Fighting with computers

Given the number of downloads, and the fact I wanted to use the red pen myself, I patched my previous converter code to include that. As before, the perl source code is available for download. The program will convert a g-note proprietary file format into an SVG file that at least Inkscape software (the one I use) is happy with. Luckyly one reader provided this link with the file format specs. Just type dnt2svg.pl your_dnote_file > converted.svg Windows users need to know they can get a free perl interpreter from ActiveState. Those with Apple OS X already have it in place (but you still need to know of to use a terminal).

New rules in France have been set up to punish on-line exchange of files. The new deal between the French administration, the recording industries and the Internet service providers is supposed to protect the artists' revenue. The deal is supposed to be against on-line movie and music exchange but I am not sure how easy may be to detect that a given user is downloading a song whose rights belong to a French corporation or artist. So it may well be easier to rule out any file exchange, just in case. We will see... Not everybody agrees on the idea that preventing music or video sharing over the Internet is going to improve sales figures, though. If the system they are putting in place in France does work, it may well be a market to watch carefully. I won't be surprised if, instead of the expected results (higher revenue for artists), a significant decrease on Internet users happens. Because of this, I think this is a social experiment we need to pay close attention to. Do not fo...

Many vector drawing programs do include a vectorisation tool so a vector representation of a bitmap can be obtained. I have used many times the one that comes with Inkscape program. However, I've just learned of another tool you can use. The fact the tool comes from Stanford makes you hope for very good or superb results. The picture on the left is a bitmap of a vectorised bitmap. The usefulness of that is just as a sample (but, of course, you do not want to get a bitmap of your vectorised output). The picture was taken from a recent Google Talk at our university. What makes this new tool unique is the fact it is an online service. You upload the bitmap from your web browser and after a few selections you download the result in either EPS, SVG or PNG format (the latter is a bitmap format though). The comparison you can find on the tool site shows an impressive performance compared to other vectorisation tools on commercial software (from Adobe and Corel). Update: Since this entry...

I reported some days ago I could no longer use The GIMP on the newest OS X 10.5 , aka Leopard. It transpired the problem was due to changes on X11 support. Apple has moved from Xfree86 to X.org implementation and this move created some trouble for several Xwindow applications. Fortunately the fixes are already available and a new binary I found here is working like a charm on our iMac (this subtle change on iMac's ownership claim has not been yet noticed by my wife). BTW, if you want to try the Time Machine in Leopard you need to now that the external hard disk you use needs an HFS+ partition. So if you just have another one the drive will need to be repartitioned and you will lose all your data. Warning messages are given before though. If you used arhive install, as I did, you'll have around 12 GB with a copy of your old Tiger setup. It may be a good idea to delete it (provided you already had another backup) before using the Time Machine for the first time.

I am sure you've used many times a drop down list to chose from a set of limited choices. One common use is to mark the country when specifying a shipping address. Some websites default to your own country, which is a good thing for the locals but eventually other people will have to select another value from the list. As I am currently based in Spain everything I buy from other countries does not default to my country so I am forced to go down the list. There is a shortcut that works on different operating systems which is pressing the first character of the word you are looking for to go to the first, second, third element, and so on of names starting with that same character. Sometimes this can be much faster than using the mouse. However, I have discovered that the common way of storing this lists does not make my life very easy when searching for my own country. There are several problems: Not all the site use the same list so you never know what is the location of the item yo...

My wife's iMac is dead after the Leopard upgrade (I was about to tell you how fast was the delivery of the DVD from Apple's store). I've seen I'm not alone and I'm going to have to do another type of install that essentially will wipe out all the apps and config already done. This is the feedback I left on Apple's feedback page: I had an almost "virgin" one-month old aluminium iMac 20". I requested the upgrade DVD to go from Tiger to Leopard. Now my system refuses to accept my password anymore. After a blue screen it gets back to asking me my password again (I'm positive I'm typing the right password). Now I have discovered many users are having the same problem. Shame on you Apple. It's really not acceptable. None of the "rm" tricks proposed did fix the problem so I guess I'll have to go through the archive install. This ruined my day. I am not happy. So be warned, do not expect the normal upgrade to work and reserve a ...

Did you ever wanted to play a file on a different device but you were prevented to do so because the file you bought had some nasty DRM inside? Well, I did and I wanted to do something about it. There is a tool that seems to work nicely for this purpose and it does not involves cracking the DRM system. It is tunebite software . It somehow reminds me the idea of Total Recorder but now it does work with videos too. The idea is quite simple: If you can play it you can record on-the-fly from your own computer. I guess it is easier to say than to do it. But this company seems to have done a pretty good job. They claim doing this is not illegal but I cannot provide you legal advice. For me it did the work of enabling my wife watching a DRM-ed video on her Creative Vision:M , which by the way it is a better video "iPod" than Apple's.

There are many open source projects out there. Many of you are familiar with the concept of open source software, where the source code is made available. Not so common is the idea of open-source hardware. What is the idea here? You get the full details of the hardware and firmware as if it were just the code of an open source software project. It is about extending the openness of a project to the hardware and firmware levels. Arduino is one of these open-source hardware projects. It is a family of small printed circuit boards powered by Atmel micro-controllers that can be programed. You develop the code for these micro-controllers using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) also provided on the project's web-page, available for Windows, Linux or OSX. The IDE is based on Processing IDE I covered a while ago and the programming language is based on Wiring language. The goal is to make user life easier as the development is aimed to artists more than to engineers. The micro...

Digital photography brings yet another way to annoy friends and relatives. Digital photogtraphy is convenient, and you do not have to buy or develop film, so you may end up, like me, taking (and keeping) many shots that are not that great. Thousands of pictures pile up on your hard drive but they are not in a format you can easily share with your grandma (unless she is Internet proficient). Two online services I have found quite useful are flickr and Google's Picasa. They make easy for you to share your photos even when you are on the go. However, if you want to create something oriented for people who at most are capable of playing a DVD then you need other tools. Some DVD burning programs can help you creating a simple slideshow of your photos. However my experience is that just a sequence of pictures without a soundtrack is not something people are going to enjoy. Another problem is that even if you have sound, the pictures without any motion look boring and uninteresting most o...

Contrary to what the name may suggest this device is not a mouse but a trackball. At around $100 it is an expensive alternative to traditional mice. Kensington trackballs have been around for more than 15 years and I have read good things about them. I decided to judge by myself and I bought one unit. The bottom line is that except the annoying noise and feel of the scroll ring the device is quite nice. The optical tracking is hopefully more precise and less sensitive to dirt than older mechanical systems. I have contacted Kensington customer support to report the problem, but given what I have read on the net it seems to be a common complaint from users. I have not yet heard from Kensington but I have thought you may want to "hear" and feel it by yourself before buying one unit.

I've tried both versions, windows and osx, and they seem to work ok. The new era of P2P TV is here for you to decide whether it will stay or not. Joost image and sound quality are quite ok. Service is now open to everybody, you may want to give it a try.

I tried to use Mailinator.com service today unsuccessfully. It seems the popular passwordless free webmail service is not available now (being passwordless means that you should not use it for any private messages as anybody might have access to your messages if they figure out your mailbox name). For several years, Mailinator was a useful allied for those not willing to give up their real email address when registering for a service or download. They seem to have a blog . And nothing about shutting down the system is ever mentioned. So hopefully is just a technical problem they are experiencing as the domain name is paid for till 2011 by Mailinator's creator Paul Tyma. Pinging the server works, but the system rejects any http connection attempt. Anyway, fear not as there are different interesting alternatives . Update: They are back on-line!!

I have been fascinated with the idea of a silent computer and the new Apple iMac captured my attention when they created the new aluminum line. Last time I bought a computer from Apple it ended up being used mostly by my wife. For this problem not to happen again I've just bought her a new iMac!. I am allowed to use it from time to time (mostly to install new software). After a few hours of using the system I am more than happy with the looks, the clutter-free desktop and the silent operation (I guess that after several minutes of heavy load you will start listening some noise but this just has not happened yet). I've read it has three fans inside. The main complain is that the unit is not user serviceable (say goodbye to upgrade your hard disk). However everything I've tried just worked out of the box, no problem at all. I only needed to look the documentation to learn how to suspend the system (press play 3 seconds on the remote or the power button or select suspend in t...

I've used for some time their Google Docs service that offered on-line Spreadsheets and Text editing and now the third complement has come to life: Presentations have been added to the mix and offer, like the other tools, easy collaboration among a group of users of the same documents. I've used a shared spreadsheet for marking lab sessions across a group of teachers and it proved quite useful. Of course none of these tools compare very well against a locally installed Office application, but it just uses on any networked computer and its free and your documents are accessible from anywhere on the net. When you factor in the possible collaboration between several people on the same documents Google's proposal becomes much more attactive plus you save lots of emails.

I've just read on Slashdot about an error in Excel's multiplication. Details can be found in this Google group thread. In short, it seems a multiplication whose result gives 65,535 (which is 2^16 -1 or 0xFFFF in hex) will return 100,000. I haven't tested it myself yet, but it seems several other people did. I would be worried if I were using that software for any calculation. Update: I've already tested and it happened indeed (see the picture). Cell A1 shows the offending formula and A2 shows you the result of that formula (which should be 65,535 instead). However, I've tested other multiplications whose result should be the same and they all seemed to work ok. That's funny. (BTW, decimal point is "," in my locale in case you are wondering).

While I mentioned HDR on a previous entry , at the time I comented the need of three (or more) different exposures to obtain an HDR image. More recently I have learned that you can use the same software to obtain the same result with just one photo. The basic idea is that camera sensor have significantly more resolution than the 8 bits per color of JPEG. Some cameras -- unfortunately the most expensive ones -- allow you to access to the original sampled data. The so called RAW format. After some processing a JPEG file can be obtained changing, for example, the exposure one f-stop up or down (this is like dark-room magic). In the above image I took a single exposure and I used Canon's RAW processing software to obtain three JPEG files with exposure values -1, 0 and +1 from the original shot. Then the three were combined with (the trial version of) Photomatix software. Original shot is shown below for you to compare. Update : Actually, thanks to one of your postings I've learned ...

After returning from holidays I've came across two different stories that somehow did not look right and turned out to be a scam or a hoax. First one was a person who told me about a recent e-mail she got from a friend who, interestingly, claimed to be in Nigeria and lost her wallet in a cab. The twist was that the message was apparently coming from a real person that she knew. I tend to be quite suspicious whenever somebody asks me money by email, specially if the requester is based in Nigeria ( 419 scam is a classic). This time it was a new variation , based on hijacking a person's email account (gmail, hotmail, etc) so they take control of that person's email and they use his/her address book contacts. This way the person receiving the scam email believe they are talking to a person they know. If they are lucky you will rush to Western Union to wire the money trying to help your friend. The second weird news came from a good friend who was worried about the news that s...

While on vacation in Sweden I started having a lot of pain on my lower back. I thought it might be a kidney problem and after a few days without the problem going away by itself I went to the Emergency Room at Sundsvall's hospital (sjukhus in Swedish in case you are wondering). Though I was kindly asked to return on the evening as my condition was not life threatening. When I returned my condition worsen quite a bit and I was told to stay overnight at the hospital (not a good thing when you are on a vacation trip). Fortunately, after three days my blood tests had improved and I was allowed to leave the hospital. We were very lucky as our friends in Sundsvall helped us to go through this (once again, thank you very much guys!!). While at the hospital they performed a CT scan to determine what and where the problem was. They found a 2.5mm stone leaving my right kidney and I was told the problem will likely dissappear without surgery, which luckily did. When I left the hospital I was ...

Some weeks ago I mentioned Ubuntu's Feisty was having a weird printing problem that I and many other people reported. It was unclear what was the triggering action and where the fault might be. And it seems it was for a a reason: While everybody thought the problem was in cups code, in the end it turned out the error was on another package. D-Bus is a library that offers a high-level interprocess communication. This library might be used by cups if available. There was a bug on the last version on the library (used by both Debian and Ubuntu) that eventually caused pipes not to be closed properly. The net result was that the cups process was gathering more and more file descriptors till a limit was reached. Thanks to the joint work of many users, Martin Pitt provided a fix for Ubuntu . Your printing blues is over.

I've got a call from a friend who was desperately trying to get Wi-fi working at home. The brand new PlayStation 3 was not able to use the home network as the broadband router was not configured as a DHCP server. The WiFi access point they had did not show up on any menu. When I get there I realized the WiFi access point was either dead or the power supply was not fully operational, so the whole thing was actually dead. As I was trying to be of some help and because my friend did have two wireless cards I suggested he could use the so called ad-hoc mode to network wirelessly his two computers while the Playstation was connected using and Ethernet cable to the broadband router. To get this working you need to connect one of the computers to an Ethernet port of the broadband router and then you share this connection so a second computer can use it too while it connects wirelessly to the first computer (no access point is involved here, so that is what this mode is called ad-hoc mode)...