jmoiron.net

I missed what seems like quite a few get-togethers of jeremy's, and when people asked my why the only excuse I could muster was that I don't like sushi. It's a pretty valid excuse, but I think if the company had been different I would have gone.

Zoro's hard drive bit the dust rather suddenly last week. I lost only a small bit of data, and it could have been better were it not for laziness. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, were it not for laziness as well: I had never transfered the movie files that I took off of my laptop, so a few movie files (mostly of skateboarders) that I had taken in Tokyo were lost, but I also still haven't even removed the pictures from Cairo from my camera, so those are all still safe on my CF card. Irony!

Palomar has a new album coming out someday soon, and although it won't be on the 30th of August, they will at least be playing live at the Mercury Lounge along with another great band Supersystem, who will be releasing their new album A Million Microphones on the 22nd. The following day, Asobi Seksu, who just released their new album Citrus (which is quite good), will play at Maxwells in Hoboken approximately 5 blocks from where I work. I encourage everyone I know to come out and have some fun.

Shifting a music discussion back into a technical realm, I purchased some cheesy $5 sennheiser earbuds when I bought my mp3 player, thinking that I'd just skimp on my commute headphones because they weren't important. But I've been regretting throwing that $5 away on cheap headphones ever since, and if my impulse $65 theft of HD280P's has taught me, a good pair of headphones is money well spent. So I did a little bit of impulsing, while at J&R in the city handing over my laptop for a warranty makeover, and purchased a pair of sennheiser CS 300's. I hadn't read any review of them, but I know that in ear headphones tend to be quite good, and that sennheiser headphones seem to be quite good.

For a few years yet, people in the US won't have usable internet on their cell phones. Until this isn't true anymore, what I did next will become more and more common. I called up a friend I knew would be by a computer and asked him to quickly look at some opinions on the headphones. He told me that they seemed pretty good, and that the price I got was also pretty fair (I consider anything within 15% of online to be fair after you add in instant gratification, and the headphones were $50), so I went ahead with it.

As I walked down the stairs at the WTC path train, I turned on my zen nano and fiddled around with the in-ear phones, trying to get a snug fit in my ear canal. Suddenly, the world around me was gone: the bustle of the financial district was just some unfortunate youtube video that ran without permissions to /dev/dsp, gasping for a hold of the mixer only to have it audaciously yanked away. These headphones sound fantastic, with a full rich bass and enough isolation to lock out all that path train noise. I listened to Interpol's Hands Away (a slow, bassy, quiet song) on my way back to Hoboken, slackjawed and in awe. So, when you purchase headphones, purchase good ones. You might be one of those "CD's and MP3's sound the same to me" people, but anyone would hear the difference between these and ipod headphones.

Just to ensure that this entry has the least ammount of flow and the maximum number of tags, I'll briefly mention some of my recent development work. I've been hammering out some administration side improvements and reorganizing the backend of this site on a development fork. There is the beginnings of some user-facing stuff, including some harmless tweaking of cookies (to remember comment names). I haven't found out a good way to do this yet, but I have a way to edit virtually any type of object from wherever it is displayed. Unfortunately it turns the page into a crap-shoot when I'm logged in, so I need to figure out a new interface for it.

Finally, due to some external pressure, I have been hacking away on the gallery section. I am still a little unsure how I want to store EXIF data or how I want to present the images for browsing, but I think the gallery is going to be a bit flashier and definitely a bit ajaxier than the main site. Most of my hacking so far has gone into EXIF.py, since PIL seems somewhat unable to garner any MakerNote data. Today I successfully hacked in Casio type 2 MakerNote tag handling, and added the PrintIM and other various tags from the 2.2 standard. I think eventually I'll decide on a decent subset of data to keep stored away in the database, and viewing details can strain the server a bit to introspect the actual file.

I'll write more on the hacking and make my changes available after I add in some other cameras. If anyone wants to help me out by submitting some EXIF loaded jpegs from their digital cameras to me, please do so.