Tobias Hoellrich

June 09, 2006

Santa Fe Workshops: Free Summer Image Presentations

If you happen to be in the Santa Fe, Albuquerque area then you have a great opportunity to listen to some of the instructors of Santa Fe Workshops classes free of charge. Every year in the summertime they offer a free series of talks and presentations on Monday and Wednesday evenings. You can find this summer's schedule here. If you happen to go to one of the presentations remember to say hi to me ...

March 30, 2006

Spiegel's DesignKlicks

German's print and online magazine "Der Spiegel" has launched a new sub-section on their web site called Design Klicks.

It's a platform for photographers, architects, illustrators, designers to showcase their work. Doesn't sound too exciting? That's what I thought first, but the (Flash) presentation of the stuff is first-rate. Yes, it's partly in German, but you'll get it. Especially go and try the "Scape" feature.

March 11, 2006

Giga vu pro evolution

Rob Galbraith's description of the Giga vu pro evolution sounds very interesting. Most exciting are the ftp/wireless features in the device. Looks like the Epson P-4000 has finally competition.
[ via dangerousmeta.com ]

February 16, 2006

Tamper Data for Firefox

If you ever wanted to see the data that is being sent from yoru browser to a web server or wanted to the response coming back from the server, you previously needed to resort to proxy techniques like burpproxy, listed on an interface via tcpdump or use one of the commercial traffic analysis applications.

Thanks to Adam Judson you can now do this all from the comfort of your Firefox browser using his Tamper Data extension. Tamper Data installs a new sidebar that allows you to enable/disable "tampering". When in tamper mode, you can intercept all requests and potentially modify them before they are being sent to the receiving web server.
Highly useful if you need to debug the traffic from/to your web application directly from within your browser.

Great job, Adam!

February 06, 2006

Technorati's David Sifry on the state of the Blogosphere

Technorati's David Sifry posted his February 2006 State of the Blogosphere. There are some pretty incredible numbers in his report:

• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
  
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
  
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
  

January 30, 2006

Wow - ashesandsnow.org

George Colberts photos at http://www.ashesandsnow.org are absolutely mesmerizing. If you have some time hop on over and be amazed. And if you happen to be in the Santa Monica area you may want to stop by the Nomadic Museum until May 14, 2006 where his photos are on exhibition. [ via my wife at Manitou Galleries. ]

January 29, 2006

Very creative use of tilt-shift lenses

Without reading the article first, go to http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1760 and take a look at the photos. Now tell me whether you're seeing photographs of model-scenes or if you see real-world views. Awesome use of tilt-shift lenses. [via http://www.boingboing.net]

December 29, 2005

Bye Grant!

A few days ago we received an email message which infromed us that Grant Munsey had passed away. I was deeply saddened by the news, but also happy to hear that his suffering had come to an end. You can read more about Grant's 5 year struggle at http://www.punkalunka.org.

I think Grant started at Adobe in 1997 and I had the pleasure to know him for the last two years before a severe illness struck him in 2001. Grant was an immense pleasure to talk to and I'm a bit sad that I never really got to work with him on a project. Grant was also the one who convinced senior management at Adobe that it was time to give back to the Open Source community. The original http://opensource.adobe.com exists primarily because of his efforts.

Bye Grant - you'll be missed a lot.

December 19, 2005

Photoshop on "Sleeper Cell"

Over the last few days the PVR at home has recorded the latest episodes of Sleeper Cell on Showtime. For those of you who have not heard about it: the show is about a terrorist sleeper cell in the US which has been infiltrated by an FBI agent. You get to know the individuals and their motives why they have decided to become terrorists. This is not your run-of-the-mill CSI-type show, but an interesting concept that tries to provides inside into the terrorists minds.

Anyway, so yesterday I watched one of the episodes when it struck me how far Photoshop has come: During one of the episodes the sleeper cell members get information on how to receive further instructions for the upcoming big-bang. They are supposed to look for a certain auction on ebay for a rug, download the image associated with the auction, revert thorugh the "liquify" filter in photoshop to retrieve the password that allows them access to a secure web site on the internet. I kid you not.

December 12, 2005

Just throw that camera away!

Literally! Ryan Gallagher showcases some pretty psychadelic images on his site. "Camera Tossing" is the technique behind those images: using the timer function on his camera the shutter is depressed and then the camera is throw in the air. In mid-air the timer will expire and film will be exposed. You get results like this one:

December 05, 2005

Excited!

I have to chime in with my fellow Adobe bloggers and express my excitement about the merger between Macromedia and Adobe. This is going to be one heck of a combination. Now we can concentrate on unifying our technologies instead of trying to grab market shares from each other.

It was kind of strange to see MACR drop off the face of my yahoo page this morning, but it will live on under ADBE from now on.

A hearty welcome to all the new folks from San Francisco!

November 18, 2005

Networks and Entertainment finally converging?

Wowzers - talk about an interesting acquisition: Cisco Systems, Inc. Announces Agreement to Acquire Scientific-Atlanta, Inc.. So the home and corporate networking giant buys one of the biggest players in the set-top boxes (the devices that deliver your satellite/cable signal to your TV) market.

This and Microsoft's announcement to support CableCARD next year, should set the stage for a nice battle in your living room.

Javascript award of the month goes to ...

JS/UIX - a Un*x-like OS for browsers, written entirely in JavaScript. And, no, I'm not kidding. This is what I can see in Firefox:

PS: I know that Slashdot ran the story in June 2005, but I haven't seen it yet.

October 31, 2005

Light Field Photography - no more blurry photos

I read about this at www.spiegel.de today and thought it would be useful to reference here. Ren Ng at Stanford Univeristy writes in his paper titled Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera about a "camera that samples the 4D light field on its sensor in a single photographic exposure". The result is a photograph that can be "sharpened" at different depths after the photograph has been taken. Ren has quite a number of sample movies on his web site that show the effect of moving the focusing plane. I like the Water (link to .wmv file) in particular.

Is that going to make "Unsharp Mask" in Photoshop obsolete?

September 29, 2005

Photoshop CS2 @ "Der Spiegel"

Jamiri who does comics for Spiegel Online on a regular basis seems to have received his copy of Photoshop CS2 and used it in one of his latest comics.

And for those of you who don't speak German:
page 1:
"Who is this guy? He looks exactly like you!"
"Yes. Amazing, isn't it?"
page 2:
"He was a freebie with Photoshop CS2."
"Stop that."

August 25, 2005

Photos on TV anyone?

As mentioned before, I work in an area called "Digital Home" where we try to see to what extent Adobe can play a role in the wired home of the future.
Photos and especially digital photos play an important enabling role in this environment. I strongly believe that once people have seen their favorite photos on a large-screen TV set from the comfort of their couch, it will be hard to go back to the den and have everybody grouped around a 19" computer monitor to review photos.

I'm curious if readers of blogs.adobe.com already have systems in place that allow them to view photos on a TV set. And if you are in the lucky position, what do you like and dislike about your setup?

Are you using:

• a Microsoft Mediacenter PC connected to your TV set?
• a Tivo Series 2 PVR with the Home Media Option?
• a Moxi with it's Photo features?
• a laptop hooked up to your TV set?
• a camera directly connected to your TV set?
• a dedicated media adapter, such as the iCube play@TV?
• a PC running Linux and something like MythTV?
• anything else?

Personally I have experiemented with a number of devices connected to a Samsung 56" DLP. A Gateway FMC-901X Mediacenter PC (now discontiuned), a Mac mini (unfortunately have to use mouse/keyboard to interact), an original TiVo Series 2 PVR with the Home Media Option (which got disconnected, because it did not do HD recordings) and a Linksys WMA11B media adapter. I also hooked up Canon and Nikon digital cameras directly to the TV set.

While all of the solutions about have nice features, I would not consider any of them the ultimate solution.

So, do you have the ultimate solution?