(Almost) nobody likes to get married in Paris in the Summer

The graph below shows how many marriages there have been in France in 2008, depending on the size of the municipality -- rural, small town, bigger town, even bigger, and Paris and its surroundings. Base 100 is the average for the darkest and coldest months of the year, January to March.

What is striking is that from October to April the pattern of weddings is pretty much similar in all municipalities, but that starting in May, the small towns see a disproportionate amount of weddings when everybody flees for a nice sunny week-end in the countryside, increasing the chances that your guests will actually come to your wedding. There are more than 10 times more weddings in August in the rural counties, while for Paris the number only doubles between bleakwinter and nicesummer. Overall, one third of the weddings are in July and August, and while there are as many weddings in the smallest towns and in Paris in January to March, there are 4 times more weddings in July and August.

The smaller the town, the larger the number of weddings in every month from May to September; the difference between the different city sizes is most acute in August. So you might run into trouble finding a place to host your wedding party in the countryside, not in Paris, in July and August. June is very bad in Paris.

(disclaimer: I got married in Paris... in August - but the party was in September)

Number of weddings in France in 2008


These statistics are taken from INSEE - Données détaillées des statistiques d'état civil sur les mariages en 2008

Hand painted mural

Hand painted mural
Originally uploaded by Seb Przd

In the pool

In the pool
Originally uploaded by alexispz

Sound again

I upgraded recently to Kubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty", and I made the mistake of installing PulseAudio, the "new generation" audio system for linux. What a mistake. I then spent several hours trying to get sound working again - there is a thread in the Ubuntu forums with more than 125 pages of people complaining about PulseAudio, and this is not counting the whole collection of other threads on the same topic.

Of course, if you want to uninstall PulseAudio, you have to uninstall most of KDE because of dependencies - or so it seems. I had to install first the replacement for PulseAudio (ESound, which works fine, thank you), before being able to purge the pulseaudio related packages. Except one library, which has to stay there apparently.

And now sound works again. Hurrah!

Cloud of pictures

A fun way of displaying pictures.

Get this widget at roytanck.com

1.9 gigapixels

1.9 gigapixels: My largest panorama yet
Originally uploaded by Seb Przd

With the help of a new computer with 4GB of RAM I have been able to stitch very large images. My newest record is 1.9 Gigapixels, from 372 images shot over a 15 minutes span. The weather conditions were not good, and the exposures vary a bit over the image.

It took a bit more than 2 days to set up the control points (automatic and manually for some images), 1h30 to remap the images, and 23 hours to blend. I really should have bought a computer that could be upgraded to 8GB of RAM...

On the flickr page of the image I have additional details; if you want to view the full image you can do that on GigaPan.

Video + immersive panorama

Pano2VR has a new feature of interactive VR movies (or said another way, video immersive panoramas). Here is my first attempt (the video is over 3MB, please be patient if you want to enjoy it fully).

You will be travelling inside a torus made of Villarceau circles.

Click here to view the immersive video.