In Valid Logic

I was quite disappointed when the UK show Top Gear disappeared from Discovery Channel a few months ago. It was a weekly favorite for me to watch while eating lunch.

Last week, I noticed that once again, Top Gear is on Discovery Channel (2 shows tonight, 1 show tomorrow night), though is this the new US version I’ve heard about?

Quite honestly, I don’t think I would like a US version of the show. Just look at the shot of the hosts… they look like your typical all-American boys. The problem? Their favorites will probably be American muscle cars, like the Mustang, Camero, Firebird, and Corvette. Sorry, but I don’t really care for those cars. I liked the UK show because they showed a lot of very nice foreign cars and the tastes were far more refined.

Have it set to record it tonight… will probably watch it during lunch tomorrow, but if it is the new US version, I’m going to be skeptical.

Jason Mauss, one of our technical writters. This makes up the California Telligent crew!

At the first California Community Server/Telligent meetup.

So I got my new layout up and I think I got most of the kinks worked out earlier.  Still need to clean up the markup some, since while I was skinning I went back and made some CSS changes that I hadn’t accounted for, and deviated from the nice clean markup I originally had on my proof.  But, I wanted to update the build on my site, and figured I’d push out the layout then too.

I think I am going to be needing to re-organize my photos section, since I got a ton of pictures on there that don’t really need to be.  I used to think “ohh, post all your photos, share you life!”  But that is just boring.  There’d be a lot of bad shots, and just simply no relevance.  So think I am going to trim it down, keep it more like a portfolio, with then maybe a random section for stuff I post to my blog.  I did add the Files section, since I plan on making more code available.  I’ve been sitting on a couple CS mods I’d written and haven’t released.

What I thought was going to be a simple update to my site with a new skin is turning out a little uglier than I though, and apologise.  I thought my new layout was done and good to go, but it seems there are still a few CSS issues with it.

According to the MSDN documentation for NameValueCollection.Add(string, string) under Remarks:

If the specified key already exists in the target NameValueCollection instance, the specified value is added to the existing comma-separated list of values associated with the same key in the target NameValueCollection instance.

Yes, but a short time ago, I was nearly buried alive by my own inbox.  Over a span of about 45 days, my inbox went from zero (from the last time I’d just transfered it to my archive without sorting) to 1500 messages, all unsorted.  It had gotten out of hand, and there was no hope of taking control of it on my own.  Until a friend pointed me to ClearContext.  It is based on the ideas behind Getting Things Done and has helped me to get and keep my inbox at a nice daily average of about 10 messages.  Definitely a very very useful piece of software!

Ryan Whitaker makes a good point.  Why do applications always just assume they can save their crap in my My Documents folder?  Sorry, but I like to keep it organised my way and it always frustrates me when some of these folders are just auto created.  It is My Documents, not Your Documents!

For a while now, I’ve been growing frustrated with some of the EXIF support in Community Server.  Originally, it used the ImageProperties attributes that go along with System.Drawing.Image.  However, in order to read those values, the image had to be completely processed into an Image object, and when we created the FTP Server add-on, bulk uploads would nearly peg the CPU while processing everything.

The solution was to adapt a way of reading the properties raw from the image, without having to process the whole thing.  There was a lack of .NET based EXIF libraries, but I did manage to find Drew Noakes’ library, which was in Java, but it did have a C# port.  So I cannibalised the port to get what we needed (mainly stripped it down and changed it to use XML resource files).  I had plans to add in the code other things like IPTC and manufacturer specific tags, but never got to it.  The way it was working was still frustrating, as it would often show properties like “Flash: 16”.  What does that mean?  Well, 16 stood for something, but it wasn’t able to process those individually.

Then I got my new Digital Rebel XT.  Upon uploading my first pictures, I found none of the EXIF tags were showing.  After some testing, it was causing a stack overflow exception due to a cyclic EXIF directory.  This was a bug in the core library.  Luckily, a few days before I found this, Drew released a new version of his Java library with this issue fixed… but nothing about an updated C# port.

So what is a desperate coder to do?  Port it themselves!  It took me a couple night here there over the past few weeks to get it done, but finally got it all ported to C#.  Porting Java to C# is so boring.  I’m not fully done yet, as naming conventions are still wrong (getTagName() as opposed to GetTagName()).  Surprisingly, it worked pretty much right away… except for some certain images.

My normal picture workflow now is take pictures in RAW, open in Photoshop to adjust white balance, reduce noise, and often resize… then I save as a TIFF, and then fire up FastStone Photo Resizer to convert them all to JPEG and to carry over the EXIF data.  The problem was that the library wasn’t reading any EXIF properties from these files.  Fast forward a couple of hours of debugging and researching, I found the bug in the library (was checking the size of a EXIF directory wrong), and it is working great!

Now fast forward another couple hours of hacking things apart, and I finally managed to get it built into my Community Server build.  So now you get far more proper EXIF values, such as these.  Complete with IPTC, support for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, and a bunch of other manufactures.

This support is not going to be in Community Server v2.0 RTM though.  It is far to late to throw this into the source, and I haven’t even fully tested it, or changed it to use our XML resource files.  But I will probably be looking into releasing it after CS RTMs, though it will certainly not be an update for the faint of heart.

Overall, I’d love to see the Photo Galleries in CS expand far greater and be a serious option for photo enthusiasts, and fully featured EXIF support is definitely a big step in that direction.

BlogJet v1.6.2 was released mid-last month.  I just finally found out about it today.  It has a fix for display duplicate category entries for Community Server, .Text, and dasBlog.  That was driving me nuts a while ago when I was digging through the code in CS to figure out why it had duplicates, only to come up completely dry.  Very glad to find it was fixed though!