scot hacker's foobar blog

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.