p

I might update this blog with interessting findings, but lets face it people have already written tons about this little wonder.