Yes, I'm back. Kaddi and me were on vacation again. This time it was two weeks in Iceland. We had a rental car and toured around the whole island. Of course we had no Internet most of the time, but I didn't miss it much. However I missed something I didn't expect: microblogging.

It's interesting how lifestreaming has become a part of my life and somehow helps me to keep track of the things that touch me in a way. So instead of microblogging live, I just jotted down some notes in my Palm and now post them below as a very abridged summary of my Iceland vacation. Of course you'll find a selection of the over 1500 photos we took, too.

Over the last few days, I built another DokuWiki plugin. It's called PanoView.

The plugin allows you to embed really large images into your wiki pages without clogging people's bandwidth. The feature works similar to Google Maps. The large original image is sliced up into several smaller tiles. Only visible tiles are downloaded. The image can be panned and zoomed.

This might be useful to display construction drawings or medical photos, but works great for panorama images, too.

For better understanding, just have a look at the example below (RSS readers need to click through for the JavaScript version).

+ -

{"width":"520","height":"390","align":0,"initialZoom":2,"tileBaseUri":"\/lib\/plugins\/panoview\/tiles.php","tileSize":256,"maxZoom":10,"blankTile":"\/lib\/plugins\/panoview\/gfx\/blank.gif","loadingTile":"\/lib\/plugins\/panoview\/gfx\/progress.gif","image":"blog:2009-06:sanfrancisco.jpg","imageHeight":4716,"imageWidth":11709}

The image shows San Francisco after the big earthquake in 1906. The original scan is a 156MB TIF which I converted into the 13MB JPEG shown above. The image dimensions are 11709×4716 pixel (about 55 Megapixel).

The image tiling is done on the fly when viewing an image in the PanoView plugin for the first time. Subsequent view are served from cache.

The plugin is available here: plugin:panoview.

It's time again to answer the questions I found in my referrer logs.

Here's our newest selection:

• What does the # command in Twitter do?
• What does the glowing blue strip on the Wii mean?
• How do I view Pocket Queries?
• Who invented the LightBox JavaScript?
• How to read the Browser History?
• How to quickly tell who isn't following you back on Twitter?

Today was a public holiday in Germany so I had a long weekend. I spent it with family in a holiday home up at the North Sea coast. We had gorgeous weather and the usual pic dump follows without further ado.

After several years, it was time for a change. I spent the last three days with building the new splitbrain.org design. So if you're reading this in your feedreader: now is the time to click through to http://www.splitbrain.org and enjoy its new look (now with 100% more tentacles).

I'm pretty happy with the outcome, but I'm sure I missed many things that might look weird now. So if you encounter anything that doesn't look right or if you just want to leave appraisal or criticism please do so in the comments.