Recently in tech Category

After a break of a few years (was in Denmark and then Sweden during 2007 and 2008) I made sure to not miss this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas.

The big news of course is the enormous construction projects, planned during the boom, which are lurching to either a conclusion or a halt, depending on the financial temerity of their backers. In the former category (although barely) is the CityCenter development on the center Strip:

The interior of the Venetian expansion, Palazzo, was also on display:

The whole set of pics is available on Flickr and on my own site.

The day after the convention ended we travelled to a ghost town in the desert, for a glimpse of what a previous Nevada boomtown looked like. Updates from there soon.

Holding forth in my talk during HASTAC III, a conference on humanities computing in Illinois. The conference concluded with a dinner for HASTAC Scholars, grad students selected to blog about the conference:

Whole set of pictures online here.

The internal 320gig drive that had been inside my 24” iMac since its purchase last summer had finally reached the point of being too full to hold everything conveniently. In addition, the price of fast Caviar Black hard drives have now fallen to the point where it makes sense to stick a terabyte in my main desktop machine. Out came dozens of Torx screws, plus the 24” piece of glass that covers the front — removed from its magnetic fasteners through judicious use of large suction cups.

I used the technique that lets you keep the LCD attached by one cable, swung out of the way, rather than removing to completely and finding a safe place for it. Inside, the space for the hard drive is at the top center:

One interesting detail I noticed while the machine was disassembled: the back of the front cabinet where the shiny Apple logo resides looks to be a circular cutout in the aluminum, suggestive of a design which would have allowed a semi-transparent white logo instead of the opaque metal one that eventually was used:

Apple’s used backlit logos on products such as its laptops for many years, and there are suggestions next month’s impending iPhone upgrade may also use such a design element.

The day after Christmas was spent assembling the Spacewarp kit that Santa brought to the kids:

Spacewarp was one of the funnest toys I remember from my childhood in the 1980s, and you can now import kits from the line of Japanese re-issues. See all the pictures online here.

The Events Calendar on our website dates back to 2003, and database behind it uses the ISO/IEC 8859-1 encoding method that was current back then. We see more and more departments putting in event information with full diacritical support (such as "César Chávez"), as support in operating systems and keyboard layouts gets better and easier to use. The actual calendar pages use the old ISO Latin system for their character encoding, and since the only thing on those pages is the calendar itself, it's always worked just fine.

But we had recently transitioned the front page to UTF-8, in order to simplify editing text there. This led to an unfortunate case of Mojibake when events with upper-ascii in their titles hit our UTF-8 home page, as they do starting 7 days before their occurrence:

I considered doing a mass conversion of the database to UTF-8 encoding, but the narratives of people trying to do this on the web are pretty hairy. A better solution seemed to be to keep everything (underlying data and the specific calendar pages themselves) in legacy Latin, and transform the strings in real time when they were extracted from the database on the home page via php. There turns out to be a useful command for this: utf8_encode.

$uperson = utf8_encode($person);

This brings the character encoding into alignment with the rest of the page, while not generating gratuitous encoding headaches (and possible catastrophes) with our production event database.

Here I am giving my poster session on TEI-based markup of runic inscriptions. My neighbors were the University of Alberta, UCLA and the NSF.

EXIF is the standard used to record metadata about digital images, usually time-of-capture data such as aperture and f/stop. In the process of digitizing old negatives and slides, one can easily capture information about the colorspace, light source, and other attributes of the scanner — an Epson V700 in my case. This has a certain archival value when used in color-critical workflows. Family photographs, however, don’t usually fall into this category. What if instead of taking capturing information about the intermediary imaging device — the film scanner — we recorded instead the attributes of the originary device? It turns out this is pretty trivial to do with command-line EXIF manipulation tools such as exiftool.

In the above example, we’re inserting attributes of the original imaging device (a Kodak Instamatic X-15F last sold in 1988) into our scanned TIFF files. The X-15F had a fixed aperture of f/11, and a set exposure of 1/90th of a second. The non-removable lens was 43mm, close to the ‘normal’ range of 50mm.

This lets us sort and manage these scans in the same way as every other digital image in our library:

This particular Instamatic camera has been in my family a long time — the earliest time I can find it documented is about 1981:

It went with us to Hawaii in the middle of the 1980s, and was taken to the top of Squaw Valley not long after. I don’t know the date of the last set of photos that it took, but with accurate EXIF-based metadata about these negatives, it’s an easy step to create a virtual album of them all.