20 Oct 2005
UPDATE: Maybe I was wrong. See the bottom of this article for more.
The sensor on this must be an absolute piece of trash. It hasn’t even got the excuse of a slowly dying sensor due to a manufacturing defect/humidity… it’s just really poor quality.
The above image has just been scaled, and carefully compressed so as not to exacerbate the problem (in actual fact, JPEG compression artifacts reduce the severity of it). It looks as though it’s had a posterize filter applied to it (reducing the number of colours in the palette, similar to what indexed GIF photos look like), but it hasn’t. That’s straight out of the camera… so far as I can tell, no other software has touched it.
Maybe it just looks worse to me than it is because I’ve got three sets of images here, the other two of which come from a Canon EOS-300D — or Digital Rebel in US-speak — (or maybe a pair of them, judging from time delay between shots, but last I heard they were junky consumer versions of the EOS-10D with plastic casing, and “special” lens options, so why anyone would buy two of them is beyond me). I don’t know, I was just pretty appalled this was coming straight of a camera — ANY camera, regardless as to the brand. It’s not overexposed, or blurred, or grainy (well, it is, but you can’t see it particularly well in the scaled version and that’s not what I’m complaining about — I understand low-light does that to photos), it’s just really bad colour. Incidentally, it was shot as a JPEG. So, it’s not like I or anyone else has screwed up RAW processing — the camera has done that for us.
Oh, and incidentally, what’s with 3:2 ratios? I think it’s nicer than 4:3, but it bugged me to look shots from the Canon before I figured out what was going on!
Update: Perhaps they have been processed a little. One or two of the Rebel’s photos are exhibiting similar qualities, so that leads me to believe someone was being a tool with saturation in Photoshop or the like. And unhelpfully left the EXIF data intact so I thought it was unchanged. :-( I guess I’m often guilty of much the same thing with the GIMP, but oh well. Doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while!
20 Oct 2005
I watched a customer profile video on Big Spaceship, a company doing some funky things with Macromedia’s new Flash 8, and hurried off to have a look at the Underworld: Evolution site (because of the technology, and, yes, because I’m a sucker for that kind of movie).
Alas, Flash 8 is required — and 7 is the latest available for Linux! I was loathe to walk over to another computer just for that, so I’ll have a look later I guess.
20 Oct 2005
I figured I’d go with Atom when creating an app to extract photo feeds for the gallery here, because it’s touted as the next best thing since sliced bread. It’s not. Maybe that’s just coz I’m overtired and have spent too long staring at Feed Validator, but probably not. What the hell is with a limitation on the number of times you can have the same value on an update date? Maybe I posted multiple things at once! Or had scheduled posts. Whatever. Either way, a limit of two on this is ridiculous and… seemingly completely superfluous.
As is the requirement to have a <content> element in the feed. For this gallery feed, that really isn’t neccessary. I conceded that point, but am now regretting it: this means I am now bound to introduce a feature I really don’t want in the future! Note to self: next time a validator comes along, abscond. (Mmm… scones…)
On the record, right now: I know the feed is invalid, and I don’t give a crap. I haven’t even tested it in a feed reader yet: my eyes are doing all the parsing right now. You can check it out at http://www.joahua.com/photostack/atomiccat.php — thus named because of Atom and cat-scan. More bugs presently exist than I care to name, or even think about, but my neck feels like I’ve been sitting at this computer for about a day (it’s been a few hours…), and I really need sleep. Will resolve later, in the meantime… add that feed (application/atom+xml) to your feed reader at your own risk. It’s highly likely to break stuff.
I’ll also setup mod_rewrite rules sometime so it looks like a real feed. Sometime…
19 Oct 2005
For English Advanced Module C, Telling the Truth, consider:
In no particular order. Some are, however, better than others. All except Network are available online (via their own website of publication or Project Gutenberg).
Oh, and before anyone says they can get Network from P2P, I’ll wish you good luck. It’s available on DVD, but only just, and it’s hardly a popular film anymore. I rented it out, watched and took notes, then a few days later wanted to check something. I couldn’t find anything online, so… I wouldn’t waste your time.
These are all relatively/very obscure, so it’s unlikely many people will use them. Unless of course lots of people are searching for module C/telling the truth texts online and find this post. At any rate, enjoy.
19 Oct 2005
Open Source Xara Xtreme
Someone alluded to this on a mailing list I’m a member of (Roy Schestowitz, on lyx-users), and, being the day before an exam and all, I couldn’t help but check it out. I remember playing with Xara tools back in the day of bundled garbage on computer magazine CDs (that was also my first brush with a full version of Flash, at version 3, but that’s another story. I’d played with FutureSplash sometime before then, too.) — it looks as though it’s come a long way.
I’ve used Sodipodi on Linux to do some useful things, but haven’t had a chance to play around with Inkscape yet… though it looks similar, maybe even a fork? Definitely on the to-do list. Anyway, the folks at Xara want people to spread the word they’ve got a cool GPL’d app coming for the Linux desktop (Mac OS too), and I think it’s a great thing for the Open Source community, which is why I’m pimping it here.
There’s a version on their xaraxtreme.org site that is functional already, though it only views files at present… editing functionality is… presumably some way off.
I think if someone offered Pantone swatches for sale with a good quality open-source app, I’d go for it. Their business model seems solid enough after they’ve got it off the ground, but only time will tell. One hopes they stay around, because this appears to be a far better contribution than Corel’s abortive attempts to launch a graphics app on the Linux desktop (closed source, of course — Photo-PAINT 9, if I recall correctly. It was a RAM-guzzling beast that I may have even enjoyed at the time — circa 2000 — had it not been for the fact that I was trying to run it on a middle-of-the-road Pentium (1) with 32MB of RAM) before their silent acquiescence was purchased by Microsoft.
If nothing else, it’ll stir up the space a little bit and hopefully the mention of open source will get otherwise-complacent Adobe innovating again in the Mac space… or, alternatively, it could go the other way and they might just ditch that platform altogether in favour of Windows, though I doubt it.
*Listens as creatives the world over unite and raise arms in an unprecedented revolution against a software company. Hey, it could happen.*