BorderMaker is a tool for creating borders, watermarks etc on digital images. The nice part is that it comes in a Windows version (written in Java) and a cross-platform version (JAR file). It's a pretty versatile tool and it's for free :).
The cross-platform version works on Apple OSX, but has the limitation that the EXIF information gets lost. On Windows the supplied
jhead.exe program works without any problems. On OSX, the .exe file (obviously) won't work. Thankfully, there is a
OSX compiled version available. The program (jhead) itself works like a charm, but won't work from the BorderMaker interface (under OSX).
./jhead -te "${src_file}" "${dest_file}"
The parameters ${src_file} and ${dest_file} generate errors. When the command is executed from the command line, everything works (with the variables substituted with the real filenames).
Currently I use a workaround on OSX by executing jhead after I have created the 'bordered' images wit the command
explained on the jhead website;
jhead -te "originals\&i" *.jpg
OK... Disaster struck... Yesterday morning I had a flashing DSL LED on my DSL modem. Flashing ain't good. A stable green light is good, flashing is bad, very bad. Flashing means it tries to connect to teh Internets, but it can't.
Thankfully, I have a nice neighbor with no encryption on his wireless. Downside is that I need to sit in the hallway to use it. Hopefully the problem will be fixed tomorrow. If not you might be reading this somewhere next week (if ever).
UPDATE: Well things are improving (a very tiny little bit). Statistics show, that the website is available 15% of the time instead of 2%.
An optimist would say; 'an improvement of 750%'. My opinion is not that optimistic I might say......
UPDATE#2: No idea what's wrong with the Internets connection. Last night it downloaded three movies worked without any problems. This morning I had to switch it off and on to get it going again. I must say that the modem itself is running awfully hot. In the mean time I have two different types of modems in spare (510i and a 546i). Strange thing is that the logs show disconnections due to idle time?? Idle? The thing hasn't been idle ever since I installed it.
UPDATE#3: Well, the techies suggested a downgrade path to check if it might help. Off course, I'm against this. This means slower lines, slower downloads etc. It's like going back to the digital stone ages. Furthermore, it worked perfectly over the last 7 years.... The performance didn't degrade over time. The performance just said 'poof'.
Anyway, in the meantime I'm back to 4Mbps, and things seem to look good, but it also looked good yesterday. So until further notice this website might be online (or not, or whatever).
Yesterday, Apple Launch a complete new line of music players. Every player is renewed. The biggest changes are:
As I might have mentioned my 'old' iPod Photo 20GB is acting up, so I was kinda going to buy me a new one, but which one do I want? The
iPhone touch is just gorgeous, but the iPod Classic holds ton's of music and video's...... *sigh*.
Guess I have to let fate decide....
Now it's time for apple to start shipping 'Leopard' as soon as possible. I don't want to buy a iMac now, and buy Leopard next month (even if it is with a discount).
Today my Windows PC started to show major hick-ups. The drives are making 'clacking' noises together with high pitched sounds :cry: . Also the system freezes up every ten minutes or so.
So, you can imagine that I'm starting to backup my stuff with the hope that it makes it to the external drive. Every time the system crashes (during the copying) I see my digital life flash in before me.... Hope I can make it before the flames come out.....
UPDATE: OK, I finally got my data of the PC, so that's one worry less. In the mean time, I've ordered a new hard drive. If that doesn't solve the problem, I guess I have to upgrade prematurely to an iMac..... The current components are all quite old, so I have to replace everything if it's not just the drive. I might sell the GPU (NVIDIA(Asus) 7900GTX/512MB/PCI-e). So if you're interessted
Not every TV serie will be successful. So it's possible that some series won't be continued on TV. If this happens, most of the time they have some sort of scenario to end the show. Star Trek Enterprise was one of those shows. The show was killed, and they had 4 (or 5) episodes to end it. Not my cup of tea, but the show ended somewhat decent.
Lately, the dutch TV stations are buying new TV shows from the US. These shows are pretty new (Heroes, Day Break, Traveler, etc.), so finally we don;t have to wait 5 years to watch a new show. But there's a catch. Almost every new show was killed prematurely in the States. So the result is a TV show with a crappy ending.
[spoiler]
Traveler has 8 episodes, and ends in the middle of the action, with a ton of unanswered questions (who was the black bellboy, What happens to the main character's girlfriend?, etc.). At least ended Day Break a bit decent.....
[/spoiler]
Everyone who has worked a bit with Linux/Unix/OSX knows that the command '
rm -rf *' is kinda destructive (understatement). Compare it with the old '
deltree.exe' command in MS-DOS. The latter explains it without saying too much about it.
Anyway, yesterday I ran into an annoyance of OSX (and it wasn't the first time I ran into it). Every once in a while when I mount a smb share on my MacBook Pro nothing happens. When I try to connect again I get a message that I'm already connected to that share :?: :?: , but there's no visible indication in the Finder of this.
The way to see the shortcut to the share (for me at least) is to relaunch Finder (Force Quit). But this is highly annoying.
Yesterday I decided to take a look under the hood, and started terminal and opened the Volumes directory. This contained over 30 sub directories, and they all had names similar to the smb shares (ftp, ftp-1, ftp-2, web, web-1, etc). the directories were empty (the +10 I checked anyway), so I wanted to delete al those directories in the hope that my annoying messages about being connected would be gone.
First I entered every directory and removed the
.DS_STORE file by hand and after that I removed the directory with
rmdir. This would take more time than I wanted to spend, so I needed something quicker, and what's quicker than the rm command with all the appropriate switches??
I made sure that I wasn't executing the command from the root of the drive (he, I'm not that stupid). So after I executed the command I heard something weird. I heard the hard disks in my server go crazy.....
Aaaaaarrrggghhhh
Somehow there still was a share mounted, and the rm command was recursively deleting ALL content on the share. By the time I realized this (about 5 to 10 seconds) my 300GB drive was 90% empty instead of 95% full.Thankfully I had some excellent undelete tools on my server so I was able to recover the content over the network to my PC, and after that I could copy them back to my share.
First there were wireless networks, then there was WEP. WEP was the protective layer for wireless, so that your data was (kinda) secure when it traveled through the air. This layer was compromised rather quick, so alternatives were needed.
The initial alternative was WPA. This new layer of protection was a lot stronger (there still isn't a way of hacking this quickly). Downside was that it took a while to become a standard, so every vendor was free to use it as they saw fit. This could result into incompatibility issues when you used different vendors in your wireless environment.
The final WPA standard became WPA2, and was to overcome the incompatibility issues with the earlier WPA.... NOT!!!
Most consumer wireless products in my vicinity just won't connect properly using WPA2 (with either AES or TKIP). The only thing that keeps working is WPA. When connecting to a wireless network which is protected with WPA2, everything seems to go fine, but when you want to transfer data, nothing happens. Also, the wireless base station doesn't show any association with the client.
What is wrong with this picture? Does this mean that there are also different implementations of WPA2 among vendors?
A quick WPA2 configuration with a 32 character (or 16 character) WPA2-PSK key just won't work, while the client devices all support at least WPA2-PSK with TKIP.
I'm still in the process of migrating from Windows to OSX. During this process I run into the most annoying things. The latest annoyance is the way different operating systems access (read AND write) files on volumes (internal, external, network etc.).
Windows uses the well-known driveletters (C:, D:,) for local resources, and
\\<servername\ networked resources while Apple uses so-called volumes for both. If you try to use a Windows file reference on a Mac, you're out of luck. This is also true the other way around.
The reason for this 'rant' is that I use photo catalog / manipulation software on both Windows and OSX. At first, I used different programs on the platforms. This became a problem when I added photos to product X on OSX. When I needed to some work on the Windows machine, I had to add the photo again to product Y on the Windows machine. This results into two different libraries with almost the same content.
After some searching I found
iView Media Pro (which unfortunately has been acquired by Microsoft). This piece of software is used for cataloging different kinds of media, AND the same software is available on both platforms.
Unfortunately, even though the media catalogs could be read on both platforms (the catalog holds the thumbnail and other metadata about the original), the reference to the actual media is platform dependent. So the metadata was showing up, but the actual file could not be read on the other platform.
The same problem occurs with Adobe Lightroom. Available on both platforms, but the catalogs can't be exchanged.
Why is it so hard to have a product which is available on multiple platforms, and uses some sort of database to be able to exchange data between them? Am I the only one running into to this?
Network storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. More people are using network storage to have their content online without have the need of a dedicated (workgroup or enterprise) server. These appliances are accessible through smb, cifs, webdav, etc. Every OS can access the content, but every OS/application uses a different markup.
Standardization has a long way to go.....
I use my Nokia E61i with my corporate exchange environment to synchronize my agenda. The installation of the Nokia Data Suite is pretty straight forward (no reboot required). After the installation I paired the phone with the OS, and am able to synchronize my agenda...
This is where the horror begins; as soon as I reboot the laptop the Nokia is unable to sync. It connects for about a second, and the logs show a succesfull sync, but nothing happends.
It is possible to browse the phone with the Data Suite application, and I can make a backup. So everything works except synching with Outlook (which is opened AND connected to the Exchange server).
If I try to sync my contacts to my Mac Book Pro (using iSync), everything works and keeps working.
The only way to solve this is to remove the Data Suite application and reinstall it. After that I can sync, until I reboot. Also, reinstalling is creating extra COM ports. 2 COM ports for every reinstall. last week I had 8 bluetooth COM ports on my system. No way of removing them (the OS keeps 'finding' them after a reboot), but to use System Restore point.
I tried 3 different versions of the Data Suite (even the one released earlier this week), but the behavior persists.
By the way, synching using the USB cable doesn't solve anything, so it seems to be a sync issue in the Nokia Datasuite and not just BT related, since all other functions do work.
Apple released the iPhone last Friday in the US. I didn't report on this, because a) I can't get my hands on it atm, b) there was a lot of media coverage this weekend, c) I had better things to do.
They sold over half a million phones this weekend. That's great, BUT....
There are some elementary things missing on the phone. Things I couldn't live with. Most of them are mentioned
here.
As you might have noticed, I have a Nokia E61i at this moment. This phone was meant to be kinda temporary, since the iPhone won't be available in Europe just yet. But if Apple won't resolve most of those 'issues' there won't be an iPhone for me.
How lame is it that you can't use Bluetooth the way it's meant for transferring files, 'abusing' it for a modem, so you can hook it up to your laptop and surf the Internet. At this moment, every other (Windows Mobile or Symbian based) phone on the market with has more functionality than the current iPhone. The only drawback on the current phones is that they're not made by Apple.
So I'll stick to my Nokia until they fixed those elementary functions.
