News You Can Bruise for 2000 June 22

I want to use gphoto to obtain pictures from my digital camera, but it's horribly designed, over 50 megabytes in size, requires an 8 meg helper app to talk to my particular model of camera, makes me agree to an onerous licensing agreement, and puts me through the trouble of making up fake personal information so that the authors of gphoto won't be secretly sent my real personal information and my personalized gphoto serial number the next time I connect the laptop to the Internet.

Did I say gphoto? Sorry, I meant Adobe Photodeluxe. gphoto has an 800-kilobyte RPM, is GPLed, and talks to over 100 models of camera.

All kidding aside, why should I have to install 60 megs of software to download pictures from a digital camera onto a Windows machine? I'm feeling generous, so I'll throw the GIMP onto the Linux side, even though it provides about an order of magnitude more image manipulation functionality than does Adobe Photodeluxe. That's still under 20 megs. How do people live this way? My conclusion: gphoto was developed by people who were pissed off at Adobe Photodeluxe.

If you'll excuse me, I now have to save each of my 40 pictures individually, convincing the program each time that I want to save it in JPEG format (the way they're stored in the camera) instead of the proprietary Adobe Photodeluxe format.

It gets better (worse). Adobe Photodeluxe doesn't even have an option to save a picture in JPEG format. Apparantly I don't need that. I can choose between version 3.0 of the Adobe Photodeluxe proprietary file format, and the original recipe, version 1.0 of the Adobe Photodeluxe proprietary file format.

I can only even get 12 of my pictures out of the camera before the "scratch disk" (Everyone knows you have a separate hard drive just for swap) fills up. These images were 45K apiece when they were in the camera; I saved a PPD file just to look at and it's 900K.

Foster Brereton, I love you like a brother, but the company you intern for makes shitty software.

Windows people: How do you live?

The saga continues. I can save a picture in JPEG format (they quaintly call it "exporting", but I have to save it in the crap format first and then export it to JPEG. The online help recommends that if I want to send my picture in a format that people on a Mac or UNIX machine can read, I should export it into PDF format. Yes, PDF, the recognized cross-platform standard for digital photographs.

I think I can say with confidence that if they didn't have to say "With Adobe Photodeluxe, you can export your photos right to the Web!", there would be no way to get my photo into JPEG format.

It's at this point that I leave to set up my real computer and get my photos with gphoto, the way God intended.

(If you're wondering why I have a Windows laptop and why I never mentioned it before, it's because I didn't have it before, and it's not technically mine. I have it on loan from MAP, where I no longer work. The people there want me to be able to fix the software I wrote for them if something goes wrong, so I was given an old laptop on which to fix it. I will also be given money on a per-incident basis, and now that I am a professional with a real job I will probably command a higher rate.)

Ah, sweet Linux booze. I had to copy all the files over to my mom's computer to get them onto the Net, but it was so much easier than wrestling with Adobe Photodeluxe, which now symbolizes to me all that is wrong with proprietary software.

No descriptions for the pictures yet, to be added as usual in my copious free time.

I miss you, Celeste.

Those pictures weren't transferred as binary. I could probably blame this on Windows' stupid FTP program, but I'm sick of blaming things on things. I'll get pscp and redo them now.

The pictures are up now. They are pictures from yesterday when my great-uncle Justin Call took Celeste and me sailing. There are also some pictures of my mother and her cousins.

I was explaining what I'll be doing at collab.net to one of my mother's cousins and I was flailing around to try and explain the concept of open source development, and she suddenly says "So it's a lot like the way Linux is developed.", and I was so relieved that she knew what I was talking about after all, that I immediately agreed wholeheartedly with her, and she then started thinking that I was working on some competitor to Linux and the whole thing started over again. Hopefully this interview with Brian Behlendorf will clear things up for those who are curious.

Steve from the UK wrote a song inspired by Segfault. I haven't listened to it (it's a 4 meg download), so I can't recommend it or not, but you can listen to it at his mp3.com site and let me know what you think. He wants me to mention it on the site, which I probably will do.