Category: Geek

A student with a borked PC-formatted FireWire drive called – the drive had failed and all of his thesis work was on it — 8.5GB worth of video, ProTools audio projects, images, documents. We have a variety of Mac-based rescue tools, but didn’t have anything but Norton on-hand for PCs. Google turned up ProSoft DataRescue. 40MB download, burned to a CD, which booted… a custom version of Gnoppix(!). Went straight to its own interface, no Linux desktop. DataRescue’s philosophy is that trying to fix drives can cause more damage, so it only scans, builds databases, and offers recovery (but you gotta pay for the recovery part!). Three hours to scan, and it turned up about 95% of the lost data, which it then copied to another drive we plugged into the system. A thing of beauty.

The hardest part was creating a valid destination drive. We only have FireWire drives here, and DataRescue wanted one that was FAT-formatted, not NTFS. But… surprise! WinXP no longer knows how to format drives FAT or FAT32 — NTFS only. That meant we needed a PC with a FireWire port that wasn’t yet on WinXP. We turned up exactly one in the whole school, which saved the day and let us create a valid destination.

Boring yeah, but somehow you end up with this feeling like you’ve just pulled a body from the river, gotten it breathing again.

Yahoo! has a new live search function called Y!Q that lets site owners embed marked links into sections of web pages. Users clicking the links get a small popup box with top contextualized results. Because blogs etc. deal with multiple topics per page, Y!Q lets you cordon off sections with DIV classes which interact with a JavaScript library. If you use a publishing system like Movable Type, it’s a simple matter of surrounding the summary insertion code with appropriate Y!Q tags and rebuilding. Pretty nifty, though it does add a bit of weight to pages.

Implemented Y!Q for John Battelle’s SearchBlog today.

Has the rise of Firefox and the ire of web developers finally sunk in for the IE development team? We already know that IE7 will be released before Longhorn, probably in response to Firefox’s popularity. Now it’s starting to sound like IE7 may actually attempt some semblance of W3C standards compliance:

Without making any promises, leaders in the IE development team suggest that after years of inaction on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards problems, Microsoft will finally clean up its act. … Developers’ concerns about standards and feature support in the current version of IE are reflected in the browser team’s current to-do list.

Microsoft listening to their customers? Imagine that! If true, a lot of web developers jobs are about to get a whole lot easier.

Rather than writing their own code, Harvard and a bunch of other well-funded business schools outsourced the job of creating an online application system to a firm called ApplyYourself. The firm did such a craptastic job of coding even the most basic security into their application that students soon discovered they could learn the status of their application simply by sticking their name onto the end of the URL.

You’d think that would be bad for ApplyYourself, and it probably is. But guess who it’s worse for? Every student who got curious and tried the URL “hacking” trick is being denied admission. So: Strike one against Harvard for hiring a lame development firm. Strike two against Harvard for punishing students for their own security holes. Strike three goes to students who failed to learn from Curious George that curiosity can only lead to trouble. It’s not like the students broke into the system — they walked in through the side door. And without malicious intent or consequences.

Thanks Rob

Enthusiastic about iPhoto 5‘s ability to handle RAW images from digital cameras, Amy shot a short roll in RAW, only to find that iPhoto 5 refused to import them. Eh? I probably should have known this, but it turns out that RAW (known as NEF in many Nikon cameras) is not a file format as such, but a representation of the actual bits coming directly off the image sensor, with no in-camera processing whatsoever. Because image sensors are different from camera to camera, so is the layout of the raw data. So not only do RAW formats differ from one manufacturer to another, but even from camera to camera by the same manufacturer. In fact, the RAW “format” sometimes changes within a single product line! iPhoto’s list of supported cameras (lower right of that page) shows that iPhoto supports the PowerShot G5, but not the PowerShot G2, which we have.

The idea of RAW is that the photographer gets a “digital negative” — the most possible data available for post-processing and archival purposes. The downside is that image manipulation applications need to know the specifics of the data layout on the CCD to be able to do anything meaningful with the images. To overcome this compatibility problem, some cameras do perform a minimal amount of processing on the image before storage (e.g. “RAW+JPEG”).

So why don’t cameras simply support one of the many uncompressed image formats available — say, TGA or BMP or uncompressed TIFF? No data loss or compression would be necessary, and the application-level compatibility issues would go away.

Photoshop supports RAW for a wide range of cameras, and there’s the dcraw.c library for Linux, which supports some 87 cameras — so the code is out there and we can expect to see better iPhoto RAW support in the future (hopefully there’s a RAW plugin architecture at work here). But it bugs me that application vendors should even have to worry about this kind of thing. I’m sure insiders can come up with all kinds of historical and technical explanations for how we got to this point, but it’s a classic example of an industry working at cross-purposes to itself.

As arbitrary as any Top 100 list, but I really enjoyed Mobile PC’s Top 100 Gadgets of All Time compilation. Tons of great memories (with pics!), ranging from the Popeil (Ronco) Pocket Fisherman to the Fuzzbuster to the top-loading VCR (my grandparents had one — they were early adopters in some weird ways, especially where TV was concerned), to the acoustic data coupler modem to the Zenith “Lazy Bones” corded remote (yep, that was its real name).

From the entry for the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler, my favorite sentence of 2005 comes in the form of a question:

Tired of having to clean out your scramblin’ bowl?

Answer: Yes!

Via Dylan

Google Maps is the coolest thing to happen to online maps since… online maps. But their basic location and navigation capabilities just scratch the surface. Thrown in GPS data, XML wrappers, and some simple animation techniques, and the possibilities crack wide open. Paul writes:

“Here’s an interesting combination of GPS, Google Maps and Flash (with cellphone GPS and photos to come in the future): A Google Maps walking tour of Keene, NH.”

Jon Udell (who created the walking tour) asks: What will we be able to do when there are millions of people walking around with GPS-enabled phones? And he answers himself: “We’re going to use them to collectively annotate the planet.”