Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night, Amazon announced that they're adding a persistent storage capability to their EC2 service. To review, EC2 provides the ability to create virtual servers on the fly. These servers are a bit ephemeral, however. They can fail at any time and don't provide any persistent, local storage of their own. If an EC2 instance fails, you have to completely restart it, losing any data it may have been working on. Amazon's S3 service is persistent storage, but it is not designed to be accessed as local storage by EC2 instances. The newly announced persistent storage capability is designed to solve this issue. It's like an on-demand S.A.N., but with more flexibility. One of the really nice things about it is the ability to checkpoint a persistent volume to S3. This is great for database backups, among other things. No performance numbers have been published yet, but those who have been using it say the performance is good. This makes Amazon Web Services even more interesting, because it's now easier to run a normal MySQL instance without having to do something like running some kind of replication just to deal with the non-persistent local storage. And it scales up.

See Werner Vogels' announcement of the persistent storage service, and RightScale's analysis of it, for more information.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend, seeing my panorama pictures yesterday, said I could have done a much better job using Photoshop CS3. He offered to redo one of my panoramas to show me how much better Photoshop was at blending the exposures of the individual images. I have to agree, it definitely looks better. The resulting picture doesn't have any of the banding or abrupt transitions seen in my original panoramas. Time, perhaps, to grab a copy of CS3. The only question is whether it's worth spending $1000 on.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been experimenting with panoramas over the past few months, with varying degrees of success. Panoramas are multiple pictures of a given scene, from different views, combined into one larger, (hopefully) coherent, image. Since I'm only using my iPhone, the individual source pictures aren't that great (fingers crossed that iPhone 2.0 has a better camera), but I like the results. I'm using Calico to assemble the panoramas, and I think it does a good job. One of the challenges is adjusting the exposure/colors of the individual pictures. Calico does some of that automatically, but as you can see in these, there's still some variation. A second challenge is getting enough 'coverage' of the scene. As you can see in these panoramas, there are some black spots indicating where I didn't get enough coverage (ie. take a picture). Click through each picture to Flickr for other sizes.

The first panorama was taken in Kauai last month:

The next two panoramas are from Northstar, Lake Tahoe. The first is from off the top of Comstock:

And this one is from mid-way down Prosser. It's difficult to see, but in the upper, middle of this picture is the Truckee, Tahoe airport:

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)