As planned yesterday, took a sequence of shots to create a “fisheye” view, using the
Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4, simply because that's a “standard” lens. It took 5 rows
of 7 shots to cover what I expected to be the complete area, a total of 105 shots (3 each at
different exposure for each position).
The first problem was the top row: it was all sky, there was almost nothing to identify the
location of the images, and only two were placed. OK, this is just an experiment, and
there's really nothing of interest in the sky, so I just cut off the top row.
The result? First rectilinear, then fisheye. Or at least, that's what Hugin claimed:
I can't see any significant difference, except that the second one is lower resolution: the
first is 242 MP, the second only 211. And despite appearances, they have numerous
discontinuities in places where I wouldn't have expected them, like round the left-hand
window frames. Clearly much more work is needed to make a real panorama with this
resolution.
And why is the rectilinear image not rectilinear? Maybe it can't be. Looking at the single
photo again, it's not nearly as wide. It has about 155° diagonal, but the stitched images
are considerably wider. Rectilinear images max out at 180°, and maybe this image goes
beyond that angle.. There is a difference, though, which can be seen in the line of
stones at the bottom right.
So: I have images. To do anything useful with them would require even more work.
Hugin is not a ball of fire,
though other programs, like DxO PhotoLab, might
give that impression that it is. Stitching a normal-sized panorama (up to about 90 MP)
takes a couple of minutes. But today I had much larger images to stitch. enblend
took 2 hours, 9 minutes and used 26 minutes of CPU time:
So why so long? eureka is an 8 processor machine, so it should produce 26 minutes of
CPU time in a little over 3 minutes. But the disks were going crazy, over 100 MB/s. Over
the course of the run that's about 750 GB of data transferred.
The highlighted 16881740 is the process memory image in kB, so about 16 GB of memory.
So CACHESIZE does make a difference, apart from allocating double the setting in
memory. Instead of 129 minutes elapsed time it only took 26 minutes and 16 minutes of CPU
time (it's too polite to use more than one CPU).
That's worth keeping. How do I set that in my normal build scripts? Looking at them, I
find:
hugin_executor --stitching $i
OK, how do I set image cache size from hugin_executor? As far as I can tell, I
don't. There doesn't seem to be any provision for it. Where do I go from here?
I didn't use it very much. It was oversize and difficult to fold together. I might still
have it, but I don't know where, and if I find it it will probably be in the shed and
covered in dust.
So how about a new, smaller one? Out looking on eBay and found that they don't make them any more. Instead there are tents with
built-in LEDs. How big? Ah, they're too polite to throw that in your face.
The original tents that I saw 12 years ago were 60x60 cm, I decided that bigger was better
and bought an 80x80. That's too big, but on closer examination I discover that the modern
ones are something like 22 cm on a side. That's tiny! No wonder they don't want to
confess. But they're not expensive, and maybe that's just what I'm looking for. The
longest side of these paste packages is 20 cm, so they'll (just) fit. To be considered.
Came into the office and picked up my phone this morning. Pressed the power button briefly.
Nothing. The thing had shut down.
Why? It was on the charger. Not plugged in properly? No, after rebooting, it showed 100%
charge. I haven't seen that on a phone before. Was it a crash? A deliberate shutdown?
People suggest that I go looking for log files, but can I bear the thought?
I asked the people at the entrance about the first sign, and they said that to forget it:
they had forgotten to remove it. But this photo was taken after we left again.
The market was also pretty empty. Normally this hall is full on both sides:
And not surprisingly we didn't find much: some sweets and snacks, and that was all. I had
hoped to find some spring bulbs for the garden, but possibly we were too early. But the
whole thing wasn't really worth the effort (and the somewhat delayed breakfast). We should
investigate buying this sort of thing on line.
On the way back from Ballarat,
stopped in to the post office in Napoleons, which is open even on
Sundays, to pick up some wine that I had ordered—8 cases.
My fault or theirs? Until proof, left the three cartons there and back home where I found,
of course, that it was my fault. Why? After the last time I looked very carefully. It
could be the somewhat hard-to-navigate web site, but that's not much of an excuse. I really
must read the checkout invoice more carefully.
And what do I do about it? I recall that they're prepared to refund, so that's an option. But the surprising
thing about the Chardonnay that I got in October was that I actually preferred it to the Sauvignon blanc that I normally
drink. So I should at least give the Cabernet sauvignon a chance.
Today I got round to trying out the new frying pan (and explicitly not frypan) with lid that
I discussed on Wednesday.
Is that interesting? Well, surprisingly, yes. It heated unevenly. Here the large slice of
bacon had been turned over; the right-hand side had been on the edge of the pan, and the
left-hand side towards the middle.
Clearly the left-hand side had been cooked considerably more than the right-hand side.
Similar considerations apply to the smaller piece in the middle of the pan and the one on
the edge.
That dotted area is the area heated by induction. It's only 18 cm across! The pan has a
diameter of 28 cm, though that's to the top; the cooking surface is about 24 cm across:
Here the heating surface is of another kind, but it's 22.3 cm across, 93% of the cooking
area, and probably enough to ensure even heating—if I understand the composition of
the bottom correctly.
So: Yet Another return? Why are frying pans so complicated?
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