I arrived back in New Zealand after a family trip to Sydney yesterday.  I now find myself in the departure lounge of Auckland International once again en route to Melbourne, via Sydney.  This time I am working.  I am off to the ACEC2010 conference.  The programme has catered for many tastes and I am really looking forward t my breakouts and will be updating this site regularly throughout the conference, WiFi permitting.  Roaming data charges are far too prohibitive for me to contemplate.

I have been bitten by the panorama bug. This last few days I have been looking at all of the open source software for creating 360 degree panoramas. Apart from looking really cool I can see many education applications and envisage embedding 360 degree panoramas into blogs and wikis.

I have been out and about trying to create 360×180 panorama of images with my 18mm lens to then put into Hugin for it to stitch it together.  It is no mean feat for it to do and so far  I have only managed to create a cylindrical panorama and not a full spherical one.  Once the stitching process has been learnt and understood, I will then move on to use the enblend360 utility which creates a composite image from three different exposures of the same images in order to get a uniform exposure. Finally, when this has all happened I will then be able to produce a ‘rectilinear’ image for submission to 360cities and inclusion into their collection for embedding into Google Earth. However to reach that exalted state I have to submit three rectilinear images, so I had better get cracking.  My three images will be panoramas of Auckland, and my first one will be from the top of one of the cones and am still working on the others at the moment.  In the meantime take a look at the different embedded panoramas below.

Boeing 777 UA in World

Red Phone Box in London

Ta Prohm temple in Angkor Wat, Cambodia in Asia

It has been a good weekend. The copy for the new site has been re-written several times and now that I am happy with it, for the moment, the new look site has gone live. I have just quickly run through the links and all seems to be working.

Now that the web site has been re-vamped I can now go back to concentrating on the work that my clients need me to do. Should be an interesting week ahead with leads to turn from prospects to clients.

You can see from the masthead that I have re-vamped the look and feel of the blog. This is because I have spent the last week re-building the website. I am in the process of checking the copy for the new site and just tweaking a few minor graphics issues and with luck the new site will be live over the weekend.

Continuing the Open Source software theme.  I have been attending a course on 3D animation for the last 10 weeks, it came to an end this week.  I attended primarily to bring my Blender skills up a notch or two.  I am self taught and am well aware that while this method can work well it is also a recipie for engendering bad habits!

The course was at the Freelance Animation School here in Auckland and their program of choice is Max 3DS.  As is usual at the end of these things we had to complete an evaluation.  I thanked Mark our tutor for teaching me more about Blender in the previous weeks that I had learnt in a long time.  He was confused as we had not even looked at Blender!  It got me thinking and we discussed how using Open Source 3D animation would be a good choice for adult evening classes.  At this point his boss walked in and we had a discussion about why Open Source software should be offered as a short course option.  I believe that offering short courses in Inkscape and Blender for example to secondary school teachers would be able to provide foundation courses in these programmes in school which would teach the pupils the basic principles of the programmes that in courses such as the ones offered at Freelance, students would arrive with a better grounding and with a skill set that could be easily transferred to the commercial variants that the work with at Freelance.

Mark’s boss seemed very impressed by this notion.  We are currently investigating how I could put together a programme of lessons for their tutors, alumni and existing students in such open source programmes as Blender, Inkscape, The Gimp etc and have me deliver them.  I have already drafted out a series of lessons and skills, I will be meeting the school again in a week or so to continue the planning.

I have been approached by an author in the US who is writing a book on bartering, the book title is The ABCs of Barter and Trade Exchanges by Trish A. Truitt. The book is due for publication at the end of July at the earliest.  They will also have a web site which is due to go live soon  the link is:  http://www.ABCsOfBarter.com The reason for the contact is that she wants to reference one of my tutorials on You Tube in her publication, I have of course said yes.  The tutorial that she is interested in is my Open Office tutorial, which is just an introduction to the program.  I figured that a tutorial was not really necessary as most users of the Internet would already be familiar with a myriad of word processing programmes.  However Trish thought that the style was clear and conscise enough to warrant a mention in her book.

We have been chatting for a while now and it was clear that she did not want to reference a You Tube link in her book.  I suggested that I create a wiki and embed the video there.  The result is that I have now created an open source wiki for all of my Open Source software tutorials.  It is a repository of tutorials organised by application and will continue to grow in the weeks and months ahead.  Indeed today I will be sitting down and re-creating the ‘addons’ tutorial that I have already created and will also create a series of Calc tutorials for inclusion on this specific Open Source wiki.

The address is: http://opensourcesource.wikispaces.com

I am currently working with two schools to design and revamp their sites.  It is interesting work designing websites for schools as each has their own ethos and philosophy.  A website should be something that acts as a mirror, especially for institutions such as schools.  As such, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for schools.  I have seen several school websites recently that have been ‘templated’ by the same company and they look just that, die cast.  In fact the more you look at these sites, the more you see the company that built them than the school.

I have been working on a new website concept for a client this last week. The client was happy with the roughed out pdf I sent to them, then when I expanded on my ideas at a recent meeting, they understood the concept better and had the opportuniy to add more of themselves to the concept. I have now created a design, built it and have sent it to them. They are ecstatic about the outcome. I now have to wait for them to send the text and image content they want on the page and it will go to my test site for their final approval before going live on their domain.

I have submitted my two presentations to the organisers of Ulearn 09. I am thinking that my personal theme for this year’s event is to give rather than take. By that I mean, my intention is for me to go to Christchurch and share as much as I can, rather than attend breakouts to glean as much as I can.

As a result of this I may well end up submitting a few more presentation proposals for the organisers to choose from. Time now to organise cheap flights and accomodation, before the best seats and rooms get snapped up.

The good news is that my Milestone report has had the green light from the national facilitator. I had to make a few minor changes and additions, it was then converted to pdf and is now in the annals of the Ministry.

I will get some in depth feedback at a later point. Next Wednesday I have to present my findings to the cluster lead teachers, complete with my analysis of their efforts and what I feel the next steps are based on their submitted evidence.