UI Design

Apple, Google and you:

dummy

Hilarious, but true. Although being somewhat different and currently under heavy critic (i.e. here) as far as Apple is concert, both Apples and Googles interface designs are appealing, at least to me and the comic summarize this very well: Do one thing and do this well.

The strip was posted here, i found it on this blog

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27-Mar-08


Feeling dizzy…

After staring at this

dummy

for about a day in various rotations and flips just to get Oracle GeoRaster work together with a homebrew GIS like application made me feel somewhat dizzy. To be cartesian or not cartesian, that is the question 😉

Otherwise, Oracle GeoRaster works quite well, at least for that bunch of german TK25 maps in GK3 coordinates that used to float around in the filesystem and are now being stored in the database.

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26-Mar-08


Handle EXIF data with ruby (and style…)

I use rmagick when it comes to deal with images. I’m not that disappointed like Zed Shaw with rmagick (but Zed is totally right when he points out on page 4: “[…] and is difficult to install (unless your computer is nearly exactly the same as the author’s).”), but when it comes to deal with EXIF, rmagick sucks big time.

After some searching i found another EXIF reader called “EXIF Reader” (EXIFR), which can be downloaded and installed from here or via gems.

I came mainly to this point becaus rmagick completly failed reading GPS data from my images (and it is hard to use with all other values).

EXIFR on the contrast cannot do image manipulation, so i needed both. Maybe i’m still just to new to ruby, but exifr gave me a hard time not reading the same image twice from file, once for rmagick and once for exifr.

I came up with the following solution:

require 'rubygems'
require 'RMagick'
require 'exifr'
image = Magick::ImageList.new("whatever_image.jpg")
exif_info = case image.format 
when 'JPEG'
  EXIFR::JPEG.new(StringIO.new(image.to_blob))
when 'TIFF'
  EXIFR::TIFF.new(StringIO.new(image.to_blob))
else
  nil
end

This uses rmagick to instantiate a magick image and then a StringIO object to build up the exif information if the image is a jpeg or a tiff image.

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09-Mar-08


First time ever to Cebit

Yesterday i meet Jan in Hanover at the Cebit:

Jan and me at Cebit 2008 Jan and me at Cebit 2008

Talking with him was great, Cebit… I’m not so excited. Less comercial overkill and more interessting nerdig topics would be better. Also, i woke up with cold this morning, should have listened to this post.

Anyway, was a nice trip in the end and not that expensive.

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05-Mar-08