Monday, July 22, 2002

Mediachance makes a bunch of digital photo editing tools, most of which are more sophisticated than a newbie like me can use profitably. However, they have one tool, the Digital Camera Enhancer, which is easy to use and which has already saved many a picture of mine. You know those pictures you take where everything is great, except part of your subject's face is in the shade? This little mini-app does a great job of lightening up that face. Highly recommended. Plus it's free. 11:48:01 PM

Just wanted to take a quick minute to plug some tools for digital photography. The first is Irfan View. This is the fastest, easiest graphic viewer for Windows that I have found. It is great for looking through a set of files and for doing very basic photo editing -- red eye reduction, color balance, cropping and rotating. It has a very nice standard interface that doesn't intimidate someone who isn't a graphic professional, but doesn't condescend with cutesy icons that are difficult to decipher, either. Plus, it is free. Highly recommended. 11:45:31 PM

	Wednesday, July 17, 2002

The Cellar's image of the date site led me to this photo on the Hubble Space Telescope site. This is apparently the remnants of the explosion of the star Cassiopeia A. If this is what the universe looks like, than I agree with the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, who said "not only is the universe stranger than we imagine , it is stranger than we can imagine." (It may have been J. B. S. Haldane who said it first, I have seen both citations. I remember it from reading the science fiction of Arthur C Clarke). 2:43:18 PM

I seem to be into images today. I just rediscovered the Cellar's image of the day site. Fun stuff. Today had a cool bug, yesterday had something truly strange. The site is worth checking out. 2:26:46 PM

	Monday, July 15, 2002

Like so many other people, I got a digital camera this year, and have re-discovered the joys of photography. I love the instant feedback, and the fact that there is no penalty for making a mistake. Plus I have a beautiful child, and I love taking pictures of him. In the last year I have taken hundreds of pictures, and I have been trying to figure out how to display them. I spent hours trying dozens of desktop Windows applications, and none of them produced what I wanted -- clean simple html for several pages of thumbnails, with each thumbnail linked to medium and then a large sized version of the picture. Then I found Gallery, a php server side application. It does exactly what I wanted. I installed it, uploaded the pictures, used the "captionator" to add captions to the thumbnails, and voila - a beautiful gallery. A great application, if you have an account on a server that supports PHP. The only downside to Gallery is that the documentation is currently almost non-existent. If it doesn't work, you are hosed. Plus it advertises all kinds of cool customization features that I will end up trying, but as far as I can tell they aren't documented anywhere. With that caveat, highly recommended. 2:03:19 AM