Monthly Archives: September 2004

adobe dng

Posted by on 27Sep04 Comments Off

Digital Negative (DNG): http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html

My first thought was “Oh good – another image file format – just what I need”, but that’s a mistake. Adobe do have some very good points about why we need .DNG in their PDF file (see above):

“Camera manufacturers often drop support for a propriety raw format a few years after a camera is discontinued. Without continued software support, users may not be able to access images stored in proprietary raw formats and the images may be lost forever. Since DNG is publicly documented, it is far more likely that raw images stored as DNG files will be readable by software in the distant future, making DNG a safer choice for archival.”

This is pretty much the same sentiment behind Dave Coffin’s dcraw (the code of which isused in Adobe’s current RAW conversion tool) in that if the source code is out there that can easily be compiled, the format should never die out completely.

I’ve only given DNG a quick run around at the moment, and the data files to appear to be largely the same size as my current Canon Powershot G3 raw originals, which is nice (the 3.5MB RAW files end up as 22MB 16-bit PSD images) and do seem to have all of the metadata like ISO preserved. It’ll be interesting to see how this related to Elements 3 later next month: will that have support for all the formats except DNG to aid the sales of PS, or will is only support DNG and you will need PS if you wish to open RAW files directly ?

Personally I’d force Elements users to convert to DNG and help the spread of the format usage – one extra conversion step isn’t going to be that much of a bind considering that Elements is around £59 (pre-order) and PS CS is over £600 (not upgrade).

Update: This more informative announcement has quite a list of DNG ‘supporters’ http://www.photographyblog.com/comments.php?id=3883_0_1_0_C, but sadly missing is any camera manufacturer. Ok, so it’s maybe too soon for that, and it could be that the various RAW formats are tailored not around some desire to form a secret Cabal, but what is easiest for the camera CPU to generate from the CCD data, and so any form of processing will slow down image capture/file writing time and so DNG won’t be seen as a native camera option for quite some time.

Updated Update: Michael Reichmann also has a few (positive) things to say about DNG http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/dng.shtml

Share

god vs. bush

Posted by on 21Sep04 Comments Off

http://www.greenfaces.se/upload/uploads/godvsbush.gif

Another link from Duncan – I was going to pass this off as being as loony as numerology, but now I’m starting to wonder…

Share

the power of q

Posted by on 17Sep04 Comments Off

I tend to use vi/vim quite a lot and have grown from hating it, to enjoying it like a cracked filling: I can’t help but poke at it and am always startled by the results. Today, I learnt about a command that makes all of the others seem tame:

q

Wow. It starts recording and will then playback the results, which might sound tame but has just turned an hour and a half of work into 60 seconds of jaw dropping fun. I have a program file where I want to trace the function call route, and for reasons I shan’t explain the easiest way to do this is to place a print statement at the start of each function, and then simply watch until the program dies. Mind you, this is in Forth so print is in fact ." but to do this over a 144KB text file with over 150 functions is tedious. However, all of the functions start the same way, with a bracket, number and then a comma, so armed with that, the keystrokes are:

qa/^: (\d,
yy
p
xi."<ESC>A" cr<ESC>q

Simple ! Now all I have to do is type @a to get it all to work, but that’s not the end of it: @a behaves just like any other command, so prefix it with a number, eg: 100@a and 100 functions have just had a trace print added !

I’m so happy – serious vim users are welcome to point and laugh, I don’t care at the moment :smile:

Share

making ms word more annoying

Posted by on 10Sep04 Comments Off

Waiting for my coffee to brew, I had a great idea: how to add in a new feature to Word that would be more annoying than Clippy ! (that’s great as in “I don’t use Word so I can laugh at those who must”…)

How about a Bumble Bee (called Bumbly, of course) that looks at the action taken during a spelling check. S/he stores the original incorrect spellings for every word that is corrected so that after a few weeks s/he can learn the sort of typing mistakes that you make the most, as well as the words that you most commonly mis-spell.

Ok, so far so trivial – you’d not have seen Bumbly for the first few weeks after installation as s/he was learning your ‘style’, but then the master stroke: once there is enough data in the mis-dictionary Bumbly will appear when you try to open Word. S/he will buzz around a blank document and spout speech bubbles (all in pale yellow/black, of course) telling you the words that you most commonly mistype. You will have to chase around the screen to click on the close icon to get rid of them, and then the fun starts: Bumbly will quiz you at random once you have closed all of the bubbles and you will have to get at least 3 out of 5 words correct before you can start styping a new document or even let Word continue opening the file you double clicked on !

Genius ! The sale of new PC hardware will go through the roof as apoplectic VP’s soundly thrash their computers in an enraged flash-back to spelling humilations in front of their class when 8 years old. The fact that it will also kill off Word as a viable (ha – I use that word loosly) WP is merely the icing on the cake.

Redmond, are you listening ? This is the next killer feature for Office.

Share

announcements of the death of SPF are, perhaps, premature ?

Posted by on 06Sep04 Comments Off

I’ve seen recent mentions in a few places on the ‘net[1] that SPF (Sender Policy Framework) as an anti-spam measure has failed because more Spam companies have correct SPF details than non-spammers. I feel that for exactly the same reasons, SPF is working, and working well.

Ignoring the merits of SPF (for the moment) the concept is simple: for any given email that arrives at an SMTP server, can the From: be trusted ? The whole systems works because although it’s trivial to forge the From: line, it’s much harder to fake DNS entries (although not impossible, but it requires work and illegal impersonations of the owner) so DNS is used to list all of the machines in the world that can legitimately send email with a From: line containing that domain.

Ok, so we can see if the alleged sender is valid, but the content is still open to any sort of ‘abuse’, and this is where the claims of failure have arisen. SPF was never intended to stop rubbish content, but it does empower recipients to make much more qualified guesses in their Spam filters. Take hotmail.com domains: all of the email that I have received from hotmail.com addresses for the last 6 months has been spam. Shall I add hotmail.com to my list of banned domains ? No. I have people in my address book that do use hotmail.com, and I certainly don’t want to blacklist them, or delay messages from any other legitimate user. What I can say for sure is that every single one of those emails did not originate from a hotmail.com server. If hotmail.com had SPF in place now (they are currently working on it) then I could have acurately scored those incoming mails via SpamAssassin as being forged.

Ok, so that much is obvious, but how can a larger user base of Spammers be a good thing for SPF ? Simple: if all of my junk mail were (overnight) to be sent from emails that aren’t forged, it’s would take me just a few days to remove virtually all of the rubbish from plain view. I could markdown entire domains, or mark those that appear to be spammer friendly and have less imapct than ever on correct email and all without the hassle of needing to whitelist individuals.

Think about it – if normal (snail) mail arrived with all marketing (from companies you have never bought from) in a red envelope, how much time would it take to ignore it ? That’s what SPF is all about.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/31/HNspammerstudy_1.html
http://www.ciphertrust.com/spf_stats
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/09/04/popular_spam_fighters_effectiveness_questioned/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/03/email_authentication_spam/

Share

maybe I shouldn’t bother with that pilot training

Posted by on 05Sep04 Comments Off

UserFriendly Strip 04sep04: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040904&mode=classic

Oh dear. That is so me… Perhaps it’s a good idea that I’m not going to start learning anytime soon.

Share
Page 1 of 11