Mon 19 Feb 2007

Software Updates From All Over

After having a reasonably productive morning, I decided to do some random sysadmin tasks for my home setup that have been sitting on the list for ages.

What follows is some rambling from spending a couple of hours happily wrapped up in "new software" land. Mostly (only?) of interest to Linux users.

Desktop updating

First off the block was manually untangling an RPM dependency problem that had snuck in to some third-party rpms for my wireless card on my main desktop box. This has been blocking me from doing a full package update for a few months (if the kernel updates and the drivers don't, then no more network and I decided to fix the root cause, rather than just disable kernel updates), but I'd forgotten how long it had really been since I'd done an update:

Woah, baby! 380-odd packages in the queue. No wonder it took forever to check all the dependencies and even then I had to sort out one package by hand because it hadn't landed in any repository I was updating from. Note to self: you really, really have to fix those problems when you first notice them. All's well that ends well, though. The packages are downloading now (up to number 49/383 as I write this).

New Blender release

The wonderful guys over at blender.org released Blender version 2.43 today.

They also released their new website; looks nice, although I'm getting a bit tired of all the dark backgrounds that are going around these days. Black is not the new black, as far as I'm concerned.

Pointers to release notes and downloads are available from BlenderNation, although a lot of the comments there are about people pointing out that they, too, can see the problems with the website that the previous 27 posters have already pointed out. Not adding an awful lot of value, to my way of seeing things.

The Blender support volunteers decided that life was just too quiet for them, so they decided to release the new blender.org website on the same day as the new Blender software. Since nothing ever goes to plan with a big website rollout, not surprisingly there are problems. Unfortunately, one of the longer lasting ones, I suspect, is that they are about to (re-)discover that the old CMS really did have poorlydesigned URLs, so all existing deep-linked bookmarks are now broken. Maybe they will be able to put in redirects over time.

Enblend Gets An Update

I like taking photographs. I also like fooling around with my photographs and my computer (since my photos can often use all the help they can get in an effort to look better).

One of the little-known tools for Linux users in the area of panoramic photography is a combination of Hugin and Enblend. The former is used to match up common points in a sequence of photographs and then does the mathematics necessary to stitch them together. The latter program helps to merge the stitched results together by helping to blend the seams between the images. With a bit of patience in the original photographing department and a some fiddling on the computer, it's possible to create really nice panoramas with not too much effort.

During my system updating this morning, I noticed that Enblend had undergone a major update (to the point that I needed to manually install one of its bleeding-edge dependencies). This should be a big win, because some of the processing that both enblend and hugin did can take some time on larger images and the speedups and partial checkpointing built into the new version looks like it might be useful. All this is fully untested by me at the moment — I'm still waiting for the update to complete — but it looks promising and any software update after a year's development is often worth the wait for a tool like this.

Side note: If you are interested in other under-appreciated things you can do to photographs with Linux, could I suggest having a play with creating HDR composite images. This Flickr post is not a bad place to start.

Topics: software/graphics, photography, technology/sysadmin