Pixel picked a good moment to sit up in the windowsill. This is probably my best cat photo to date.

The machines are in their new location with better connectivity, though the main server is still in dire need of an upgrade. Writing will resume soon, though likely more personal entries than news and analysis for a while.

Much delayed, it seems I have managed to complete all of the editing for the Washington hike photos in time to get everything sent out for the holidays. There were 471 total exposures (about a hundred less than I thought, when I first started editing, but I'd forgotten that my shoot rate tapered off towards the end of the trip), out of which I produced 274 final edited images. This number is deceptively low this pass; it doesn't take into account that there were lots of stitched images that condensed down into individual panoramas. Although the total number of resulting panoramas is still well into the single digits, their preparation took a surprising bulk of the time. Even using PTGUI, getting a pano just right could take an entire day.

I've stitched a few image pairs together before, but this weekend I completed my first cylindrical projection, 197° horizontal field of view over five images, using PTGUI to handle the stitching.

After the quality problems I had with my previous stitching attempts (one using Hugin, another using a trial version of PTGUI), I had been expecting not to generate particularly good results. I managed to pleasantly surprise myself, however, and without checking against the master stitching file, I can't find the seams in the result anymore, and I'm satisfied with the overall output quality. On top of that, the sepia version of a two-image stitch I did last week is going to end up in my collection as one of my best images yet.

Out of munchies in the house, and not feeling like dealing with the world outside long enough to go shopping, I found a brick of baking chocolate and decided to try to turn it into something edible. I tried using brown sugar to sweeten it, only to discover that my supply of brown sugar, unused since the last time I tried baking something half a year ago or longer, had turned into a light brown brick. Softening this brick with water seemed to work to get a bit out, and after I hit on using whipped cream to lighten up the resulting sweetened, melted mass, I ended up with something tolerably fudge-like.

I have finally finished the editing and upload of all of the pictures from the June 14 outing to Sequoia and King's Canyon National Park, including the short stop at Casa de Fruta before travelling. We didn't cover the entire park, just the Grant Grove and Giant Forest portions, but the result was 401 pictures, of which 208 were kept, and 6 made it into the Scenes collection.

Direct links to the specific galleries:

1. Casa de Fruta
2. Grant Grove
3. Giant Forest

A security problem in the version of Drupal I was running finally prompted me to spend the day upgrading the system to the new 4.6 series. The good things: the new trackback anti-spam system is working very well, so trackbacks have been re-enabled. The new image system is much less buggy than it used to be, and in particular, resizing properly happens only in one direction now. Access permissions specific to taxonomy terms are actually working now, so works of fiction are now only accessible to users who are logged in (at Lynne's long request). There's now a type of node for storing recipes, should that become of interest. Nodes can now accept arbitrary files as attachments. The image filter actually works now, making it easier to publish linked thumbnails.

I've survived my trip. I expect I'll be making a number of personal entries over the next couple weeks, in between processing photos. I haven't done a complete count yet, but my first order estimate is about 1300 photographs.

It's strange to be back at the computer. I've been away from tech long enough that the mouse and keyboard feel a little unfamiliar and slow under my hands.

Later, though. I'm tired, sweaty, and I never did travel well.

A while back I wrote a short note to myself about the other blogs that had posted information on how to cut down on referrer spam. Since that time, I've noticed that 95% of the remaining referrer spam coming into my system had one thing in common: they were all looking for the file /adserver/campaign.php (which doesn't exist).

I've developed the following Apache mod_rewrite rule that seems to be quite effective, and just in time for the February log changeover:

I've successfully moved my personal system over to a Koolance PC3-720BK water-cooled case. It took me a lot more work than I expected, and the result isn't as quiet as I could have hoped (the case itself is fairly quiet, but the sum total of all the other devices is still loud), but I'm reasonably well satisfied. This is my second attempt at water cooling (my first attempt with a first-generation Koolance case ended in disaster), and I'm still a trifle nervous, but it seems to be working out well so far.