Effluvium - a.k.a. Rob's Rants

I am giving Blogger a try.
So you can read my new rants here: http://balrob.blogspot.com/

My first blogger post is about how to get a boolean “OR” in an Itunes Smart Playlist.
The most recent post, as at the time writing this, is about playing “hunt the dialog” in Leopard. 

I have been evaluating the new, version 2, Apple Aperture product as a replacement for Microsoft Expression Media (aka IView MediaPro) which I currently use.

I have used the excellent online tutorials to explore Aperture and believe I have a reasonable grasp on it now. I will comment on the pros & cons of Aperture later - for now I want to comment on Metadata.

First some background:
When Apple first released Spotlight (in OS X Tiger) I was very interested to see how useful it would be as the search tool for my photo library - especially by a user other than me (i.e my wife) who doesn’t use, or want to use, Expression Media. Unfortunately, it (Spotlight) mostly sucked - due to the limited subset of fields it indexed. I found this handy-dandy reference to which IPTC fields are indexed by Spotlight http://holocore.com/?PictureSync_metadata - it’s also a good mapping between field names used by IPTC, XMP, Quicktime & Spotlight. The field list used by PictureSync are the ones I commonly use in Expression Media - and have the same name.
As you can see; Location, Categories, People, Event & URL are not indexed by Spotlight in Tiger. How crap is that ! For Leopard there has been some improvement in that People are indexed (and known as Contacts) - but Location isn’t and neither are Categories.

So, I made a few changes to my process for cataloging my photos:
I decided that I would write some AppleScript to set the value of the Caption field from a combination of the other fields, and in the case where the photo already had a Caption, I would move that data into the Title field.
All of my captions are now created this way and look something like this (in one big text string):
[Title]. [list of people]. [event]. [Location], [City], [Country]. [Event Date]. [list of Categories] [list of Keywords]

I couldn’t use newlines in the Caption string, because I found that Preview truncates the Caption at the first newline when displaying the field. It’s a display only problem, doesn’t affect how searchable the Spotlight index is, but needed fixing so that my wife could read all of the metadata for the photos she views.

With a rich Caption, Spotlight indexes all the metadata I care about for photos but is still no help with movie files. Movie files don’t have a standard for embedding meta-data like image files do - at least not one that I’m aware of. Quicktime files have a meta-data system, AVI’s, mp4’s (and all the others) probably have a system too - the point is each type has it’s own system and I can’t rely on these being indexed by Spotlight, and they aren’t supported by Expression Media. To fix this problem I modified the AppleScript that I had written for setting the Caption, and used it to set the Finder Comment for the file. This worked well - now my movies are Spotlight indexed.

Ok, so what has this got to do with Aperture. Well, it sets the scene for the evaluation; creating Spotlight indexable meta-data for images & movies is something I use Expression Media for today. Can Aperture do this?

The sad answer is that Aperture has no support for media other than still images. It could certainly be my photo manager, but without support for movies it’s a non starter.
I was enamored with Aperture - I can see how it would improve the life of a Pro photographer - and some of it’s tools for manipulating things like color balance & exposure and so on, seemed so much easier to use, and use well, than the tools in Photoshop CS3.

Maybe I’ll write about Aperture some other day ...

For many years I have been using IView’s MediaPro to catalog my growing home photo library.
It’s not perfect, but it’s strengths were just where I needed them - in making it easy to richly decorate my photos with meta-data and to filter & sort by the same. Almost every conceivable data type that you would want to associate with an image-file is supported.
In 2002, the first year that I owned a digital camera (a Canon G2), I created 711 photos which weighed in at 1.16GB.
In 2007 I created 4075 image files & video clips, and this required 30.17 GB to store (mainly because of the very low compression achieved by the Motion-JPEG movies made by Canon consumer cameras).
Each photo & movie made in those 6 years, about 12,800 in all, is cataloged by MediaPro - and I can easily find every (digital) photo I have taken of my daughter, or my son, or my Wife, or any other close family member or friend thanks to the searchable catalog I have - plus some discipline over the years to actually add the data to each pic (which sounds onerous, but it’s not that hard with the right tools). I can also search by Date (as you would expect), Location, Event, Category (from a managed list of standard categories I created), and keyword.
Maybe I have taken this too far for an amateur - but I have learned, by attempting to find anything in my many uncataloged boxes of negatives & prints (from before 2002), that uncataloged photos are the same as photos that no one will ever see.

So Imagine my horror when IView was purchased by Microsoft in June 2006. MediaPro is a multi-platform application, running on Macs & Windows computers alike, and I use a Mac.
Naturally I was somewhat suspicious about the future of the application under Microsoft’s ownership, in particular I was worried that the Mac version would languish compared with the Windows version. When offered, I took advantage of the free “upgrade” to the newly re-branded MS version - now called Expression Media - and my worse fears were immediately realized. The new MS version would not run any of the Applescript I had written to manipulate photo meta-data. When I visited the MS support forums I could find little of interest to a Mac user (and thus I figured that most Mac users had long since abandoned ship) and the format of the forum was appalling.
So, although I had Expression Media I refrained from using it and kept my eye open for alternatives. A subsequent update to Expression Media (many months later) fixed the Applescript problem - so I can use Expression Media - but I am still looking for an alternative that I can rely on.

A cogent article comparing the Microsoft OS monopoly with Apple’s music business.

I was pretty much forced to use a Palm Treo 650 due to it being adopted as a standard mobile device in the company I work in.
Being moved off the Sony Ericsson P910i was hard but there were some consolations.

We use an application called Goodlink which securely connects the phone to our corporate MS Exchange server - providing a seamless email & calendar experience.
I must say that it is a damn good application - an efficient UI, it’s fast & reliable, and also provides access to web-based apps behind the firewall (not that any of them run properly in the mini-browser). Often, email arrives on my phone before it shows up in Outlook! So, a big tick for Good Link, it’s a pity about the Treo.
The Treo 650 sports a whole 32MB of “memory”, of which only 23MB is user accessible flash RAM. The rest might be regular RAM, used by running applications, or maybe it’s ROM used by the system, I’m not sure.
I think it’s very dodgy advertising 32MB of memory, when only 23MB can be used - the fine print clarification might be technically accurate but the large print is still misleading. They don’t say what the difference of 9MB is used for - does it contribute to value to the consumer in some way, I can’t tell? I mean, would you buy a car that advertised 7 seats and then in fine print said “only 5 seats available to user” - but didn’t say what the other 2 seats were for or where they were? Crazy.
It reminds me of the way CRT monitors were advertised. You know, the 19” monitor that only had 17” viewable, and the 17” monitor only had 15” viewable. What is the bloody point of calling it a 19” monitor if 2” were always missing - it boils down to bare-faced lying - which the whole industry adopted because no-one had the balls to put a stop to it.
So, back to the Treo. 23MB of RAM is just a joke. Especially considering that this has to be used for both application & user data storage.
I have run out of memory several times and then had to migrate some apps over to the SD Card, which is 1GB in size. You’d think my memory problems would be over with a 1GB DS Card right? Wrong. The SD Card is not first class memory as far as the Palm OS is concerned. Some apps, or app components can not be moved to the SD Card - and Palm OS doesn’t help you make the best use of the memory you have. It offers no advice on what can be moved, or utilities (other than a copy & delete function, but no actual “move” function). So you have to do it manually with some trial and error.
This can leave you in the VERY frustrating position of having a huge amount of available memory, but still suffering from out of memory errors (remind anyone of MS DOS?)
Couple this with spontaneous reboots every couple of days, and a weird situation where the phone says “No Service SOS calls only” requiring a restart of the phone function, leaves me to conclude that the Treo is only half baked.

I have seen ads for the new Treo 700p. It has 128MB of memory of which 60MB is user accessible. It has an OS update too so maybe it’s more stable. I’ll update this post once I’ve tested it (if I ever do), once our IT dept can get Good Link to run (needs a patch apparently)

EspressoPorn

This really gets my goat, that Regional Encoding, the bane of the DVD owner, is being considered for the new HD DVD’s. This, in my opinion is extremely anti-competitive!

Years ago, when DVD’s were first introduced, I remember Regional Encoding being promoted as a way to preserve the business of movie theatres. Since there weren’t enough reels of any given movie to cover the globe, movie releases are staggered, e.g once the movie is finished in US theatres, the reels move to Australia at the same time that the DVD is released in the US. Australians can’t play the US (Region 1) DVD’s on their players so they’ll be compelled to go to the theatre or else to wait for the DVD release in their region (which is region 4). 

If this is the reason for Regional Encoding, why do they regionally encode old movies which haven’t been in the cinema for 10 years ? It is possible to make a region free DVD, why not use this for the back catalog?
Why compel people to go to the theatre instead of buying or renting a DVD? Is the Motion Picture industry propping up the Theatres, and if so why?
The studios have enough control over the wholesale price of both theatre releases and DVD’s to ensure that if the Theatre business dried up, they’d still make their money on the DVD’s. So I don’t think this that this is about protecting theatres.

Is it an anti-piracy measure? No it’s not. DVD’s can be readily copied bit for bit. The copy will play just like the original, since it’s identical and indistinguishable.
Although there’s been much hoopla about the DVD encryption being cracked by “DVD Jon“, the primary motivation of DeCSS was to enable an open source DVD player to be created for Linux. DeCSS did not enable DVD copying per se, although it has probably helped enable region-free DVD copies to be made but that’s a digression.

We’re still left with the question of the fundamental motivation for Regional Encoding. We know it’s about dollars, but what’s the angle ?

Well, the answer becomes clear if you live outside of the US, especially if you live in a small market like New Zealand, as I do. Just imagine if you will, that the local DVD store is charging twice as much in real terms (excluding currency differences) for a DVD as they cost in the US. What choice do you have if you want to buy the movie? Can you buy it from Amazon.Com and import it (which is often cheaper even with the freight charges) ? Well, not if the Motion Picture industry has it’s way, since the Region 1 disc you import will not play on your Region 4 player. So you are forced to pay, or go without.
By dividing the world up into regions, the Motion Picture industry, in my opinion, is attempting to guarantee that the price pressures from one market do not spill over into others, i.e Regional Encoding is all about price protection and nothing else.

The Copyright (Removal of the Prohibition on Parallel Importing) Amendment Act 1998 allows for the parallel importing of non-infringing copies of a work into New Zealand - an attempt to compensate for such issues in small markets.
Of course, Parallel Importing doesn’t help with DVD’s ‘cos they won’t play - or at least they shouldn’t. Fortunately, in the New Zealand case, any reseller wanting to actually sell a DVD player needs to ensure that it is Region Free - a practice outlawed under the agreements that the DVD Player manufacturers signed in order to get the decryption keys that enable the players to work. Fortunately, it would seem that the New Zealand case is overlooked, or quietly suffered by the Motion Picture industry because they haven’t stopped it. However, many of my imported DVD’s will not play on my computer - the computer manufacturers don’t feel compelled to sell region free players and so the public rely on downloaded firmware updates that are sure to break their warranty.

Unfortunately, legislation in the US which attempts to prevent anti-competitive behaviour doesn’t seem to apply in cross border scenarios. So long as US consumers aren’t affected, the MPAA is free to force Regional Encoding on HD DVD’s, much to disadvantage of many of us.

Additional reading:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526-6927.html
http://hometheater.about.com/cs/dvdlaserdisc/a/aaregioncodesa.htm

I thought this was mucho interesting:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html

Here’s the news article from the NZ Herald and an editorial on the subject by Russell Brown.
I’ve held, since the late 90’s, that LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) was necessary and inevitable in NZ.
Although the Labour Government of the time, in 1987, were responsible for selling the local loop to Telecom, they could not have predicted the competitive pressures or technological needs of this century.
Certainly, the needs of the country, in this regard, were evident in the early 90’s during the fourth National Government. Unfortunately, there were complete idiots in that government ...

I’m moving house next week, and Telecom NZ can’t reconnect my DSL connection until 8 days after the move. Since I’m using this connection to host a mail server that my family relies on this is somewhat of a problem. 

It’s especially annoying (the late reconnection) because Telecom are running a Special Offer to attract new customers to their “Jetstream “ ADSL service and the resulting new connections have consumed all available DSL servicemen until 8 days after I move house.
What ever happened to “looking after the customers you have” ? Eh !! Quite frankly this sucks.

Anyway, dwelling on poor service from monopolists will get me nowhere ... on to the problem at hand ...

It had occurred to me that a good friend of mine had a Jetstream connection and was amenable to having my Cobalt Qube sitting in his study.
I have a Static IP address to simplify running of a mail server, so it wouldn’t be a simple case of relocating the server itself.

A complicating factor is that my friend and I use different ISP’s. “What?” I hear you say, hadn’t I mentioned that we were both on Jetstream ?
Yes, I did. There is no contradiction here. Telecom NZ has a natural monopoly , in that they own the “last mile”, or local loop for all domestic telephone installations in NZ. The only form of competition to date is that ISP’s can interconnect to Telecom’s IPNet and can sell to their subscribers the connection to the Internet from IPNet - but all domestic subscribers, no matter what ISP they choose, must first connect to IPNet over telecom’s copper wires, through telecom’s DSLAM s, paying the lions share of the total fee (75%) to Telecom. This situation will hopefully change this year with Telecom offering bitsream wholesale services to competitors.

So, I’m using a different ISP than my friend, but we’re both using Jetstream from Telecom NZ.

Side Note - Why I chose the ISP I did:
My ISP, Paradise , let me have a static IP at no extra charge. I had been using Telecom’s own ISP, Xtra , but when I asked them for a Static IP they wanted to charge me an extra $20 per month ! I couldn’t believe them. They consider a Static IP to be a “business service” - despite my protests. The ISP portion of the total broadband fees was only $20 and this already includes a Dynamic IP address - I just wanted the same one each time I powered my router on - is this worth another $20? No. So, Xtra, if you’re listening - “YOU SUCK”. They should be called “Less” not “Xtra” - what a sad joke their name is.
When I asked Paradise for a Static IP, they said “Why?”. At last a sensible response. Thanks for asking. I told them that I wanted to host my own mail server. “Ok” they said, and “do you want us to act as your name server, and backup smtp server too - for the same $20 ISP fee?” . I just about fell off my chair. What could I say but “yes” and that’s why Paradise is my ISP.

Back to my problem. I had a chat with a Paradise tech support guy. For some reason I’ve always found them to be knowledgeable and helpful, and this time was no exception. I understood that all the ISP’s using Jetstream were all connected on IPNet, and from seeing my friend’s router configuration, the only apparent config difference was in the PPPoA usernames (which include the ISP details, e.g. instead of ).
Is it possible that by just changing the login details on each of our routers that we would swap our ISP connections? Well, “yes”. That’s what the Paradise guy told me.
Also, my “Static IP Address” isn’t really static at all - at least not in the traditional sense. It’s a dynamic address, but Paradise has assigned a fixed address to my account so I always get the same one when I power up This means I shouldn’t have to change any router settings other than the credentials for the account.

Did it work?  ... almost.

At my friends house, I put my credentials into his router and rebooted it (for some reason this particular Conextant router always reboots when you save the configuration). And ... no go. I had forgotten to turn off my own router at home so it was still logged in. Bugger! I knew I had to do this, and had thought about it earlier in the day, just forgot to do it when I left home.
Fortunately, the round trip was only 10 minutes. Once I’d powered off my router, we retried my friends router and it all worked as expected!
The correct IP had been assigned - I just needed to open the right NAT pinholes for incoming & outgoing mail, and SSH, and we’re done.
We tested the mail delivery & reception - all good, except my friend can not collect his POP mail, from Xtra, from my Paradise connection. Why ? We don’t know and will explore this later. Naturally, I had changed his Outlook settings to use the Paradise SMTP server, but could not explain why the POP didn’t work unchanged. We forwarded his mail to an account on my Qube and changed from POP to IMAP. I think my friend will appreciate the convenience of having a local IMAP server vs a remote POP server - at least for a couple of weeks.

Back at my place, I didn’t have success with connecting my router to Xtra. In preparation for this operation, my friend had changed his account password with Xtra. Unfortunately, Xtra store the actual DSL password in a different place to the main account & webmail password. We needed to call their tech support to a) learn this fact and b) get the DSL password changed.
Xtra, you suck, have I mentioned this before ?