UK’s Sustrans (sustainable transportation) has done something really interesting. They’ve worked it out to put mile markers all over Britain, in support of a National Cycle Network.

And that’s nice and nifty, but what’s really cool is that they’re all cast iron and look like public sculptures. They also had a tie-in with local schools to let students paint the markers in bright colors.

Link to Sustrans’ page on the markers. They’re doing it right, with a comprehensive approach.

User manyfires over on flickr introduces me to the following quote:

“Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” ~Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman turns out to be a really interesting guy to discover on JFK MLK day.

Manyfires’ photography is quite excellent, too. She puts little stories and essays along with the image. Go look.

OK, things that make me laugh out loud get posted here.

I remember back in the day, back when Star Trek was still settling in to the collective mind of western culture… There was a lot of talk about how it was a metaphor for the cold war in general and in southeast Asia in particular. The Federation was the US and the Klingons were the USSR. James T. Kirk *was* America, arrogance and all. This was back before the newer spin-offs came into being. We had science and logic and humanity and will (Spock, Bones, Kirk) and they had naked aggression (Klingons) and guile (Romulans).

It was all so easy to think in those terms in 1968, because who doesn’t want to be the good guy?

My favorite word in the world is ‘autodidact.’ Look it up for yourself.

In the meantime, here’s a list of free educational materials from the various players in the ‘open source’ education movement. See also The Autodidact Project.

For quite a while, I labored under the assuption that because a piece of software called iView Media Pro could write IPTC data to a Pentax PEF file, it must be somehow intrinsic to PEF and other camera RAW formats to do this. Of course I’m wrong.

The way iView does it (on a Mac anyway) is to add a resource fork to the file. Since the beginning of Mac-dom, Mac file systems have had dual-forked files: A data fork and a resource fork. The resource fork is a sort of miniature structured database of semipermanent metadata. This is a feature of the filesystem which is not present on any other filesystem. It’s a really good idea, and a nifty thing to have… with a few caveats which should be obvious to anyone who thinks it through.

So the deal is that iView stores an ’8BIM’ resource per file with an ID of 1060, and that resource is just XML of XMP. No, that sentence is not in English. Extract the resource, and you get the XML, which you decode, and you have the IPTC.

And since I used iView Media Pro to store all that IPTC (and other) metadata on all my old files, I’m glad I didn’t make the stupid mistake of trying to store them to the wrong kind of filesystem.

Now, I’m able to discern this because I downloaded a fresh demo of iView Media Pro. I abandoned it because Microsoft bought them; I didn’t think they’d do too well with their Mac version after that. But it looks reasonably useful still, and maybe I’ll just go ahead and start using it again.

Ho hum. Buying software instead of making your own. From Microsoft no less…

Anyway. Searching around for info about modern-day dealings with Jurrasic-period resource forks led me here, which is a ‘blog by a guy who works at a company called Inquirium. They make educational software.

OK, I think we’re getting close here…

PictureSync, Mac OS X software which allows annotation and automatic upload to various image sharing services. Xanga not included.

No RAW files allowed, though. It’s set up for output to sharing services, not for large-scale archival purposes. I’ll probably only ever use the EXIF/IPTC tagging parts of this program, but who knows. It’s nag-ware (“Have you registered yet?”), but a license only costs $15.

If I were only shooting JPEGs, this would be my solution. The user interface is slick and nice and convenient. It will automatically do resizing and sRGB conversions. You can use automated rules to set tags. Plus a very slick full screen slideshow. It’s pretty cool.

Update: I think I’ll add this. Just a link to a list of OS X apps some guy likes. It’s a good list.

Did I mention lately that there are some guerilla filmmakers in Victoria, BC, and they manage to make at least one video every week? And most, like the newest one, are worth watching?

Well, if I didn’t, then I just did.

(Here’s another one.)

Someone on metafilter linked to this, and I’m going to put it here, because… Well… Dayum.

There’s this nifty thing called Inquisitor. It’s a live web search as you type. It works in the Safari search box. The developer calls it ‘Spotlight for the web.’

I don’t like it, though. It slows things down for me. I’m unlike other people, though, so maybe it’ll rock your world. Maybe if it were more configurable, or you could easily turn it off if you didn’t want it. It seems that Safari will let developers do stuff like this, but doesn’t give them a way to change settings.

There’s also this nifty lightweight graphics viewer/editor called DeltaLab, which is for Windows. I’m linking to it because it will decode Pentax PEF files. I’ve never used it, but I would certainly give it a try if I was one of you Windows folks.

There’s also some KDE software I tried out, called DigiKam. KDE is a linux desktop system, and what iPhoto is to Mac, digikam is to KDE. I had to install a proverbial buttload of stuff to get it working. The attraction: It stores tags and keywords in the files themselves, as EXIF and IPTC metadata. This is important to me. Unfortunately, digikam wants to collect all image files in one place, like iPhoto does. So its main strength (distributed data, stored per-file) is countervailed by its main weakness (you don’t get to store the files wherever you want to).

It’s nice software, though, if a bit annoying around the edges. Clicking on an image opens the editor. I just wanted to select it, d00d…. Anyway.

Also, there’s a new fink install of exiv2, which makes me happy. Time to start scripting.

Update: Oh, and I forgot one thing, presented here for fink users who want to launch digikam and/or other KDE software, without launching the whole desktop manager thing. The command line you’re looking for is

open-x11 kdeinit digikam –no-kded –suicide

Leave off the –suicide part if you don’t want KDE to quit after you’re done with the application. In practice, it doesn’t matter that much, though.

There’s also one more: Paw, which is exactly what I’m looking for, but requires QT4, and I’m at the end of my rope with installing GUI libraries and other assorted similar crap.

Some question about whether Bush just ordered a war against Syria and Iran.

Seems kinda important, don’t you think?

January 11, 2007
Did the President Declare “Secret War” Against Syria and Iran?

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

The big idea floating around is that Bush is trying to provoke Iran. But really, Iran can’t do anything, and the game of chess was *invented* in that region.

Glenn Greenwald with some background. He’s not talking about this rumor, but about the atmosphere in which it arises.