TaoSpace

Dashboard hubub

I urge anyone that made a point of Dashboard ripping Konfabulator to read this insightful little piece over at Daring Fireball. Good to see some counterpoint to all this blind flaming.

On another note: Far more interesting then all of this is the fact that Apple released Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Java and mobile (PPC 2003) versions of its Rendezvous technology! This is rocks disco (or something)!

Wireless Wo....uuuh no...White Balance!

Now that all the wireless stuff seems to be working (at least for the time being) one can get down to the really interesting stuff: Information and tips about Digital Photography. That is where this blog is hopefully headed..

Tip #1: Use custom white balance were possible!
It is very likely that your digital camera supports various white-balance settings. What is white-balance? It is the way the camera decides what colours to use for your photo. Why is this needed? Because the light in the scene is never really white. Daylight in the morning has a yellowish tint to it, and so does light from a normal (Tungsten) lightbulb. Fluorescent light can have one of several tints, like greenish or blueish. This is called light temperature and is measured in Kelvin. Our eyes however adjust for these different circumstances, so we see white as white all the time. The camera however needs some help to do this.
Most cameras comes with an auto white balance option, which is always on by default. If you've never heard of white balance before, this is probably what you are using. The auto white balance algoritm inside the camera will look at scene and try to guess which preset white balance (usually one of "tungsten", "fluorescent", "daylight" etc.) best matches it.

This can work quite well in many occasions. However if the scene contains very little white to begin with the camera can get it wrong, resulting in flat, uninteresting colors. The only way to solve this is to either manually set the right preset white balance on your camera or, if your camera allows it, set a custom white balance. The latter is obviously best.

When making a custom white balance you have to frame a bit of the scene which is white, or a white target card (neutral grey is also possible apparently). You can even buy (rather expensive) discs that fit over your camera's lens to help you set white balance.

However, you will soon find out from the internet that the lids of Pringles cans work just as well! ( Amazingly useful these Pringles, given that the actual can can be used as a WiFi antenna) Just hold the lid in front of the lens, press the custom white balance button (or whatever your camera has to do this) and you're done! Now just take a picture normally. How well does it work? Take a look at the pictures below.

With auto white balance:


With custom Pringles-based white balance:

As you see the second one creates much warmer colors and reflects the color of my cats fur far better then the automatic one. Basically as long as the light doesn't change significantly you should be able to keep using the custom white balance for that scene. Reshooting the white balance every once in a while to be sure doesn't hurt of course.

Should you find yourself forgetting to set the proper white balance, the curves function in Photoshop can help you. Click on the "set white point" dropper icon and select the part of the scene which should be white. You can also set grey and black points if you want to or if you lack whiteness in your image. Lacking a custom white balance option on your camera this is a really good way to liven up your digital images!

Check out this article over at dpreview.com for more on white balance and color temperature.

Under Byen again

Me and Erwin (plug, plug) took our respective girlfriends to see Under Byen live in Paradiso, Amsterdam. It was great to see these guys/girls live, just too bad that Paradiso's sound-system (small hall) sucked and that the artists were chased off the stage mid-concert (!!!) to make way for another band. I really hope their other dutch gigs were better for them.

Bought the CD and managed to get signatures of all band-members (never done something like that to be honest), which was fun. They seemed as shy about it as people wanting to get the signatures were.

Needless to say I shot a truckload of photos during the concert. First time shooting in the dark like that...
Please click on the photo above for a better version...TypePad's thumbnail generator is really crappy (doesn't take color-profiles into account and uses way to much compression!).

Let me conclude by saying that anyone that hasn't listened to their music (see previous post) should do so now!

Wireless Woes V: The Final Frontier

Yes another story about problems with wireless.
Lets recap: during the last episode Tao managed to get the Asus Access Point to work in the utilities cupboard and even managed to squeeze a wireless connection out of his PC. A happy end? Oh no!

It turned out the wireless connection on the PC was so unstable, that it kept dropping out after 30 mins for no apparent reason. After it had done so, it would flat-out refuse to acknowledge that there even was a wireless network active. It would find other networks in the neighbourhood just fine, but not Tao's anymore. The only solution at that stage was a reboot. In several cases a reboot was also needed because the driver had simply frozen all of Windows XP.

On top of this you have to fix up your wireless connection separately FOR EACH USER! In this case that meant starting the ASUS utility too.
This meant Tao's girlfriend couldn't get any internet to work at all.

So off Tao went to get a better WiFi PCI card. Linksys would do the trick, surely. Uuuhh no. Same deal, only without the crashes. This is a good time to remind everyone that the AP and the PC are only 2 or 3 meters away from eachother and that it works fine for PowerBook in the same room (as well as in every other place in the house and garden, but that's besides the point).

So that left only one option: connecting a second AP directly to the computer via ethernet and have the AP do the communication for it.
This of course rested on the assumption that APs are actually able to do this.

To Tao's utter surprise they are! All that was needed was:

• To set AP1 (the original one, connected to ADSL) to be a "hybrid" (i.e. both WDS (Wireless Distribution System) and AP)


• Set AP1 to accept connections from the MAC address of AP2.


• Set AP2 to be WDS-only


• Set AP2 to connect to the MAC address of AP1 (that is same list as you use for bullet 2 btw!)


• Set AP2 to have the same SSID (network ID) and WEP keys as AP1 (This may not be necessary, but it didn't hurt)


• Set AP2 to have an address in the same range as the rest of the network and set the gateway to be the address of my ADSL modem (this too could possibly be optional)


• Set up the PC to have an IP address in the same segment and set its gateway to the ADSL modem.

And you're done. Probably reads like it is harder then it is. Plus, since it's ethernet, you no longer have to fiddle with connections, utilities and WEP keys for each user. Amazing...

It will be interesting to see how long Tao's new found wireless bliss holds up...see it in the next episode of Wireless Woes!

Apple's Pipeline and more...

Mac Rumors has a story about Pipeline, a presumed feature of MacOS X 10.4. This seems to be a way to string applications together graphically. It uses AppleScript under surface, but doesn't seem to require the user to enter any script at all. This could be great news for lots of people that want to automate their computer in a more easy way!

Also take a look at some of the other screenshots. I like the search box inside preferences, into which you type a term for something you are interested in changing and the app will highlight the correct panel for you. Stealth mode sounds interesting although I might not have any use for it myself.

Dashboard sounds neat too, although a lot will depend on the execution of it. I'd love to be able to press one key in order to bring a set of frequently used tools into view. Stickies, calculator and addressbook probably being the most useful of these. Actually there were some rumours before about these apps becoming "integrated into the OS", with lots of people crying foul...I guess this is what was actually meant. Trust Apple to come up with something almost, but not quite entirely unlike what you are expecting...or something.

Wireless Update

The AP is in the utilities cupboard now and I'm in the livingroom typing this on the Powerbook, completely untethered. Excellent. Just tried outside in the garden and it works like a charm!

Of course the PC is the last step...I haven't yet dared to turn it on and find out if it still works...

UPDATE: It works, but the connection is relatively poor. I have the feeling this might be a problem with wireless PCI cards in general, or at least my specific brand (ASUS): poor antennas.

Easier CSS

The hardest thing about programming CSS is not remembering the various properties you can use, or how to do positioning, it is the cascade. The concept whereby a CSS style is applied not only to a certain element or set of elements (for instance using a selector) but also it that elements children.

This sounds easy enough to start with, until you realise that in some cases those children might have styles applied to them already because of other selectors. And in some cases properties of both styles will overlap. It is when this happens that problems become very hard to fix.

For a "simple" website this is still doable, but once you start talking about web applications, with tons of scripting and complex screen-layouts that it becomes almost unbearable.

My question now is: why isn't there a tool out there that, given some CSS styles and some HTML, shows you how the cascade will be? All it needs to do is to show what properties will be set to what for each element and because of which style/selector. This information is impossible to obtain from inside the browser, since the element on the page isn't explicitly given the CSS properties the cascade might apply to it. Querying a specific "misbehaving" element using the DOM will yield nothing.

A tool like the one above could show you this at a glance. Of course besides the "official" CSS cascade it could also show you how specific real-world browsers will treat your CSS...

Now if we were to add something like IntelliJ IDEA's very cool refactoring possibilities such a tool could even suggest CSS optimalisations for your given HTMLs, by looking at how the HTML elements tend receive their styles in your particular setup and if there are way of simplifying it.

Sometimes I wish I was better at programming, so I could build something like this myself, instead of complaining about it to the world at large (ha!).

Wireless Woes Yet Again

OK...this is the last time...I promise! I won't ever talk about wireless again! Well not much anyway.

Emboldened by my success with connecting my Windows laptop to my Powerbook at work I felt like wirelessing my house. Did I ever find out wireless wouldn't be tamed that easily!

I bought an access point (my ADSL modem is a router) and a PCI wireless card for my PC. Soon as I was home I turned on the AP and voila! An open network called "default" sprang up and my Powerbook connected to it.

The AP was quickly configured to talk to the ADSL modem. It basically configured itself using DCHP coming from the modem. Getting internet access to work on the Powerbook was as simple as assigning myself and IP address in the same range.

It was friday, around 15.00 when I screwed open my PC and put in the wireless card. Windows booted, recognised the card, installed the drivers from the CD and tried to connect. A whole load of trouble followed, in multiple stages and sequences. Basically take one or several of the following, mix them up in weird and definately not wonderful ways, scream in frustration, rinse, repeat:

1. The card sees your AP
2. The card doesn't see your AP
3. The card sees somebody else's AP
4. The card connects
5. The card doesn't connect eventhough you've type the right WEP key
6. You retype the WEP key
7. You try different encryption settings on AP
8. You install the utilities that came with the card.
9. When connected the IP address is wrong (autoassigned by Windows) and it refuses to let you set another IP address
10. All network cards refuse to do anything. Not even ping 127.0.0.1.
11. You deinstall the utilities that came with card.
12. You use Windows' restore feature to roll back to 2 weeks ago.
13. It just doesn't work
14. You try every permutation of settings that Windows allows for.
15. You reinstall the utilities that came with the card.
16. Etc. (Make up some more yourself)

So after experiencing the above countless times in various orders all of a sudden it worked. Today, at 13:30. Why? No idea. I did nothing I didn't do at least 10 times before. But now it really works, even after rebooting.

Of course my AP is now standing upstairs in my study, while its intended position is downstairs in the utilities cupboard. The thinking currently is that if I disconnect upstairs and reconnect downstair I'll have to do everything all over again. We'll see.

Wireless Woes Worked Out

Some months ago I lamented the poor state of wireless because I wasn't able to connect my PC laptop to the internet via AirPort and MacOS X internet connection sharing.

Today I managed to resolve these problems. How? No idea. I tried the same as last time but now it worked. Perhaps something got fixed in the 10.3.4 or AirPort 3.x or something...

Anyway, one thing to remember is that Windows expects a hexadecimal WEP key, whereas by default the Mac accepts a normal string. On the Mac you need to type a $ in front of a hex key, under Windows you shouldn't use the $. I'm pretty sure I tried this last time as well, but anyway, it works like this now.
Another thing I found out is that Windows really wants to have a WEP key. Although it claims to work without one, it actually started working only when I turned WEP encryption on (it was off on both sides before). This I also tried last time, to no effect.

I was getting worried something might be seriously wrong with me, because I wasn't able to get it to work earlier. The fact that I have no idea what I did differently this time around only supports my earlier statements that much can be improved in this area.

Frustration

Just got Karine a psa256max mp3 player. One of these "designed by Nike, built by Philips" things. Looks nice, sleek and light. Not only that all the accesories are in a similar design, from the headphones to battery charger. You even get two different straps with it, so it can be on your arm while jogging or on your waist.

Excellent sound too. Its even fast while switching from track to track.

So why is the title of this post "frustration"? Well, in a word: MusicMatch Jukebox.

If you use this device with the Mac it integrates with iTunes. On windows it uses MusicMatch Jukebox instead.
And it is possibly the worst player/ripper on the market today.
To start with the installer quits after 10 seconds. While you are making install choices it all of a sudden disappears without a trace. Poof!

After copying the installer from the CD first and then running it, it all of a sudden does work. So you start the program and insert a CD to rip. Then the next surprise: it cannot find the track information! Out of the 4 CDs I finally managed to rip I only got track info for one of them. Instead of giving proper error info, or a way to change which CDDA service it only gives an annoying popup-bubble suggesting I might not be connected to the internet! Right, and I'm the easter bunny!

This would be bad enough by itself, but next you find that the way you have to enter the track info sucks too. For instance the tracklist thingy doesn't work like a normal form-field. Most of the time it doesn't allow you paste (for some reason), tab works, but shift-tab doesn't, and in the album and artist fields tab, enter, etc. don't work at all. All this make entering lots of song-information HARD.

Finally you get all the music ripped (it artificially does this at a snails pace so you buy the "full" version) and then you're up for the next surprise: it completely ignores any artist and album info you enter before ripping. You have to add those AGAIN after you are done. Oh yeah, you then also have to rename all the mp3 files as well, as they will all be called "artist - xxxxx.mp3" with xxxx being the songname. "Artist" it exactly what it reads. Not the name of the artist but the word "artist". Strangely enough the program even has built in options to rename the mp3s for me. Why on earth doesn't it do this correctly the first time around?!

To make matters worse JukeBox seems to forget the track ordering! It will keep albums together, but inside the album it uses some weird sorting that results in all your tracks being out of order. If you then make the mistake of transferring them to the device (using another utterly confusing window with all sort of useless options) the order will be wrong on the device too! After hunting through the menus, the sidebar (another useless invention) and various other panels, knobs and twiddles you find a "manage" option which CAN sort the tracks correctly. You then have to put them into a playlist if you want the app to remember them.

There were countless other annoyances and flat out poor design-choices throughout. The incredibly unprofessional looking UI (looks like a below average submission to Skinz.com) doesn't improve matters either and don't get me started on stuttering playback. I don't get it: Why on earth does this have to so hard? Sure I can work it out in the end, but what about my girlfriend, who hasn't been working with computers for the last 21 years? She has to be able to do this herself, if she's to fully enjoy my gift. For her this will be utterly confusing from start to finish, meaning she will only learn what to click in what sequence. Any problems, errors, etc. along the way will mean she'll probably be lost as to what to do.

So, while I give thumbs up to Nike for the design and to Philips for building a solid product, both the people behind MusicMatch Jukebox and whomever decided to include it in this, otherwise excellent, bundle should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.