In Valid Logic

Last night, I was up working on a simple little CS mod for the Galleries that I may release once v2.0 comes out.

I’ve been roaming a number of photography forums lately digging around for info on photography terminology and practices and such.  One thing you frequently find is people posting pictures to share with others or get feedback on.  Often times, especially if they are asking “how can I improve xyz in a picture like abc?”, one of the first responses is to post the stats of the image they are trying to improve (stuff like aperature, ISO, shutter, focal length), as this info is sometimes over looked when first posted.

So, I thought, why not include it directly within the image when crossposting?  And that is exactly what I wrote a mod for.

Pretty simple.  You just go view one of the scaled versions of the image and change the trailing part of the path to ‘exif’.  Nice and simple.  It is configurable too, for the width/height of the scaled image, the location of the text, and the properties that it will show.

As a side note, think I am going to start a side project to overhaul the EXIF support in CS.  Haven’t found a good strong C# based EXIF library with XML based resource files.  Have one, but it is a little overly complicated, and pictures from my new camera cause a stack overflow exception in it.   Galleries could use more elaborate EXIF support (IPTC, manufacturer specific, value-definition… wtf is flash value of 73?  it is supposed to represent something else).

The wife’s much anticipated Christmas gift arrived yesterday, and she was sporting it while we had some company over last night for dinner. I think she’d like it if I got a matching geek t-shirt, but I don’t think that will happen.

Although, UPS certainly continues to show how much they care for you packages. The box was quite beat up when it arrived. When the delivery guy dropped it off, I said “WTF happened to this thing?”, though he just kind of shrugged and took off. Probably didn’t want to claim any responsibility, though I didn’t care, its not like it would damage a t-shirt.

Still playing around with the camera, learning about all the different features, and trying to understand exposure. Kind of getting into this… may pick up a book about the properties of photography. A lot of different aspects to a photo that you don’t really get to play with on a standard point-and-shoot camera. Unfortunately, a lot of my pictures while playing around with it are pretty bad, since don’t quite understand it all, but starting to get it.

For our wedding, my sister gave us this nice alarm clock weather station from Sharper Image.  It is quite nice and has I really like it, but I’ve noticed that it seems to have a bug in its software that seems to pop up about once a month.

Every so often, when I get up in the morning and hit the snooze, it will turn off the buzzer like expected, but it doesn’t go off again in 5 mins like it is supposed to (yes, it has a 5min snooze… not the usual 9min).  Instead, it gets trapped in this sort of dead-end zone where it won’t go off again (at all), you can’t turn off the alarm (the icon on the screen that the alarm is on won’t go off), can’t reset the alarm to go off the next day, can’t change the alarm time or anything else, yet the clock continues to tick along.  Only way to fix it is to unplug it, pull the battery, then plug it in and reset the time/alarm.

Goes to show that bugs can exist in the smallest of applications and in the simpliest of functions.  Normally, you wouldn’t expect to see a bug in something as basic as an alarm clock, but perhaps it goes to show that in your own alarm clocks, don’t assume your own code is without holes.

After living here for 8 months, I finally unpacked and setup my office yesterday.  I have been getting tired of pictures leaning against the wall and just a general mess of things lying around waiting to one day find their final storage place.  So, I set out to decorate the office and organize the closet (which had become our “ohh, just put it in there” storage space).  Finally, I have a nice, neat, organized office.

Before:

After:

What desktop search programs do you recommend?

Lately, I’ve been using Google Desktop, and find its file search and web history search to be great, however I am disappointed by its email and IM searching.  I use Trillian for all my messanging, and can’t find any way to tell it “look here for chat logs”.  With emails, I regularly move my emails to subfolder, and then later to a local PST file (so I don’t go over my mailbox quota).  Google isn’t really good at updating its indexes, so I will search for something in Outlook, then go to open it, and it says it can’t find it.  Only way to view the email is to have it search in IE and view the message in IE, but if I click to open it in Outlook, it won’t find it.

I used to use LookOut for my email searching within Outlook, which was bought up by Microsoft to put into MSN Toolbar.  I’d tried MSN Toolbar, but was kind of disappointed that its email search wasn’t the same as LookOut was.  I believe it also didn’t pickup on chat logs for Trillian.

So what are people using nowadays?  I’ve been thinking of going back to MSN Toolbar, since I don’t think I’d used v2.5, but the main thing I’d hope it would be able to handle would be updating indexes.for emails.

Kind of late, but thought I’d get in my “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” post.  This holiday season has definitely been a change.  This is the first Christmas since Trish and I got married, so it was the first time doing things like getting our own Christmas tree, spending Christmas Day together, and so on.  Previously, we’d always spent Christmas Day with our own families and stick to our own traditions.  Now, everything is shifting as we now form our own set of traditions.

In terms of what old Saint Nick brought this year, I made out pretty well, especially in the wardrobe department.  I think my wife rallied the troops as she had been dropping hints for a long time that I needed new pants, t-shirts, and such.  As a geek, fashion isn’t really my top priority.  As long as something still fits, no stains, and no gaping (or noteable) holes, what’s wrong with it?  Well, leave it up to the holidays to replenish your clothing needs.

One piece of clothing my wife was excited about was this “I Love My Geek” t-shirt I got for her.  She’d been dying to get a shirt like that for a while, and leave it up to ThinkGeek.com to have it.

In terms of toys and gagets, I went out yesterday and bought myself a Canon Digital Rebel XT.  I’d been wanting the camera for quite a while, and decided to take the plung and get it.  So far, I absolutely love it!  Has vastly more options that my previous camera, so still learning how to use all of the features.  Read through the entire manual last night, and still playing around with it to get the hang of it.

Today, we starting beta testing some software with various users and one of the bug reports just made me chuckle.

There are two executeables, one is a Windows service and the other is for a console mode.  When firing up the console version, it has a slight spelling error that says “Press any key to exist…”.

Couldn’t help but chuckle at it.  Not a harmful bug or anything, and it is basically one of the really early lines of code that you write and then move on and never look at again… but still, kind of funny.

Setting this mission for myself for this evening: get my site up to date to the latest Community Server beta build and the latest versions of all the related add-ins that I use.  It is kind of shameful that I am a developer at Telligent and not even using our latest public RTM version.

Why this sudden interest?  Because I’ve been working on some cool new stuff that I want to use here, but can’t because I’m two versions behind.  So, lets see how difficult this will be…