I've been playing Freelancer. Look at the time of this post. The game just sucks you from one mission to another. It was hard to pull myself away even now!

Earlier tonight (I guess it is last night now...) I went and took a bunch of photos of the Idaho State Capital building here in Boise. I stitched these together using PTAssembler (by Max Lyons) and PanoTools (originally by Helmut Dersch). I think it came out pretty good for a first try. I think it would have come out better with a real pano tripod head instead of me just winging it.

The full size image is around 11 megapixels. Each of those pixels is pretty sharp though. It has an amazing amount of detail:

Here is a small 100% crop from the center of the frame to give you an idea of scale:

[4/10/2004] I've realized that Capital should be Capitol, but you'd be surprised how many hits I get from the google search engine based on the misspelling.  Oh well, I think I'll leave it wrong.

I was playing around with SharpReader and apparently I hit their server one too many times, as I'm now banned from the slashdot RSS feed. Too funny -- I think I'll live.

You can get banned from the front page too. I've seen it happen at work when they mistook our proxy servers for someone hammering their machines. They display a big red page.

To make great panoramic pictures you need a panoramic head. To make really great pictures you need a spherical panoramic head. Max Lyons and this product from Kaidan. $740 is too much for me.

I'm looking a constructing my own Pano head similar to what Erik ruffle has done. I'm looking in to doing this with extruded aluminum "erector set" stock from 8020. I'm planning on mounting this on my Acratech ball head. Like Erik, I plan on using the ball head upside down. I've also purchased a Arca-swiss style quick release clamp from Kirk Photo to mount the camera.

I'll post pictures if anything comes of this little project.

I've been spending way too much time playing Galactic Civilizations lately. This game is like Masters of Orion, but better. It is seriously hard.

The support from the company and the forums is great also. You can upload your game results and see how you are doing compared to everyone else. I'm not doing so well...

For $40 ($10 less than most other first-run games) this is a steal. You can even download it directly and save yourself a trip to the store.

Like everyone else is saying, SharpReader looks to be the real deal...

While the work computer is installing the latest version of longhorn...

• Book: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Short review: Not nearly as good as nueromancer -- wait for the paperback.
• Book: Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris. This is the followup to The Rise of Theordore Roosevelt. After reading both of them, I think that the early life of Roosevelt is more interesting and dynamic. The detailed description of his years in the whitehouse was something of an anticlimax.
• Book: The Metaphsycisal Club by Louis Menand. I just started this and it is heavy going. However, I like it so far. It isn't as dynamic (yet) as either of the Roosevent biographies. I'll summerize after I finish it.
• Music: Scarlet's Walk by Tori Amos. This is some of her best stuff since Little Earthquakes.
• Movie: Bend It Like Beckham. I saw this at the Idaho International Film Festival (Bet you didn't know that Idaho had a film festival) and I liked it a lot. I thought it was clever with some hot women in it. What's not to like?
• Movie: The Quiet American. This 2002 remake of a 1958 film was very moving. Starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, it details a love triangle set in pre-US involvement Vietnam in the 50s. Brendan Fraser is so hit or miss -- remember Monkeybone?
• Play: Icarus written by Edwin Sanchez and directed by Brian Weaver. I enjoyed the play a lot -- I haven't been to a play in a while. I thought the ending was a little bit of a let down. It was very open ended.

Now, for the tip of the day (or week, or whatever...)

In debugging this latest problem, I had to download symbols for various OS components. Internally, we have a pretty vast symbol server that can get you .PDBs for everything that you need. Externally, you can get symbols for many components so that you can debug through them. Nothing beats a good call stack!

Both our internal and external systems use a symbol server to locate the right symbols. We didn't have this until ~2 years ago, and I don't know how we lived without it. Getting the right symbols used to be voodoo -- now it is super easy. Here is a page talking about what you have to do: http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/debugging/symbols.asp.

Also note that with VS.Net you can use this stuff too! Here is a link on that: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q319037

I haven't been posting lately because I've been super busy. I've spent the weekend debugging a tough memory leak in some COM code. I sure don't miss doing that with managed code!

I'm going to be in Redmond again tomorrow and Wednesday so updates won't be happening then either. Oh well.

BTW, I've made some progress on my FTP uploader but not as much as I'd like. I'll post something here when I have something to show.

My wife, Rachel, has another funny story on her blog. Check it out.