Tool of The Month: jhead

jhead – Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool

I wish I had bothered to search for this tool when I bought my Samsung D900 which fails to write the correct timestamp on the damn photos… oh well, better late then never.

Via Mac OS X Hints (or more precisely, google and the keywords on a comment on that post):

Simply use jhead -dsft *.jpg on the files to set
the EXIF date to the file creation-date

Mac Only

After 10 years I no longer consider myself a linux user and all it took was a few months of using OSX.

Mac is so much better it makes no sense to compare it with anything else out there at the moment. It’s in a league by itself.

Note: My home server still runs linux. Linux is without competition in the home server market in my opinion.

Leopard Review and Great Tip

The Ars Technica review of Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard is probably not the best out there but I still like it (despite the annoying, unnecessary and presumptuous history lessons) – feel free to leave a link to your favorite review in the comments and I’ll link to it in this post.

Despite that it does contain a very good tip:

If you want the alternate look when the Dock is on the bottom too, type the following commands at a Terminal prompt:

% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

% killall Dock

The alternate dock look is awesome! Absolutely love it.

And yeah last thing you need is to read another “me-too-upgraded-post” but just in case you need to know: everything went ok. letterbox is currently not working but it will be fixed soon according to the author. Apart from that everything seems ok. There are some compatibility lists out there that _might_ be outdated.

One Retarded Thing In Mac OSX – No Easy Shortcuts

There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.

I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will  get one – in your face zealot ).

Browser Windows Inside The Application

Let’s skip the part about the why – that’s for another post, maybe. I want to create an application that has browser windows inside it. I’m hardly the only person to want to do this but there seem to be surprisingly few ways to do this if you consider cross-platform support a must.

Java can’t do it. In fact after searching I was only able to find 2 options:

Option a) wxMozilla – I already knew this one but considering the last version of it (0.5.4) came out in 2005 and there are at least few posts/emails around the web seem to indicate some problems – though I haven’t investigated this thoroughly.
The big plus of wxmozilla is that I believe this is what was used to develop gush and what I want to do (want != will) is very similar to gush in terms of GUI.

Option b) GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# – this is the solution that I’m leaning towards.

Does anyone out there know any other options? Preferably something usable with either Java or Python (I really don’t feel like coding in C++) and Linux/Mac/Win support would be nice though only Linux/Mac support is strictly required.

UPDATE: having looked at things in more detail I don’t think GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# is a good solution for me based on the OSX support and the fact that I’d rather use python for this. That leaves me with wxMozilla as the only option for now (and I’m not sure that it will work).

UPDATE2: while what is (was?) the main page for wxMozilla doesn’t show it, there is an April 2006 version of wxMozilla on the sourceforge page.

Converting Between Audio File Formats

In a previous post I explained a way to convert a cue/FLAC to mp3. Recently I had to convert a cue/APE to mp3. While searching for ways to do it I came across this post in the aidanhm’s stuff blog. While it has very few posts (the last one in mid February) it does have a few posts that explain how to convert between different file formats (APE, FLAC, WAV,…) and how to deal with cuesheets in Ubuntu.

Since it’s explained there, there’s no point in me repeating it here.

While I haven’t done any of this in Mac OS X, I did download xACT

xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is a GUI based front end (written in AppleScript Studio) for the unix applications Shorten (3.5.1), shntool (2.0.3), monkey’s audio compressor (3.99),flac (1.1.3) and cdda2wav 2.01a32(with paranoia support).

I also looked at this page which explains how to use xACT to convert .flac files to mp3.

UPDATE:  Filipe IMed me about a better option for Mac OS X, Max.

Hasta-la-Vista

After like 6 weeks I removed Vista from my laptop last week. The main culprit was application compatibility (or lack of thereof) – either not installing, not running, not running well i.e. crashing OR requiring “tricks” (read annoyances) to run (run as admin and stuff) and other random, lesser annoyances.
Off course the fact that I also have Ubuntu on my laptop means that on an average day I won’t use Windows anyway – be it XP or Vista. Nevertheless I miss the integrated search. Beagle sucks. I’ll give tracker a try and post some comments about it – if I remember… I probably wont.

Off course performance (or the lack of it) had something to do with it but it was a significant factor (just another “little thing”).

Generally speaking there’s something about Vista that seems to cause more attrition – you are forced to become aware of it for some reason(s) I can’t seem to figure out what exactly. No it’s not UAC, I turned that off – it got really old, really fast (“sigh. continue”) and I suspect turning off UAC will be the norm among Vista “power users”/experts/wtv. I should probably mention that I’m used to Ubuntu’s password prompts whenever I need to do admin stuff and those are NOWHERE near as bad as UAC – in fact I don’t even consider those prompts all that annoying (except when they take a while and I forget in which monitor they are opening in). That’s because you get the UAC prompts (yes, plural) not at the start of the application/installation but only when the applications actually tries to do the admin stuff. So much for unattended installations. I found it very annoying. And why not go all the way instead of that half-ass “continue” button, why not just ask for the password? (wouldn’t surprise me if they were just afraid of trojans imitating it)

Ok that UAC rant was a bit off-topic… I was talking about attrition, I didn’t explain very well what I meant by it. I’m sure GUI experts have some term for it but I don’t know it. The GUI just seems to run contrary to some common GUI design principles at times – mainly those of directness (try changing the wallpaper or the theme), efficiency/predictability/consistency (the new control panel where everything is at least a thousand clicks away in 100 different types of menus/tabs/wtv and you have to guess where and when you do you’re rewarded with something that looks a lot like the old XP applet where it used to be 2 or 3 clicks away from the starting line), comprehensibility, simplicity and clarity. Though it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly where (except in the control panel case), but it just annoys me (though I think it’s mainly windows explorer and the taskbar/system tray). I used Vista for 6 weeks, and I’ve every version of Windows since 95 excluding ME (yeah I dodged that one, the only (large) version of Windows that became a flop so far), and I couldn’t get used to it. Plus the more Gnome evolves the harder it is for me to go back to any Windows, I just miss Gnome and it’s attractiveness. Something else that is to blame for my lack of patience with Vista is that every time I boot into Windows it feels like a chore. It’s something I don’t want to do, it’s something I’m being forced to do.

Funny thing. There was a time when linux newcomers complained about installing apps in linux and said that I should be more like in Windows. Now it’s the other way around. People try Ubuntu and ask why isn’t app installation in Windows that easy and convenient. I doubt that’s something Microsoft will ever manage to do.

Thank god for Linux and GNOME (and Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu).

Now compare my Vista experience with that of OSX: today, for the first time, I used OSX for more than 5 minutes unattended simply because I left my notebook at home and Filipe was in a meeting (thanks btw) . A full half hour! And I got used to it. I was quite impressed with how fast I got used to it – and I how much I actually liked it (loved the growl notifications that kept popping up) – though I obviously didn’t use it long enough for major annoyances to appear (like some linux/windows app that has no equivalent in OSX or having to use interface-crippled software like VLC). Sucks that I have to admit it (but no way I’m going to stop making no-one-uses-it jokes). I feel dirty somehow, like I’ve joined the unwashed mass of Mac-Zealots *eeew* I already felt slightly ashamed of belonging to the same species as them… But I’ll go even further: if I knew what I know now (namely that linux’s power management would keep sucking) I would’ve bought a macbook (one of the 13″ models probably) one year ago when I bought my Vaio. There I’ve said it. Now I’ve got to go take a bath.

But before I do one more word of praise for Linux and another stab at Windows: my Windows XP installation currently occupies around 40GB. My Ubuntu installation (including 3 different desktop environments – GNOME, KDE and Xfce not counting fluxbox which is too small to matter anyway) occupies around 4GB – 10x less.

In Summary:
Why don’t I use Vista? I have something better, it’s called Ubuntu.
Do I recommend OSX? No, I haven’t used it enough to recommend it or recommend against it. One huge disadvantage is that it’s tied to Apple hardware. (Zealots: please don’t bother telling me how that’s actually a hidden advantage, it’s not)

Making Windows look good – Linux themes in Windows

I learned about Linux themes in Windows via the Tux Vermelho blog (in Portuguese) which in turn learned about it from the Tech by Colin blog (in English). I’ll mirror the instructions here just in case:

1 – Download the Belchfire to patch to make Windows accept new themes (hurray for MS crippleware) from here.

2 – Download a Visual Style (Colin recomends these):
* Clearlooks
* Human
* Plastik
I went with clearlooks (same one I usually use in Linux).

3 – Icons. Get the Tango Patcher. Previews here.
I went with Tangerine (though I usually use the OSX icons in Linux – they are just sooo purrty).

4 – Tango for Firefox and Tango/Tangerine for uTorrent. You may be able to find (some of) these themes for other applications too.

And that’s all folks.

Windows Vista – First Impressions

From one and a half days of Vista use:

The Good:

• UAC actually looks pretty good, unfortunately I suspect many users will disable it;
• More security stuff (such as ASLR) – only time will tell how effective they will be, but it’s no doubt an improvement;
• It feels a lot more responsive;
• The WinKey+Tab is badass (though not as good as OSX’s expose);
• Search for everything (documents, programs, configuration options, …);
• It’s pretty (I really like the new progress bar in explorer).

The Bad:

• Configuring Windows with the new control panel is much harder – options are spread around like crazy;
• Networking for laptops is as bad as in XP (i.e. nowhere near as good as in Ubuntu);
• They couldn’t even ensure out-of-the-box compatibility for Visual Studio 2005 – they’ll address it in VS2k5 SP1.

Some links I cant be bothered to make a specific post for:

Online Security Sessions from TechEd IT Forum Available
Windows Vista Security Guide
Gunnar Peterson’s OS Security Features Chart

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