Mark your calendars: celebrate the Leap Second!
According to Bulletin C of the International Earth Rotation Service:
A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2008. The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:2008 December 31, 23h 59m 59s
The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:
2008 December 31, 23h 59m 60s
2009 January 1, 0h 0m 0s
from 2006 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2009 January 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = - 33s
from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = - 34s
This means that tomorrow, 3:59:59 PM PST will be followed by 3:59:60 PM PST prior to the advent of 4:00:00 PM PST.
Paper Street Oil Company
Good gas mileage my ass
For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator.Using fat to fuel cars might be environmentally friendly, but it's definitely illegal in California to use human medical waste to power vehicles, and Bittner is being investigated by the state's public health department.
XScreenSaver 5.08
XScreenSaver 5.08 out now.
A bunch of bug fixes, but most notably this time, I finally retired a bunch of screen savers that suck. Also I rewrote Jigsaw and Sonar as OpenGL programs, and they are a lot slicker now. The pieces in Jigsaw come in many more varieties, and it rotates the pieces as well.
Tags: firstperson, linux, mac, xscreensaver
Current Music: School of Seven Bells -- Wired for Light ♬
Cocoa EXIF rotation
Dear Lazyweb,
How do you load an NSImage with proper EXIF rotation applied? I can't figure out how to determine the correct rotation. The following doesn't work. I get a dictionary containing a bunch of EXIF keys like exposure and shutter speed, but the "Orientation" tag is notably missing, and the image is displayed sideways. Preview and Finder display it properly, and exiftool says the field is there.
NSImage *img = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:filename];
NSArray *reps = [img representations];
NSBitmapImageRep *rep = reps ? [reps objectAtIndex:0] : 0;
if (rep) {
NSDictionary *exif = [rep valueForProperty: @"NSImageEXIFData"];
if (exif) {
NSString *rot = [exif objectForKey:@"Orientation"];
NSLog (@"rot = %@", rot);
NSEnumerator *e = [exif keyEnumerator];
id key;
while ((key = [e nextObject])) {
NSLog (@"%@ = %@", key, [exif objectForKey:key]);
}
}
}
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, xscreensaver
Current Music: Cabaret Voltaire -- Motion Rotation ♬
I built an ornithopter.
Tags: firstperson, photography, retrocomputing, robots, toys
Current Music: Curve -- The Birds They Do Fly ♬
You stay classy, Music Industry.
Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls says:
if you hadn't noticed, all of the dresden dolls and amanda palmer official videos have been taken off youtube.yes, folks...girl anachronism, coin-operated boy, shores of california, almost everything from who killed amanda palmer....pretty much the whole deal. all gone. go look for yourself. and you ask...wtf? this is why: nytimes, wired.
basically: "Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music's videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening."
in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i'm stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power...they're not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they're just starving for cash right now and they're doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it's abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.
money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it;s very unlikely it would ever make it's way into the artists' bank accounts.
damn, man. this shit is fucked UP.