The One with the Thoughts of Frans

The Way Alternative Text Should Be Rendered

2010-03-05T09:13:13Z

Vlad Alexander describes how browsers mess up horribly on alternative text. I noticed the deficiencies in Opera and Firefox before, but what Webkit does is simply ridiculous. I don’t entirely agree with him since I don’t think that the alternative content should display without any indication that it’s alternative text whatsoever. I consider Opera’s behavior best in this regard (as opposed to the obtrusive icons most other browsers throw in there), except for the part where it applies width and height meant for images to the text thus cutting them off.

Opera 10.50

2010-03-03T12:30:20Z

For those of you who read my blog, use Opera and don’t follow the latest releases, Opera 10.50 for Windows was released yesterday. Download it now!

What Is Philosophy?

2010-03-01T10:29:17Z

I wrote this summary for a university course, but I never finished it.

The History of Philosophy

The history of Western philosophy starts in Greece—Miletus, more precisely, situated in modern-day western Turkey—, around the beginning of the sixth century BCE. According to Aristotle, Thales of Miletos was the first to develop a way of thinking that deserves the name philosophy, around 585 BCE.
The first philosophers were possibly aware of the novelty of their enterprise; at any rate, they made up a new term for it, historia, which means as much as “research.”
The verb philosophein is not found until the second half of the fifth century BCE. This verb and the substantive philosophia do not become commonplace until the first half of the fourth century BCE. Literally, it means “love/desire to/strive to” (phileô) “knowledge” (sophia).
Philosophia did originally not only specify a specific way thinking: originally philosophizing as an intellectual activity was intrinsically connected to a certain way of life. Something of this ancient concept is still present in our modern language: someone who sees things “philosophically” might possess the spiritual calmness the philosophers of Antiquity had in mind.

This intrinsic connection no longer exists, but some particular terms have maintained this connotation to the present day. Kantian, Heideggerian, phenomenologist or structuralist, on the other hand, only refer to certain points of view. The only qualities the philosopher needs to have are the same that every other scientist should have. Consequently, practicing philosophy does not mean that someone is or tries to be a better human being. It should be noted that this isn’t a modern development. During the Middle Ages, philosophy was little but a tool to support theology, and that is where the modern meaning of philosophy as academic and purely theoretical originated.

The Four Philosophical Questions According To Kant

What can I know?
What should I do?
What may I hope?
=> What is a human being?

To know what philosophy is, it does not suffice to know the history. You need to know which questions philosophy wants to answer. According to Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) philosophy tries to answer three main questions, which come together in one big question.

The Prettiness Disease

2010-02-20T18:23:43Z

The following post on the MyOpera forum spurred me to complain about something I call the prettiness disease. By this I mean adding features that either don’t help usability or actually impair it just because it looks good (according to some). A prime example is most of the features added to Mac OS X as compared to preceding incarnations, but Microsoft and the open-source community have also bought into it.

[…] the thing that most annoys me about [combine always, hide labels] is the fact that it removes the ability to simply click the taskbar icon to minimize/maximize. […] This is the case only, when taskbar buttons are not set to the default ‘combine always, hide labels’. Then it needs CTRL-click to directly switch to the last visible window of a ‘grouped’ application. This is standard Win7 behaviour also with IE8. So, if you disklike the current behaviour disable grouping of taskbar buttons for now. Perhaps there might be an option within Opera later on…

I don’t care for the “combine always, hide labels” setting in Windows 7. I think it’s a failed copy of Apple’s crappy dock, where looking pretty is the only thing that counts while losing out on usability.

Oh wow, look how clean this looks, with all the pretty icons. No text. Whoopie. Now try to identify your windows when there’s 10 different ones. What’s that, thumbnails? Oh how useful, now I can really spot the difference between my 10 directories filled with files, my 10 web pages on the same forum, my 10 text documents in my word processing application, and so on and so forth. There’s a reason I give my directories names, you know. The same applies to just about any other application. The icon only identifies the application, the text-based title identifies what the heck it actually is. Thumbnails would only work the way Microsoft seems to think they should work in Windows 7 if all I ever opened was pictures.

It’s easy enough to combine a text-based title with thumbnails (for those who like thumbnails) and flashy effects (OK, I admit that as long as they’re shorter than a second I don’t completely dislike effects like burning or fading windows, things that light up, etc), but writing your own Compiz plugin is near-impossible without completely reverse-engineering the code (documentation? comments? what’s that?), and for Windows that situation isn’t very different, at least for me.

SimplePie-based Feed Mashup

2010-03-07T20:20:20Z

This tool is now named Tubes and is hosted on Bitbucket.

As I wrote a few months ago, Yahoo Pipes is a nice tool. Nonetheless, it has a few shortcomings which annoyed me because I could neither fix nor work around them. Therefore, I decided to write my own mashup tool. For the impatient, you can download the file right now before reading anything else.

Since SimplePie seems to be the feed aggregation library of choice for many projects, I decided to go with it. I ran into a few minor issues, but nothing I couldn’t handle easily. The code I wrote is based on the multifeeds.php demo file and SimplePie 1.1.3, because in 1.2 it didn’t work (the multifeeds demo, that is — by extension I suppose this file won’t either). It’s a little rough around the edges, and SimplePie is clearly meant for HTML output rather than XML (although its HTML isn’t quite decent either, even if the input feed is), so I decided to fix the whole thing up with Tidy, which takes care of low quality input material as well. Hopefully that makes this whole thing more robust than it would otherwise be. The code is based around bringing various Opera feeds I read together in one big feed, but this can very easily be changed.

So now that I’ve got the basics of output into a feed taken care of, I can easily duplicate other functionality of Yahoo Pipes if I want. Much better.

How to Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Ubuntu/Gnome

2010-02-10T21:09:37Z

Someone asked me how to find a shortcut key to call something like Task Manager to terminate a program.

In Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, the following applies:

The easiest option in this particular instance:
Alt + F2, gnome-system-monitor, Enter
The slightly more complicated (though still easy), always applicable option:
System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts

Click Add

Type whatever you like in name. “System Monitor”, “Task Manager” or anything you like. It doesn’t really matter, just so you can identify it yourself.

Type gnome-system-monitor in Command.

Click Apply.

Scroll down to the bottom (Custom Shortcuts)

Click on where it says “Disabled”

Press Ctrl + Alt + Del (by default this keybinding gives you the logout/shutdown screen, so you’ll probably get a warning about reassigning this particular combination).

For more information on keybindings in Ubuntu, I’d advise you to read the community documentation. If you’re interested, you can also check out the original context of what I wrote in this post.

Erf: Usually With Sidewalks

2010-02-03T13:27:34Z

I do agree with Joe Clark’s recent blog entry protesting shared streets without sidewalks, but I feel that the Netherlands was mistreated by the Toronto Star and to a lesser extent Joe Clark himself. For starters, the sidewalk-free erf as apparently exists in Cologne (assuming that’s what Koln is supposed to mean — if you don’t know how to type Köln, type Koeln or just use the English name) is something that, in the Netherlands, usually only exists where there is no place for sidewalks, and all erven are culs-de-sac. Erf is a Dutch word that means something like yard or court, but in the context of roads it rather refers to an area that is supposed to be more or less as safe as a yard for those cycling, walking, or playing in it. A place where the road-function (transport) is secondary to the area-function. By the way, woonerf is a now an outdated word that means something like living yard. Erven originally only existed in residential areas.

I’d say a typical erf does have sidewalks. Its distinguishing features are that cars have to drive really slowly (no precise speed is specified, but in practice it definitely doesn’t mean anything over about 10 kmph) because everybody except cars can utilize the street however they like, and that traffic can’t pass through: it’s a cul-de-sac after all. Most important it means a place where it’s safe for kids to play on the entire street and where everybody can utilize the street however they like. By no means does it mean that there aren’t supposed to be any sidewalks, and to claim that it does is a misunderstanding at best. Sadly some misguided people have managed to introduce erven without sidewalks in some places where there is enough space for them, but I’m glad to say that this is far from the norm.

Another typical situation is the 30 km zone, though you might see lower speeds like 20 km at times. This kind of zone will typically have a number of speed bumps in place to keep people at this speed and it is usually a through-going road, though seldom the preferred one. This zone will always have sidewalks and may or may not have separate cycling lanes, the latter being almost universally present on roads where the speed limit is 50 or above.

In conclusion, the Toronto Star must have projected its own vision of “better” street conditions on what is actually going on in countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium. An erf does not mean a lack of sidewalks, its application is only in carefully selected areas, and it is always meant to be a cul-de-sac. If you want to copy erven, at least do it right. Don’t claim they’re things they’re not.

30 Days to Becoming an Opera Lover

2010-01-17T17:48:10Z

The 30 Days to Becoming an Opera 6 Lover series may very well have been what pulled me over the edge. That which made me choose Opera instead of MyIE2 (now Maxthon). It should therefore be no surprise that I still harbor warm feelings toward it. While it may be old, and the original series is no longer hosted by TnT Luoma as far as I can tell, I think that the series could still teach current (aspiring) users of Opera a thing or two — even the Opera 6 series. Due to the large part the Opera 6 series played in my personal discovery of Opera, however, my judgment may be somewhat impaired.

I dug into the Internet Archive and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the 30 Days series for Opera 6 is available through the archive in a nice ZIP file. The original Opera 6 lover pages do not seem to have been preserved, but the ZIP file is easier to use regardless.

The 30 Days series for Opera 8 was also preserved. The Opera 8 series is still available in the archives of TnT Luoma, but the pictures and some other things are broken. Besides, I like the old layout better; it used to be blue, however, which was even better — you probably don’t want to read the oldest text available, though. While I would not recommend a detailed read (it is quite outdated after all), I would certainly recommend skimming through most of it.

By the time Opera 8 came out — and consequently, the 30 Days to Becoming an Opera 8 Lover series — I was already a seasoned Opera user, so the series didn’t do much for me. I did discover one very important Opera feature thanks to it, however. In the default keyboard setup, Shift + F2 is bound to go to nickname. If you don’t know what nicknames are, you can give bookmarks so-called nicknames and if you type them out in the address bar and press enter it will take you to the bookmark, and it will offer it in the autocomplete suggestions while you’re typing. Useful, but not a huge time saver.

Go to nickname is better, because it starts going to the nickname as soon as it’s got a match. So if you have only one bookmark with a nickname that starts with a, you’ll only have to type a and you’ll be on your way. I had not realized this prior to reading the Opera 8 Lover series, and it wasn’t actually written in the series, but without it I might very well never have tried this feature again. After some consideration and major inspiration by Moose I rebound F2 to new page & go to nickname, which means that ever since, pressing F2 automatically opened a new page and this tremendously useful dialog. The introduction of speed dial didn’t do much for me thanks to this keyboard shortcut. It might take a few seconds more to configure, but it’s worth it. Additionally, new tabs will open even faster if you disable speed dial.

Teaching Wordpress Some Manners: Enabling Day/Month/Year Archives

2010-01-22T14:16:07Z

Wordpress can’t cope with day/month/year (/%day%/%monthnum%/%year%/) permalinks properly by default. I had no idea because I’ve always used year/month[/day]. It’s fine for the posts, but in the archives /date/month/year fails. Luckily WP (Wordpress) supports plugins in a clever manner, and it has a great API (application programming interface).

Initially I tried the WP API:

add_rewrite_rule('date/(\d{1,2})/(\d{4})', 'index.php?m=$matches[2]$matches[1]', 'top');

This kept giving me an error which I couldn’t (be bothered to) debug since it went several functions deep into the WP core, so I gave up on the API and circumvented it with the help of something I found.

Anyhow, here’s the plugin. Save in a file named rewrite-day-month-year.php or just name it whatever you like.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Rewrite Rules for Day/Month/Year
Plugin URI: http://frans.lowter.us/2010/01/22/teaching-wordpress-some-manners-enabling-daymonthyear-archives
Description: Wordpress can't cope with /%day%/%monthnum%/%year%/ for some reason. That is to day, it fails when you try to go for an archive in the form of /date/month/year/ This teaches it some manners. Probably/hopefully shouldn't interfere with other structures, but why you'd activate it if you don't need it I wouldn't know.
Version: 1.0
License: GPL
Author: Frans
Author URI: http://frans.lowter.us

Based on http://dd32.id.au/files/wordpress/test-rewrite.php
*/ 

function test_add_rewrite_rules( $wp_rewrite ) {
	$new_rules = array(
		"date/(\d{2})/(\d{4})" => 'index.php?m=' . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(2) . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1),
		"date/(\d{4})" => 'index.php?year=' . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1)
	);
	$wp_rewrite->rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules; //NOTE: You must add it to the start of the array, Else WP's greedy rules at the end of the array will eat the request
}

register_activation_hook( __FILE__, 'flush_rules_initiate' );
register_deactivation_hook( __FILE__, 'test_flush_rules' );
// add_action('init','test_flush_rules'); // for testing

function flush_rules_initiate() {
	// Add the permalink override stuff
	add_action('generate_rewrite_rules', 'test_add_rewrite_rules');
	test_flush_rules();
}

function test_flush_rules(){
	//Flush the rewrite rules so that the new rules from this plugin get added,
	//This should only be done when the rewrite rules are changing, Ie. When this plugin is activated(Or Deactivated), For simplicity while developing using WP Rewrite, I flush the rules on every page load
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
?>

Unobtrusive Input Value Modifier

2010-01-17T17:52:53Z

Inputs that say things like “search here” are generally messed up. In this post I will first explain why and then I will show you how to do it properly.

The Wordpress theme I’m modifying for my wife had the following HTML in it:

<input type="text" value="Search this site" onfocus="if (this.value == 'Search this site') {this.value = '';}" onblur="if (this.value == '') {this.value = 'Search this site...';}" name="s" id="searchbox" />

There are three main problems with this.

It prefills the search box with “Search this site.” This is incredibly annoying and obnoxious behavior for people with Javascript disabled. If you must add such text, add it through Javascript.
The values don’t even match up, so if you focus on the INPUT, deselect it and select it again the text stays there. Even for users with Javascript enabled. Errors of this type could easily be avoided if the text value were stored in a variable.
Which brings me to the third problem. The script should be external so it can be cached. That would save bandwidth for both you and your visitors and if there are people with Javascript disabled, they won’t even have to load the ~~junk~~script once.

Because just about every such box I have ever encountered is complete and utter crap (this is actually one of the better ones), I decided to reproduce its functionality in an unobtrusive manner, eliminating all of the mistakes I outlined above.

The HTML is now reduced to this:

<input name="s" id="searchbox"/>

You could remove the trailing slash if you’re writing HTML, or put a space in between if that’s the way you write XHTML, but that’s of no consequence otherwise. The type="text" is not essential because it’s the default, but it shouldn’t hurt to leave it in. Also see Anne van Kesteren’s Optimizing Optimizing HTML for some tips on going somewhat over the top with minimalism.

The Javascript that changes the text to “Search this site…” is now in an external file:

(function() {
	function searchbox_text_change() {
		var s = document.getElementById('searchbox');
		var s_text = 'Search this site...'
		if (s.value == '') s.value = s_text;
		else if (s.value == s_text) s.value = '';
	}
	document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',
	function(){
		var s = document.getElementById('searchbox');
		searchbox_text_change();
		s.addEventListener('focus', searchbox_text_change, false);
		s.addEventListener('blur', searchbox_text_change, false);
	},
	false);
})();

All of this took me about five minutes. There’s a tiny bit of redundancy going on, but I can’t be bothered to fix that. It’s superior to just about any stupid such script I ever encountered and likely to most of the same type that I will encounter in the future. Use this script as much as you please. You don’t even have to link back to me, since I just want those bloody things to work in a way that doesn’t make me cringe.

The same kind of principle applies to autofocus junk. Never ever do any such thing if I started typing something. I’d rather you never did it at all, but if you really feel that you must do it for some masochistic reason, at the very least check if the value is still empty with if (s.value=='').

Taking Sidenotes to 2010

2010-01-12T17:26:53Z

Five years ago there were lots of posts dealing with people’s visions of the least-bad method to include sidenotes — or footnotes — to HTML, and like any self-respecting HTML-geek I created my own take on the matter. As might be expected from five year old writings it is now outdated, and I’m glad it is. It means the cruft can be retired, and media queries can be used to their full glory — except in IE8, that is.

The script I wrote to supply non-Opera browsers with faux-media-query functionality assumes that any browser not Opera should have the script applied to it, because at the time Opera 7+ was the only browser that supported media queries. I knew this wasn’t exactly the proper way to write scripts, but it was meant to be updated to use some more intelligent detection at some point. As such things go, however, it never was. In my defense, the worst the script did was duplicate some functionality that was already provided by media queries, so I rather doubt anybody noticed any adverse effects. Heck, they might have noticed positive effects, since as I wrote at the time, “For now, it might even be the best solution to apply the Javascript to Opera as well, because Opera does not reapply media queries on resize yet (and it does fire the onresize event as every browser does).” For good measure I’m also including the script as I used it on my website since 2006. It has this nifty little added feature that it doesn’t actually do anything if there are no sidenotes present, which is something media queries cannot do. I think I considered writing a more intelligent check based on style features that would be set by the media query back in early ‘06, but I can’t recall why I never did. For those interested in hacking the old script, the way I set it up it should be possible to determine whether media queries are supported very easily by combining a test for at least medium width with the marginRight style property on the sidenotes. If set, media queries are working; if not, go ahead and do some scripting magic.

Now, on to the updated sidenotes. I abandoned absolute positioning in favor of going completely for float. I believe I wanted to do this originally, but there were too many float bugs in all kinds of browsers to make it viable (that means everything not Presto or KHTML). Since these appear to be fixed, there is no reason not to take full advantage of floats, which most important means using clear so that sidenotes will not overlap. Previously I had to seriously consider the placement and frequency of sidenotes. Now I can just add them whenever I want. I still think my original reasoning is quite valid, however, which means I don’t think sidenotes should be inserted lightly or contain overly long texts.

Let’s start out. How do we markup a sidenote? Well, as HTML contains no way whatsoever to markup a foot- or sidenote, the logical choice is small. Why small? Well, it means that the content of small is less important. A footnote should not be a footnote at all if it’s as important, or more important than the text itself, right? Thus, the markup of the sidenote is as follows:
<small class="sidenote">A sidenote</small>

This is still what I use, but ASIDE would be more appropriate in HTML 5.

The sidenote as I created it is meant to be put at the end of a sentence, inside a paragraph. Therefore it would be displayed at its original position in the text if author CSS was disabled, or read at its intended location on screenreaders. If it wouldn’t be put as a separate sentence, it would look strange if not displayed the intended way. The sidenote is placed inside the paragraph with the other text, for if it would require multiple paragraphs, should it be a sidenote?

Were Sidenotes Always Compatible With Any Element?

You could always apply the sidenote class to any element, such as P or DIV.

There is one issue I didn’t take into account five years ago. For example, including two paragraphs or so of background information on a country or city in a sidenote would be an appropriate use of sidenotes since it’s not really a part of the text. My original stance (although not explicitly written) was that this should be solved with hyperlinks, but I have somewhat revised this stance. The markup would then become something like:

<div class="sidenote">
	<h3>Were Sidenotes Always Compatible With Any Element?</h3>
	<p>You could always apply the <code>sidenote</code> class to any element, such as <code>P</code> or <code>DIV</code>.</p>
</div>

Or in HTML 5:

<aside>
	<h3>Were Sidenotes Always Compatible With Any Element?</h3>
	<p>You could always apply the <code>sidenote</code> class to any element, such as <code>P</code> or <code>DIV</code>.</p>
</aside>

The main sidenote CSS is still very similar to what it was in 2005.

.sidenote {
	background: #efd;
	display: block;
	float: right;
	clear: right;
	width: 200px;
	border: 1px solid #eee;
	border-right: 0;
	margin: 2px;
	margin-right: -20px;
	padding: 3px;
	text-indent: 0;
	cursor: help;
}
.sidenote:before { content: '\2190' ' '; }
.sidenote:hover {
	background: #ff0;
}
/* enable usage of code in sidenotes without the layout breaking  */
.sidenote code {
	white-space: normal;
}

There are a few minor differences, but other than the addition of the .sidenote code line nothing worth mentioning. Only a few weeks ago I noticed that adding a line of code to a sidenote somewhat broke my layout because it stretched beyond the viewport. A few more global ways to accomplish normal white space in sidenotes come to mind (such as !important in the main class or .sidenote *), but from what I understand using such methods increases parsing time, if only ever so slightly.

The media queries performing the sidenote magic were significantly slimmed down, and a low-resolution in-line display was added:

@media all and (max-width: 350px) {
	.sidenote {
		display: inline;
		float: none;
		border: 0;
		margin: 0;
	}
	.sidenote:before {content:"";}
}
@media all and (min-width: 750px) {
	#wrapper{margin-right:207px}
	.sidenote {
		border-right:1px;
		margin: 0;
		margin-right:-228px;
	}
}
@media all and (min-width: 980px) {
	#wrapper{margin-right:auto}
}

#wrapper is just in there to keep IE from embarrassing itself; if I were creating my blog’s design today I’d just go with body. Switching completely to float makes it possible to keep the overrides to a minimum, but that’s not the important change here. I switched to simple media queries for two reasons.

It’s much easier to maintain and change. No more duplication.
I don’t think most media types are as relevant anymore as I did back then. Specifically, in regard to such things as handheld devices what I want to do is offer different layouts based on screen size, not on whether they consider themselves to be handheld, screen, or some other fancy media type. Safari on the iPhone considers itself a big browser, for instance, but should it really get the “big” layout? None of this is especially relevant for my sidenotes, but it does reflect my opinion on it. Additionally, specifically overriding for certain media types rather than being specifically inclusive makes sure that no one is left out. In other words, this is future-safe. If the media type magazine ever emerges (they already did a magazine with an eInk cover, didn’t they?), my media query is ready for it now. And for those who care about such things, it also avoids an IE bug or two.

That’s it. My sidenotes are ready for the nearby future. They’re so 2010. Feel free to use or expand on my ideas, but please add a link back to me somewhere if you do.

Mounting Remote Filesystems With sshfs

2010-01-10T16:13:37Z

This is a condensed and edited version of the Ubuntu Blog guide regarding how to mount a remote ssh filesystem using sshfs, based on my personal experience.

Before you can use sshfs, you’ll need an SSH server. This is useful for all kinds of things, but that’s not important here. To set up an SSH server in Ubuntu, all you need to do is sudo apt-get install openssh-server. Setting it up in Cygwin (like I did to access my Windows box, and to tunnel VNC through it) is a bit trickier, but there are decent tutorials out there. Once that’s taken care of, you can set up sshsf.

sudo apt-get install sshfs
sudo mkdir /media/dir-name
sudo chown `whoami` /media/dir-name
sudo adduser `whoami` fuse

Log out and log back in again so that you’re a proper part of the group.

Mount using sshfs [user@]host.ext:/remote-dir /media/dir-name; unmount using fusermount -u /media/dir-name.

It all worked perfectly for me, but if not, there’s apparently a solution.

If you get the following error:

fusermount: fuse device not found, try ‘modprobe fuse’ first

You will have to load the fuse module by doing:
$sudo modprobe fuse

You can add fuse to the modules that are loaded on startup by editing the file /etc/modules and adding a line with only the word “fuse” in it, at the end.

and then issue the sshfs command above again.

If you’re on Windows, don’t panick. Dokan SSHFS will perform the same task.

It should be noted that this is even easier within KDE applications, where you can simply use fish://your-server.com, but sshfs cooperates better with the rest of my system. Trying the same with Dolphin in KDE on Windows results in a KIOslave going crazy using all the CPU it can, however.

Aside from easy editing of files directly on my Windows box, this finally enabled me to stream videos from my Windows box, although right now only lower quality ones since it’s also connected through WLAN. With Samba things just weren’t working out, and the same applied to FTP (though it was better for file transfers than Samba, I have to say). Admittedly, this still actually uses FTP under the hood, but it just works better. Besides it will also be secure to use remotely thanks to SSH.

Grub2 Brilliance

2010-01-07T22:04:46Z

This is what update-grub outputs (I keep typing grub-update because it just seems more logical):

$ sudo update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic
[…]
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
[…]
done

This is what /etc/default/grub wants to set the default boot entry:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)"

Thanks. That really made things so much simpler.

Using exiv2 to Help Manage Your Pictures

2010-01-04T10:02:35Z

Installation

As always, in Ubuntu it’s a piece of cake with sudo apt-get install exiv2.

Adjusting Exif Date/Time

With exiv2, exiv2 ad -a [-]HH[:MM[:SS]] file does the job.

For example, my camera was still on DST when I shot my new year’s fireworks pictures, which made them appear as if they were shot at 1 AM. Thus, I ran the command exiv2 ad -a -1 *.JPG to fix it.

Using a Command File

I use a file named exif-copyright-2010.txt (and another one for 2009 etc.) with just two lines in it, which I apply instantly when grabbing pictures from my camera. This file contains the following lines.

add Exif.Image.Artist	Ascii	"My name"
add Exif.Image.Copyright	Ascii	"Copyright © 2010 My name"

This can be applied using exiv2 -m /somewhere/exif-copyright-2010.txt file. I used to mess about with batch processing in graphical applications — which worked fine — but this is much faster.

You can read more about all of this on the official website.

Updates on Twitter

2010-01-02T20:01:16Z

I don’t care much for Twitter. The maximum message length of 140 characters is extremely limiting and, unless you resort to chatspeak, it’s hard to say anything meaningful in such a limited space. If you do resort to chatspeak, it won’t look meaningful even if it is. Catch 22! I imagine the best way to say something meaningful is to link to a blog post offering more explanation, or maybe I’m just prejudiced against chatspeak. Regardless, since most people comment on blog posts using Twitter, and everybody and their grandparents is using it, I figured I should look into a way to utilize it in a more meaningful way than logging in about once a year.

microblog-purple offers convenient integration into Pidgin, which I already use for chatting. It’s easy to install on Ubuntu using sudo apt-get install pidgin-mbpurple, but you may want to consider using PPA for both Pidgin and microblog-purple. Note that the microblog-purple from PPA is named pidgin-microblog, so if you already installed pidgin-mbpurple you’ll have to remove that first. That’s what it is, after all: a chat service with a 140-character limit — most chat services offer at least 500 characters or so. At least it has better offline and history support than most. You also need to enable the plugin named Twitgin so you get a character count on the window where you communicate with Twitter.

Since, like I said, almost everybody uses it, I figured it might also be a good idea to announce new blog posts on Twitter automatically. I searched around a bit in the forest of Twitter plugins and WP to Twitter sounds like it best meets my needs. This post is a test of the plugin, and it announces my partial submission to the crowd — not submission in the sense of Islam, but submission in the sense of realism.

Fireworks on the Scheldt

2010-01-01T13:53:06Z

Last night I decided to try to take some pictures of fireworks without a tripod. Considering the freezing temperatures I knew I was in for disaster, but with plenty of space available on my memory card, that didn’t really matter.

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I think the most important thing we just observed is that if you want to take nice pictures of fireworks, you should probably not stand upwind — although considering the distance involved that would have taken almost as long as the fireworks lasted (about 20 minutes). I did zoom in quite a bit. On the other hand, you’ll miss some or most of the smell of gunpowder if you do that, which is an important part of the watching experience, after all.

Happy new year!

2009 in Places

2009-12-31T22:17:41Z

I decided to join the crowd over half a decade after this kind of post started showing up across the Internet — and I bet it wasn’t new when I first saw it either. Here is my 2009 in places, alphabetically. I spent the night at most of these places, but some were “merely” the subject of day trips.

America
- Chicago
- West Bloomfield (+Detroit)
- Holland: where they tried to explain the flags of the Dutch provinces and Wilhelmina peppermint to me.
- Palatine
- Saugatuck
Belgium
- Antwerpen
- Brugge
- Brussel
- Gent
France
- Lille: on the way back the conductor told us we’d better be glad he’s Flemish, ’cause the French would give us a huge fine for not validating our dated return ticket prior to boarding the train (had already been checked on the way there, as well…), and that this was apparently written “clearly in 4 languages at the station.” Maybe on the validating machines themselves, but certainly nowhere else. Other than that it was quite nice.
Germany
- Nürnberg: old looking city, but actually quite new due to WW2. Nice museums and metro system. Each church was apparently built by killing all the Jews who lived where the church is now located. A Nazi past, so to speak. The hotel had rooms based around local fairy tales, and was a total dream: both for the price we paid, and compared to our accommodations in Italy.
Italy
- Atrani, Amalfi, Amalfi Coast: wonderful scenery, a horrible road that makes a 20–30 minute drive into one that’s more like two hours, lots of touristy shops, and the most laid back people anywhere, ever.
- Capri: didn’t spend quite as much time here as we’d liked; blue grotto is nice but overpriced.
- Florence: northern Italy is so refreshing after the south, recommended.
- Torre Annunziata: Naples suburb that is near the Pompeii and Oplonti archeological excavations; also has a convenient train connection to Naples. Very impressive Roman ruins, and nice landscape, but the modern-day suburbs, city, and nearby villages are not very inviting. The atmosphere is a lot better in the villages than around the city, but the natives peer at you like you were some creature from outer space, which is rather uncomfortable.
- Rome: definitely need to go back sometime; we barely scratched the surface despite being there for a while. Scariest and oldest elevator I’ve ever used. Who says elevators aren’t supposed to go down like 10cm when you step into them?
- Sorrento: lots of stairs, just like anywhere else along that coast.
- Venice: involved quite a bit of dragging with suitcases. Very special place.
The Netherlands
- Amsterdam
- Den Haag: they didn’t have a sand sculpture. Lame.
- Den Helder
- Middelburg
- Rotterdam
- Scheveningen
- Texel
- Utrecht: I lived here, after all.
Sweden
- Stockholm
- Tippen, Saltsjöbaden: where we spent the night and enjoyed the hospitality and company of a good friend.

How To Make µTorrent Independent From Documents & Settings

2009-12-27T10:24:32Z

If you copy (or move) the files in %appdata%\utorrent to the same directory where you keep utorrent.exe, it will exist independently from your Windows installation, and will be unaffected by reinstalling Windows. By reinstalling Windows I mean reformatting your dedicated Windows partition and starting fresh.

Google Browser Size: Works Best on Annoying Pages

2009-12-25T17:42:11Z

Browser Size is a utility by Google Labs which overlays a semi-transparent image with percentages indicating what part of the website people can see without scrolling. I don’t know how long it has been around, but I found out about it, played a couple of minutes with it, and read the about page a couple of days ago. I mentally stumbled when I read the following.

Browser Size works best on web pages with a fixed layout aligned to the left (emphasis added). If the content reflows as the width is adjusted or it is centered, then the results can be misleading. In this case, you can obtain more accurate results by reducing the browser width to a percentage column, e.g. 90% and seeing what content falls below the 90% horizontal line.

I realize it would be hard to implement it any other way, and I would certainly hope that most people understand you have to play around with the size of your window to use the tool in a meaningful way without having read the preceding message — those that don’t probably won’t read the message either. It seems to me that this should certainly be the preferred way to use the tool — how it works best. Don’t encourage those who produce such annoying designs by saying their methods work best. What they hopefully meant to say is that it works best to expose web pages with a fixed layout for the excrements they are.

Epson Does Not Know How to Write Printer Drivers With Sane Defaults—Or Why Color “Enhancements” As An Opt-Out Are Bad

2009-12-22T21:46:18Z

A couple of days ago, I wanted to print some photos on my Epson printer. I don’t do this often because I usually merely print text, but it is capable of it. I had always thought that the discrepancy between what was on my screen and what came out on paper was a matter of RGB to CYMK (or whatever my printer uses internally) conversion, but today I found out that it is merely a stupid driver. I am embarrassed that I only discovered this after utilizing the printer for several years, but in my defense, I have barely used it for printing pictures.

I’ll start off by showing the culprit. If you select some combination of a type of photo paper with one of the photo quality settings, PhotoEnhance is automatically checked. Despite being somewhat of a control freak in regard to my software and hardware, I wrongfully assumed that this meant some other kind of optimization in ink usage for photo paper as compared to normal paper. Hovering it quickly revealed my mistake: Enhances photos by optimizing color levels. Useful for low resolution images. EXCUSE ME!? I am not printing any low resolution images, and if I were, I would most certainly fix any potential color level issues myself prior to printing, if only because I could try various algorithms for blowing the picture up to a resolution more suitable for printing. Now it’s fine that this switch is there to save me such trouble if I happen to be printing low resolution imagery, but I am not doing any such thing. Tampering with it unasked could potentially have somewhat favorable results, somewhat detrimental results, or results that are so bad that they cause me to write this post.

Let’s start with exhibit one. A picture of us on the beach. Perhaps it could be made a little better by playing a bit with some color or brightness levels prior to printing, but I deemed it sufficiently decent.

Here is the first print-out I made of this picture. As you can see, the colors were made a little brighter, and the results of the PhotoEnhance feature were actually not too bad. It’s not the picture I wanted to be printed, but it’s close enough that I wasn’t suspecting anything to be fundamentally wrong. In this sense it’s comparable to the few pictures I printed previously.

This is the picture I printed later, without PhotoEnhance. Scanning it introduced some color distortions compared to the original picture, but it should nevertheless be clear that it’s closer to the original, i.e. what I wanted to be printed.

Here is the picture that sparked all of this. It’s a perfectly innocent picture of us standing at some random bridge in Amsterdam.

The monstrosity my printer made of this actually seems a touch less bad in the scanned version, but it should still be clear how horrible it is.

And finally, the same picture without PhotoEnhance. As before with the beach, most of the color differences with the original were actually introduced by scanning, and not by printing.

In conclusion, my printer is perfectly capable of producing very nice, approaching color perfect reproductions of photographs, but by default it creates something that made me think its photo printing capabilities were highly exaggerated for years. Since I didn’t buy it to print photos this was not an issue, but it’s certainly yet another example of a hardware manufacturer messing up their otherwise perfectly fine products with bad software.