This week has been a week of pictures for me. I was looking around on Wikipedia earlier in the week and decided that the articles around the Porirua area where I live was looking a little barren. So I've been out taking a few snaps to liven it up a little. The articles themselves don't look that great either so I'll see if I can't put some effort into improving them as well.

As a result though, I've been playing with photographs and I'm finding that the graphics landscape on Linux has improved significantly since last time I was playing around with things. I've been using Hugin for making panoramas since someone pointed me to it at Debconf5 in Helsinki, but version 0.7beta4 with Panorama Tools 13 is an immense improvement. It seems that now if I take my photos the right way I can expect Hugin to create a panorama with only a couple of minutes of time, and no real effort to speak of. I built some Debian packages of Hugin 0.7beta4 and libpano13 which are here, if you're interested. Sadly, it seems that the current maintainer has not updated these packages for a long time.

Something I've also been trying to do properly for some time is to produce decent HDR images. Although the tools have been around for a while they are somewhat inaccessible to people, taking a long time to gain any kind of intuitive understanding about how they work and what parameters a person should use. The answer, it turns out, is something like the Hugin one: provide a GUI front end. Well there now is one, and it's damn good. I've now started taking a few photos in triplicate so I can fiddle around with QtPfsGUI and learn to recognise the situations where HDR can make a better photo. It's not an addictive name, but it's great software and when I've managed to get my head around it I will create an HDR area on my gallery and put a few fun images in there. I've built some Debian packages of this also, but I've never had to deal with something using QMake before and it doesn't seem particularly friendly to packaging. Probably I'm just beating on it the wrong way. Anyway, here are some Debian QtPfsGui packages for anyone who is interested. Maybe if you know how better to drive qmake from a distribution point of view you could send me some tips.

Something that I really like about both Hugin and QtPfsGui is the way that they are providing a GUI framework for some pre-existing command-line tools. The separation of UI from function is a classic application of the Unix model that will be familiar to anyone who has ever piped find into xargs, and it really does allow for the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. What is interesting about the two above, seems to be that by providing the UI they have managed to breathe some new life into the underlying functions as well.

The next thing that I'm really looking forward to is the upcoming 0.46 release of Inkscape SVG editor. This totally awesome program just gets better and better and a bunch of the upcoming enhancements come from the Google Summer of Code. Actually all of these programs are quite a bit better recently because of the sponsorship they have received from the GSoC.

There have been a few Catalyst people mentoring some GSoC projects - mostly around Moodle, Lisp and Git - so a couple of the Catalyst folks will be off to the big meetup / review in a couple of weeks. I hope those lucky stiffs pass on my thanks to everyone involved.