Why not use the lowest denominator FAT32? Well, it is an old standard which is supported by every OS out there, but it has its limitations. If you need to write large files, video comes to mind or backup archives, you are out of luck with files beyond 4GB. True, most people may not have files that large. And I’m not saying you cannot use FAT32 if you wish to do so. If I have to use a Windows file system I prefer NTFS, since it allows me to write large files to it, which once in a while I need to do.

On your Mac you can read NTFS drives, but you won’t be able to write to them. That’s where the NTFS-3G driver comes into play. It is an open source driver that comes in Linux and Mac flavors (NTFS-3G for Mac).

I installed the latest stable driver, which is now called standard build. It brings all the dependencies it needs with it, so it is very easy. I installed and used it under Leopard. After the installation it was suggested that I reboot, which I did. It might work without rebooting though. Now you will have two new admin panels in the System Preferences screen (under Other: NTFS-3G and MacFUSE). I never made any changes there. When you use the Disk Utility you will see that you now have an option to format a drive with NTFS. I tried it on an external drive and it worked perfectly fine. The drive could be used under Windows without problems.

If you don’t trust open source products you can also buy a product named Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X at the Paragon website. I never tried it, so I cannot say if it is better or not.

There is one thing: if your drive was not unmounted the proper way (happens after a crash for example) you will see a complaint and the suggestion to use Windows to mount and unmount it before using it. This is of course somewhat of a pain, and maybe not even be possible. I usually opt to just go ahead and mount it anyways. I never had any issues or lost data because of it. Your experience may be different, so do what you think is the right thing to do at your own risk.

I never mounted a partition that contained the Windows C drive in read/write mode. Better be careful here.

All this worked under Leopard. At the moment I don’t have any NTFS drives sitting around so I cannot test how well this will work with Snow Leopard. If you have any experience, please add a comment.

Edit: I bought a NTFS formatted 1.5TB Seagate Extreme drive today (was much cheaper than the MAC counterpart). Before I re-formatted the drive I tested if I can write to it, and it worked like a charm.

The client site is hosted on a webserver where PHP is used in FastCGI mode. This means the PHP scripts run with user rights, which seems to contribute to the problem described below. I could not repeat the same behavior with a Linux setup where PHP runs as an Apache module. In this case PHP scripts run under the apache user which is an unprivileged user that simply cannot write files into the account root.

In order to get the client’s site ready for prime time I changed the URL settings in the ‘General Settings’ section. I hit submit and Bang! 500 error. Nothing worked. Not WordPress, not non WordPress parts of the site.

It turned out that WordPress wrote the .htaccess file into the account root and not the website root. I could repeat this behavior on the same setup and also on a test setup on my work PC. On this Windows machine I have a XAMPP setup and WordPress wrote the .htaccess file directly into c:\.

I do not really understand why WordPress rewrites the .htaccess over and over in the first place. But I’m sure there is a good reason for this. I just didn’t find it yet.

I filed a bug report at core.trac.wordpress.org. The ticket number is 10609. It looks like other folks have experienced similar issues.

If you experienced something similar, head over to Trac and add your comment. This is something that needs to be fixed.

Update:

I was doing some tests and the problem seems to be in the function get_home_path() in wp-admin/includes/file.php

In line 73: $pos = strpos($_SERVER [ "SCRIPT_FILENAME" ], $wp_path_rel_to_home);

the code tries to get the position of a string in a filename. On a Windows XAMPP system this looks like:

$pos = strpos(”C:/websites/SITE/wp-admin/options.php”,”http://SITE.com”);

$pos will be empty in that case. The resulting $home_path will be empty also, resulting in $home_path = ‘/’;  (code: $home_path = trailingslashit( $home_path );)

Now WordPress will write the .htaccess file into the account root, if it has permission to do so. On a Windows system this is very likely C:\

On a Linux system only the root user can write into the root directory, so the server, no matter if it runs PHP as the apache user or the account owner, will in most cases not be able to write anything into root. On some VPS  like setups however, the user can write into his/her own account root, and here WordPress can, if PHP runs in CGI mode, write the file into the account root.

Now I wonder why the WordPress developers don’t just use $_SERVER[ "SCRIPT_NAME" ] instead of $wp_path_rel_to_home?

The result would look like this:
$pos = strpos(”C:/websites/SITE/wp-admin/options.php”,”/wp-admin/options.php”);

and would actually return a $pos that could be used to generate the correct path for WordPress.

After KDE 4.1 was released I switched over from my beloved KDE 3.5. It was a rough relationship at first. Then version 4.2 came along and I saw light again. Much improved functionality and stability. This morning I installed KDE 4.3. Everything looks a bit more refined. I will need to use it a bit longer to test new features. The upgrade via Yast (I use OpenSUSE 11.1) worked well.

Check out the video below to learn about the features.

Get your OpenSUSE KDE repositories here: http://en.opensuse.org/KDE4 and learn more about this release at the KDE website.

Examples

To add the focal length go to the folder of your image and then type:
exiftool -FocalLength='50.0mm' blue.jpg
This will add a focal length of 50 mm to your jpg file. In this case the file was the blue bottle. Replace blue.jpg with the filename of your image.

Unfortunately the aperture cannot be written with this tool.

To write all the options of exiftool into a text file do the following:
exiftool > ~/exiftool.txt
This will write the help content which includes the options and examples into a text file in your home directory.

To list all the exif data of your image (you need to be in the folder of your image, or you have to type the path):
exiftool list ‐EXIF:All blue.jpg

There is more you can do, just read the exiftool help. It is all command line stuff though, but that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

Resources

[1] Exiftools www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool
It also comes in a Windows and Mac flavor.

Look Ma, New Clothes

One thing I love about Linux is the ease and freedom with which I can change the look and feel. You might think big deal, who cares. Well, I want to have the option to look at a desktop environment that I select, not someone else. And let’s face it, the XP look is ugly. I never liked it.

You can of course buy programs like Blinds (or whatever the name is). I tried it a couple years ago and I had the feeling that it wasn’t all that stable. You could buy an extra pack from MS, which is not available anymore. They want you to upgrade. You also can download a certain dll file (patched uxtheme.dll)  which will overwrite the original and allow you to change themes at will.

Royalty

A nice theme for windows, which is close to the Luna look, is Royale [1]. It is an official theme and can be used without any extra work. Just install and select it in your theme selector.

How to select: Right click in an empty area of your desktop, select Properties and go to the Theme tab and select the theme Royale. After clicking Apply or OK you are all set.

The theme seems to run stable. I use it at work and also on my laptop. No issues at all.

Oh – Those Drab Folders

If you ever worked on a MAC you probably are familiar with the option to select different colors for your folders. Similar to the categories in Outlook 2007 (no idea if this was available in Office 2003). Marking folders with colors can be really helpful, especially if you have many of them. iColorFolder comes to the rescue [2].

After you downloaded and installed iColorFolder you right click on the folder you want to color code and you will see a new menu item: Color Label (see image below).

In addition you can also install extra skins [2]. You can either select one of the options during the time of installation or later on by running the skin selector (Start -> All Programs -> iColorFolder -> Skin Selector).

Although not a total change in look and feel, you have at least some customization, a more refined look if you will.

Why did I re-install windows on my old laptop? The only reason was the quality, or lack thereof, of the graphic card driver. This laptop uses an older Intel chip for its graphics. Rather low end. Under Linux there is no decent driver that will work with it anymore. Yes, there are two versions of a driver, but only the older one will work with this laptop  resulting in banding galore. So I decided to try Windows again and I must say the graphics display is much better. Still not great, but much less banding. My guess is that the old linux driver cannot display 32bit colors although it says it does. I do not have these issues on my main machine which runs Linux. Graphics are great (using an ATI card there).

Resources

[1] Royale Theme for XP
[2] iColorFolder

JPG Magazine is/was my favorite photo magazine.

Read the articles here 8020 Media to Shut Down and here JPG Magazine Says Goodbye.

Part I

The tips in the first part are centered around making photos. They cover things like composition, camera location, exposure and shutter speed, how to make most out of your camera and lenses, reading histograms and more. The individual tips are short and easy to read. I’d say they give the reader a good starting point for taking pictures.

Part II

Part II takes a slightly different approach. It groups the tips into topics. One topic per week. It covers topics like low light, sport and action, functions of digital cameras, printing, work flow and more. The individual articles cover a lot of ground and should provide some information for every one.

Part III

Just like part II, part III is grouped into weekly topics. At the time of this writing the series is still in progress, we are at day 86. This time around there is a bit more emphasis on the digital darkroom, some articles about creativity and a fair bit amount of buying advice. My favorite in this group of tips is the topic “Creative camera motion techniques.” I’m not too keen about the buying advice pieces. Since these tips come from a camera store it is understandable and not surprising that they are included, especially since the series started before the holiday season.

Summary

This series of tips will provide the beginning or not so experienced photographer with some good starting points on how to improve the skill of creating photographs. The articles are short and easy to read and provide a base where one if interested can dig deeper.

For the advanced photographer many of the articles are probably not thorough enough. But this group doesn’t seem to be the target for this anyway.

Resources

[1] Adorama Camera – http://www.adorama.com
[2] 100 Photography Tips in 100 Days – Part I
[3] 100 Photography Tips in 100 Days – Part II
[4] 100 Photography Tips in 100 Days – Part III

How To Get Started

First I uninstalled ndiswrapper so I could start from scratch. You might want to do the same should you have it installed (or Linuxant, or…). I also deleted my wlan0 entry from my network settings via Yast.

In order to have your card correctly recognized you will need to update the package hwinfo. You’ll find it under [1]. After you installed it, plug your card in and start the network device tool in Yast to set up your card. When the screen is ready for you you should be able to see your wlan card associated with the RTL driver r8180.

Now go ahead and set up your network. Decide if you want DHCP or not. Then under detailed settings -> advanced -> hardware details set your card to pcmcia (given it is a pcmcia card, mine is). Under the detailed settings -> advanced -> detailed settings set the device activation to hot plug, and check user controlled.

The next screen (after clicking next) allows you to set the ESSID for your wireless access point, and your authentication. For testing purposes you might want to start without any encryption. Click next and your network will be set up.

The Last Finishing Steps

With some luck you are all set now. In my case that wasn’t the case. The card was recognized and set up, but a network connection could not be established. Maybe I should have restarted my laptop, but I didn’t. Instead I added the following line to the file /etc/modfile.local.conf:

alias wlan0 r8180

My network connection could now be established. I could ping machines in my network, but couldn’t get beyond. It turned out that the wlan interface didn’t get the name servers. In order to fix this I added the following lines to my /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-bus-pcmcia file:

DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE=’yes’
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF=’yes’
DHCLIENT_PRIMARY_DEVICE=’yes’

These lines make sure that your wlan interface gets a default gateway and nameservers. Restarting the wlan connection by plugging the card out and in again should get you going now.

Resources

[1] hwinfo package