My pal Evo made the tv news last week on his Brew Diet. Â This is for SCIENCE! Â Follow his diet exploits at funanymore.com
Category Archives: Geek
All things geek
Thanks, Steve
Steve Jobs passed away today at age 56 after a battle with cancer. Â Here’s a few random thoughts…
On this day, I own a buttload of Apple gear: iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Apple TV 2, Time Capsule, Mac Mini… I’m planning on getting an iPhone 4S as soon as possible.
I was (and am) a big open source dork at heart, but Apple’s simplicity and ease of use, especially the past 7 years really spoke to the pragmatic side of me. Â It turned me into a fan boy, I guess. Â It didn’t hurt that OS X is NeXTStep is UNIX… I touch OS X and Linux every day.
One of Dinah’s first words was iPod which she taught herself so she could ask me to turn on music for her.
In college, I loved using the NeXT computers we had. My first class in college used scheme on the NeXT’s. The NeXT is one of the first places I played Doom. Â I took calculus using Mathematica on the Mac in college.
Steve also touched my kids’ lives via Pixar. (Okay, my life too, I saw Toy Story in the theater first run, long before I had kids.) Also through their first computer, a Mac Mini.
There were too other public figures who’s lives and deaths touched me the way Steve’s passing is touching me today: Jim Henson and Fred Rodgers.
OS X 10.7/Lion attemping to mount a Windows 2008 file share: WTF?
Overall, I’m happy with the changes that Lion brings. I was a bit thrown off by some of the changes that happened as Spaces got folded into Mission Control, but once I found out how to assign apps to desktops in the new style I calmed down.
We’re stuck with one vexing problem at work that’s Lion related: We have all of the work Macs tied into Active Directory and that’s working pretty well. However, we can’t seem to mount a Windows 2008 file share if it has access permissions on it. This worked fine in Snow Leopard, but I’m getting an error dialog with “You do not have permission to access this server” when I use the “Connect to Server” GUI box.
However, if I go to the command line and issue a mount -t smbfs cifs://server/path/to/share /some/path it mounts just fine. I’m not sure what the command line is doing different from the GUI, but seriously WTF?
Its holding us back from doing wider deployment. I can live with doing a manual command, other users, not so much.
[Update: I’ve opened a bug with Apple.]
[Update 8/24/2011: Apple has put up a Knowledge Base article addressing this at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4829 which explains the behavior differences. I don’t have a great workaround yet but we know the why now.]
[Update 2/15/2012: 10.7.3 is still showing this behaviour]
[Update 9/14/2012: I should have posted this awhile ago, but Mountain Lion continues the trend of the behavior change.]
How do I stack up on twitter? Infographic showdown
Infographics of me vs @tcar, me vs. @beattyj, and me vs @evo_terra. Due to Evo’s popularity and social media presence I thought it would be interesting. In any case, a fun little twitter bug. I like how it knows I like beer. And that it thinks Jason is a rapper. HAHAHA
The infographics after the jump. Continue reading How do I stack up on twitter? Infographic showdown
smashingly rich EXIF metadata
As followers of my blog know, this year I’ve taken a little bit of a photography kick. This post takes some more photography without being a photo of the day, but also gets some of my geek on. This started as an e-mail exchange, but as I replied I thought it would make a good post.
It started when Rev Tom e-mailed me via flickr with the following:
Your photos have smashingly rich EXIF metadata! And Flickr seems to respect it, too, amazingly. What do you use? I take it you add XMP tags because some of them look remarkably unlike standard EXIF tags. Is that right?
(A good example is the metadata on my recent moon photo as seen on flickr.) Some of the following I’ve shared here before, but it was in the mail to Tom so I’ll reuse it here:
I’m using Aperture on my Mac to handle my photos these days. I have 16,382 photos, so I was out-growing “directories of images,” so I moved to iPhoto, which gave me the added bonus of being able to sync photos to my iOS devices and AppleTV. I then outgrew iPhoto for keeping them straight once I got the Canon T2i and started doing 18 megapixel RAW images, iPhoto was just choking on editing them. (And it looks like I’ve added 3,153 of those since I got the T2i according to a quick search I did.) In either case, I had to move to Aperture or Lightroom, and since there was a direct upgrade path to Aperture from iPhoto, and I’m drinking Cupertino Kool-aid these days, Aperture was an easy choice.
So, the answer on richer metadata is that I’m filling out the IPTC set for my personal information. It looks like some of the standard metadata like caption is also tossed in there. XMP is a super-set of IPTC (due to some collaboration) and looks like that’s how it ends up being shared when I expose it. (Check out this about.com article that quickly overviews EXIF, IPTC, and XMP and its relationships.) Aperture also directly is uploading into flickr for me, so it might be using some other stuff in the flickr API to fill it in.
The following images are screenshots of what Aperture lets me fill in when I select the “IPTC Core” metadata.
The next image shows the large amount of metadata subsets that Aperture will expose to me. Most of those screens have a few pieces of redundant data that can be found on the other, but each tab has a few unique things to fill in.
One of the things you can do on Aperture is have some automatic actions performed at import time. The next image is what I’ve got automatically done when I import photos.
I mostly add the IPTC bits, but I also rename the photos on import to the YYYY-MM-DD_HH:MM:SS that I’ve been using since I got a digital camera in ’97. That also becomes the default title, but I generally override that in images I share, or at least I try to.
Once I discovered that some of that stuff was exposed in flickr, I started filling in photos I KNEW I was gonna share with as much data as I’d ever used or added to the flickr experience.
RE Tech Rocks DC
Get ready, I’m going to start to use flickr a lot more, I just upgraded my flickr account to a pro account. Here’s my first attack against you visually, the photos I took at the “RE Tech Rocks DC” event the other night where non-other than good friend and boss Mark Lesswing performed on his acoustic bass.
(BTW, the above if a flash based slideshow from flickr…sorry iPad users, but I’m experimenting with flickr.)
Photo 124: The home of 1s and 0s
Photo 101: Batman, Inc.
More depth experiments. The second one has too much crap in the background.
Photo 98: The Justice League is broke!
Even the Justice League has been hit by the economy. Batman must not be funding the jets anymore, and with Ted Kord dead there’s no one to drive the Bug, they are down to a van.
Giving WPTouch a try
I’m giving WPTouch a try to make the experience of visiting the blog from an iPhone and iPhone-like devices easier.  If you do visit from such a device, let me know how its working for you (or not.)