There’s still search engines out there other than Google? Really?
Foggy Holiday
One photo and a photo-panorama from December 24th, just because I haven’t posted anything in a while…
The panorama was six photos originally, stitched in Hugin. The flat grey foggy background seemed to cause Hugin some issues – notice how obvious a few of the vertical join lines are in the centre of the image. Odd.
I had someone email me a few days ago about my Nov. 25th F-Spot blogpost and it’s long discussion thread. I’d planned to do a followup post in early December, but holidays and reality obviously got in the way, and I’ve got Wordpress set up to automatically close commenting after three weeks to frustrate the spambots a bit. I’ll do a proper followup F-Spot post this week!
Hope everyone had a satisfactory, safe holiday season.
Exciting Olympic Links, Round 2
Apparently the City of Vancouver and/or VANOC (the Vancouver Olympic Committee) are gunning for anti-Olympic graphics again. More links on that BoingBoing story, but the ongoing efforts of the BC Civil Liberties Association during this runup to the Olympics have been heroic.
This collection would cause VANOC to collectively crap themselves, especially the VANOC logo redone with drug paraphernilia.
Over on the other side of the country, the Mounties in yet another attempt to quash more anti-Olympic sentiment. Because we’re all supposed to be happy and joyful that we’re hosting this corporate greedfest disguised as a sports event, haven’t you heard?
Previous Olympic excitement here.
Seasonal(ish) Links
Tis the season, and all that…
The Big Picture started their 2009 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar back on December 1st. (I’m of the opinion that the Hubble Space Telescope is the greatest public art project ever undertaken. The science is a bonus.)
The HP Lovecraft Historical Society does excellent mock-carols on Cthulhuish themes. Here’s a Youtube vid of Death To The World.
Bartender/blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler has a excellent eggnog recipe. Easy, quick and yummy. Suggestion: cut the amount of sugar in the recipe in half; it’s still plenty sweet enough done that way. I’ll be doing this at a couple of Xmas parties in the next few weeks, as I did last year, and I’m sure it’ll be a hit all over again.
Oh, and December 25th is also Newtonmas (birthday of Isaac Newton), amongst other things.
Last year’s post on approximately the same theme.
Perhaps the F stands for “Fail”?
Recent news that Ubuntu will likely be giving up the GIMP as part of the default install are interesting, but not a huge concern to me – I already have to install Inkscape, so adding the GIMP to the huge sudo aptitude install command I run on a shiny new Ubuntu install isn’t a big deal. I’d love having both Inkscape and the GIMP by default, but there’s only so much space on a CD-ROM-sized ISO. Fair enough.
What still concerns me is F-Spot by default. Not because of Mono fearmongering – I really don’t care what language the thing is written in – but just because it’s got some very irritating behaviours compared to the older lightweight editor/viewer/photo manager I still use, gthumb.
Allow me some simple demonstrations of why gthumb is still, in many ways, superior to f-spot.
I take a fair number of photos, and as anyone knows, they add up in filesize very quickly. I shoot fair-sized JPG, not the very largest my camera could, and not RAW, and I still have 10.2GB of images in Photo – 4133 images, apparently. I´ve only owned a digital camera for about two and a half years. Someone with a longer digital history, or who shoots RAW, or who simply takes even more photos than I do, is going to easily dwarf my photo collection. My photo collection is still old enough to have pre-dated F-Spot in Ubuntu, however.
So, I want to view, manage and do light editing of this existing photo collection. Fire up F-Spot (Applications->Graphics->F-Spot Photo Manager). There is no File->Open command, and by default the “Browse” button on the toolbar does absolutely nothing… so File->Import it is. Aim this at my existing ~/Photos directory… and by default it will duplicate the entire thing, rearranging the files to it’s liking as it duplicates them!
F-Spot will also take an insanely long time trying this – I aborted the whole mess ten minutes in, with only 1434 of 4133 files “loaded” (what does that mean? they don’t need to be loaded, they already exist in ~/Photos!) and the “Import” button still greyed out…
Are you serious? All I want to do is crop one of them! Abort, abort! Fine, we’ll find an existing image through Nautilus, and choose to open that in F-Spot individually.
Nope, sorry. That gets you your image, without the insanely long Import process, but it’s in a little window called “F-Spot View” with none of the editing tools available, and no way to switch to an actual editing window…
Now let’s try the same simple procedure(s) in gthumb. Same existing photo collection, in the Ubuntu-supplied default ~/Photos, but first we’ll install gthumb with your favourite package manager. (gthumb languishes in Universe these days, so have that enabled) Now go Applications->Graphics->gThumb Image Viewer. No Import button, any images that happen to be in your ~ will show up on one pane, and a Nautilus-style folder navigation pane to the left. Rummage through your files with that pane, no need to wait for some sort of unexplained “importing”of existing files here.
Or go the other way – find an individual image through Nautilus or on your desktop, right-click, choose Open With->gThumb, and open your image. You get exactly the same window you would if you’d opened gthumb via the menu, with all the lightweight editing options you require right there.
No “importing”, no attempt to duplicate your entire photo collection, no crippled “viewer” window with no useful tools in it, and gthumb will traverse your entire directory, not just the one folder it insists on importing/duplicating everything in. Oh, and no distracting “Mono is of teh devil!!!11111” nonsense either, just for a bonus. Somebody does need to code an upload-to-Flickr plugin for gthumb, granted.
While the GIMP is being removed from Ubuntu 10.04, let’s ditch F-Spot and return to gthumb too!
Launchpad bugs for most of the above Fail-spot issues: 488566, 488574. Closely related, and older: 182862.
Related silly “Import” bugs: 412091.
There’s probably many others over on Gnome’s bugtracker, but I only searched LP’s Fail-spot bugs for now.
First Winter Storm
Victoria Airport weather as of about forty minutes ago:
METAR CYYJ 190200Z 15028G36KT 3SM -RA BR FEW008 FEW016 OVC030 07/05
A2969 RMK SF1SC2SC6 SLP055
See that “15028G36KT”? That’s wind, lots of it. 28 knots is 50km/h, sustained wind speed, with gusts up to 38 knots, 70km/h!
Victoria Harbour – right down in the city proper, about 25km south of the airport – isn’t quite as bad, but still lots of wind:
METAR CYWH 190200Z 15018G28KT 12SM -SHRA FEW010 SCT025 OVC050 08/01
A2969 RMK CF1CU2SC5 SLP055=
18G28 – the harbour’s gust speed only just matchs the sustained wind speed for the airport!
We’ve had a constant stream of weather warnings for the last 24hrs, but it took until this afternoon for the wind to really start hammering us.
Nobody makes a proper METAR-widget for Wordpress. Lots of weather plugins, but there don’t seem to be any to show proper raw METARs. Perhaps when I get my PHP skillz back up to speed I’ll attempt one, using the US NOAA/FAA API.
And the otherwise-awesome Gnome panel weather applet has had its location listings gutted recently, so I can’t get both the local airport and local harbour on my panels like I used to… hopefully this regression gets fixed for Ubuntu 10.04!
Now, though, I think I’m going to make something warm and alcoholic to drink, check my flashlights, and hope the power stays on…
Over to Wordpress MU
In the interests of running most of my webspace with one system, I installed Wordpress Multiuser a while ago and started experimenting with it.
This evening I exported all my posts from my old Pivot-based blog into a new WPMU blog, cleaned the imports up, adjusted my Planet Ubuntu feed, and should be up and running on the new WPMU version of Turned Skyward.
Comments didn’t survive the export/import process, so if you said something especially erudite, you’ll have to go over to the old blog and have a look at it there. Note that the old blog is read-only from now on; comments are closed. A couple of older posts of mine had interesting comment threads; I might edit those posts here to link to their counterparts over on the old blog.
Onward and upward (or something like that) with WPMU; I’m liking it a lot and looking forward to moving more of my web content to a centralized CMS.
Nov. 11, Reprise
Just about the only photo of mine that turned out from the Remembrance Day ceremony downtown a few days ago. It was sunny, fairly cold, and well attended – the paper said seven to ten thousand. Lots of kids & families, which is good.
November 11th
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The poem itself on WikiSource; about the poem on Wikipedia.
Base image for the graphic above courtesy of Veterans Affairs Canada. And I should note, in passing, that my text on the image recreates perhaps the best-known error possible with this famous poem…
How To Get Backup Religion
… have your entire system freeze solid, and then, in the recovery console, fsck choke because of a galloping screenful of badblock errors. Then you realize you have no working LiveCDs in the house. And your last backup dates from April. Oh crap.
That was Sunday night; Monday I went down to my brother’s, snagged a couple of spare USB keys for backup, and got him to burn me an Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD. If I ever meet the genius who originally thought up Linux LiveCDs, I’ll buy him a beer. Or as many as he wants, really… Booted up into the LiveCD, found that according to gparted, there was nothing much wrong with my /home directory, but my /root was utterly screwed and unreachable. Phew. Systems can be replaced, personal data, not so much.
I have two harddrives in this tower – one 18 month old 500GB that was in use, and which has now thrown the bad blocks at me. The older 120GB drive is not in use, but still plugged in, so I’ve reformatted it, repartitioned, and tomorrow will reinstall Karmic from scratch. I’ve also been filling USB keys and burning DVDs of a lot of my less replacable personal stuff, just in case the already-damaged 500GB drive decides to utterly blow itself up… there also isn’t enough space on the 120GB for all my stuff, unsurprisingly, so some of it is going to be living on DVDs for a while.
The 500GB is still under warranty, so it’ll be wiped and sent off to Seagate post-haste. Nifty Linux discovery of the evening: if you need your hard drive’s model and serial numbers, System -> Administration -> Disc Utility can provide both, and much other useful info about just how your screwed-up hard drive is screwed up.
And a Dear Lazyweb request: Where the heck does Evolution hide all it’s data (it’s not all in .evolution, far as I can tell) and how can you coax a full dump of this data out of a non-functional install? My last .tar.bz backup from Evolution was back in April…
I haven’t decided on a backup solution for the future, but I obviously need one, something better than “DVDs full of a few bits and pieces, burned when I get around to it, which isn’t often…”. Money is tight, so once my warranty-replaced 500GB is back online I’ll probably use the 120GB drive as a backup solution until I can get something better and larger. A 500+GB external drive should probably be on my Christmas wish list, I’m thinking.
Final Score: probably no personal data lost, barring the Evolution mess, cramped quarters on an old hard drive while the new one is RMA’d, and much time lost while I sort the mess out. And a new appreciation of both live CDs and backups…
