Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I have a DVD that has my only backup of some family photos that have somehow gotten corrupted by iPhoto. (The photo files have gotten truncated to zero bytes!)

The only problem is that the DVD won't mount on any of my Macs. The Mac just spits out the DVD after a minute or so. The DVD looks fine; it's not like there's a big blotch on it....

Does anybody know of some tools or techniques for reading a DVD that is corrupt?

In case anybody is interested in a "new" (to you) computer, I'm selling my old Power Mac G4 on eBay.

Makes a great keepsake for Watson fans!

Being a developer, one thing that I need to do more than the average user (I hope) is to re-install the operating system. As a new major operating system version gets close to release (e.g Tiger, which is supposedly due any time between two weeks and three months from now), I find myself installing the new builds every week or two. And let me tell you: it's really tedious.

Over the years, I've built up a document that I refer to (and modify as needed) every time I do an installation. It takes about a half an hour after I get the operating system installed to where I can actually get back to work!

The main reason that this is so tedious is that there are so many applications and extensions that I use that are (by default at least) installed on top of the operating system, as opposed to in my account. And that a lot of tweaks require editing the system files, which of course get rewritten when I do a fresh installation.

Another thing which makes this tedious is that so many items need to be installed from the user interface, as opposed to from the command line. And even if they could be installed from the command line, it would take a lot of work to figure out how to "convert" those operations — which are easy to do with the mouse — to a script.

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OK, I finally have something interesting to write about in the "Cocoa" category. I'm going to talk about Class Posing.

On the application I'm working on, I want to be able to support textured iApp-like windows, but not require them. There are probably some sophisticated ways to handle this choice, but the biggest restriction is that you can't change the style of an NSWindow once that window has been initialized. And if you are loading a window from a nib, the window has already been initialized!

I was struggling to come up with a solution that would avoid having to create two almost identical nib files for each window type: one textured, one untextured. Then I came up with the solution: use posing!

What I've done is to create a new subclass of NSWindow called MyPosingWindow. It intercepts the initialization, and checks the preferences to see if the window should be changed to a textured window, and then lets NSWindow do its stuff.

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I got fed with the bad behavior of my old Kodak digital camera ... for the last six months or more, it has produced terrible flash pictures (as if the shutter were staying open longer than it was supposed to) and only mediocre daylight pictures. So I took the plunge after reading many reviews over the course of several weeks, I chose the Pentax Optio 750. What an ugly camera on the outside (though it reminds me of a film camera). But it seems to have a great set of features for my needs: 7 Megapixel, 5X zoom lens, flip-out LCD, 17-foot range for the built-in flash with autofocus assist lamp, QuickTime movies. Of course I couldn't find a camera with all the features I wanted For example, I was hoping to get a camera with a feature that I had mentally invented years ago and was pleasantly surprised to see that it exists in some cameras: a positional sensor so that I wouldn't have to manually rotate "sideways" photos in iPhoto.

The only feature I'm really worried about with this camera will be speed. I hate pressing the shutter button, only to have the actual camera capture the image one second later, after the subjects are done saying "cheese" and have already started to turn away!

(By the way, this post has nothing to do with my earlier request for RAW photos, except that since this model doesn't support that format, I would need some examples of that format. Thanks to all who sent me their sample files!)

Here's a question to ask of my five readers out there ... do any of you have any samples of "RAW" images, which the newest version of iPhoto supports? I am trying to verify that the program I'm writing can read these kinds of files without going through any special hoops, but I don't have any sample images. And Google hasn't been very helpful.

If you have any snapshots that you can point me to or email to me, I'd appreciate it. (You can post a message, or find a working email address link here.)

Lately, I've discovered mashups — for the uninitiated, it's digitally combining two (or more) songs into a (hopefully) pleasing new composition, an unintended duet. It's the musical equivalent of taking two completely different works of art and blending elements of one into another using PhotoShop; imagine inserting Marilyn Monroe into a Boticelli painting, for instance. Usually they juxtapose a currrently popular artist with a classic song from the 70s or 80s.

You can find mashup mp3 files all over the web; some of the ones that I like the most come from Go Home Productions. It helps when I actually know one or all of the songs involved, so mixing two songs on today's pop charts doesn't do much for me. A particular favorite is GHP's Rapture Riders, mixing Blondie's "Rapture" with the Doors' "Riders On The Storm."

Any favorites you'd like to recommend, in the comments?

Yesterday I blogged (in the "Cocoa" category) about an upcoming tool that Apple just wrote about called Quartz Composer (at the bottom of this page). Thanks to David Nolen's comment, the rest of the Mac world can now get a hint as to what this is all about. The program comes from an application called PixelShox, the old version of which is still available at this page right here.

Mac Developers, Power-users, and Graphic Nuts may find it interesting to download it and try it out to get a taste of what to expect with Tiger....

I've been using the developer builds of Tiger for a few weeks full-time now, and occasionally I run into bugs that I would like to report to Apple. But I've been having big problems with their bugreporting system, the one you have to be a member of the Apple Developer Connection to use.

Apparently Apple is working on the issue, but for now they suggest using the reporting form here: http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/bugrptform.html.

Yesterday I mentioned we are using Core Data and Core Image in our application in development. As it turns out, Apple posted a new article yesterday about Core Image. I glanced at it briefly, but since we have seeded version of Tiger, I expected nothing new.

But then I noticed a mention of a tool that comes with Tiger at the bottom of that page, called Quartz Composer. It's really cool. Obviously I can't really describe what it's all about, but I can quote Apple's page, and you can look at their screenshot!

Another tool for exploring the abilities of Core Image is Quartz Composer, shown to the left. It allows you to combine Core Image filters with a rich set of graphical and nongraphical technologies, such as OpenGL, QuickTime, and RSS. Compositions created with Quartz Composer can be run standalone or can be incorporated into other applications. You can also save Quartz Composer compositions as screen savers.

So you can incorporate the creations you make with Quartz Composer into other applications, really? It turns out that this is exactly what we need for our application. So right now I'm exploring Quartz Composer and trying to figure out how to really make good use of it — it's powerful and since it's more of a developer tool than a user tool, it's not as easy to use as, say, iTunes!

(If there are other Mac developers running Tiger who are also getting up to speed with Quartz Composer, I'd love to hear from you!)

Yesterday, at our local bookstore, I picked up a copy of Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell. I almost completely devoured it last night. A really interesting read; it's a little bit psychology, sociology, marketing, history, and though not really stated explicitly, chaos theory. I like the discussion of the three types of people who help get ideas to spread: the Connector, somebody who knows a lot of people, even weakly (The people on the social networks with the super high numbers are those kind of people); the Maven, the person who just loves to be an expert at stuff and share that information with others; and the Salesmanperson, who has this innate ability to convince people of just about anything. Anybody with a weblog is probably at least a little bit of one or more of these categories!

Joe Bob sez check it out.

Well, we have been working on our new application for several months now. We still have a way to go before it's ready for release, so we recently decided to take the plunge and make this application work on Tiger only, taking advantage of some Tiger-only technologies such as Core Image and Core Data.

Of course, we don't know when Tiger will be available, but by the time we are ready to release our application, Tiger will probably be available. Hopefully it will have been out for a few weeks to give a significant of the Macosphere to migrate. (Experience tells me that users tend to move over pretty quickly to a new release.)

OK, I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been posting to my weblog lately. The problem is that I immediately started using NetNewsWire 2.0 beta, never quite got over some problems I was having with MarsEdit once it came out. So I lost my ability to conveniently post from a nice user interface.

I've figured it out now, so blogging can continue at is previous breakneck pace.