Orby Online

When thinking about every place I’ve ever been, I can immediately think of the one or two distinctive smells that help define that place in my mind. Further, these smells can (and usually do) change as the the definition of the place enlarges or contracts. For instance, the distinctive smells of my sock drawer can be different than the distinctive smells of my apartment, which can be different than the distinctive smells of Seattle, which can in turn be different than the different smells of Washington, and so on.

I, for one, am glad that I do not associate the smells of my sock drawer with the great state of Washington.

Many places have different distinctive smells to different people. Some may think of San Francisco as a melding of the smell of the ocean and fresh fish, while others may associate it with sourdough bread and that distinctive odor of Chinatown. If a smell is particularly powerful or special to a place, many people associate it with that place - like San Francisco and sourdough bread. The bread and its distinct smell are so pervasive throughout the city that if you’re one of those people that are bothered by the eau de sourdough, you’re totally screwed.

I have been told by a number of people - and experienced first hand - that the Indian culture places a great deal of importance on smell. For instance, just about every restaurant I’ve been in to has incense, flowers, potpourri, or some combination there of placed at the restaurant’s entrance and at each table. This has the effect of making the entrance to an Indian restaurant a far more enjoyable experience when compared to an American restaurant. I can’t help but feel as if the restaurant values my visit, rather than seeing me as just another source of income.

But this obsession with smell has the occasional tendency to go beyond a subtle smell of flowers or incense and get really out of hand. Sometimes, the smell is overwhelming and takes you aback. I would compare it to walking into the fragrance section at Macy’s, and multiplying all of the competing smells by ten.

I’m sure part of my sensitivity is partly due to the fact that I’m rarely surrounded by these types of smells - incense isn’t exactly commonplace in the US, and the flowers they use here can only be described as the most fragrant flowers on the face of the earth. But I’m beginning to think that, maybe, the people around here are bombarded so often by these powerful fragrances that they’re numb to them.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen much of India. My travels thus far include little more than the Delhi airport, the city of Agra, a collection touristy places around Delhi, the apartment I’m staying at in Gurgaon, a smattering of restaurants, a few shopping districts, and the office I’m working at. Claiming that I’ve seen a lot of India would be akin to spending a few days in Chicago and professing to know everything there is to know about the US.

But I have a feeling that, no matter where I go on the remainder of my trip, I’ve already found the two smells that I will forever associate with every part of India:

1. Whatever you call that bathroom sanitizer scent.
2. Something similar to a campfire from 20 feet away.

Why the atrocious bathroom smell?

Perhaps because they take such pains to make everywhere else smell so powerfully, Indians seem to have come to the collective decision that bathrooms should have one single, unified smell that unites them all in one vivid, overpowering funk. Every urinal has at least two urinal cakes in it and a minimum of two heaping handfuls of little white balls the are about three quarters of an inch in diameter. Additionally, no less than three of these little white balls occupy every sink.

I believe the root of the smell resides within these little balls - they are Satan in his odorous form.

The effect is one of complete and utter devastation upon one’s nostrils. It sometimes burns to breath in the bathroom, and the smell sticks with you for a good thirty minutes afterwards. And this smell isn’t exclusive to one restaurant or shop: every single bathroom I’ve been in has this same overpowering stench. I’ve removed all of the white balls from the bathroom of the apartment I’m staying in, and yet I’m still paralyzed every time I enter. There is no preparation one can take, no means by which to guard oneself against the effect of this olfactory menace.

If I leave my clothes in the bathroom while showering, they will not lose the smell (the smells half life is longer than uranium’s). If I leave the bathroom door open for even five minutes, the smell will invade the rest of the apartment for hours. This stench, this overpowering fragrance of nuclear proportions, is the bane of my Indian existence.

All of this bathroom stuff is getting old. Didn’t you say something about fire?

People here seem to burn just about everything. These fires are used in a variety of wasy: get rid of garbage, cook on the side of the road, create light for conversations, or to create a spectacle. When this smoke combines with the pollution emitting from the millions of cars, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, auto rickshaws, and buses, the end result is a place that smells like fire - always.

For the first week I was here in India, the smell was quite troubling. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my mind believing that the building I’m in was on fire. Gradually, I became able to ignore the smell - which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

My respiratory system also reacted quite violently at first. I routinely lost my voice by the end of the day, had a sore throat all of the time, and was constantly coughing stuff up. Slowly, my body has become more accepting the poisonous air, and the mal effects have begun to gradually subside.

The smoke, pollution, and dust are so thick that they result in the sky losing its usual blue color and being white for days on end. This is not the effect of clouds - a quick look at the weather radar shows that the sky is cloudless. Out of the 14 days I’ve been here, the sky has had a blueish tint only three days.

Monday began like most others: I woke up earlier than I would have otherwise wanted to and didn’t eat enough breakfast. But instead of being just another day, Monday was quite different. I changed continents, hemispheres, and cultures. I have to convert my dollars to rupees, push my body’s internal clock forward twelve and a half hours, remember to always ask for drinks without ice, never drink the water, and think of as many humorous uses of the word “naan” as possible.

It’s a naan-issue, really.

I’ve been sent to New Delhi, India (in the suburb of Gurgaon, specifically) for work, and it’s certainly shaping up to be an interesting trip.

My itinerary was pretty simple: a four hour flight from Seattle to Chicago, sit around for five hours, and then a direct fifteen hour flight to New Delhi from Chicago.

Although Seattle/Chicago was as uneventful as could be expected, the layover in Chicago was at least mildly entertaining. I was admiring the massive Boeing 777 being prepped to chariot me 7500 miles across the world when a sizable amount of water started spraying out from the plane underneath its tail. Quickly afterwards, the throngs of children noticed the spray and began shouting “Momma! The plane is peeing! The plane is peeing! Look!”

I don’t think the leak was normal, as the ground crew walked back to the leak and proceeded to stare at it for a good twenty minutes. Eventually, three men drove up in a truck, climbed up into the plane, and managed to get the plane to stop peeing. That, or its bladder was empty.

A few hours later, boarding began on what the kids now referred to as the “pee plane”. I started the flight expecting to be able to sleep through much of the journey, hoping for a deep slumber that would pause only briefly in the interest of eating. I was wrong.

Our flight path took us up through Canada, over Greenland, Across the top portion of Sweden, down through Russia, through Afghanistan (no, we weren’t shot at, but I did notice that we increased both our speed and altitude when crossing the country), across Pakistan, and finally to New Delhi, India. After surviving the flight, I honestly believe that all of the mild to medium turbulence in the entire world is collected along this route. We didn’t have any of the roller coaster style turbulence, but were subjected to the type of constant mild bumps and shakes that make going to sleep impossible.

In the process of creating a Wordpress photoblog theme called LitenessPhoto for the photography section of this website, I’ve had to learn the ins and outs of PHP’s EXIF extension and GD library of image functions.

For the uninitiated, EXIF data is information stored in an image file that can specify what kind of camera was used to take a digital picture, exposure information, image resolution, and quite a bit more. For a good overview, check out this Wikipedia article. The GD library allows PHP to create, manipulate, and pull information from photos.

I created Orby Photo with the intention of being able to automatically display the exposure time, f/stop, exposure bias, focal length, and ISO speed of any pictures taken with my camera; all without any work needing to be done by me (use of the EXIF extension). I also want the ability to display an album picture (usually a combination of some of the photos from an album) created by myself, or have one created automatically by PHP if one created by me is not present in a specified folder (use of the GD library).

Although this was easy on paper, a number of wrenches and baby sledges were thrown into the mix at various points during and after development.

For instance, getting the f/stop value should be as easy as $aperture = $exif[FNumber];. However, it seems that the presence of the $exif[FNumber] variable is dependent upon which version of iPhoto I’m using. This forces me to use $exif[ApertureValue] whenever $aperture = $exif[FNumber]; isn’t present.

For reasons I won’t go into here, these numbers are not the same. Instead, $exif[FNumber] is equal to to the square root of two raised to the power of the value $exif[ApertureValue]. Because we’re now dealing with irrational numbers, the computed f/stop value doesn’t always come out to the correct f/stop value of the image. Because of this, a series of if/else statements must be present in order to correct for situations where the computed value is not equal to the actual f/stop value (e.g. 21.9 instead of 22). Because wider f/stop values sometimes include one decimal place, I couldn’t simply round to the closes whole number, or f/2.8 would become f/3.

Instead of a simple output statement for the f/stop value, the code quickly ballooned to:

if (isset($exif[FNumber]))
	$aperture = $exif[FNumber];
else
	$aperture = round(pow(sqrt(2),
		convert_fraction($exif[ApertureValue], true)),1);

if ($aperture == ‘21.9′)
	$aperture = 22;
elseif ($aperture == ‘14.1′)
	$aperture = 14;
elseif ($aperture == ‘20.1′)
	$aperture = 20;
elseif ($aperture == ‘24.9′)
	$aperture = 25;

$output .= “$tabs<h3>:Aperture</h3>:\\n$tabs<p>:f/”.$aperture.”</p>:\\n”;

I hope to finish up development of the theme soon, and then begin the process of packaging it up so other Wordpress users can easily add it to their sites.

Hugin is a cross-platform GUI that allows the user to “assemble a mosiac of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and much more.” Having long wanted to create panoramas but lacking the skills and time to make one that looks good, Hugin seemed like the perfect tool for me.

I went to the Hugin for OSX port page, navigated to the download section, and grabbed a copy. After downloading, I quickly realized that like most open source programs, the documentation on how to use Hugin was sorely lacking. I eventually learned how to do what I wanted to do through trial and error as well as reading numerous tutorials scattered around the web.

My first headache was getting Autopano to work, which is arguably the most important tool that Hugin can use. When it works, Autopano scans through the images you add to Hugin, finds where they overlap, and figures out the best way to stitch the images together. The version of Autopano linked within Hugin’s tools folder requires that the Mono environment be installed on your computer to work, so pick that up first.

After installing Mono, I noticed the following line in Hugin’s explanation on how to get Autopano working:

There are two ways of using Autopano-SIFT from HuginOSX. One is very easy, but does not always work, and hence not supported. The other should work as long as you set up autopano-sift correctly, but it involves editing shell script.

As usually happens, the very easy way did not work for me, so I had to do some minor shell script editing. After following the instructions and properly setting up the AUTOPANO_PATH variable and changing every instance of “generatekeys.exe” to “generatekeys-sd.exe” in the autopano-complete.sh file, I thought I was ready to rock.

However, Hugin quickly let me know that my rocking was yet to happen. Instead, it gave me this error:

I double, triple, and quadruple checked my changes to the shell script, and I couldn’t find what I’d done wrong. I completely removed Autopano from my computer and downloaded a new copy to insure I hadn’t inadvertently changed something else.

Eventually, I realized that Autopano does not like it when the images you’ve added to Hugin have spaces in their path or filename. So after changing the folder and file names (in the example case seen in the error message above from “folder with spaces” to “folder”), my images were analyzed and properly linked.

I’m not going to go into the finer points of optimizing the panorama by adding vertical and horizontal lines or any other such thing - I do not have the experience or knowledge of Hugin to be considered a source on such things. But with the little experience that I do have, I was able to successfully turn thirteen separate images into this:

If you click on the image to see a larger version, you’ll see that the stitching areas between images are very visible, and very ugly. This is where Enblend comes in. Although Enblend can be run from within Hugin by selecting the “into a high quality TIFF file” option in Quick Stitcher, I recommend against it. Instead, export everything as multiple TIFF files.

Once this is complete, you can run the images through Enblend via the command line in Terminal. An example command would be:

/Applications/HuginOSX/tools/enblend/enblend -v -o \\
/Path/To/Save/Final/Pano/Image.tiff \\
/Path/To/Image/1.tiff \\
/Path/To/Image/2.tiff \\
/And/So/On.tiff

Enblend takes quite a while (can be many hours depending on image size, number of images, and processor speed) to do it’s stuff, and I prefer running it through the terminal so I can free up system resources by closing Hugin. There isn’t any sort of progress indicator or time remaining information in enblend, so I run it with the -v flag (verbose) to keep me from thinking my computer froze.

Enblend looks at the various parts of the TIFF files that overlap, and figures out how to blend them. It will blend images over a wide area in parts of the images where there is little variation in the surrounding area - like in skies and clouds - and will blend images in a very small area where people won’t notice a harsh transition - like in rocky areas or in tree trunks.

If you compare the image below to the image above, you’ll see how great a job enblend does:

For the next step, I played around with enblend’s exported TIFF image in Photoshop. I used the Stamp tool and Gaussian blur filter almost exclusively, and am pretty happy with the results. There are some areas I could spend more time in, like making the sky areas that I added look more uniform, but overall I think it looks pretty good for a first try.

My biggest gripe with the Hugin is its lack of documentation. There are numerous options and optimization modes that are not referenced anywhere in the help. Sure, I can look around online for most of the information, but it would save every new user a half-day’s worth of time if all of that information was put in the one place it should be - Hugin’s help file.

That’s not to say Hugin and its associated tools are bad, because they aren’t - they just lack the information necessary for new users to get up to speed in a short amount of time.

Some statistics from the project:

• Total pictures stitched: 13
• Final resolution of panorama: 17964 x 2529 pixels.
• Total time necessary for me to be at computer: ~30 mins.
• Total time my computer spent on processing the images: ~6 hours

In case you’re curious, the panorama shows what you can see from the top of Mt. Rose, the third highest peak in the Lake Tahoe Sierra. You can see some other pictures from the hike here.