monochrome

Fittja in Concrete

12 May 2012 19:40:44 +0200

Fittja is one of the suburbs of Stockholm known as "concrete suburbs" ("betongförorter") - so let's have a look at all this concrete. For those wishing a non-concrete experience of Fittja, a counterpoint to this entry is Mångkulturellt Centrum, where delicious food is served Monday to Friday and select weekends.

Super Moon Over Tensta

12 May 2012 19:35:39 +0200

The "super moon" over Tensta, seen from Granholmstoppen.

Ruins of the Whitehouse

12 May 2012 19:31:29 +0200

The burnt ruins of the Whitehouse Restaurant at the foot of Granholmstoppen.

J�rvaf�ltet After Sunset

12 May 2012 19:22:33 +0200

A 360-degree VR panorama of Järvafältet, as seen from Granholmstoppen after sunset.

Beehives at H�sta G�rd

12 May 2012 19:21:15 +0200

A set of yellow beehives at Hästa Gård.

Igelb�cken

12 May 2012 19:20:03 +0200

A bridge over Igelbäcken after sunset.

An Evening in Akalla

12 May 2012 19:18:23 +0200

Walking through Akalla one evening.

Akalla in Bloom

12 May 2012 19:15:44 +0200

Cherry blossoms and blooming buds in Akalla.

On Brogrammers and Women

05 May 2012 20:18:06 +0200

Valerie Aurora writes that the companies you fund will be more profitable, have a higher chance of success, and use less capital if you have women involved in managing the company.

This confuses causes and effects. There is nothing exceptional about women and having them involved will not make any difference in itself. Having a company culture that is capable of welcoming and involving different genders, races, ages, and so on, however, will. E pluribus unum. Such a culture can manage the inevitable stresses that comes with differences and harness the full potential of its members.

A company with both men and women have a higher chance of success simply because it has a better culture. The presence of women is an indicator of this, not a cause.

Bigshot SimpleImage

04 May 2012 09:39:32 +0200

Bigshot is a Javascript library for zoomable images. The purpose of the library is to enable the presentation of much larger images than the standard HTML img tag allows for, in a user-friendly and efficient way.

In order to present relatively huge amounts of image data without completely overwhelming the client, Bigshot uses a tiled image pyramid: Tiled, because the image is broken up into smaller squares so we only load the parts of the image that is actually visible; pyramid, because the big image is resampled at lower resolutions so we only load the minimum size that will fill the pixels on the screen that has been allocated for the image.^[1] These two optimizations ensures that within an acceptable margin, we're only loading as much image data as the user actually sees. We're not loading a huge image, only to have it be displayed thumbnail-size; when zoomed in, we only load the parts of the image that are actually visible in the viewport.

Turning a huge "normal" image into this pyramid requires preprocessing, something Bigshot does via the MakeImagePyramid command-line tool. The issues are:

While the command line tool is as easy to use as I could make it, it is still a non-trivial amount of work to run it for each image that should be made zoomable.
The image pyramid is either a set of folders, or a .bigshot archive file. This file can only be viewed with Bigshot.

For huge images, these downsides are more than offset by the ability to actually show the image without consuming excessive client resources. However, there is a class of images that are large enough that one would like to have the ability to zoom, but not large enough that the optimizations of creating a tiled image pyramid weigh up the added complexity.

I call these "simple" images: Essentially high-resolution bog-standard JPEG:s with the same zoom controls as the huge, more advanced, tiled, multi-resolution images. Bigshot now supports these via the SimpleImage class.

Here is an example. The image is 3008 by 2820 pixels and weighs in at 756 kB. The viewer is configured to allow up to 400% zoom, but this can of course be changed by setting the maxZoom parameter to something more appropriate.

Footnotes

[1]	This is rocket science: Image Tiling at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Husby G�rd at Dusk

02 May 2012 18:25:07 +0200

View of the fields near Husby Gård at dusk.

H�sta G�rd at Dusk

02 May 2012 18:23:10 +0200

View of Hästa gård in the distance by the sunset and Hästa pond immediately in front. The purpose of the pond is to increase biological diversity by re-establishing a wetland ecosystem near the nearby Igelbäcken stream.

Petasites Hybridus

02 May 2012 18:18:42 +0200

This is Petasites Hybridus, known in Swedish as pestskråp (lit. "plague-butterbur"), as it was believed it could even cure plague. Its main use, however, was to cure convulsions, something it has been used for since the Middle Ages. This use, unlike curing plague, has a basis in science: The active substance, an alkaloid named petasin, was isolated from the plant the 1950's and is 15 times as powerful as papaverin, which is used to cure cramps.

Koh Phangan Uppsala

02 May 2012 18:12:45 +0200

Way back in the early 2000's I heard about a Thai restaurant named Koh Phangan in Södermalm, Stockholm. Rumor had it that it was quite good.

Koh Phangan, Uppsala

Övre Slottsg 12
75 310 Uppsala
Sweden
www.kohphangan.se

It was. I can therefore happily inform anyone in Uppsala that Koh Phangan has expanded to their town. It's just as good as the old one in Södermalm - with the same colorful interior as the photo below shows:

This battery of Christmas lights works best at night, but even at mid-day you'll find that they put out enough light to be a significant factor of the interior. The food is good, albeit a bit tame compared to newer Thai restaurants.

Uppsala Cathedral

02 May 2012 18:11:14 +0200

If Stockholm is the secular caputal of Sweden, then Uppsala is the religious capital. The town was originally situated a couple of kilometers north, at a place called Gamla Uppsala (Old Uppsala). This was, according to Adam of Bremen, the pagan center of Sweden. As the old gods were jettisoned for the new God, the church made sure to do a thorough job of bringing the light of Christ to this pagan cesspool: Uppsala was made into an archdiocese, with its Archbishop becoming the primate of Sweden. There would be no heathen relapses.

Hike to �rsj�tj�rnen

02 May 2012 17:55:41 +0200

A hike through Tyresta to the Lake År Tarns.