Jeremey's Weblog

Audio Resolution and Sample Rates

So I'm mixing down some tracks recorded at 48kHz, and I've learned an interesting thing: a 192kbps MP3 created straight from the 48kHz masters sounds MUCH better than a uncompressed 44.1kHz AIFF from the same. The difference is astonishingly clear. You go, higher sample rates!

Testing a Flock Post

I'm posting this with Flock. Integrated blogging sounds good... we'll see if it really is.

Flock: Firefox for the Mac

So I pretty much don't like using Firefox on the Mac because it's very not-Mac-like. It's clunky. And then there's Camino, and Camino pretty much drives me nuts because it isn't compatible with Firefox extensions (or maybe it is and I missed something). I cannot use a web browser that doesn't have ad blocking. Safari has Saft and PithHelmet, I use both. Firefox has Adblock. No ad blocking, no usie da browsa.

So enter Flock, a new Firefox-based browser that's in early beta for the Mac. Flock rocks, really. It's a native Mac UI, the icons are much prettier than Camino's, and it has a number of very unique "social webing" features built in, including beautiful Flickr integration, blogging built right in (for API-based services such as MT, TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.), and a very cool RSS reader (pretty like Safari's but with more features and control).

So I know Flock's gig is all the social stuff, and that's what they're promoting, and it's very cool, but it's also just plain "Firefox done right" on the Mac. I'm looking forward to 1.0.

Lauren Weinstein's "Internet and Empires" Talk

This is a really good talk that Lauren Weinstein gave at Google about technology and privacy and so on. It's long, but very good IMO.

The Coffee Groundz

Coffee in Sugar Land is now at least a little bit cooler. The Coffee Groundz is a new cafe at the corner of Hwy 6 and US 59. The interior is nice, maybe a bit bright, but spacious, with great floors. There are 10-ish small cafe tables, 5 against a long bench and the others more out in the room. Two of the tables have a couple comfy-looking leather chairs. They serve gelato and crepes in addition to coffee, apparently.

So on to the coffee... they have French press! Woohoo! It's $5, but you get a full 16-20oz (I'm guessing) French press of coffee... and it was good coffee. It didn't taste over-extracted and it wasn't full of sludge. I had the Guatemala, which they ground for my pot (i.e. they didn't use already-ground coffee). I'm not sure if they ground it before heating water or after. In any case, my coffee was quite good, I finished the pot.

And free Wi-Fi, of course, and they have power all along the bench against the wall. My only complaint: they close at 10pm on weeknights. Sigh.

Boys Portrait

Glorious Light

A couple pictures taken this evening as the storm clouds were parting (I added a closeup of the sun peeking through in the one on the right):

Lightroom Beta 3

Lightroom beta 3 is out, woohoo! I'd been hoping for an update for some time. Beta 3 looks really good... I happened to do a shoot of the boys last night (getting lights set up for another shoot), so I had some images to import and process. I always import off the CF card using iView MediaPro for cataloging purposes, so I didn't get to see any improvements in CF import, but everything in Lightroom went smoothly. The UI is a bit improved, I think; things have gotten a little crisper. It definitely seems snappier on my 1.25GHz Powerbook G4 than beta 2 did, and it's better about telling me when it's working on something.

There's a web module now (see sample gallery links below), separate from slideshows (which is muy good), and the default options turn out a decent HTML gallery. There's a nice concept of "index" and "small view" (larger selected photo plus index) and "large view" (larger still selected photo only). The design needs some tweaking, particularly the links (e.g. prev/next). They should be arrows or something, not run-together words. But the index mouse-overs are great, they look just like mousing over an image in Lightroom's gallery view. The identity plate is annoyingly large and has borders that are just too spacious, but it can be turned off. It would be nice to adjust the layout so that the plate isn't owning all the horizontal space up at the top, e.g. aligning all of the other text with the bottom of the plate, but on the right.

The flash gallery looks nice but the images are washed out. They look like they haven't been converted to sRGB, even though they are sporting sRGB profiles. Either that or the flash renderer fails to handle profiles correctly. Something's not right, but it could be that I forgot to check some box (like the "do the right thing" box). But given that Lightroom should just manage color correctly and not bother me about it, it's a little disappointing.

Memory usage over time seems to be improved... beta 2 would eat everything I had and then some and the rest of my apps and the OS would be chunking away in swap. With beta 3, I processed about 40 images and then let it sit overnight and then did some more work this morning and my other apps were still usable.

I made one slideshow in the slideshow module, which was great, but exporting it was weird... almost like that just wasn't finished it all. The export dialog has no format option selected when it appears, and if you leave it that way, it exports to flash... but if you go to choose an option, the only one is PDF. That and the flash export never finished.

So it's still a beta (surprise!), but very usable for image processing IMO. Lightroom is really only a processor for me, anyway. It's where photos go from raw RAW to finished. Once finished, I'm usually exporting them via some other means (e.g. iView MediaPro for web galleries). I would love it if Lightroom would surpass MediaPro for web export, but it seems like there's a long way to go. Maybe if templates can easily be created.

So that's my "12 hours with Lightroom beta 3". It's good.

UPDATE: Sample galleries: HTML Flash

New Design

I was bored with the old one... but I'm liking the themes Wordpress has more... I may port one, or I may just move this over there.

UPDATE: I changed the new design. This is pretty simple and I'm liking it.

Excel Passwords... Ha!

I'm sure the world will be shocked to learn that Microsoft's implementation of protecting Excel worksheets and workbooks may be... uhh... lacking in security. I needed to make a modification to a protected workbook (for extremely practical and entirely wholesome reasons), so I figured that I would see what it would take to figure out or find the password. Well not much, it turns out. I viewed the document using "less" in a terminal and near the end (always look there first) there's a section of code-like string fragments having to do with protecting and unprotecting, and nestled nearby was a short string that didn't make sense as code, didn't make sense as any kind of Excel keyword, and was not contained in the visible Excel workbook text.

So I tried unprotecting the workbook with that string as the password. Yep, that did it. Now I'm sure it was implemented that way so that the average human who forgets a password ten minutes after thinking it up wouldn't be completely stuck. But those kinds of "failsafes" are usually just wide open back doors. Definitely the case here.

No doubt thousands of other people figured this out long ago, but it was amusing to me.