Technology Tales

Another avalanche of new DSLR’s…

A flurry of new DSLR announcements came out today; they seem to come in droves when they do arrive, but I reckon that upcoming photography shows might have something to do with it. Canon replaced its entry level offering with the 12.2 megapixel EOS 450D. Yes, I know that megapixels aren't everything, yet a goodly number does make a rather good impression and Canon's range looks a bit lop-sided again with the entry level DSLR on the surface of it having the potential for recording more detail than the next one up in their range, the EOS 40D. It almost seems that it would have been more sensible to delay the arrival of that camera until after the 450D and give enthusiasts a really impressive option.

As it stands, they might end up playing into the hands of Nikon with its D300, a strong contender if I were in the market looking for a DSLR. Pentax displays no such idiosyncrasies with its 10.2 megapixel K200D and its 14.6 megapixel K20D, while Samsung has also presented their variant of the latter: the GX200. It will be interesting to see reports of how all of these new arrivals perform. Launches like this do not take long to make your once shiny acquisitions look dated, and that fate certainly seems to have befallen my K10D. For some reason, that reminds me that my trusty old EOS 10D needs to be sent away for cleaning, a job that has been on the to-do list for a while.

Running Photoshop Elements 5 on Ubuntu and openSUSE

When you buy a piece of software and get accustomed to its ways of working, it is natural to want to continue using it. That applied to a number of applications when I moved over to Linux in the latter half of last year, and one of these was Adobe's Photoshop Elements 5.0, a purchase made earlier in the year. My way forward was to hang on to Windows by way of VMware. However, Elements fails to edit or save files in the Linux file system accessed through VMware's shared folders feature. I have yet to work out what's happening, but the idea of using a more conventional networking arrangement has come to mind.

Another idea that intrigued me was the idea of using WINE, the Windows API emulator for Linux. You can get it in the Ubuntu and openSUSE software repositories, but the WINE website has more to say on the subject. That's only the first stage, though, as you might see from WINE's Wiki page on Photoshop and its like. However, their advice is a spot incomplete, so I'll make it more explicit here. You need to run Winetricks from its online home as follows:

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks fakeie6

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks mdac28

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks jet40

The first line flicks a switch to fool Microsoft components to install thinking that they are installing into a Windows system with IE on board. Without this, the rest will not happen. The second installs Microsoft's native ODBC drivers; Elements will not function at all without these if my experience is any guide. The last step is to add JET support so that Elements' Organiser can get going. With all of these in place, having a working Photoshop Elements instance under Linux should be a goer. Apart from the odd crash, things seem to be working OK on Ubuntu and openSUSE seems hospitable too. Further experimentation may reveal more.

Update: The WINE Wiki has now been updated (and links back here!). As per dank's comment, the above lines can be condensed into what you see below:

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks fakeie6 mdac28 jet40

À la carte?

Recently, I have been having a fiddle with WINE (more on that, later) and my Applications menu started to look a spot messy, and I was failing to find a way to clean things up. It turns out that I was looking for something called Alacarte to do the deed. Thankfully, it does it well, too. After running it from the command line, I finally its place under System>Preferences. It was titled Main Menu, which may explain why a spot of googling was needed. That my mind was tired when first trying to find what I needed didn't help either.

A year in the making…

It was a year ago that I set this blog on the go. Then, I was exploring the possibilities offered by WordPress.com. After some months, I decided that I wanted to make my own decisions rather than have them, so I went independent in June. Between those dates, some big launches took my attention: Windows Vista, Office 2007 & CS3 come to mind. All the while, my experience of UNIX, Oracle and other such matters kept growing more and more. In the latter half of the year, I finally made the leap from Windows to Linux on the home computing front, a decision that taught me a lot and one that I don't regret. Other subjects featured from time to time as well; my musings on web development and blogging made their appearance too. 2007 was a packed year on the technology front, and 2008 is only just getting under way. There's a Vista laptop, and I am already picking up ideas for posts, though I am not going to force them out like I might have tried to do last year. 2008 may be a spot more leisurely, but I hope that it's just as interesting.

A second post today?

While I know what I said about a post every two days, something has entered my head that seems timely. Things seem to starting up for 2008 and my getting a swathe of post ideas is only one of them. Today, Sun has bought up MySQL, the database that stores these ruminations for posterity, and Oracle has finally got its hands on Bea, the people behind the Weblogic software with which I have had an indirect brush for a lot of 2007.

New version of SAS on the way

This is something of a newsflash posting, but this morning's issue of the SAS Tech Report newsletter has said at last when SAS 9.2 is expected to be released. Though SAS has been talking a bit about 9.2, dates were elusive and, to a point, they still are. Nevertheless, hearing the Q1 of this year is the time slot for the unveiling is better than knowing nothing at all. Am I alone in wondering if it is coming later than was planned?

Desktop.ini on the desktop?

Being an experienced computer, I set Windows Explorer to display hidden files when using a Windows PC. However, on my Vista-empowered laptop, that causes two desktop.ini files to appear on the desktop, one for all users and one for my user account. And displaying hidden files does not seem to be something that you can do on a folder by folder basis. With XP, this did not cause hidden files to appear on your desktop like this, so the behaviour could be seen as a step backwards. A spot of googling exposed me to some trite suggestions regarding re-hiding files again, but deleting them seems to be the only way out. Despite the dire warnings being issued, there didn't seem to be any untoward problems caused by my actions. For now, I'll see if they stay away, yet episodes like this do make me wonder if it is time for Microsoft to stop treating us like idiots and give us things that work the in which we want them to function. Well, I'm glad that Linux is the linchpin of my home computing world...

What? No DNG?

Since Google's Picasa is now available for Linux, I decided to give it a spin. The availability of downloadable DEB packages made installation a piece of cake. It has been ported using WINE, which means that the look and feel is very much of the Windows world. The functionality is similar too, which means that it can seek out image files on your PC. However, it didn't find any DNG files for me, a surprise when DNG could become the standard raw camera format for digital imaging. In contrast, the lack of support for proprietary formats like Canon's CRW might be understandable. Because I like to review the raw image files before committing to editing them, Picasa will not suffice for this purpose, leading me to stick with what I already use.

A new laptop

Having had it on my wish list for a few years, I finally succumbed to temptation and purchased a laptop in the PC World sale, a Toshiba Equium A200-1VO in fact. I reserved it on the web and popped into the nearest store a few hours later. However, while the reservation system worked, the collection did not go as smooth as I had hoped; it appears that the store where I went was not as well staffed as I would have liked, so I needed to wait before I was served. Finding the right part of the store was another issue. Nevertheless, service was efficient once the wait was over, and I left with the said laptop, a half-price copy of Norton 360 and a network cable.

The laptop comes with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core CPU, 2 GB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive. The size of the hard drive may not set the world alight and neither, I suspect, will the Intel graphics adapter. Speaking of graphics, the glossy screen might not be to everyone's taste, but its 1280x800 maximum resolution is definitely respectable. Windows Vista Home Premium is the included operating system, and a 90-day trial of Norton Internet Security comes too; I'll wait for that to expire before adding in Norton 360. While I am not rushing to add software, the Home and Student version of Office 2007 has made its way on there.

As regards performance, the machine so far has done what I have asked of without any bother. Even so, battery life is far from extensive, with a maximum of ninety minutes. For long stints away from a power socket, an extra battery might be in order, and there is an offer show on the box in which the device came. That would add to the weight, though; at around 2.5 kg, it isn't something that I would go carrying on a weekend backpacking trip. Despite those limitations, it will get some enough use for me to see how things proceed from here.

java.net.MalformedURLException: unknown protocol: j

While I know that there are better things to call a blog post than to use part of an error message that I got from Saxonica's Saxon when I was converting XML files into PHP equivalents for the visitor information section of my main website, it is handy for anyone else needing to look up a solution when they encounter it. In my case, I use the open source Saxon-B rather than the commercial Saxon-SA, and it fulfils all of my needs. Version 8 and later (it has now reached 9.0.0.2) handle the XSLT 2.0 features that I need to make the transformations really clever.

Also, because Saxon is available as a jar file, it is cross-platform so long as you have Java on board. There are, however, some slight differences in behaviour. Now, I run the thing on Linux, where any Windows-style file locations are not recognised. When I had the file path in a DTD declaration starting with J:\, that was thought to be a protocol like file, http, https, ftp and so on because of the colon. Since there's no j protocol, Java gets confused, issuing the rather obscure error that titles this post. Otherwise, the migration of the Perl script that creates XSLT files and fires off the required XML to PHP transformations was a fairly straightforward exercise once file locations and shebang line were set right.