Ran across a fairly nasty bug in Yahoo’s spreadsheet viewer, the one that lets its users view excel and similar files. I had a file set up with a column of type time, in HH:MM:SS AM/PM format, and what it does with that is show them as 12 AM or 12 PM! I could not figure out why my co-hort (in organizing a seminar) was having such trouble confirming flight arrivals and departures until she showed me what she was doing.

So…if you’re using Yahoo to look at these files, be aware that it has at least this problem. Google’s spreadsheet viewer was fine, MS’s Excel was fine, and OOo’s spread sheet all were fine with this file. And Google and OOo are free (the former with a Google Account, that’s easy enough to sign up for).

So just passing along that warning. Also, sorry about the hiatus, it’s been absolutely crazy at work and then also with this seminar coming up. I should be picking up soon.

So I got some email over the weekend from an old friend back in grad school days, which was a pleasant surprise. I asked him how he found me this time ’round, and he pointed this out:

Actually, I was playing with Google’s new code search. After the obvious vanity search and a couple others, I tried this which lead to your blog. It turns out that their code search is an awesome way of finding lost programmers.

Google keeps pulling new bunnies out of that magic search hat. Searches based on publicly available/published code is a pretty cool concept…

I have been playing around with the Linux version of Picasa for the last week or so, as the need to organize my pictures in some way became more urgent.

Installation

The Linux version of Picasa is available for download on this page. There are several options — rpm, deb and bin packages, each with instructions. I had no trouble downloading and installing the deb package on my Ubuntu 6.06 setup.

Unfortunately, Google does not include instructions for using the package manager on these pages; they are to be found in the FAQ instead and if I were to do this over, this is how I would install:

Add the Google Picasa for Linux repository:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free

and now apt-get can be used:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install picasa 

The Good

When Picasa starts up, it immediately begins to scan the hard disk drive for pictures. It will scan everything for anything remotely image-worthy. This can lead to some interesting results as it will pick up images used by various installed applications.

Under the Tools->Folder Manager menu, I found a dialogue to mark which directories to look at or ignore. I can tell it to scan particular directories once or always; or to ignore them altogether. I chose to have it continually scan only my home directory and this got rid of many of the spurious images.

The really cool part was finding photos I had completely forgotten about and which were lost in the general directory disorganization resulting from having migrated from about three or four hdd’s and two or three computers in the last seven years.

One thing I like quite a bit about Picasa is that it leaves the original images alone (except for red eye fixes) unless I tell it otherwise. (Some people will file this under “The Ugly;” it’s going to be a matter of personal opinion.) I have discovered, in going over something like seven years of pictures that having the original “raw” (not to be confused with RAW format) upload makes all the difference in recovering the original quality of the pictures.

Pictures downloaded from digital cameras are in JPG, which is a lossy compressed format. The practical consequence of this is that each edit to a JPG file (depending on the software used, sometimes even something as simple as rotation) usually results in loss of quality in the saved version. So I want to always keep the original files around as the baseline for going back to especially if I mess up a series of edits.

I organize my pictures by year, with each event or topic getting its own sub directory within that year. Last year, I started including a “raw” directory which is supposed to be where I upload all the camera images and then copy them over to the organized sub directories. So for example, the year 2005 might contain the following directories: raw, january family dinner, easter, home improvements, fourth of july, rome trip, thanksgiving, and christmas. The “raw” has all photos taken, ever, in 2005; the remainder are the best pictures for that event, sorted out, rotated, color corrected, with blurry or bad pictures omitted. Now I admit I’ve been a bit piecemeal about that approach, but after working with Picasa for a while and being able to see all of my photos over the last seven years at a go, I’m an enthusiastic convert now.

Picasa works perfectly with this approach. Let’s say my next set of pictures is from my brother in law’s birthday party next weekend. I’ll upload all the pictures into my “raw” directory, and then go over them with Picasa — correcting, rotating, etc. Then I will export the chosen pictures into “A’s B-day” directory within the 2006 folder. Voila!

Picasa arranges the photos it finds by date, within the name of the folder it’s found them in. This has some drawbacks, as it creates a flat list. Therefore several of my directories which each had “web” subdirectories (holding smaller versions for various websites) showed up as multiple “web” folders in Picasa, which is a bit confusing. But either I can rename the directories themselves, or tell Picasa to use a different name for the folder. Still it can be a bit confusing to see multiple instances of the same filename occurring. This was especially bad with one set of trip pictures I had — the main directory was named “Red River” and then under that it had a directory for each day we were there, and then under each day-directory, there were three folders, one for each photographer with a camera, since we pooled all our pictures together. So in the end, I had multiple folders each with the photographer’s name. Each “leaf” directory within a particular year should have as unique a name as possible, or else the folders can be renamed in Picasa.

Picasa supports tagging of each picture, and that builds up a list of labels above the folders. Clicking on any of the labels (tags) pulls up all the pictures so tagged, which is a great way to help keep pictures organized.

When viewing individual pictures, Picasa offers a number of “editing” options. As I’ve mentioned, changes aren’t actually made (with the exception of red-eye fixes) to the files themselves. These corrections are more like overlays maintained by Picasa and include the basics like rotation, color correction, fill lighting, saturation and so on. It’s very fast and snappy when working with files, and it does a very good job at cleaning up files. I found the “I’m feeling lucky” button to work particularly well when involving photos of statuary and paintings. If I want to save these changes to actual files, all I need to do is to export them to another directory.

The Bad

Because of issues with driver support, Linux Picasa cannot burn to CD. This isn’t a show stopper for me; I prefer to use my own software for this, but it’s a pity this isn’t integrated into Picasa since it’s usually a timesaver.

Also related to the lack of uniformity across Linux installations, Linux Picasa is a bit wobbly with handling some issues such as which browser or email program to use, or how to access directories and files. There are template files intended to provide such specific information on what to do in a particular installation. The FAQs reference these files in passing, but unfortunately not in detail. They are:

picasa/desktop/picasa-hook-filemanager.sh.template
picasa/desktop/picasa-hook-urlhandler.sh.template
picasa/desktop/picasa-hook-email.sh.template

I first had to find the template files in question. Finally by using

locate picasa | grep desktop

I was able to determine the files resided in /opt/picasa/desktop. The file is not terribly helpful though. I copied the template file into my own ~/bin directory and played with a couple of settings. I tried a couple of things, here’s my final list:

#/usr/bin/nautilus "$1":h
#/usr/bin/konqueror --profile filemanager "$1"
#nautilus `dirname "$1"`
nautilus "${1%%$(basename "$1")}"

I did google for any examples anyone else may have constructed from these files, but the best I found was this, which was interesting, but not the level of detail I was looking for.

But the real problem wasn’t the contents of the script. The problem was in getting Picasa to recognize and hence execute the script! Like a good little unix weenie, I copied the file from its opt home into my local bin directory, chmodded it to 755, made my additions, and restarted Picasa. Nada. Checked my path with printenv. The bin dir was listed. Executed the script directly with a couple of path names, everything started up fine. In desperation, tried copying the file back to the picasa/desktop directory, still no dice.

The only thing that finally worked was to drop the script into /opt/picasa/bin. However, the Google documentation on this point is at best misleading, since it implies that the file need only be somewhere in the path, but clearly it’s only looking in one of a few places such as the bin directory. Grrr.

The Ugly

For some unknown reason, the Linux version of Picasa does not come with an export button to the Picasaweb site. As a result, I’m forced to upload pictures manually using the browser. Which is rather like shovelling coal in the nuclear fusion age.

I also found out that it’s not a good idea to change permissions on directories (or to rename or move them) after one has made extensive “changes” and tags to those directories. Ahem. From Picasa’s point of view those files are gone, and so it discards the meta data it’s got on those files.

However, I can’t really think of a good way for Picasa to handle this kind of thing. If a directory is suddenly inaccessible, what else can it do but assume the files are gone? The only way around this would be for Picasa to store the metadata (tags, etc) with each picture file itself and I can’t see that being done. It’s a possible argument that Picasa should at least save the edits to the file but there are two ways around that: either export a modified folder to a physical folder or tell it to save the actual changes to those files. If the metadata is saved within each folder, all that has to happen is for someone to move the files to another directory, rather than renaming the directory.

So it seems to me to be a fairly nasty situation with no good work around. And since the real issue is the meta data, I don’t even consider this a side effect of the no-modification-to-original philosphy that people either love or hate because the meta data question remains whether or not edits are saved to the files or not.

Flickr versus Picasa Web

Ironically enough, since Linux Picasa does not have the web export button that Windows Picasa does, it’s much easier to upload pictures to Flickr. Since overall I prefer Flickr’s options and interface to Picasaweb’s, this turned out to be a plus for me. To send pictures to Flickr is quite easy, especially when I use my gmail account. In the past few days I’ve sent almost 2000 pictures to Flickr!

I first set up an email address at Flickr. The folks over there will generate a random email address for their users. I can email pictures to this address along with various options in the subject line and they will show right up in my Flickr photo stream.

Now I select the pictures I want to send. I can send up to six pictures at once if I have set the email options (Tools->Options->Email: from here, set the gmail account, size of picture and so on).

Since Picasa is a google product, it interfaces very nicely with gmail. Once I log in with my gmail password, I can select up to six medium sized pictures, choose File->Email (or the handy ^E). I can tab through gmail’s known email addresses to the Flickr-generated one, choose that, and then set the subject line to what I want as the title for those pictures. I then add after the title (still in the subject line) a tags: tag1 tag2 which lets me set the tags for those pictures. Then I clear out the message body and either leave it blank or write something appropriate to all the included pictures and send it off.

Voila!

In contrast, the only alternative way I could find to upload to my Picasaweb site was a browse/upload page provided by picasaweb itself which was so painfully slow, I don’t want to bother with it again. I’ll revisit Picasaweb once the upload button is included in the Linux version of Picasa. On quick scrutiny, though, Picasaweb has very few features at the moment and not very much storage space as compared to Flickr.

Oh, you wanted to know where my Flickr photostream is? Right here If I know you in real life, drop me a note and I’ll add you as a friend contact if you really want to see all 2K pics . Otherwise, feel free to look over my public photos and add me as a contact if you like which I will reciprocate. I always enjoy browsing pics…

Summary

Overall, I’m impressed with this program despite the fairly extensive “bad” and “ugly” sections. I do not understand why some features were left off the Linux version, and I hope that this will be fixed in the future.

Overview

Now, it is with some chagrin that I admit I didn’t cotton to rss/atom/other feeds until earlier this year. When Google released its Google Reader, I played around with it, since I tend to check out most of their toys anyway.

Well.

Whether you’re a geek like me or not, it’s worth learning how to use feeds. And yet, since I brushed them off and didn’t even consider their utility for some time, I’m writing up about them here to clarify why they’re so handy and how they can be used.

There’s two concepts to cover here. First is the feed itself. Although I see them called “RSS” or “Atom” or “subscriptions” and so on, technically they’re just “feeds” — rss, atom, xml, etc are different formats for the feed. Think of a feed as a broadcast of a web page. Instead of a user going TO a webpage, a user looks at a broadcast FROM the webpage. What’s the distinction? I can tell all the particular feeds I’m interested to come to a single place (i.e., aggregate) and I can then read them in that place, all together. Since any kind of webpage can broadcast a feed, there are feeds available for blogs, online news sites, photo sites, podcasts, and even video blogs (known by the awful “vlogs” contraction). Since most blogging software comes bundled with setups for feed broadcasts, chances are a blog I find interesting I can add to my collection of feeds.

Which brings me to the second part, the feed reader (or feed aggregator). A feed reader will take my list of feeds (or my subscription list) and fetch their latest broadcasts and then present them to me. The resulting presentation will not look like the original website pages but are instead a simplified layout. I can even opt for synopsis rather than full articles. I actually find this simplification to be a blessing in many cases; not only to avoid some horrible layouts or clashing colours or lots of adbling, but also with a standardized reader layout I can concentrate more on the content of what I’m reading. Depending on the particlar feed reader, I can browse through lists of the subscriptions, lists of their currently unread articles (by title or by title and synopsys), or at the unread contents. The exact options and layout varies by reader, of course. In some cases, only a synopsis is actually broadcast. In other cases, everything is sent, down to images used for the particular article, and I can choose whether to display these as a synopsis or in their entirety. Which I can choose to do therefore also depends on the sort of information the feed contains.

To give a scenario: I have a collection of subscriptions to daily comic strip publications. So I group these subscriptions into a single folder or group (also called outlines or tags or categories, etc). I also mark them for full display. Now when I choose to see my comics subscriptions, I get a single page with all of the latest comic strip publications laid out one after the other. I can just browse this single page, reading nothing but the exact comic strips I want. It’s better than the newspaper comic page!

There’s a fairly dry summary here and a bit more of an interesting summary here, especially in the Usage and History sections.

Read the rest of this entry »

Came across this article the other day and I’ve been thinking about it. Setting aside his somewhat confusing terminology (”Free Software” really should be called open source, because the very program he is railing against, Picasa, is free software. The source code is proprietary, but the software is still free…), he nevertheless touches on a number of issues I’ve been fascinated by for the last several years or so.

In any case, like any good geek, I’ve used freeware for years. Who wouldn’t? And of course I’ve always been generally aware of open source software, as anyone on Unix would be, through the efforts of gnu, linux and the like. However, since I was using Windows increasingly in my current job and lazily on my home computer, it wasn’t until about two years ago when I decided I was going to migrate to Linux and then last year when I completely removed the Windows installation that I was looking much more closely at Open Source.

We already know that the Open Source model is sound. There’s more than two decades worth of solid work, starting with the early GNU projects to today’s Linux distros and more to show that. What’s more, especially for the more popular and widely used programs, the churn rate on bug fixes and feature additions is much higher. You only have to look at Firefox’s quick turn around on bug fixes, and the number of releases its made as compared to Microsoft’s completely anemic Internet Explorer 6 which gets only a minor facelift some seven years later with the release of IE7.

But if you’re not compiling things, if you’re not poking through the code, if you’re happy using just executables, then the philosophical differences between freeware and open source aren’t going to be obvious. And certainly there’s quite a bit of other freeware that enjoy the same pace of responsiveness and bugfix/feature adding. Linux users, even while preaching the open source mantra, tend to rave as much about google software as anyone else, and last I checked, googleware, while free, is most certainly not open source.

There’s a slew of other considerations as well. Open source software is more likely than most to be present on multiple platforms. A good piece of software whose code is accessible can be ported by someone interested in it elsewhere. This simply doesn’t happen with proprietary code; only the owner of the code will make any necessary investment to do so, and many don’t. And the beauty of using the same program whether you’re on Windows, Mac, or Unix is that you don’t have to memorize new interfaces. You’re more likely to be able to interact without issues with someone on another computer. Send them a file and it will be correctly interpreted and opened. The frustration factor goes down and the usability factor goes up.

However, I think Picasa is a slightly different issue. The only reason Picasa is available on Linux is because it’s bundled with Wine, an open source program that allows Linux users to run Windows applications. Google made extensive fixes and extensions to Wine so that it would be able to run Picasa in Linux. We therefore have a piece of open source software which has been extensively upgraded in order for Picasa to make its Linux debut.

This actually takes the entire Picasa debate out of the usual free vs open domain, and indirectly brings me to another issue especially relevant with today’s issues on domestic surveillance by the governments: the final reason that pushed me over the edge into getting out of Windows was the whole DRM and privacy concerns. This involves not just the DVD protection stuff but also the trusted chip technology (blog of helios has a pretty good run down on this whole issue worth reading — check also for which hardware is involved). You’ll notice that now these trusted chip sets are going to be on Macintosh computers as well, with their well publicized move to Intel chips.

Linux is literally the only way out of this for the foreseable future, and it’s Open Source that will guarantee that. Even if DRM were somehow put into it, anyone could recompile without it. Folks outside the country could keep versions available.

And how did I come to this digression with Picasa? Back to Wine: it could well be a way for die-hard Windows users to get away from the DRM technology while still running the programs that they know and love. I just love the multiple levels of irony here.