The above are the result of PanoLab, Hugin, Calico, and a single shot with a very wide angle lens (Canon’s 10-22mm, effectively 16mm on my Rebel XTi). The first three originated on my iPhone and the PanoLab shot was stitched and originally uploaded to Flickr on my iPhone (though I have since done some color enhancement and reuploaded the photo from my MacBook Pro). Hugin is GPL, the other solutions are less free (in both senses).

I’m a WordPress Partisan, so I agree with Mark Ghosh’s criticism of this Wordpress vs Drupal Report. Still, it reminds me that I should point out XXLmag, SLAM Online, and Ford among the very non-bloggy sites built on WordPress.

I’ve been using DoubleTake to stitch panoramas for a while, but when I discovered p0ps Harlow’s photos and learned he was using Calico Panorama, I figured it was worth taking a look.

DoubleTake has done a great job for a number of my photos (Mt. Moriah, San Francisco Motorcycles, Mt. Mondadnock), and when the automatic stitch failed, I could manually reposition (or re-order) the photos. I could also adjust the individual images to make them better match each other. It worked well with landscape panoramas, but also left me frustrated with a number of other images. The motorcycles I noted above, the Prelinger Library, and the view from my roof all took a lot more work than I expected. And DoubleTake can only work with a single row of images.

Calico, on the other hand, seemed to allow a photographer to shoot photos like a drunk with a shotgun. And my first test surprised me with how it bent the geometry of the two photos to magically align them despite lens the distortions and slightly different angles.

But my second test revealed some frustrations. Calico’s ability to automatically align photos was amazing, but not perfect. There was Corey, but nothing I could find in the UI would allow me to reposition that frame.

Not that DoubleTake could do any better. The automatic stitching failed to even get the frames in the right order, and my best efforts couldn’t make the geometry work.

Unfortunately, now I can’t use either of them. DoubleTake allows me to tweak the image, but I now know it takes too long to get the results I now expect. And Calico will get me almost everything I expect, but won’t let me tweak it to make it perfect. I wish these two could work together, because the product I want has the best features of each.

panorama, stitching, software, Calico Panorama, DoubleTake, comparison, photograpy

Sure, the iPhone is a sweet phone (even at $600), but how does it compare to the less definable internet tablet category?

I’ve actually used a Pepper Pad and held an OLPC in my hands (yes, they exist), but what I know about the Nokia n800 (the successor to the n770) is limited to what I’ve been told.

All four devices have feature-complete browsers and can take advantage of the rich web 2.0 applications their larger cousins can. And each offers some local applications, including media players. But these aren’t general purpose PCs, and they’re not trying to replace PCs. These are information age devices that deliver the network in places we generally don’t bring our laptops.

The iPhone is the smallest and lightest of the bunch, though it also has the smallest screen (counting both pixels and inches). Still, it’s claimed battery life bests everything but the famously power-efficient OLPC. Yet even the 8GB iPhone isn’t the most expensive of the bunch, and the 4GB model is just a bit more than the least expensive publicly available tablet.

Mix the mainstreaming of social software over the past couple years with a device like this and step back. Twitter was just the start. Still, the iPhone might also find use among ebook users (though what we really need is a browser-based book reader) and for other purposes.

olpc, internet tablet, information age, iphone, nokia n800, pepper pad, comparison, chart

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.

I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At lunch, one of the other participants mentioned to the trainer that some of the activities in the software seemed to have too many steps, too many places to go wrong, too many turns between beginning and end.

The answer began by explaining that the most analogous activity would be the acquisition of books for the collection. Adding a book to the collection requires first identifying the book, reading the reviews, choosing to purchase, identifying a vendor and cost, identifying funding, ordering, receiving, cataloging…

The list went on, perhaps with too much detail, but it landed on the following: “there are at least 12 steps to just putting a book on the shelf. When you think about it like that, our software is easy.”

I bit my tongue at that moment, but I’ve been grinding my teeth about it since.

Here’s what’s eating me: You can compare one unlikable thing to any other unlikable thing and come out ahead, but what about “real-world” comparisons?

Paul Graham explains in his “Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn” essay that developers often compare themselves to the wrong things, misunderstanding who their competition is:

A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?”

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. (emphasis added)

Graham is talking to startups, but switch some words around and you’ll get my message: if you compare yourself to something that sucks, you’ll only be able to say you’re more or less sucky.

A better comparison for this product would have been against flickr, where activities that are closely analogous to those in the software we’re being trained on often require only one step. And taking Graham’s advice, the best way to approach it would be constantly ask “can we do this better?” “Could a competitor we don’t yet know about do this better?”

(Aside: social software is that which gets spammed, that which gets you laid, and that which you’ll need no training on.)

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

bad answers, compare, comparison, competition, crap, developers, development, failure, future libraries, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, software, startups, suck, sucks, sucky, training, vendors

Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:

One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule. (link added)

Go read the whole story.

nature, journal, peer review, quality, wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, Britannica, head to head, compare, comparison, social software, wisdom of crowds, thewisdom of the crowds