Cricalix.Net

I finally have the sample prints from Jessops/Snapfish, Photobox, Kodak and BonusPrint.

Of those four print companies, I can observe the following:

• Kodak and Bonusprint got the greyscale/black and white photo correct
• Photobox and Snapfish added a green tint to the black and white photos
• Photobox’s prints are horribly fuzzy
• Kodak generates a less green-saturated photo than the other three, but may not be an accurate green
• Due to the above, the Kodak print skin-tones are warmer

I still don’t have a calibrated monitor, so some of the colour distortion can be attributed to the fact that what I’m seeing isn’t necessarily right according to sRGB. The softness/blur applied to the Photobox photos rules out their service for me - I supplied them with very high quality JPEGs (which is probably an oxymoron), with all the appropriate sharpening/blurring applied.

On the plus side for Bonusprint, their Windows client accepts TIF files, which means the JPEG compression artifacts won’t be present in any photos I submit as TIF. However, compared to the default Kodak prints, the green saturation is definitely higher, possibly too high. I scanned in sample images from all four print shops, and comparing a single spot between Kodak and Bonusprint, I get (RGB) 117,127,70 from the Bonusprint print, while the Kodak print says 87,108,73 for the same location.

Decisions, decisions.

This weekend was the 80th birthday celebration for my paternal grandfather - 26 people, two hotels, a bus, no mobile phones, and yours truly the designated photographer (and taxi driver). I shall come to the two hotels part in a bit.

Mum and Dad arrived Friday night at my place, as we intended to carpool down to Devon on Saturday morning. So far, so good. We departed Saturday morning around 8 a.m., with the intent of going down the M5. This intent was duly squashed by traffic reports of severe congestion around the Bristol area due to an accident, so we headed cross-country instead. A rather uneventful ride ensued, with yours truly doing the first 3 hours or so of the drive (I <3 my 406). We arrived on Dartmoor around 1 p.m., and stopped for lunch at a pub that used to be the school my maternal grandfather attended. A light snack, 15 more minutes drive and we arrived at the Two Bridges hotel in western Dartmoor - and true to what I’d been told, my phone registered 0 bars of signal. A snooze beckoned at this point, so we checked in, and headed upstairs. (more…)

As I wandered through Leamingon on Saturday afternoon, I came across a wedding party - a perfect chance to hone my hobby a bit more. I stayed out of the way of the guy making a living from the shoot, and attempted to get some decent photos. Of the 50+ photos that I shot, there are about 10 that are decent, and maybe 2 that are good - at least when viewed on my LCD. I punted my choices across to Jessops (their online system powered by Snapfish), and ran a single 5×7 of each of the pictures.

I now have the pictures in front of me, and have a few observations.

1. Despite being pre-cropped to 5×7, the printing process managed to slice a few millimeters off of each end of the photo. Normally not a problem, but I’ve got at least one shot where the top of the groom’s head has been sliced off, as has his elbow.
   1. Lesson: When using Snapfish, leave a few mm extra on the crop
2. Black and white on my screen looks totally different from black and white prints. The colour cast of the black and white shots is ‘wrong’ for some definition of wrong - the saturation is off, and there’s a greenish cast to the print.
   1. Lesson: Not sure yet, perhaps try Photobox. Probably get a Spyder too, to calibrate the screen.

I’ve now shunted the same photos over to Photobox, Kodak and Bonusprint and will see how their printers handle the same images. Of those three, Bonusprint are the only ones who seem to offer the colour profile of their printers.  The other possibility is that I need to switch to AdobeRGB instead of sRGB - I would hope that Lightroom is embedding the profile data. Once I’m happy with the printer output, I’ll try to get a set of the photos sent to the bride and groom - hopefully by going down where the wedding was held, and asking them to please forward the prints.

Given that I have been designated the official photographer for my grandfather’s 80th birthday bash (a small gathering of family and friends in the middle of Dartmoor), I decided it was in my best interest to shell out on a flash other than the one built in to the D80. I looked at the Nikon offerings for a few days, and eventually settled on the Nikon SB-600. It’s placed between the SB-400 and SB-800 Speedlights, but appears to be a good compromise of features for the money (and getting it quite a few £ below retail certainly swayed my decision).

I’ve been shooting some test shots tonight with it, and I’m starting to wonder how I ever managed without an off-body flash. The flexibility that it’ll give me is incredible - I just need a dim room and some test subjects to get my flash-work down pat. I’ve also worked out how to get the D80 to act as a commander unit when the 600 is sitting on a stand, which is great - my initial trials made me think that it wouldn’t work. I’ll need to build a diffuser for the on-board flash, but that’s actually remarkably easy, I’ve already got a spare white film canister from Jessops (just walked in and asked if they had any :).

Of course, this means that I now have another item to pack in my camera bag, along with a spare set of rechargeable triple-A batteries, but it’ll be worth it. I think the only other items I want now are a good tripod, and perhaps a 50/1.4 or 50/1.8 prime. Oh, and having seen this, an eyecup for the D80 might not be a bad idea either, given I wear glasses. It’s also time to start reading the Strobist blog a lot more. One more link - I love the second comment on this photo, made by the owner of the camera; he’s got a good point, I never use anything other than MASP either (with a slight hit of Auto when I just don’t care).

I lied, one more.

As mentioned in a previous post, Alfresco got put on my stack of things to look at. We’ve decided to forget about integrating it into Liferay for the time being, and just use Alfresco as a standalone product (possibly with LDAP or NTLM authentication). So, I gave a brief demo to my boss and my director today, and it was somewhere just above blind leading the blind :)

Alfresco is some very nifty software. It operates at least three different ways to get data in and out of it - a standard web interface, WebDAV and CIFS. With a few clicks, I can add the ‘Versionable’ aspect to every document loaded into Alfresco, and this versioning works regardless of which interface you use. So I can create an HTML document using the TinyMCE editor, and it gets version 1.0. I can then WebDAV in, copy the file to my PC, edit it, copy it back, and it gets version 1.1. For giggles, I can browse to the network share, edit the file ‘on the server’, and it gets version 1.2. Unfortunately, only the web interface lets you set a version note to go with the version. There’s also a drag-and-drop target executable that allows you to check a file out and in - so only your changes apply.

The WebDAV interface works from Konqueror - I’m having name resolution issues with the CIFS interface for some reason. I’m pretty sure I could get FUSE to talk to Alfresco, giving me a local mounted directory with full access into the Alfresco server.

So, onwards and upwards. Alfresco looks to be a nice solution to our morass of scattered documentation.

When I migrated the work PC back to XP, I installed the eTrust antivirus software that $work has a license for.  Everything seemed fine, until my co-worker mentioned that I’d installed the wrong version.  ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I’ll sort that out now then.’  Quick install from the central deployment server, and all was well, or so I thought.

Enter stage left our hero, ‘Windows needs to reboot’.  Fine, fine, reboot if you must.

A few hours later, I needed to VNC to one of the servers.  This would be easy, if my VNC icon was still pointing to the VNC application.  Instead it had been replaced by the Windows default ‘I have no clue where it went boss!’ icon.  ‘Peculiar.’ I remarked to myself.  Went into my downloads location, re-ran the installer.  Got one step in, and it complained that it couldn’t find the source files for the install.  Then I noticed that my installer had vanished from disk as well.  Beyond peculiar.

So, lets test.  Download the installer again.  Run it.  It vanishes from the Desktop within a few seconds of being run.  I check the local eTrust console in case it’s thinking ‘Virus!’, which is isn’t.  I try it again, same effect.  I try a third time, this time with a movie capture running (just in case I was seeing things).  Still does it.  Gave up, found a different VNC application and used that for the rest of the day.

This Monday, I poked and prodded it some more, and found the management console for eTrust after reading that PestPatrol (part of eTrust) doesn’t like VNC very much.  After much fiddling, I found the PestPatrol exclusions - there was even a local policy called ‘VNC’.  Sounds perfect.  Click.  Add exclusion.  Search.  UltraVNC.  Add UltraVNC 1.0.2. Save.  Weird, not listed.  Repeat several times (proof of insanity anyone?).  Still not listed.  Shrug, add path exclusion, hit save.  Done.

Re-install UltraVNC.  Installer stays around.  Run UltraVNC client.  Stays around.

I hate platforms that silently remove software, and even worse, don’t log that software was removed.  Oh well.

for e in dbname:dbuser:outputfile ; do
        # Strip the longest left match
        # Strip the longest right match
        # Strip the shortest right match
        # Strip the longest left match.
        # Presto, cleaned up variables.
        O=${e##*:*:}
        D=${e%%:*:*}
        U=${e%:*}
        U=${U##*:}
        pg_dump -f -d -U $U $D > $O
done

Isn’t line noise neat?