The result of stitching six photos together with Hugin, autopano-sift, and enblend:
The St.-Pauli-Landungsbrücken with the Queen Mary 2 in the drydock, Hamburg, Germany in November 2005. Photographed from the Stintfang. The full image has a size of 9256x2240.
The result of stitching 16 photos together with Hugin, autopano-sift, and enblend:
The Massif du Soreiller with the Aiguille du Plat de la Selle near Les Deux Alpes, France. Photographed from the Dôme de Puy Salié. The full image has a size of 14443x2156. More pictures from Les Deux Alpes.
In response to mjg59's rant about controlling the LCD brightness on laptops, I invested some time to reverse engineer the Windows driver of my MSI S270 laptop which implements changing LCD brightness. It requires some ugly fiddling with registers of the "embedded controller" on ports 0x62 and 0x66. The result of my work is s270ctrl, a small userspace utility. I'm planning to turn this into a proper kernel module soon.
If you have access to the current issue (03/06) of the german Linux Magazin make sure to read the two extensive articles about Avahi (p.64 and p.90). Daniel S. Haischt wrote the second article, I wrote the other. Both are a worthy read!
Due to the great work of Sebastien Estienne there are now Debian packages of mod_dnssd and mod_mime_xattr available from my little Debian package repository. They've been uploaded to Ubuntu as well, but we are still looking for some Debian developer who would be willing to upload them to Debian proper. Feel free to contact me if you are interested!
It has been pretty cold in Hamburg the last days. There's now a thick but holey ice cover on the Elbe river:
I updated my little Apache module mod_mime_xattr to be compatible with Apache 2.0.
What is it useful for? Linux (2.4 with patch, 2.6 out-of-the-box) has been supporting extended attributes for files (EAs) for ages, but very few applications use them. To change that I wrote a small module for Apache which interpretes the EA user.mime_type and uses its value as MIME type for all files served by Apache. The EA has been standardized by the XDG MIME system, but apparently neither Gnome nor KDE support it right now.
Usage of mod_mime_xattr is simple. To enable interpretation of the EA on the entire tree use something like this in your Apache configuration file:
<Directory /> XAttrMimeType On </Directory>
That's all that is required to make use of user.mime_type on all files where it is set. To set the EA use a command like this one:
setfattr -n "user.mime_type" -v "text/html" foo.txt
And foo.txt will become a file with the MIME type of text/html, although its suffix is .txt!
The first release of mod_dnssd is now available. It adds DNS-SD based Zeroconf support to Apache 2.0 using Avahi.
This work has been inspired by Sander Temme's and Sebastien Estienne's mod_zeroconf module, but supersedes it in every way. MacOSX ships with mod_rendezvous/mod_bonjour, but mod_dnssd is much more powerful than this piece of software as well. In short: mod_dnssd is definitely the greatest way to add Zeroconf support to Apache available today.
A few examples just to show how great mod_dnssd is:
DNSSDEnable On
This is everything you need to enable DNS-SD support in Apache after loading the module. It will publish all virtual hosts and all existing mod_userdir directories (i.e. ~/public_html) as services of type _http._tcp.
In case you want to publish some subdirectory of the web server as service, just place DNSSDServiceName inside a <Location> section for that path:
<Location /foobar> DNSSDServiceName "A special service called foobar" </Location>
You can even use it to publish WebDAV shares using Apache's mod_dav module:
<Location /webdav> Dav On DNSSDServiceName "A WebDAV folder" DNSSDServiceTypes _webdav._tcp </Location>
This especially cool since we now have a free software server counterpart for Gnome's and KDE's WebDAV client functionality.
Or to publish your blog as RSS service:
<Location /blog.cgi?rss> DNSSDServiceName "The blog" DNSSDServiceTypes _rss._tcp </Location>
A few days ago we relased Avahi 0.6.3. This is an important bugfix release, everyone should update as soon as possible.
Avahi now has its own domain avahi.org and finally has a logo, thanks to the great work of Mathieu Drouet:
Avahi has moved from Debian Experimental to Unstable. Ubuntu moved it from Universe to Main since it successfully passed their security auditing. The Fedora Core development distribution contains it too, as does SuSE's and Gentoo's. But where's Mandriva? Apparently they are considering it, for whatever it is worth. FreeBSD Ports has it too. I guess this means that Avahi has now been accepted by all major distributions. Hurrah!
Impressions of the winter in Val Thorens, Savoie, France and in Hamburg, Germany:
