Congratulations to our client The Old Farmer’s Almanac for being named one of NetLife magazine’s Top 200 of 2001 websites.

NetLife’s review of the site is as follows:

The well-designed site includes layers of interesting facts on gardening, weather and astronomy from the folks who’ve been predicting the weather since 1792. Features such as Weekly Wisdom and Trusted Tips are eclectic fun.

The folks at The Old Farmer’s Almanac are a joy to work with, and their web team deserves this recognition. Bravo!

I wrote a little earlier about my first impressions of iPhoto, Apple’s new photo cataloging super-program.

I’ve now had a good 5 or 6 hours of solid use of the program, and my generally positive feelings continue. Everything is still slower than it should really be (with the odd exception of rotating photos, which is instantaneous in iPhoto and takes an eternity in Canon’s own ZoomBrowser software that came with my digital camera). But the user interface us well-designed and consistent, and everything works just like it should.

To use the print ordering and hard-bound book ordering features of the product you have to sign up for “One Click Ordering,” which means registering your billing and shipping details with their servers to facilitate easier ordering. I wasn’t as bothered by this prospect as I imagined I would be.
[ident]The process of ordering prints was dead simple: drag and drop, order. That’s it. When you compare this to the process of ordering prints otherwise — even at well-designed sites like Shutterfly and Prism — which is inevitably cumbersome, it makes this one of the stand-out features of the product. I’ve ordered some 4x6 prints (10 come free — except for $3.99 shipping) and will report on their quality when they arrive.

Similarly, the “make a hardbound book of your photos” process was very well designed and easy to follow: just select an album, organize the photos in the order you want them to appear, choose a template, enter some text, and order. It’s not cheap — $49 for a 10 page book — but if the quality’s as good as they claim it is, it will be worth it from time to time.

In the end, a nice addition to my iBook, and a welcome rescue from the hell of ZoomBrowser.

For as long as I can remember — days? weeks? — the clock mounted on the wall on the outside of the Bank of Montreal on Grafton Street in Charlottetown has been broken. It just sits there telling the wrong time (I suppose it’s actually correct twice a day). I decided the time was right to contact the manager about this matter. I will advise of their response.

We pause now for a brief technical moment.

Most modern digital cameras attach metadata to the JPEG files that they create and transfer to a host PC. The metadata contains information like the date and time the picture was taken, the model and make of the camera, whether a flash was used and so on. This metadata is structured according to a format known as EXIF or Exchangeable Image File, and its specification is available online.

Normally we humble users don’t have to worry about this EXIF information because most smart photo cataloging and editing programs understand and preserve this section of the JPEG file, and use it wisely. One such an example of a program is Apple’s new iPhoto (pictured right).

Today I imported about 3,000 digital photos into iPhoto, and was surprised to see about 45 of them sorted “out of order” when I sorted them all by date. It appears as though the date on my digital camera was off by a year when I took those photos — it was reading 2000 as the year during 2001.

I deleted the photos from iPhoto, changed their file creation time (thinking this is where iPhoto was getting the date information from), and re-imported them. No change in iPhoto. It’s only at this point that I became aquainted with the mystical world of EXIF data.

Suffice to say that what I needed was a EXIF editor so I could change the [wrong by a year] date information embedded in the JPEG files themselves. I couldn’t actually find a EXIF editor, but what I did find, a program called Exifer (for Windows only) let me extract the EXIF data, do a search and replace with a simple text editor, and then re-attach the modified EXIF data to the photos. So I was able to move the photos from 2000 into 2001, import them into iPhoto, and have them appear in the proper year.

Lots of learning to solve a simple problem!

Initial impressions of Apple’s iPhoto: it’s slower on my iBook by a factor of 2 than it was when Steve Jobs demonstrated it at MacWorld today (probably because he was using some super-powerful desktop with a fast hard drive); I’m frustrated that I can’t create nested categories (aka Albums), but this seems to be the Apple Way, as it reflects a similar limitation (or feature?) in their iTunes product. Otherwise it’s pretty nifty, and much, much better a photo cataloger than I’ve ever used on a PC.

My other web annoyance is those nasty pop-up ads that now appear to be a part of most major sites, from Amazon.com to Slate.

Thanks to the iron memory of my trusty friend Oliver I have now installed a program called Pop-Up Stopper that has completely eliminated the pop-up ads from my life. It’s simple to install and it just plain works (thanks, Oliver).

One important thing to note: Pop-Up Stopper stops both evil and good pop-up windows (i.e. pop-up shipping information on a shopping cart that you might actually find useful). There is allowance for this in that you can set the program to beep when it’s cancelling out a pop-up window, and you can hold down the Control key while clicking on a link to allow the window to pop up.

I’ve written earlier about the increasing problem of spam (aka junk email) in my life (even my accountant sends me spam!). And I’ve been searching in vain for a solution to it.

My major problem in this regard was relying on Microsoft Outlook’s junk mail filters as my chief defense against spam, which really doesn’t help much at all because it’s based on filtering out email from people who’ve sent me spam before, based on email address. This doesn’t catch most spam, and requires some manual input from me every time I get a spam email.

So after looking at what’s available out there, I’ve installed a nice set of procmail filters called Junkfilter. The installation wasn’t painless — largely due to my lack of procmail literacy — but once it was all installed, I’m finding that it catches about 98% of spam and dumps it into a special mailbox that I’ll check once in a while to pick out any mis-identified real email.

Junkfilter is quite flexible and lets you configure your level of spam filtering. It combines a variety of techniques to identify spam, including looking at various mail headers, known sources of spam, keywords in the email and so on.

So far, I’m impressed.

One of the songs I used to own on 45 rpm record was Baby Come Back by the late 1970s soft pop group Player. Part of the lyrics:

All day long, wearing a mask of false bravado
Trying to keep up a smile that hides a tear

In true “ripped up like a douche, another runner in the night” fashion, I originally thought they were singing “vosbrevado”. Some sort of exotic mask-making material, I guess (“I’ll take 2 yards of fushia vosbrevado please”).

It was only later that I learned about the true nature of false bravado — defined by the dictionary as “defiant or swaggering behavior” but meaning ever so much more.
Which is where my thoughts turned when I came across the front page of Tumbleweed Communications which says:

Within 5 years all Internet communications will be secure and Tumbleweed® Secure Guardian will be the industry standard for securing every channel of Internet communication, for every enterprise, everywhere.

Do the people who write this bullshit hope that simply by writing something down you can make it magically come true? Closer to home you can find:

By combining industry-leading expertise from across the group of companies, Aliant utilizes the Aliant Premium^TM Model to deliver unique, end-to-end solutions to customers.

…right on the front page of Aliant’s website.

I think my New Year’s Resolution for 2002 is to avoid doing business with companies that don’t know how to accurately and honestly describe what they do. Avoid false bravdo, in other words. Here’s my suggestion for Aliant in this regard:

Aliant is a bunch of old telephone companies, plus a bunch of other companies we bought to go with them, all joined together so we can save money and try to appear more powerful. We pretend we’re fuzzy and eastern, but we’re really just a branch plant of BCE, which also owns the Globe and Mail and CTV. We’re trying to get all these companies to work together, but it’s really hard and so far we’ve had a few successes but otherwise generally mediocre results. It seems it’s harder than we thought to move beyond thinking like a monopoly: it’s buried really, really deep in our DNA.

No charge.

Nomination for best headline of the year: From Cardigan to the Taliban. Appeared on the CBC Charlottetown website today.

I’ve just realized, both from reading their channel guide and by confirming with an operator, that if we upgrade to digital cable from regular “full meal deal” analog cable with Eastlink, we’ll actually save about $5.00 per month, and get more channels to boot. You’d think they’d make a bigger deal about this in their advertising.

In the spirit of this note from my Sask brother, a summary of my recent movie encounters:

• Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, Down to Earth - Three movies all based on the same Harry Segall play. I’ve watched each of the three over the past month. Down to Earth is so bad as to be watchable the entire way through only by devoted fans of the genre, and even that was a stretch; it stinks. Heaven Can Wait, the 1978 Warren Beatty version, is the best of the three, mostly for the stellar cast (James Mason, Buck Henry, Charles Grodin, Dyan Cannon and Julie Christie among them). Here Comes Mr. Jordan is also well done, and an interesting watch for we fans of the Beatty film, as they are close in many details. So watch the first two, and leave off the last.

• Time Code - A weird movie with the screen split into four for the duration, shot in real time with four converging plots. If you are interested in seeing the experiment, get it on DVD, as there are some really neat options, including one which allows you to select which of the quadrants you hear audio from. Otherwise quite confusing, and a stretch to say its entertaining.

• American Buffalo - As a diehard David Mamet fan, I’m surprised I’d never seen this 1996 version of Mamet’s play. Stars Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz, who are both brilliant (slight edge goes to Hoffman). Classic Mamet-style dialogue. Classic Mamet-style plot.

• Hurly Burly - A pretentious and confusing movie starring Sean Penn, Robin Wright, Kevin Spacey, Gary Shandling and Chazz Palminteri. Excellent performance from Penn. Is Gary Shandling really an actor? Not sure about Palminteri. Too cerebral to be truly entertaining, but worth a watch.

• Sabrina - The modern one, with Han Solo in the lead. Worth watching again. Well constructed romantic comedy. Of course it’s missing Audrey Hepburn, for which you need to turn to the original.

• Groundhog Day - Ironically, given the plot, the movie can be watched time and time again, and wears very well. Bill Murray is under-rated. Andie Macdowell is not under-rated, but she performs well.

• The Gift - We rarely abandon movies, but Cate Blanchett chanelling Sissy Spacek, Keanu Reeves as an abusive drunk, Hilary Swank doing whatever she does and finally Katie Holmes. It was all enough to get us to stop the DVD and occupy ourselves with more interesting pursuits. Maybe it’s a good movie, but we’ll never know.