Life Less Literary

Aaargh! I fucking HATE iPhoto!

I wouldn’t really use it, but it’s just there on my Mac, which is nowadays my only portable computer, and hence the one I use to download photos onto when I’m on the move. And it least it lets me import the pictures and run a quick slide show to see what they look like (albeit one that moves around annoyingly so I can never see the full images).

All well and good, until I decide to do something with it. As with almost all Mac software, and increasingly PC software too, iPhoto likes to protect you from the messy stuff going on behind the scenes. So I’ve had to drill through the hard disk to find out where it actually puts my pictures: in subdirectories of subdirectories of subdirectories, somewhere a couple of miles beneath my “pictures” folder. So far so good. Again rather annoyingly the pictures are stored in individual folders for each day, so I have to keep drilling down and back up again. And when I reach my destination, all of the images are JPEGs. No sign of my camera RAW files, until I drill one step further down into “originals”. Thank goodness, there they are.

So I copy all of the files from “originals” over to my PC hard disk. Then I do it for the “originals” folder from the next day. As I am doing so, I am also copying more stuff to the Mac. My hard disk is getting dangerously full. So I delete all the images from one folder up, because they’re just JPEGs converted by iPhoto, right?

Moving to the PC, I find I have lots of JPEGs mixed in with my RAW files, duplicates. Gradually I spot a pattern emerging. All of the RAW files which were taken in portrait have an accompanying JPEG. Then there are some more JPEGs, which were the images I took on my second memory card: I changed the settings to JPEG, because I was rapidly running out of space for photos. Gradually as I go through them all, I realise some pictures are missing. I still have the thumbnails in iPhoto, though not the full-sized images as I have since deleted all of these. Then it dawns on me, all of the missing images are landscape photos taken in JPEG mode.

And that’s it. They’re gone for good. Deleted by my own hastiness, and Apple’s appalingly structured file-system. So, to summarise, in iPhoto the folder called “originals” does not contain copies of all your originals, as I had assumed. If your file is a landscape RAW, it will contain that file. If it is a portrait RAW, it will contain that file plus a rotated JPEG copy. If it is a portrait JPEG, the folder will contain a rotated JPEG copy. And if it is a landscape JPEG, it’s skipped and goes straight to the top-level folder. Which also contains copies of all of the other variations. In summary, each picture is stored between one and three times, in varying locations. Why? I had always assumed that the quintillions of hidden files you get when copying Mac files to a PC contained some sort of metadata, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to add to that metadata a little something about whether an image should be rotated (as Photoshop on the PC does, and many other programs) rather than having to make up to two additional copies of the file?

Mood: furious. And depressed. All of my best photos from last night were, of course, landscape JPEGs. But then, I would say that. It’s the ones that got away.

These last few weeks, I’ve been bashing my head against my monitor trying to get the colours on it to look right.

I tried to set up my monitor gamma correctly when I first got it (the monitor is an Iiyama ProLite E511S), but had some trouble because the damn thing doesn’t have a brightness control (it does a brightness button, but it doesn’t do anything. It also has a brightness icon in the on-screen menu, but it’s greyed out). As one of the first things the Adobe Gamma control panel tells me to do is set the brightness correctly, this left me a bit stranded. I muddled my way through the rest of the gamma wizard, but it was obvious that something was wrong, I just couldn’t get a decent range whatever I did. In the end I gave up and settled with whatever I ended up with. Which, to be honest, was pretty atrocious, but I managed to put it to the back of my head.

Until, that is, Guy pointed out recently that my Art Gallery Crawl photos were severely lacking in proper blacks. Because my monitor was set way too dark. Which I kind of knew, but was too lazy to do anything about. Well, as I now have a decent camera (although this morning it’s just gone kaput on me - aaargh! - at the moment I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’s going to get better after a short rest inside a carrier bag with some sachets of silica gel) I thought I ought to get my monitor set up somewhat better, so I tried again. This time, I had the opposite problem - everything came out looking quite clearly too light. In addition to that, my light greys had a sort of blue/cyan tint to them, which I thought must be due to an incorrect white point setting but running the gamma control panel several times showed that I clearly had the most neutral grey selected.

Well, yesterday I really went to work on this problem. I discovered that, although I can’t set brightness on the monitor, I could set it in my graphics card control panel. Unfortunately, if I set brightness and contrast as advised in the Adobe control panel then everything looked completely whack and it wasn’t possible to set the gamma slider down far enough to get the central box disappear. Aargh.

Well, I’m not quite sure what I did, but I fiddled some more with the graphics card control panel, fiddled with the Adobe gamma control panel, and downloaded another monitor calibration app called WiziWYG, and somehow I ended up getting almost what I was after. It wasn’t 100% perfect - the midrange gamma seemed slightly out, but at least I had a nice, distinct range of black and whites, my greys looked grey, and all my colours were vibrant. It was definitely progress.

Not sure what’s happened today, I don’t think I can have saved the monitor profile properly, but everything’s gone pear-shaped again. My blacks are too deep, my light-greys are blue again, and darker greys seem to have a touch of orange in them. Aaargh. Back to the drawing board. At least I now know that something better is achievable, if I just strive enough.

I’m posting this in the hope that it will save somebody from having to go through what I’ve just suffered, trying to get my Japanese-language website to display properly.

I have been trying to make a website using Japanese characters. Surprisingly, it was all going very well, everything seemed to work pretty much OK once I had stuck the requisite <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> tag in there.

However, when I converted the site to PHP and modularised it, I had lots of problems with include files. I would paste some Japanese characters into the includes, in exactly the same way as I had done for the main pages, but when I checked the website all of the Japanese characters were replaced by question marks. I then re-opened the include file in Dreamweaver MX2004 and found that there too all my lovingly pasted Kanji had morphed into a long line of “?”s.

I searched in vain for a solution - lots of stuff on the web telling me how to make my web pages Japanese, but nothing dealing with mere snippets where I didn’t have the luxury of throwing in a UTF-8 header. Eventually I stumbled on the solution, while browsing through the Dreamweaver preferences. I went to Edit->Preferences->New Document and changed the default encoding to UTF-8. Then I created a new blank PHP document (switching settings didn’t seem to have any effect on the old documents, only on newly created ones), paste all of the code from the old PHP include file, then paste the Kanji in the relevant places, save it, and when all is done don’t forget to switch default coding back to Western European. Et voilà! My Japanese script looks like proper Japanese script, not like a row of question marks. Hurrah!

I’ve been playing around with my new Apple Mac PowerBook and OS X - mostly having fun, finding it quite a liberating experience after 15 years of Windows, although I have the odd gripe (like… I have to pay extra money to watch a video full-screen?!? Go fuck yourself Steve Jobs!)

This morning, I’ve been trying to access files from my two PCs downstairs. Went to finder, “Go” menu, “Connect to Server”. The first machine I tried connected fine, no problem. The second just was not having it; despite trying several times, using server name or IP address, rebooting the server, etc, Finder kept coming up with “The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in ’smb://servername’ could not be read or written (Error code -36)”.

I found an Apple technote about Error 36, to do with plaintext vs. encrypted passwords, but this clearly wasn’t the same problem as the console messages I got were different. Mine read:


mount_smbfs: error from NetrShareEnum call: exception = 382312522
mount_smbfs: error from NetrShareEnum call: status = 0×00000005
mount_smbfs: unable to list resources: raperr = 5 (0×0005)


So I finally tried another workaround: instead of connecting to the top level of the computer, I connected directly to the share I wanted, i.e. smb://servername/sharename rather than just smb://servername. Worked a treat! So now I have all my PC documents available from my Mac laptop!

OK, I now have Movable Type 3.15 installed on here, along with MT-Keystrokes to catch the spam (it uses Javascript to make sure that you’re typing your comments, rather than injecting them directly via spambot). It took me a while to get the comments back up and running, but they seem to be working fine now - if you have any problems, please email me.

Before I moved to this PC, I had some RSS feed aggregator software running. I forget the name, and it was quite nice (you could even point it at non-RSS webpages and build an RSS template). But that was quite a while ago, since Day Zero I’ve just been browsing all my friends’ blogs and other RSS sites using the very primitive method of dropping them into my favourites and browsing over there every day (or perhaps ten times per day).

So… I’m looking for recommendations for a new RSS reader. For Windows. Preferably free. What do you use, and why?

(Warning: this could well turn into one of those boring tech entries that you’d be just as well not reading).

I nearly have a fully working set of computers. Nearly. Several months ago, my main PC started having problems, overheated disk drives started to lose sectors, one thing after another started to fail. In the end I decided I needed a new computer, and although I’d long promised myself an Apple, when I sat down and worked it out I just couldn’t afford one. So instead I bought myself a Scan 3XS-64. It’s a bloody nice machine, although I was surprised to find it about four times as loud as my existing PC (which I built using only “quiet” components, which themselves are far louder than I’d like).

So I got that machine just over a month ago, but since then I’ve been busy trying to round up and rationalise all of my existing files, which are spread over five or six hard disks, some of which don’t work any more (fortunately Restorer 2000 and a few sharp whacks with my hand have helped me to recover pretty much everything). I also got myself a 250Gb Western Digital Media Centre external disk drive, which lets me keep all my data central and move it from machine to machine. Which I have been doing, tidying things up as I go along, and in the process of doing this I’ve found some amazing stuff: Christmas cards from 8 years ago, recordings of Rowan singing when she was two, bits of writing I sent to Gill in India 11 years ago, etc.

And I haven’t wasted my old PC either - I’ve taken it completely to bits and am almost finished with building it up as a Linux machine (running Mandrake 10.1). Only problem is I can’t get my wireless network card - I finally got hold of a driver for it (had to manually install all sorts of development tools & kernel source to get it working), but the driver doesn’t seem to give me any way to enter network settings etc. <sigh>. I’m using (supposedly) the most user-friendly Linux distro and still it’s taken me three days (and counting) to get my network card running. Some things never change. Still, once it is working, I’ll have my file-server, print-server, ftp-server, MP3-server, filesharing client, all in the one box, keeping my new PC pristine clean for me to do workstation-type stuff on it. Roll on that day.

Meanwhile, I’m also building a third PC, using some of the left-over bits & pieces plus a couple of extra parts I had to buy. This will be the girls’ machine, so finally Rowan will stop hassling me to play Morrowind on my computer (some chance! As soon as she realises my computer’s faster, she’ll be on my back again). So, anyway, what this means is that right now, I have three PCs lying open, internals all over the place, in my office. They all more-or-less work, but none of them to a degree that I’m quite happy about, and there’s no room to sit down, I’m clumping over case screws, spare hard disks and piles of unanswered correspondence wherever I go. Meanwhile (again), my old laptop sits on the dinner table upstairs, and I’ve taken to doing all of my work on this. Or at least, what work I’ve got around to doing. For the last month this PC-limbo has meant that I’ve hardly done any paying work, I’ve almost stopped following the blogs I love, I’ve lost contact with pretty much everyone I know online, lost track of my various appointments… basically I have stopped life as I know it (doesn’t help that I’ve spend most of the time under a cloud of SAD either).

So, wish me luck. All I need is another big push or two (and a lot of luck on the Linux front) and I’ll be back to normal, only better. Meanwhile, I’m becoming all too used to living in limbo-land.

As if anyone out there wanted to hear more computer woe from me - earlier today I installed some piece of software called ABF Internet Explorer Tools (it’s a long story, I wanted to be able to test Flash files without having to delete my browser cache each time, for some reason IE doesn’t seem to re-check SWFs to see whether they’ve been updated).

The software didn’t help me do what I wanted, but it didn’t seem to do any harm either. Until I rebooted. Then every time I tried to open an Explorer window (which includes trying to navigate my hard disk or open Control Panel) the machine would just sit there for an eternity before telling my that Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger had crashed.

Turned out this ABF shit was hooking itself into every Explorer window, and then buggering them up somehow so they never showed. Problem was, because I couldn’t open Control Panel, I couldn’t get to Add/Remove Programs, so I couldn’t get rid of ABF. In the end I did it by going to Start->Run, then browsing through to Program Files/ABF blah blah blah and running the Uninstall program from there (I’m just glad it didn’t bugger up the File->Open dialog too).

A tough one to crack that.

In other news, I was at a lock-in last night, at a pub which shall remain nameless. I had I don’t know how many pints of bitter plus a Laphroaig, didn’t feel very drunk at the time (although I do remember sort of staggering off in search of a chip shop at 1am) but I haven’t half been suffering today (also due to the fact that I smoked my first cigarette in a month or more).

Dammit! I got a phone call from RCS Printers who are supposed to be making me 5000 flyers and 350 assorted posters (100 A3 and 250 A4). They told me that the bride is pixellated on all three and the men are pixellated on the flyer. Also that the word “Marriage” is too close to the edge on the flyer (actually I suspected that, but forgot to fix it before sending to print). I’m confused about the pixellated shit - I did a trial print before sending it off, looked fine to me. I very much suspect what they mean is that the bride is out-of-focus. I would have expected a printers’, especially such a large and busy one, to know the different between blurred and pixellated but, WTF, they’re humans and humans are stupid. As for the men… ? I dunno, perhaps they mean that on the reverse of the flyer they’re faded? Yeah, I knew that, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read the writing.

Anyway, I took the call in a library, which wasn’t really the best place, so couldn’t discuss it at length. By the time I got back here, they’d all gone home, so I’m left pondering.

Meantime I tried to track down the InDesign originals… you guessed it, they’re on my faulty hard-disk. Ah well, I was going to have to open up the machine and have a poke sooner or later, might as well make it sooner.

First job is to try and work out which drive is which. I have six (count ‘em) hard disks stuffed inside my machine (albeit one of them has been unplugged for months, it’s just taking up space) and as well as the two onboard IDE channels and two SATA I have a PCI card with another two IDEs. Cue lots of unplugging and re-plugging trying to work out which was which. In the process of which I discover that G:\ - my “general crap” drive full of warez, DVDs and junk which I thought crashed out about a month back, is actually still operational, either it works intermittently or I just knocked a cable somewhere. So that was quite a nice surprise, but far nicer would have been to have got D:\ - my data and everything drive - working.

No such luck yet, but my detective work has revealed that the problem with D:\ is likely to be fairly high-level: it shows up fine in the BIOS, and even Windows Disk Manager reports it as “Healthy (Active)”, it’s only when I try to browse to it or use any files off it that I get the “file or directory is corrupted and unreadable” error. Also the volume label (which I think was “Data”) is not showing up in Disk Manager or Explorer, the latter just refers to it as “Local Disk”.

So I’ve downloaded a couple of trial versions of disk recovery tools, am running one right at this moment which has happily located and is now scanning the disk. If it comes up with anything then I’ll have to sling the authors $70 or so, which will allow me to use the full recovery power of the software to copy all my files off somewhere else (hmmm, lemme scan through all those other disks to find one with 100gig of free space…). Once I’ve done that I’ll probably… well, you know me, I live dangerously, I’ll probably just re-format the dodgy disk and stick everything back on there again

So, like I said before, all is not yet lost. It’s just… well, as is always the case with these type of events, it couldn’t have come at a much worse time.

But it’s nice to re-acquaint myself with the computer’s infernal internals every couple of months or so.

How fucking prescient am I?

D:\ is not accessible.

The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

AAARRRGHHH!!!!!!

Ah well, there goes every photo I ever took since I got my digital camera, and a few more beside. There goes all the websites I ever built. There goes everything.

On the bright side, my new fan has blue LEDs in it. How cool is that?

Seriously though, I think this may not be the end of the world because (a) my computer is acting so screwy, I seriously hope it may change its mind again after a few more reboots, or a serious dis- and re-mantling, or a quick rattle of the sledgehammer, or something. Also, I have the old RAID mirror, which at least contains all this stuff up until a few months ago. Still… AAARGH.

And when I say acting screwy, I mean like:

• The on/off switch has more-or-less stopped working, although when I’m fiddling around inside the box I can usually, unintentionally, get the machine to switch on by touching an IDE cable.
• The last few reboots the monitor wasn’t getting any signal from the graphics card. Then suddenly it did.
• The DVD writer only writes things when it feels like it, on its terms (and it recently went offline, and then came back as “new hardware”).
• As already mentioned, hard disks are dropping like flies.
• One of the hard-disk cooler fans has developed noisy bearings. I hate noisy fans (my new fan is super-silent. Oh, and it has blue LEDs, did I mention that? Yet they still only charged me the price of a normal LED-less 35dB fan).
• I don’t know, just fucking everything, alright? You want more? You want suffering? Well fuck you!

So, I may be reading too much into this, but I think the message is (1) get a new computer and (2) get a proper backup strategy. Sadly, I am too poor for (1) and too fucking useless for (2). So what do I do? I’ll tell you what I do, I run into the street and cry “why me, God, why me”.

Also on the plus side, I just watched a DVD of Lost in La Mancha. And I think I’ve got problems?

Somebody please send me a free computer. A G5 would be really nice, but I’m not fussy. Just make sure it’s chocka with hard disks. And memory, I like memory.