Rant du Jour

My topic of the day is the brokenness of digital camera automatic image rotation.

Well, new cameras nowadays have an orientation sensor that can tell if it’s being held in portrait or landscape mode, and record this information into the picture.

Unfortunately it doesn’t save the JPEG image itself as portrait. It still stores all of them as landscapes. At least that what Canon does.

Complicating the matter is the fact that I use incompatible software.

IrfanView has a great Lossless JPEG rotation feature. I can browse the images in a directory, and when I find one I need to rotate, I hit Shift-J, hit Enter, and the image is rotated for me. I can also choose the rotation direction (90, 180 or 270 degrees) before hitting Enter, but it stores the selected angle between rotations and because my portrait pictures are taken from the same angle (90° clockwise) I don’t need to re-select the angle. The conversion is also lossless, meaning, it doesn’t convert the picture into a bitmap (with its compression artifacts), rotates it and saves it (adding even more artifacts), but instead it manipulates the internal data matrices via some clever transposition and mirroring, without changing their values. Neat huh?

Buuuuut (just one t)… the problem is, IrfanView doesn’t change the EXIF information regarding the orientation. And it doesn’t rotate the thumbnail (as far as I know) that is actually embedded in every digital camera image.

And then I started trying XnView, a great freeware browser. The problem (for me) is, XnView does read the EXIF orientation information, and displays the image with the correct orientation. Which is great, and not so great. If I just upload the pictures on the internet assuming they’re already rotated, people viewing them have to rotate their heads 90° counter-clockwise, because, well, so far browsers don’t read and respect the EXIF orientation.

[And imagine if a new version of a browser started doing that. Incompatibility hell! Then one would need an update of all HTML authoring tools, old browsers would still be incorrect, etc. etc.

Come to think of it, that's the internet today, so why isn't anybody doing it (auto-rotation) yet?

Or, could one build an extension (for Firefox) or integrate (into Opera) an option to rotate images for the viewers? Client-side only, of course.]

And, because IrfanView doesn’t change the EXIF rotation information, pictures I’ve rotated in IrfanView are displayed rotated yet another 90° in XnView. Argh!

So what’s the point of this rant? Well, probably it’s that I suck because I use IrfanView, which is outdated…

Bloody Internet…

Oh man, why the hell is it so easy to get distracted on the internet.

I was laying in my bed actually doing something for my project (hah, unbelievable).

I wanted to look something up on the internet, if a hierarchical Public Key Infrastructure is really a transitive trust-model with the user explicitly trusting the low-level certificate issuer.

So I Wikipediaed (new verb! You saw it here first!) “PKI”. I see there a link to PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Hey, that wasn’t there before…

So I actually read about the Communists before reading about the PK-Infrastructure.

And then I wondered who put “PKI” in, I don’t think it was there the last time I looked.

The user “Idont Havaname” put it there. In Nov 2006. Did I last look at this page before than? It’s possible.

So I start reading his profile…

And land upon a list of “two cows” jokes.

I like this one:

Switzerland:
You have 5000 cows, none of which belongs to you. You charge for storing them for others.

Some of The Have to be Good

What?

Oh, it’s supposed to be “Them”. “Some of them have to be good.”

Yeah, that piece of typo adorns Technorati‘s new re-designed homepage, when you disable the CSS and see their motto as plain text (which is of course, the same way search engines see it).

I stumbled upon it because of the horrendous scrolling marquee they have on the top of the page, which was slowing Opera down. I hit one button to turn off their CSS, and I wondered where the m went. Was it a rendering bug, I thought, considering the have was italicized. But no, the source code reveals it was actually missing.

How embarassing.;-)

Screenshot evidence:

Good News Everyone…

Jerry Falwell is dead!

One sign you’re doing/you something wrong in life is when so many people cheer when you croak and die: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (that’s just the first few hits on Technorati…), and 8!

Wakoopa: First Impressions

I stumbled upon Wakoopa (damn that name’s hard to remember) on Lifehacker a few days ago and wondered, hmm, if this is yet another Bubble 2.0 product.

From their success (a thousand users in 22 hours), it looks amazingly easy to start a Web 2.0 company these days. I do wonder what the use of the total statistics would be, I don’t think you’d find anything surprising in there: most people (especially the Web 2.0 crowd) will be using the web browser, and it will be Firefox, because hey, that’s the browser of the Web 2.0 crowd. I think yesterday I saw Gator or [whatever it is that spyware monkey buddy is called] showed up in the statistics. Oh no, the unwashed masses are here already? That’s fast.

I do like the idea of gathering the statistics for my individual use, to see if I spend more time using TeXnicCenter (a LaTeX editor), DC++ (ehem, a chat program), or Opera. Opera would probably win.

Too bad their program doesn’t work yet for me, for I am inside a network where the use of a HTTP proxy is mandatory.

Wakoopa (damn this name’s hard to remember) did lead me upon HeidiSQL, a very impressive MySQL GUI, so they get a thumbs up from me!

Yahoo! No Photo!

The news caught me somewhat by surprise. I mean, they just reinvented their photos interface (it’s much cooler now, IMO), but now they’re shutting it down? It’s somewhat understandable; why have 2 photo hosting services considering they already bought Flickr a long time ago? But why upgrade it if you were just going to shut it down? Argh, managers!
Meanwhile a USA Today article on the topic says Photobucket has 40%, and Flickr 4.5%, share of the photo sharing “business”. Wow, I had thought Flickr is better known than that.

Sometimes you forget that most of the world is still using version 1.0 of this Web-thingymajig…

jPod Inspired Nostalgic Blabber…

Yay, I got jPod in the mail today. I haven’t read it though, I just opened the Amazon-package (ah Amazon, the e-Santa) to confirm they sent the correct book. Wow and it’s thicker than I thought! Looking at the cover with the Legoids reminded me of Microserfs, which also had a Legoid on its cover, and that made me think of how I got introduced to Douglas Coupland… [cue flashback sequence...]

It felt nice, being a member of what I’d call the jet-set, lounging around the departure terminal waiting for my flight. Ah, those were the days, sitting at the airport in Sydney feeling like an international businessman. Was it pretense? I was going to take a jet, going home for my annual summer break. I’d get a bite to eat (even if it were only McDonald’s, hah), sit where you get to watch the planes, or browse the stores. I particularly liked the bookstore.

And that’s where I found Microserfs. It was probably the title that first caught my eye, and that it’s about (fictional) ex-Microsoft employees interested me even more. So I bought it, sat on a nice comfy chair, and started reading.

And read, boarded the plane, and kept reading. I wonder if I finished the book on the plane or if the plane made it to Jakarta first. It was funny, it was intriguing (I wasn’t sure if it was really fictitious or if the stroy was real, why haven’t I heard about their product, I wondered). I became a Douglas Coupland fan.

So there I was, holding the Amazon book-wrapper with jPod inside, it’s interesting how that random sighting of that book back then lead to that moment just a few hours ago, some 8 years and 16.5kkm (Kilo-kilometers, Megameters?) apart.