Comments for gnapse.com

Comment on Railscasts on text by marc cathomen

marc cathomen — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:03:12 +0000

yes, this is a great service.
It also makes clear that video is often not the appropriate media to transport information. It’s much faster to get an overview over this kind of conten if it’s in text form.
thx for the post

Comment on Picasa rotate sucks by dlamblin

dlamblin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:51:06 +0000

Rotating a file on disk degrades the quality. Picasa is trying to do the right thing. Of course, if Picasa implemented a lossless JPEG rotation method as an option, most everyone would be happy.

I know you’re on a Mac, but look at this software and try to find an equivalent:
http://annystudio.com/software/jpeglosslessrotator/

Note: Even “lossless” JPEG rotation can degrade quality at the edges. See this explanation:
http://www.betterjpeg.com/lossless-rotation.htm

Comment on Picasa turns awesome with face recognition technology by Christopher Taylor

Christopher Taylor — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:44:37 +0000

I use both Picassa and Flickr for sharing photos over the internet but i use Flickr more often than Picassa.–*

Comment on Resting on Rails considered harmful by alert

alert — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:34:51 +0000

alert(‘Nice site’)Nice site

Comment on Picasa rotate sucks by ernesto

ernesto — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:49:46 +0000

Well, my Canon PowerShot A480 does not add EXIF rotation tags to my pictures. Fortunately, I found out that I can rotate the pictures in the camera, manually, before I download them to Picasa, so I do not have to use the picasa rotate feature anymore.

I would love to find a Picasa replacement, but except for these issues with rotating, Picasa is the best that I have found. So I live with the compromise of rotating before with another tool (either my camera or with Adobe Bridge) and then import to Picasa.

Comment on Picasa rotate sucks by Jörg Hartmann

Jörg Hartmann — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:24:08 +0000

Non-distructive editing is the way to go, but Picasa misses the two obviously appropriate ways to do non-distructive rotation:
1) adding EXIF rotation tags
2) lossless JPEG rotation (transformation)

Every cam or mobile phone does 1), and all common free image organizars _exept_ Picasa do 2), some do both.

Comment on Picasa rotate sucks by ernesto

ernesto — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:31:49 +0000

I do know about the auto-rotation feature, but my camera is brand new (although not a professional on) and it does not have the auto-rotation feature. Its a Canon Powershot A480, and I have inspected the picture’s metadata (EXIF info) for the rotation info, but it is not there. Maybe you mean every professional camera since 5 years ago, but amateur cameras, at least mine, does not have this.

I start to sense that this sacred preservation of the original is something for pro photographers, but for average amateur pictures like mine it’s not that important. Picasa should at least have the option and warn you about it.

BTW, I have read that there is a way to rotate a JPG picture without any lost of quality at all, but the picture’s size must be a multiple of 16 o 8 or something like that. Most standard pictures resolutions today comply with this, so I don’t see why not making these applications use that algorithm.

Comment on Picasa rotate sucks by Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:25:12 +0000

Yea, believe it or not, Picasa is doing it correctly. Image cataloging programs ought to treat your images as negatives–that is to say: inviolate. Lightroom already does this, and Photoshop & Bridge participate in a complex post-processing workflow to provide the same non-destructive capability. This is true of JPEGs, and obviously true of RAW files; RAW is considered to be a read-only format from which some other format must be rendered (JPEG, GIF, etc)–if you’ve ever wondered why you can’t edit and save back to RAW format in any image editing program, that’s why.

The problem here is not with Picasa, actually–it’s with your camera. Just about every digital camera since 5 years ago has included an auto-rotation feature that uses sensors in the camera at the time the shutter is released to determine orientation–that should be stored in the RAW file and correctly reflected automatically. On occasion if you’re moving the camera during the exposure or shooting straight up or down it might get it wrong, in which case you need to deal with it manually…but unless you specialize in those kind of shooting techniques, shouldn’t be a problem 99% of the time.

Comment on Emacs: my first achievements, frustrations and impressions by ernesto

ernesto — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:29:33 +0000

Thanks Francois and Borbus for your comments and suggestions. However, I am forcefully not using emacs for the time being, because I got involved in a project related to iPhone development, which kind of forces me to use xcode (not even textmate). But the mere fact that I finally acquired a Mac+TextMate makes it difficult that I ever go back to emacs. I do have Aquamacs installed right now, just in case, but as I said, I haven’t had the time, not even to use TextMate.

Thanks anyway for your tips, they could come handy in the future.

Comment on Emacs: my first achievements, frustrations and impressions by Borbus

Borbus — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:49:03 +0000

Use shell for a normal bash shell. eshell is good because it is implemented in emacs lisp so it works on systems without bash. I use shell when I can though.

Why kill buffers. I use midnight-mode to clean up buffers I haven’t used in a while, other than that I mostly just leave them since they don’t get in the way. Sometimes I do close all buffers after finished a project for example, ido-mode comes to the rescue, you can kill buffers from it with just C-k.

Get out of the habit of using the up-arrow etc. use the main section of the keyboard only, it’s much faster. The default in emacs for previous is M-p.

As you use emacs more, you love it more.