Jose Oliver

http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/exclusive-first-look-worldwide-telescope

Checking out the Democratic Primaries Calendar I could not help wondering what would be like if by early June there is no clear winner in the democratic primaries. Puerto Rico has 63 delegates (more than Iowa), it would be interesting if the contest be settled down here.

Speaking of which, CNN's Election Site does not even mention Puerto Rico. Someone should update those maps.

After starting to use Windows Vista's photo management utility, Windows Photo Gallery, its successor Windows Live Photo Gallery and Microsoft's Photo Info tool I started noticing something strange happening to the date/time taken on some of the photos I had taken. The date/time had shifted after making edits to the photos within these applications. It seemed something wacky was happening to my photo's metadata.

 
Fig. 1: Same photo - different times. Vista's Date taken differs from the Photo Info tool date.

Metadata refers to the information which is embedded into the photo file. Information such as camera settings like Aperture, Exposure bias and of course, date taken, is embedded into what is known in the digital camera industry as the EXIF header. The EXIF date taken is based on the camera's internal clock.

After doing some digging it seems one important time-keeping aspect is not being addressed by most cameras and photo management applications which is the time zone (See here). Lacking time zone information a photo taken say, at 5:22pm can be the subject of interpretation. Such is the case in photo management applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Windows Live Photo Gallery as well as operating systems such as Windows Vista which also employ the XMP standard for metadata. In the XMP standard, date/time values can include a time zone value since it adheres to ISO 8601. Fair enough, but what seems to be happening is that when photos are edited in some applications the EXIF data is moved to XMP or read differently. In Windows Live Photo Gallery it seems to assume that the photo was taken in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), also referred to as UTC or Zulu Time. The fun does not end there however, because if the photo's time zone is in GMT time the date/time taken displayed may be based on your computer's current time zone settings. Say that photo taken at 5:22pm was taken in New York and when you edit it on your PC the photo management tool will change the date/time taken to UTC which means 17:22 UTC. If your PC's time zone is set to UTC - 4 then the date displayed in Vista would be 1:22pm if someone opens the photo on his/hers PC in Seattle it means the photo was taken at 7:22am given UTC - 8. This also depends of course in the time of the year if daylight savings time is in effect. 

You could approach this issue by simply then setting your camera's clock to UTC time, but I believe the best way to resolve this is that your camera's clock adds time zone information. Still, I have yet to see a camera which does this, I can only guess is that camera manufactures have figured it can lead to further confusion (Say you tend to travel a lot). Until cameras have a GPS emended within them cameras will not be able to automatically figure time zone info by themselves. 

Most of all, I find it disappointing that photo management applications such as Windows Live Photo Gallery lack the ability to display or configure time zone settings on the photos. Today, users are left with little options. Most users are surely unaware (or may don't care) of this issue which might mess up your digital memories.

I am also surprised that photo sharing sites such as Flickr also fail in interpreting time zone. Currently Flickr sets a photo's time zone to the one specified in the account, completely ignoring the time zone specified in the XMP time. I am surprised given that Flickr has an geotagging feature it cannot figure out the time zone. You can read about the confusion in Flickr on time zones in this post.

To fix my photos the only application which I have found which provides support to time zones is Geosetter, a tool for geotagging photos. Given that time zone is a function of location, it is makes sense that such an application provides support for setting time zone values correctly.

Fig. 2: Geosetter provides excellent support for setting time zone values correctly in digital photos.

The future begins...

AT&T's filtering policy is very bad news indeed...

Bad AT&T, bad!

I can understand network monitoring in a workplace environment, but meddling into one's home connection does not sound right. I can imagine a lot of false positives and service disruptions, and I can visualize those who distribute illegal content encrypting and circumventing such filtering measures. Next up, snooping into your phone calls, wait a minute... they already have done that!

I stumbled upon Geosetter the other day and thought it was worth taking some time to write a post about it. This photo geotagging application has all the features I would expect for photo geotagging and more...

Here are some of the features included which I think make it stand apart from other applications:

• Support for different file formats such as DNG, TIF and certain RAW formats
• Automatically add country, city, state location info
• Option to automatically set time zone in date taken
• Support for different GPS track files for automatic geotagging

Overall I give it 5/5 stars! If you are into geotagging give this app a try!

Flickr is currently the best medium for an individual to publishing photos online for a wide audience. I am glad that Flickr is now experimenting with hosting photos from collections such a the Library of Congress. Dubbed, Flickr Commons, the project aims to include photos from such collections and allow other Flickr members to contribute metadata in the form of tags and comments. So far the Library of Congress' page is a a regular Flickr Page, but I hope it involves into something more suited for these type of collections. Some things which would be nice would be -

1. Branding - It would be nice that Flickr allows pages to be customized by the collection's owner via a stylesheet or something. Something simple such as changing the color scheme and allowing to add links or a header image would definitely allow the institution's Flickr page to be distinguishable from any other regular Flickr page.

2. Hide Comments Option - Sure it is nice that comments can be added to a photo, but for such collections an option to "Hide Comments" from users would be nice.

3. Suggest location/geotagging - This is quite a requested feature for individual pages but for these types of collection it would be more valuable.

4. Tag Moderation - Some sort of tag moderation by the collection owner - It is nice that people can add tags, but it might be helpfull as well that the collection owner be capable of eliminating or even banning certain words to be added.

The collection owner definitely benefits from using Flickr as a back end photo repository. The Library of Congress could also create better front end page for their photo collection using Flickr's API. An example could be using machine tags to add a photo's Call Number and making it searchable from a library's web site.

Update- SeattlePI: The Library of Congress Hits the Jackpot on Flickr

I have been waiting for GPS enabled cameras to go mainstream for quite a while. As the technology becomes cheaper I think the only thing holding it back are the power consumption issue.

Nice overview of the Eye-Fi wireless SD Card. I do not have a camera which uses SD, hope they eventually support my Canon XTI / CompactFlash.

Police Helicopter in search of Tito Kayak

Possibly the funiest escape happened close to my home. A recent condo development has stirred an outcry from local enviromental groups which argue that the development is illegal, damaging to the enviroment and impedes access to a historic site. A week ago, one of the protesters- Tito Kayak climbed atop a contruction crane and managed to paralize the construction. A local court finally ordered Tito to get off the crane and issued an arrest warrant. Tito came down but manage to elude the cops in a way that makes Charlie Chaplin's Keystone Cops look like a documentary drama. Instead of comming down the crane as everyone expected - using the crane's ladder, he opted instead to rappel down the crane using a rope. As hundreds of protesters, police and onlookers watched in amazement, he jumped into a kayak (they do not call this guy Tito Kayak for nothing) which was placed by another protester and kayaked away. A Police boat was anchored nearby and two cops on jet skis failed to stop him as he kayaked below a low bridge in the Condado Lagoon. He emerged in the other side of the bridge and was caught by the cops, but to everyone's amazement - it was not Tito! It turns out that as Tito paddled under the bridge he swapped places with another protester dressed as him. A Thomas Crown Affair type escape then occurred in which a dozen or so protesters jumped in and confused police for an hour or so. Two police helicopters arrived at the scene with spotlights but where unable to locate Tito. About 2 hours of searching and the cops gave up. Now the question in everyone's mind is... Where is Tito!?

News Article: Environmental activist escapes Puerto Rico police after standoff atop a crane

Video: Tito Kayak Escape

The second generation of the Zune was announced last week. I haven't played around with one but I see some very good hardware with good potential but "restrained" features. The device has WiFi which should open the door to some interesting scenarios, such as what Apple did with Starbucks, but seems severely restricted on the current incarnation of the device. I do realize WiFi consumes a lot of power, which would make sense why in order to perform a WiFi sync the device needs to be plugged in to a power source, but if power consumption was not a constraint, one killer scenario does come to mind which would make me run out to a store; Pandora streaming to a Zune - enough said...

The public beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery was recently made publicly available as part of the new Windows Live Suite. This application is the follow up to Windows Photo Gallery which is included in Windows Vista and now runs in Windows XP. This application sports some great features I consider a must in a photo management application- such as great keyword/tag management and support for metadata standards such as XMP. Windows Live Photo Gallery also comes with some other features that sets it apart such as photo stitching.

Still, some things I would like to see in Windows Photo Gallery in the future:

• Photo Geotagging – Google's Picasa integrates nicely with Google Earth. I hope Windows Live Photo Gallery exceeds with a similar feature in the future using the Virtual Earth platform, with innovative ways of viewing geotagged photos like Flickr does.
• Plugins and Syncronization to sites or devices – A rich API could help 3rd party developers create interesting stuff such as Publish to Flickr or to sync device such as a photo displays or iPods.
• Improved metadata support - Microsoft's Photo Info tool provides more photo metadata fields which appeals more to professional photographers. It would be nice that such fields be also be exposed in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Probably the fields I use the most in Photo Info are the author, copyright and location (city, state, country and sub-location) fields. It would be nice to expose the location field as a "tree" as the folders, Date Taken and Tags currently are.
• Improve Photo Sharing – Picasa handles this nicely with Picasa Web Albums, and publishing to Live Spaces is not bad, but it is interesting how Picasa establishes a link to the online photo. I currently use Foldershare to share my photos with my family, but that application has some limitations. PixVillage has an interesting approach to Photo Sharing in which P2P is used for distributing the full resolution photos around. It would be nice to "subscribe" to certain friends photos albums online in Live Spaces within Windows Live Photo Gallery and to provide a p2p mechanism to allow downloads of the original photo automatically.

Update: Seems that Publish to Flickr using Windows Live Photo Gallery is not that far off.

I got a Canon Rebel XTI/400D last Christmas. The camera is amazing. Right from the start however I noticed that some photos taken with it came out a bit underexposed. This is not much of a sweat since this can be corrected using almost any photo editing application out there- Picasa, Windows Photo Gallery do a superb job of correcting these issues, not to mention Canon's own software which is included with the Camera. Doing a Google search on "Canon Xti Underexposure" turns out a lot of hits. Photo sites such as DPreview.com is abuzz with a lot of discussions over this issue. I contacted Canon support and was told it was likely low ISO settings not worth sending in. Taking photos with a higher ISO setting does minimize the issue, but it comes with the typical added "noise" when the ISO is increased. I am now adjusting the exposure compensation one stop. Still, after much buzz over the issue on the Web I am surprised Canon seems mum over the issue on their site.

Better-late-that-never news blog post: MS announce that Windows Photo Gallery will be added to the Live "Suite" of products, even back-porting it to Windows XP! This app is now competing directly with Google's Picasa. I have been using Vista Photo Gallery for some time now, and it has becomed one of my most uses apps in Vista (I still use Picasa for Geotagging with Google Earth).

More info over at the Pix Blog:Announcing the Windows Live Photo Gallery, Beta 1