Vallified

A colleague at work gave me the idea of storing metadata for each photo on my brother’s site inside its EXIF data. I liked this idea as I originally thought I would need another text file on disk, which described the photos. Tying data to an object by adding it to the object itself is also much more robust. The EXIF worked out pretty well, as I could read the data out using simple code like this on the backend:

<?php
$exif = exif_read_data("$main_pic",'IFD0');
echo $exif['COMMENT']['0'];
?>

But this wouldn’t work with some photos which already had metadata of various types – no data was returned by the php call. I usually set the data using the tools available with KDE, but it seems there are many types of metadata headers in JPEG photos, and some interfere with this code. I ended up using jhead, which is a handy command-line tool for manipulating EXIF data. I used it to strip all metadata from the troublesome photos before re-inserting the EXIF data I wanted. Then it all worked fine.

$ jhead -mkexif cabinet.jpg
$ jhead -ce cabinet.jpg

I suspect I may have been able to tweak the php code to deal with this issue, but in any event I like the idea of having complete control over the metadata.

I am a Yahoo! Mail Plus subscriber and recently noticed that my outbound e-mail rewrote my name as Philip O'Toole.

Seemingly it had been like this for weeks, but it only caught my attention when I sent an e-mail to my work account. Of course, if you’re a programmer it’s pretty obvious what is going on here. Yahoo!’s code is replacing the apostrophe in my name with the corresponding ASCII code. I tried resetting my name in the Options->General section but it didn’t help. Finally, after setting up a second free Yahoo! account, I worked out where to fix this – under Options->Account. It is there you’ve got to tweak your name settings.

Where to really fix your name in Yahoo! Mail

This drove me nuts – I was even on to Yahoo! support. This might help someone else out there. I would guess that Yahoo! processed the data on their servers recently, and mangled the names while doing so.

I’ve had various problems with Yahoo! Mail over the last year – perhaps because Yahoo! seems to be a company in turmoil, and is having a hard time keeping it together.

Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3

I got around to installing Yellow Dog 6.1 using a DVD of the full distro. The installation went OK, and the installer fired up in graphical mode. However it proceeded to create the swap partition almost immediately because of low-memory concerns.

When it completed YDL was quite zippy – a much, much better experience than I got from FC12. I even had audio.

I may actually use this – it depends if I can get particular media players running on it.

In between bouts of Wipeout HD, I net-installed 64-bit Fedora 12 on my 80GB PS3. Installation with PetitBoot didn’t present any problems, though audio didn’t seem to work. However FC12 is quite slow on my PS3, so I ain’t going to use it – it seems it’s paging to disk a lot.

I knew something was up when Anaconda wouldn’t fire up the graphical installer due to insufficient memory, which made it a pain to customize the software. The other thing I noticed (at least, I think I noticed it) is that FC12 showed the same MAC addresses for both eth0 and wlan0. I actually had to tell it to get a DHCP address from wlan0 before it got network connectivity – and it then got an IP address from my wired router. It seems like FC12 had swapped them.

I might try Yellow Dog Linux next.

Wipeout 2097 looks pretty poor compared to this