Of course, I used Picasa on some of the photos, working miracles instead of making me throw them away. Another tool I was considering is Picnic, allowing me to edit online so I don’t have to keep track of which computer I started with (I consistently switch between three computers with different OS) and instead let me take a break and then continue on another computer seamlessly…

For the apprentice photographer like myself, I would recommend PhotonHead, and especially the camera review. But of course, you can also learn much from for example 10 ways and many other sites which can tell you about the arts of light, composition, posture and stance….

I’ll keep exploring web 2.0 sites with this post, recommending a phone company for global calls at local cost, voki (I put one on my front page), a pretty meaningless timeticker, learning japanese, another time management tool and a nice tool for creating mindmaps.

You probably know about Twitter for short messages on what you’re up to - now you can find a similar service for the french speaking crowd at Yelago. WeShow is another beta showing videos, Streamy promises to become a new way for sharing stories online and Walletproof helps you save money both online and offline.

I’ve been looking at script.aculo.us and prototype for making this site a bit more user friendly, and less static, with some simple effects. Using Wordpress this could mean having to alter in the current theme, which I’m not fond of since I would have to remember altering again in another theme if I decide to switch. For this reason I decided to have a look for a plugin, and found what I wanted from the Signified site, with both prototype and script.aculo.us plugins for Wordpress.

After activating both plugins (instead of writing in the theme or creating your own plugin), you simply create a block element which you want to apply the effect to, and then add a trigger for the effect. In my case, I created a div for this content looking like <p id="scrcontent" style="display:none">Text</p>
and a trigger anchor to show this div: <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="new Effect.BlindDown('scrcontent');">Click</a> - it’s a simple thing to do, but be careful to not use too many effects, or it could scare away your visitors.

After installing the plugins (don’t forget that the prototype plugin is needed for the script.aculo.us plugin to work, if you want to try it yourself) it was a simple thing to add the functionality to the site - you can Click to see a description of how to do it.

In the near future I’ll explore other nice plugins and effects and show results here. Until then, have a happy playtime!

I noticed that an old post became relatively popular, the one called “The Web - past, present and future“, looking mostly at different solutions for the future web, and touching lightly on what others have said. Today I instead describe some of my own thoughts about the future of the web - with 3D applications such as Google Earth and Second Life, vertical search engines such as momondo, Ziggs and SimplyHired, and online applications like for example BudgetPulse and LabPixies helping you replace old offline applications with online equivalents.

Some keywords for the future as I see it are Usability, Attitude, Flexibility and Creativity. What is missing most now is the Usability, and looking at the average web 2.0 application you can easily see many flaws - some of which I’ll consider here later. For some testing, I joined a few of the new networks and similar ‘Web 2.0′ sites, such as yumondo, tried some online tools like udutu, while wondering how those names suddenly became so popular - but at the same time positive about the globalised feeling and relaxed attitude it shows for names.

I’ll write more about my findings here later - for now I can say that many of the sites have slow loading, that it’s often difficult or impossible to bookmark search results and similar, and that many of the designers have tried being too cool and forgot that someone should be able to use the site as well…

Since I’m creating a travel section of this site, I decided it could be interesting to make research on some of the mapping API’s out there, with Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and MS MapPoint being the obvious first candidates. These candidates are soon reduced to two when I look at MSN Maps, and especially the navigation and general feel of this application disheartens me, thereby leaving two of the giants as candidates.

Both Yahoo! and Google have extensive documentation and help for their mapping API’s, which of course helps when developing - but I’ve often found that smaller startups can have more interesting products, leading to a further search for mapping tools. The first API I find in this quick search is ZoomIn, another free system which reminds of the others, but feels a bit slow at the first look - and while looking around at their site it hits me with quite a few bad links which of course renders a bad feeling.

Moving on, I found MapQuest and the OpenAPI used for their service, including geocoding, routing, seamless movements in the map and a few other interesting features. Another option I found while looking around was MultiMap, which targets business clients and have many high profile clients.

With the options above, I started testing the interfaces with geocoding and to see if they have simple dragging, zooming and other features which are essential for a usable interface. I found that MapQuest, Google maps, MultiMap and Yahoo! were the most friendly and decided to go on with those.

In a next post I’ll give short tutorials for each api after some testing - and comment on how simple each them are. My progress can be seen under my travel section where I started with a WordPress plug-in for Google maps, and will continue next with a London map from Yahoo! maps.

Happy mapping!

As with Computer Vision, 3D Computer Graphics can be explained in a few different way - so I’ll stick to the simple, the medium and the advanced explanation. The simple explanation is that it’s what you see on the screen when playing many modern computer games or when seeing movies such as Shrek or Ice Age. These are often done with tools such as 3Ds Max or Maya by the professionals, or with free tools like Blender for the hobby artist or the learning 3D designer.

The 3D Computer Graphics (CG for short) I’ve been using is both the professional wysiwyg tools (mostly 3Ds Max) and the programming further behind the scenes,

with both DirectX, OpenGL and Cg development for the GPU (translates as a CPU for graphics calculations). Going further behind the scene lets you create more advanced features and scenes with less computational power than if using the traditional tools - meaning the effect is mostly positive, but of course the cost is in time, and developing for 3D is not a simple thing.

Leading on to the medium advanced explanation of CG, we have high school mathematics, simple physics models such as gravitation and not walking through walls and the more advanced physics when looking at how light works and how it reflects on different types of surfaces.

As with Computer Vision, I will create a separate post for the more advanced parts of Computer Graphics, before becoming more detailed in the subject. Given time, I will also introduce simple tutorials both for programming and for software packages to create 3D scenes and objects - and suggest literature and online resources which can help in learning more.

There’s a simple explanation to everything, at least if you don’t care about how sufficient the explanation is. The simple explanation for Computer Vision is that this is the reversed technology for 3D Computer Graphics. The medium explanation makes the simple one look ashamed, while the advanced could be seen as advanced physics warping the universe .

Let’s start with the simple explanation - the ‘opposite of 3D Computer Graphics’ - which tells us that since 3D CG maps locations in 3D space to a 2D screen, Computer Vision should do the opposite, meaning we have one or more images of a location and want to find the scene from these images. This translation from 2D back to three dimensions can be done in a number of ways, most of them needing more complex explanations than the simple version can offer.

Moving on to the medium difficulty explanation, we see that Computer Vision has close relatives in fields such as Photogrammetry, Signal Processing and Image Analysis, that it can be used in for example robotics or for creating 3D scenes to walk around in, and that it is one of the most advanced fields in Computer Science at the moment, with very few systems which are both simple/fast to use and completely robust. Much of the focus is on cameras, and the external and internal parameters of these cameras as photos were taken.

The internal camera parameters include the zoom/focal length, the aspect ratio and the pixel size, while the external parameters are the position and rotation of the camera in three dimensions. Since the taken photos are always in two dimensions this leads to major mathematical computational difficulties. These difficulties have for some applications lead to combining the area with preparatory methods. An example is to create an estimated ‘pre-model’ with constraints for the final result, when trying to recreate a scene using Computer Vision methods, or putting constraints by trying to predict the next step of a tracked object.

Since this post is getting a bit long I’ll continue with the advanced explanation and some tips for books and online resources in another post…