I was reading an article in a magazine recently and it talked about the issue of editing photographic images. Of course this has always happened but with the advent of powerful computers and editing software it is far more common than in the days of darkrooms. The article discussed the problem of changing the image and therefore changing recorded history.
One of the most powerful research tools for the history of the last hundred or so years is the photograph. It shows what words cannot describe. Just look at the impact the photos of the Vietnam War had and still have and on a more personal basis I have recently found and scanned some photos of my grandparents and great-grandparents. It was rather moving to see the faces of those who had previously just been names in the family history. If we change our images are we changing the way future generations will see us?
The other side of the argument is the freedom of artists to show the world as they see it. We cannot deny them the chance to produce images that give a personal view.
So how can we reconcile the two sides? While it is obvious that many artistic images are not and could never be interpreted as factual it is not so obvious with images that have received minor tweaking. If you change the colour of a building or car are you changing history? If you remove modern television antennae from an historic building does it make your image less real?
Let’s agree that some things are acceptable, correcting colours to remove colour casts for example. There is nothing wrong with fixing the effects of poor exposure. I have removed litter from the foreground of an image and don’t think it changed it too much. But what is too much?
What can be done? Digital images include metadata, the information that the camera records when it processes the image, often called EXIF or IPTC. The metadata is editable with software. It includes sections for image information, captions and artist for example. I strongly recommend adding caption information as it will ease the burden of future viewers, but that is another subject we will look at some other time. Maybe notes should be added to indicate when images are not historically accurate including what changes have been made.
What do you think? Do you change the content of your images? Have you considered the history perspective?
Author: Jim
A sixty something living in the Hawkesbury Valley on the edge of Sydney Australia.
Wireless Broadband on Fedora
I decided it was time to add broadband to my mobile setup. So I have signed up with Optus (Australia’s number 2 phone and internet supplier for non Aussie readers). As part of the package they supplied a Huawei E169 USB modem. It uses the 3G/GSM network to provide wireless broadband across much of Australia or at least the settled parts.
So how to get it working with Linux? As usual the phone companies deny it will work but what do they know? First I set it up installing the supplied sim card. Next after turning off wi-fi on the laptop I plugged the modem in. It recognised it as a USB device and asked what I wanted to do with it. I elected “do nothing” and then clicked on the Network Manager icon in the panel.
Network Manager showed the GSM device and offered to connect. I clicked and SELinux gave an error and blocked the action. After setting SELinux to permissive I tried again. The light flashed encouragingly and I opened Firefox and surfed away. It was literally that easy.
I expected to fiddle for a while but no it all worked boringly easily. I’m using it to post this now. Only “problem” so far is getting Conky to display the connections details. If only everything was that simple but then I wouldn’t have much to talk about here would I?
More on Raw
It occurred to me that I hadn’t posted anything on photography for a while. All of my posts have been about Linux. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that! As a step to add something photographic I thought I would post an update on how I handle raw images.
I have been shooting raw almost exclusively for quite sometime however I always rebooted into WIndows and used either the supplied camera software or Adobe Camera Raw to edit them and create jpgs. I tried UFRaw with the Gimp a long time ago and it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get the images to look the way I wanted. I experimented with a couple of other raw converters too but nothing produced as good a result as the Window software.
Recently though that changed. When I updated to the 64 bit version of Fedora 8 I installed UFRaw again and tried it out. I found it greatly improved. It recognised the raw format from both my cameras, a Canon 400D and my old Fuji S5500. The Fuji in particular is not handled well in Linux. It is only recognised as an external USB device but I can still transfer images from it. As DCRaw can now handle the format digiKam and others can display the images. UFRaw can be thought of as a front end for DCRaw conversions.
The results are that I no longer need to use Windows to work with raw images. This simplifies my photo workflow and means I have one less reason to keep XP alive on my system.
Managing Applications
One of the great things about Linux is the almost limitless range of applications. Name a requirement and someone has developed an application for it. The hardest part is probably selecting what you want / need. Each distro includes some way to manage the apps it provides, they are known as Package Managers, most have several. A Linux user has a choice of command line or graphical Package Managers.
One of my complaints when I started using Fedora was the default package manager, Pirut, found on the menus as “Add/Remove Software”. I found it slow and not very friendly. Oh it worked I can’t complain about it but like most Fedora users I quickly found the command line option yum was easier. Yum is fine if you know exactly what you want to install but what if you need to search. There are command line options but a graphical interface is so much easier. That is where Yumex comes in.
Yumex, the Yum EXtender, is a gui for the yum command. It has all the power of the command line including the feedback on what it is doing, but with the ease of use of a graphical interface. Why it isn’t the default for Fedora beats me. It seems to be a secret you only find out about on the forums, one of the good reasons to be a member of the forum for your distro of choice.
Yumex can be installed from the standard repositories in your preferred way but soon your preferred way will be yumex, highly recommended.
Refining Desktop Effects
I’ve written a couple of times before about desktop effects and the how to set them up. I won’t cover that again but will add a couple of things I have learned since then.
There are options
First is Compiz Options. These are found by right clicking on the Fusion Icon in the Panel. There are two options and one I use is Loose Binding. Not sure how it works but it does make a difference to performance, at least with my nVidia card. When it wasn’t selected performance was slow and X was working flat out, taking up around 30% of the cpu. With Compiz using about 15 – 20% that was quite a load. Now compiz is about 25 – 30% and X rarely over 1%.
There were other benefits too. I often found the screen totally messed up when resuming from Suspend. The only fix was to reload Window Manager, again using the Fusion Icon. Now that problem has disappeared.
I guess the lesson here is test the options, the other one is indirect rendering, and see if they improve Compiz on your computer.
Pager
The second thing is the pager. I use KDE 3.5 on Fedora 8. That is the bar that shows the number of desktops you have and allows you to click on one to bring it to the front. The standard pager refused to show the four desktops, it was stuck on one. I removed it and installed the KDE one designed for compiz, kicker-compiz. After adding it to the panel I had four desktops showing again.
As an aside there is a great option in Compiz called Window Preview. You will find it in ccsm under Extras. It shows the contents of a window in the Pager as well as when you hover over the application name on the Taskbar.
Browser Sync Finished?
The Google Operating System blog reports that Google is to discontinue its popular Browser Sync Firefox extension. It is a convenient tool that allows you to access your Browser bookmarks, cookies, history and passwords on multiple computers or as in my case multiple OSes on a dual boot computer. There is no official announcement yet from Google but if the reports are correct Browser will not be updated for Firefox 3 and server support will end at the end of 2008.
While I can understand the reluctance to rewrite the extension for the new version of Firefox I will miss it. I have found it reliable and extremely convenient. There are alternatives of course but nothing which offers the same combination of services.
Follow the link for the full story and links to alternatives.
How Many Bits? 32 or 64?
What is 64 Bit?
It seems strange but while most of us run 64bit computers we are using 32bit Operating Systems. Of course there are good reasons for this if you use Windows. Microsoft has not shown a great deal of support for 64 bit systems although it has provided them for some time. The level of driver support is reported to make Vista look good. However with Linux the situation is very different. Many distros offer a 64 bit option. While the level of support varies between distros they are mostly valid options.
So why would you use a 64bit version in preference to the standard 32 bit? The answer is as varied as why do you use Linux? There is a performance advantage but how much and whether it is discernible will depend on the applications you use. Those that manipulate large amounts of data will benefit the most but only if there are 64bit executables available. There is also the issue of addressable memory. 32 bit systems are limited to 4 gig of ram.
There is a good post of the Fedora forums with more information much of which is applicable to all Linux distros and not just to Fedora.
Having read that post and others I decided to give 64(x86_64) bit a try. I obtained a Fedora 8 x86_64 DVD and installed it on my Dell Inspiron 1520. I covered the 32bit(i386) installation earlier and so won’t repeat that except to say I had to follow the same basic procedure. The setup went as well as last time but with a few differences.
What was Different?
To have Flash in Firefox it is necessary to use nspluginwrapper and the i386 Flash plugin. This is covered on the Fedora forums where there is an area especially for x86_64.
The other pleasant surprise was that PulseAudio worked for me. Once I found that Kmix didn’t have Output enabled, the green light was off, I enabled it and I had audio. Note to self, when playing with Audio settings have the volume control on the desktop so if it suddenly works you don’t deafen everyone and have to fumble around to turn it down. Occasionally it fails to load on bootup or resuming from Sleep but that is much rarer than with i386 and the sound quality is much better. A restart of X usually fixes the problem anyway.
There were no other issues I hadn’t already faced with the original installation and so I am pleased with the change. There is a small performance improvement in things like image editing and I haven’t found any disadvantages.
I did mention in the previous post that my multimedia controls on the front panel weren’t working. Further investigation showed they were recognised but not assigned so I set up Amarok to use them and they all work fine.
Is It For You?
If you are using Windows, don’t bother. Unless you switch to Linux of course. For Linux users, if your favourite distro has a x86_64 option and your hardware is compatible and most PCs sold in the last couple of years are, see the link to the Fedora forum for info on that, give it a go. If your favourite distro doesn’t have a x86_64 option ask why or give Fedora a go.
Of Data and the Base
It is not surprising that the first thing most people install after the operating system is an office suite. It is one thing that is standard in all Linux distros too. Even if you only write the occasional letter it is an application that everyone seems to use. Perhaps the least used part of most suites is the database. In fact it is not included as a standard part of every office suite. Base was not added to OpenOffice until version 2 and even Microsoft only includes Access in the more expensive version of Office.
However I have always thought that database apps are undervalued. Few people realise the power of them and I guess the steeper learning curve deters the more casual user. I have made extensive use of various database apps for sometime now. Strange to say though the most ubiquitous one (Access) is one I have no experience with. I am not talking of full professional multiuser solutions but I do need something more than the basic Mailing list. So when I started using Linux it was natural that I would look for a database solution that ran under Linux.
When I heard Base was to be added to OpenOffice, yes that is how long ago this story starts, I was very excited. The other OO packages had proved useful replacements for the Office suite I was using at the time. In fact I started using OO in Windows before my move to Linux. When I experimented with Base though I was disappointed. I found it clunky, slow and counter-intuitive. It was only after finding a couple of tutorials online that I could get anything done.
Perhaps I was being unfair to Base as it was an immature product at the time and I was used to something with over a decade of development behind it. I had been using Approach which was part of the Lotus suite. It had always been a powerful yet relatively easy to use application. Lotus is part of IBM and they are no longer developing the Smartsuite which included Approach. They have released a beta of Lotus Symphony that is based on OpenOffice. At this stage there is no indication they will be adding a database application although there is strong support for it on the forum on their site.
In fact I had not found anything I wanted to do that I couldn’t find a way to accomplish using Approach. And I have never needed to use scripting either. Sadly that is not something I could say about other applications. An example is the simple use of a calculated field. A calculated field is one that the content is automatically developed (or calculated) from other field(s). A simple example would be the addition of tax in a price list. If you had a list of products you would type in the price and the tax code / percentage and the final selling price would be worked out. Of course this could be done using reports but if you wanted a quick visual reference you could use without the need to print price lists a calculated field is the easiest way. There are many other uses and they don’t need to be numeric fields either. In Approach it was simply a matter of defining the field as a calculated field and defining the formula and it worked. In Base it required the use of a query and adding that query as a displayed field. It is necessary to manually edit the SQL statement to ensure the result is formatted the way you require. And that is just one example.
I don’t want to spend the time developing a professional solution using mySQL or Firebird although they would do what I require. It would be like using a freight train to bring home the groceries. So what are my alternatives?
Well Base works for simple databases and can be forced to do some powerful things but it is slow and difficult to use. I hope it gets the development it deserves as it could be a useful tool with a better interface. Another option I found was Kexi. Kexi is part of the Koffice suite and my first impressions are good. It was easy to start using with an intuitive interface and good layout. I was able to create a simple table without using a tutorial or even the help screens. I haven’t worked out if it can do everything I require but it is worth a further look.
The other option is to stay with Approach. I have found it will run, with some restrictions, under Wine. For those who aren’t familiar with Wine it is an application that allows selected Windows programs to run under Linux and other ‘nix systems. No need to get into the technicalities of Wine but some programs run well and others with limitations. Unfortunately Approach falls into the latter category. It is possible to access and edit the data and even do simple maintenance work but creating a new table or report are among the tasks that are not possible. I have had mixed results with printing too. So I could do some day to day work with it but would require a windows system for any development etc.
That is what I am doing at the moment but long term I would like to consolidate everything under Linux. So the short term solution is to use Wine / Approach but long term I will give Kexi and other Linux apps further investigation. I would appreciate any suggestions for consumer level database apps that run under Linux.
Fedora 9
I guess everyone in the Linux world now knows Fedora 9 was released earlier this week. The feedback has been mixed. While there are the usual bouquets for some great changes there are also a few brickbats for some problems. To be fair Fedora is and always has been a bleeding edge distro and so from time to time will suffer the effects of having the latest but not yet greatest features. One result of this is that the forums have broken all records with the most users on line at one time almost topping 14,000 in the last 24 hours. The record before F9 was a bit over 11,000.
Two examples of the issues early adopters face are the lack of nvidia drivers due to the decision to use the latest beta of xorg. This alone has caused a fair bit of traffic on the forums. The use of KDE 4.03 as the standard KDE desktop has sparked some discussion too with many saying it is not ready for day to day use and should be considered a beta until 4.1 arrives in July.
Fedora is and will remain my distro of choice but I have decided to stick with F8 for the time being. Support will continue for F8 until F0 is released later in about six months. Although some of the new features of F9 look attractive I can’t afford to have my main system unusable. However there is a old copy of Ubuntu on one of my hard drives that I haven’t used for some time so it may go and be replaced with a F9 test system.
Don’t think I am criticising Fedora for its way of doing things. I appreciate having an up to date system and support its aim of pushing development of Linux. It is the Fedoras of this world that keep things improving for everyone else. Sometimes that can be painful for those involved but the end result is worth the pain.
My advice to anyone thinking of trying F9 or any new distro is if you use your computer for anything important don’t replace your existing system. By all means install a test system as a dual boot but keep a working system going too. Or get the Live CD version and have a play with that. If it works and all your hardware is operational then install it. If you are fortunate to have a computer you can test on then go for it!
A Fair Go for Aussies
Several Australian Internet Service Providers have combined to create a site asking for a Fair Go in the coming National Broadband Network. They claim there is a real chance that if the Government doesn’t take the right precautions there will be no competition for Internet services in Australia. If Telstra is given a monopoly all other providers will be left out in the cold and as usual the customers, that’s you and I, will pay. The site gives you a chance to register your concerns.
I would ask all Aussies on here to have a look at the site and read through the documents there and register your concerns. Fair Go Broadband.
Techodyssey 