Monday, October 30, 2006

Its 8.6GigaPixel Whoosh!!

"How many mega pixels?", its a typical question from anybody who sees a digital camera these days. I just came across a blog, it was talking about some one creating a 8.6Gigapixel photo. Big deal I have a 8.1 Mega pixel camera. Hold on! Hold on! he's talking of 8.6 Giga that's a thousand times bigger than what I currently have and for sure a thousand times bigger than that offered by any other commercial camera available.

I just could not hold my excitement to let you all out there know of this little large wonder. Please go to this site(http://haltadefinizione.deagostini.it/) and see for your self what they have created. The source for the above information is this post on slashdot. Its interesting to see the details of the making of the above picture. I am not sure, you will have the time to refer to another link, so I will copy the slashdot post over here. Please do visit this site, it has some amazing posts.

The Largest Digital Photo (From Slashdot)

Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel. It is a composite photo of the "Parete Gaudenziana," a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari, dated 1513. This fresco is in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the convent of Varallo Sesia, diocese of Novara and Province of Vercelli, Italy. The site uses Flash to let you explore the fresco over a zoom range of more than 180 to 1. The photo is made up of 1145 images, each 12.2 Mpixel and 16 bits per color channel. Read on for more technical specs of the photo.

Photo Shots: 1,145
Computed Data: 84 Gigabyte
Computed Pixels: 13,982,996,480
Color Depth: 16 bit per channel

Cropped Image Size: 8,604,431,000 (w. 96,679 x h. 89,000) pixel
Image Size before the final crop: 10,293,864,000 pixel (w. 103,560 x h. 99,400) pixel
Size on Hard Disk of the 3x16 bit final image: 51,625,586,000 byte

Size of Photographed Scene: 10.80 m x 9.94 m (35.43 ft x 32.61 ft), corresponding to 107.35 m2 (1155.37 ft2).

True Scale Resolution: 227 dpi
Pixel Density: 80 pixel/mm2
Linear Pixel Density: 9 pixel/mm

Hard Disk space dedicated to 16 bit computing: 1.8 Terabyte
Ram: 16 Gigabyte
Processors: 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) 885 Dual Core 64 bit

Shooting on January 30, 2006
Shooting time: 13 hours
Computing time: 3 months
Final Image generated on June 15, 2006

-------------------------(Slashdot post ends)-----------------------------

The size of the above photo is about a big one BHK(Bedroom-Hall-Kitchen) or infact a small two BHK in the city of Bangalore. Now surprising how much time and resources it took them to make it. May be I will ask these guys at Gigapixel for a photo of mine at 8.6GigaPixel (I still can't imagine) .

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Friday, October 27, 2006

Cool Blog Apps

Now, technology needn't mean something that has to do with physical products. What I am going to present is about one such virtual entity that has taken us all by storm. I am talking about blog and the all the technologies that made it possible. If we are happy with that, that would have been the end of the story.

However, humans can never be satiated. And that's the reason we keep getting so many new things day in and day out. I here present a few things that I have come across today. These are Websites as Graphs, and few other apps for your blogs. I should thank Ashish Sinha for all the wonderful stuff he has on his blog.

What do you think is the picture on the right. If you don't get it in spite of the huge hint early on in the post, its not my fault. To end the suspense it is the web graph of my other blog . For more detailed explanation please go to the following post by Ashish. I know you are a bit impatient, you may do well to first check out the site which lets you do this. Please visit "Websites as Graphs".

All of us bloggers, sorry there, many of us. I am excluding all those who just blog, but do not care for any other blogs. Are always curious and feel good to know who has linked back to us.
Webzari is a cool way of checking on all those who link to you. If the link is a bit to work initially, that is because it is from Yahoo! Korea and their are high chances the language displayed is Korean (assuming it is really Korean and you have the right fonts installed), else their is a high chance of it being not more than gibberish. Either way it should not deter you from entering the blog site address in the box. (what did you think they have it for). Isn't it a cool.

Now there are two more apps that Ashish describes in this post of his. Kartoo is very promising to me but I have decided against discussing it here for some not so very obvious reasons. Since I have come to discuss some of the apps for blogs, let me go ahead and mention here a very useful tool for all those bloggers like me, who have little or not traffic at all to their blogs. This is a site called Blurb. This guy Ashish is going to kill me but I don't have a choice but to link to one more of his post. (You tell me, is there any point reinventing the wheel -:) ). Coming back, I sure some of you might love to get your blog published. I am thinking the omnibus I am going to publish. (Height's of optimism).

Please post a comment here on the cool apps that you know for blogs.

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Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Robots Revisited

From the days of Isaac Asimov, robots have fascinated me. It took long time for me to realise that all the huge machines used in assembly lines are also robots. For me the robot word used to conjure up an image of a bipedal with mechanical movement and a squeaky voice. Though we are far from the kind of Robots Asimov has written of, nevertheless we making a good progress. I am sure with nano computing or quantum computing around the corner in a few decades, androids will be a reality.

Now what is it that triggered this sudden interest in robots. I have come across this blog on Engadget where they talk about robotic Olympics. The idea of Olympics is not what exited me, its the robots and the small cute things they could do. For more information you can check this blog.
If you feel too lazy to check out the link, watch the video over here.




Though not in the same league as above this is an interesting post on Gizmodo. This post talks about a robot that plays Beethoven. Any talk on robots will be incomplete without Aibo from Sony. To talk about Aibo is not possible here. Pages and pages are sufficient to write about this technological wonder from Sony. You can have a preview to Aibo in this video (For more just search Aibo on youtube).

Now if you are in love with it and want to get one, I am sorry to say it may not be possible considering Sony decided to stop its production for economic reasons. How, I envy all those proud Aibo owners.

What will be next in this world of robots, just wait and watch. All those geeks out there are going to surprise you.

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Saturday, October 21, 2006

Concept of Kancept

Just came across this concept of Kancept. The New Scientist Technology Blog points is where I picked it up. Now this is what I call cool, I am not worried about the fesability of many of the things that they suggested.

Now going one step ahead, why would it not be good if we have a place where we can have outlandish conepts on display. What those outlandish things can be, a phone with wings, which will fly to you where ever you are after locating your presence over GPS. If that is not enough how about a personal screen which uses air as the display device by illuminating the air molecules with a light source.

If I spend some more time I possibly can go on. I am sure you folks out there can exceed my imaginations. Any way to summarise, take this "Kancept" forward.

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Friday, October 20, 2006

Laws of the Intellectual Land: An addition

What a coincidence, or is it divine Providence. Just today I wrote"Laws of the Intellectual Land: Patents for Dummies". I google to figure out what to write in my first tech blog. I land up at Geoff's blog. His post on 19th (Thursday, October 19th, 2006) catches my attention. I wish him all the best and hope he finds some investors.

Now though there is nothing technical to it, I put it here for a reason. At the time of writing this, I am pretty tired from my days work and lot of travelling on the dusty roads. But, this bug of blogging has caught up with me, would it not be great that I have this device to which I can dictate (Voice recognition), it then connects to my computer wirelessly, logs on to my blog and publishes it. Now isn't that tech enough?

In my current physical state where I am half asleep, nothing can be better than such a device. On second thoughts a good application for chumby(read my post on another blog).

Geoff if you reading this hope you try to have the above invention up your sleeve.

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