http://www.ragingsloth.com/index.htmlRSS updates for RagingSloth.comenadmin@ragingsloth.comCopyright 2010 RagingSloth.com2012-04-17T20:32:16-06:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:39:22 -0600admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-04-17T20:32:16-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/5c8c9615fe1a3c3dfcaf289ff5876c95-36.html#unique-entry-id-36http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/5c8c9615fe1a3c3dfcaf289ff5876c95-36.html#unique-entry-id-36admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-04-08T22:36:13-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/9b0fe31b260fb7636cef7fa39c2f8bd3-35.html#unique-entry-id-35http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/9b0fe31b260fb7636cef7fa39c2f8bd3-35.html#unique-entry-id-35admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-03-12T22:49:32-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/d86c032a6385f910b8cf977604e87c76-34.html#unique-entry-id-34http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/d86c032a6385f910b8cf977604e87c76-34.html#unique-entry-id-34available here but keep in mind it's still a draft :).]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-03-11T23:09:27-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/3279b6c685b3ab76793f3feaf505d017-33.html#unique-entry-id-33http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/3279b6c685b3ab76793f3feaf505d017-33.html#unique-entry-id-33admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-03-11T22:49:02-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/bd8fa1c165575bce37c6acf3a7e890bb-32.html#unique-entry-id-32http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/bd8fa1c165575bce37c6acf3a7e890bb-32.html#unique-entry-id-32DS212j Network Attached Storage device so I'll be able to get to my RAW images from anywhere with internet access (Of course I'll know exactly which one I want because it will match up to my iPhoto jpeg filename so I'll only have to download the RAWs I want and not browse slowly). More on the NAS in my next post I'm about to type (but I want to keep separate). ]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-01-18T19:38:08-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/055d35625385f9f6650188bad3d7a679-31.html#unique-entry-id-31http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/055d35625385f9f6650188bad3d7a679-31.html#unique-entry-id-31look at the wikipedia article on the subject. ]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2012-01-08T15:31:19-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/e37e679a06ff84d6662c19f34bb11f93-30.html#unique-entry-id-30http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/e37e679a06ff84d6662c19f34bb11f93-30.html#unique-entry-id-30admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2011-12-24T11:22:45-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/5c83415b5bf1b4d5330f31fb568ad378-29.html#unique-entry-id-29http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/5c83415b5bf1b4d5330f31fb568ad378-29.html#unique-entry-id-29admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2011-01-26T21:23:31-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/8cbe56e58eef070e439bb6b3627b1730-28.html#unique-entry-id-28http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/8cbe56e58eef070e439bb6b3627b1730-28.html#unique-entry-id-28recent bad news about the future of the Internet in Canada I've decided to lay out a plan that will fix things forever :) Please read and force everyone you can find to read my open letter to small Canadian ISPs (and Canadians too). If you'd be willing to buy into my plan leave a comment to show your support and or criticisms. ]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2011-01-23T21:38:57-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/921fb1052a051b40ba76523644c9e34d-27.html#unique-entry-id-27http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/921fb1052a051b40ba76523644c9e34d-27.html#unique-entry-id-27http://www.flickr.com/photos/ragingsloth/]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2011-01-19T22:17:20-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/e3c9fdb813a998f0484a068c631637d2-26.html#unique-entry-id-26http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/e3c9fdb813a998f0484a068c631637d2-26.html#unique-entry-id-26admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2011-01-11T19:56:12-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/832b37f94d0481ecb1b7351f8dfd697c-25.html#unique-entry-id-25http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/832b37f94d0481ecb1b7351f8dfd697c-25.html#unique-entry-id-25here.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2011-01-08T18:41:40-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/677470f1d2c410e148d3435178e45729-24.html#unique-entry-id-24http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/677470f1d2c410e148d3435178e45729-24.html#unique-entry-id-24
In addition to writing another script I've also ordered some photo prints and as such have come to realize that having set my XSi to use Adobe RGB for whatever reason a while ago was a bad idea (to be honest I'd totally forgotten). At first I was taking mostly RAW shots but the file management was annoying given the significantly larger file sizes and the extra time it takes for programs to be able to display them. Now that I switched back to jpegs I didn't even think about the camera colour profile.

I was going to compare my apple prints to some I got from MPIX but I realized that I'd mistakenly sent Adobe RGB to MPix which requests everything in sRGB. Apple doesn't actually say anything anywhere about colour profiles when ordering prints through iPhoto and the MPix results were still better (for the specific shots I ordered,) but before I put up any comparisons I want to see what MPix comes back with when I actually provide them with what I was supposed to :) I also did some soft proofing with the MPix provided colour profiles which may seem unfair, but Apple doesn't provide colour profiles or even claim any sort of consistency between prints anyway... The general impression I got was that Apple prints are cheaper and are probably suitable for most of the prints a person might want to do, however the prints I ordered came back significantly darker than they look on my colour calibrated IPS monitor and a lot of detail was lost. Mpix of course was also dark but this makes sense when you realize the way Adobe RGB works compared to sRGB and in using the Mpix colour profiles I've lightened some of the shadowed areas to work better with their printers (which I can't reliably do when ordering from Apple). More to follow on that one.

Oh and the new Apple App Store has Aperture 3 for significantly less than the retail version. There are things I definitely like better about Aperture vs iPhoto 11, but also things that I like better about iPhoto 11 than aperture... I might get a copy and keep a separate aperture library of all my photos on an external HDD while keeping iphoto on my laptop and using it for showing people photos while I'm away and any sharing I do with them. I'm also thinking I might switch my xsi back to RAW and maintain a RAW library on aperture and jpeg conversions in iphoto to reduce the use of my laptop's relatively small drive (256GB, because it is an SSD).]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-12-15T22:42:51-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/d9456870c504eb9a0a14870889e64585-23.html#unique-entry-id-23http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/d9456870c504eb9a0a14870889e64585-23.html#unique-entry-id-23index page and free up space in the sidebar menu under software engineering. Next up I'll be making the script more generic so that it can be used on files other than png files, then I'll be hooking it into a GUI to make it into a useful application. I haven't really written anything under Photography for a while but I'm kind of at a loss for what will interest people as most of my photo related traffic is about the HDR functionality of the S95 and I'm not really sure what I could add to that. If anyone has any requests for content feel free to mention them in the comments (I get a reasonable number of hits every day... Why doesn't anyone ever comment?) ]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-12-12T14:06:07-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/f700087b575ea00a63a86b40557392fe-22.html#unique-entry-id-22http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/f700087b575ea00a63a86b40557392fe-22.html#unique-entry-id-22parallel png optimizer tutorial. If you go to the third page you'll see a nice walkthrough of the python multiprocessing module's Pool functionality and it applied to the png optimizer script.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-12-11T23:08:57-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/47718ecc1292c81d4a84a83a252da89c-21.html#unique-entry-id-21http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/47718ecc1292c81d4a84a83a252da89c-21.html#unique-entry-id-21admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-12-07T17:30:10-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/c2ebc27963ec7c7660764fa3b3995d11-20.html#unique-entry-id-20http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/c2ebc27963ec7c7660764fa3b3995d11-20.html#unique-entry-id-20RapidWeaver 5 came out today and I decided to upgrade. After all I'd gotten version 3 for almost nothing in a bundle and the upgrade to 4 was free so it wasn't that big a deal. Haven't really used many of the new features yet, except the automatic CSS consolidation and compression which hopefully will give at least a little speedup to the site. I've still got mod_pagespeed in the back of my head to get some hardcore acceleration going but in the end I really don't get enough traffic to justify spending a lot of time on it. One of the reasons I like RapidWeaver over CMS solutions is that since my server is only sending out static files performance is pretty smooth. To all those people who desperately want to edit from anywhere, I suggest buying a laptop and feeling secure your server can handle it should you ever make the reddit front page :) Oh one thing about 5 is that the css consolidation and compression really really slows down exports, but an extra minute or so isn't a big deal to me.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-12-06T22:51:10-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/e0fd0048f68acead6541bdc293555241-19.html#unique-entry-id-19http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/e0fd0048f68acead6541bdc293555241-19.html#unique-entry-id-19
Anyway after a lot of deliberation I've decided to use the python multiprocessing module rather than my initial plan to use sockets and fork, I'm still undecided as to the gui toolkit to use but that will come later anyway.

PS: if anyone has any requests for articles please leave them in the comments.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-11-11T18:53:44-07:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/a4e565b48937e097a2b7eed440e3cf2e-18.html#unique-entry-id-18http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/a4e565b48937e097a2b7eed440e3cf2e-18.html#unique-entry-id-18in-camera HDR article. Now you can see an example of some of the uglier results that can come out of the In-Camera feature, but keep in mind that it does a decent job in reasonable lighting. So from here I think I'm going to continue with my parallel png optimizer tutorial and then figure out what's next. If anyone has any article requests feel free to put them in the comments.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-11-04T18:58:05-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/a320a7713fb4718f98bb958f2cb550ed-17.html#unique-entry-id-17http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/a320a7713fb4718f98bb958f2cb550ed-17.html#unique-entry-id-17

• While I am a fan of the in-camera HDR feature I've had my first disappointments with some shots. The setting works well for quick HDR like I've said before, but does a poor job when there are extreme lighting differences, at least with the source material at the Grand Canyon. Some of the mountains look terrible in the background. I haven't tried to fix tis yet with photoshop but it is at the least an annoying extra task and more work than auto-bracketing.
• The auto-bracketing shots I took worked out well, with my mini tripod and setting a delay before shooting. One set of 3 images had to be corrected by only one pixel in one of the images. Without the delay setting significantly more adjustment was required but FDR Tools was able to set things up without noticeable ghosting.
• Photoshop Elements did a pretty bad job of combining the photos prompting me to buy the full version of FDR Tools which is very impressive.
• I still like the in-camera feature and defend it against the criticisms I've read on other sites. After all, FDR Tools running on my MacBook Pro (2.5GHz dual core) takes almost a minute to generate an HDR image while my camera running on a battery and fitting in my hand does it in approximately 7 seconds. Just keep in mind that the feature is only meant for certain applications and scenes (and skill levels).

So the future article will elaborate on these points and give some photos to back things up.

On another point I'm going to be playing around with mod_pagespeed in a virtual machine and figuring out why it screwed up my site formatting so eventually I'll have something out on that. If you want to know when it comes out the RSS feed is the best way to go.

As for me I've got 43 minutes till bed...
]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-11-03T18:20:19-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/50ba3bb73db1ad72be622b6a9290c25c-16.html#unique-entry-id-16http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/50ba3bb73db1ad72be622b6a9290c25c-16.html#unique-entry-id-16mod_pagespeed from google and decided to install it on my server. It was doing some pretty cool things to make things go faster and looked like it was going great. I was doing my testing with Firefox and never noticed any problems. Suddenly I realized however that the page no longer rendered correctly in chrome or safari. As such mod_pagespeed is now out for RagingSloth.com for the immediate future. If you had trouble accessing the site I apologize and ask that you clear your browser cache. Of course if you loaded the site while mod_pagespeed was on then you will probably have to clear your browser cache just to read this...]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-11-01T21:07:52-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/5b657bfd39f1c826f66ec54f3558cc3f-15.html#unique-entry-id-15http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/5b657bfd39f1c826f66ec54f3558cc3f-15.html#unique-entry-id-15png optimizer refactoring article. Next up is to get through my Grand Canyon HDR pics (that is going to take me a while.) and then my newly decided upon RapidWeaver+disqus tutorial. I hate to keep delaying things but it looks like I'm on 12 hour shifts starting Wednesday and lasting until next Thursday. I might be able to get a little writing done while at work but we'll have to see.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-11-01T19:38:17-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/f9af72952d2d642da76ab68049f84426-14.html#unique-entry-id-14http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/f9af72952d2d642da76ab68049f84426-14.html#unique-entry-id-14admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-10-27T20:53:41-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/38862851b72de084f671c111bc9977e1-13.html#unique-entry-id-13http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/38862851b72de084f671c111bc9977e1-13.html#unique-entry-id-13this happened to me. I get these messages over and over asking me to call Comcast (probably to wait on hold forever). In checking my account it would appear that my automatic payment setup has decided not to actually automatically pay my bill... The crazy thing is that if you go to make a one time payment you get a warning that auto pay is on. So I signed up for automatic payments before my first bill was due and yet nothing has happened and Comcast blames (and calls) me over it. So I've made the one time payment and am hoping auto pay will start working after 2 months like the article I linked talks about.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-10-26T21:18:17-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/ef1010f86b197150b39be0966423877e-12.html#unique-entry-id-12http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/ef1010f86b197150b39be0966423877e-12.html#unique-entry-id-12png optimizer refactoring article. With Halloween and all it will probably not be for a little over a week until I get a chance to finish it off and get to my Grand Canyon photos. The WIP isn't much but hopefully it will hold the attention of the tens of people that read this site :)]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-10-16T23:23:25-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/db34d5725c8c7266ce1254e6d0f8342b-11.html#unique-entry-id-11http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/db34d5725c8c7266ce1254e6d0f8342b-11.html#unique-entry-id-11RSS feed is the best way to know.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-10-06T20:22:16-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/dc378e0f5f51487137873432a59cf39c-10.html#unique-entry-id-10http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/dc378e0f5f51487137873432a59cf39c-10.html#unique-entry-id-10RSS feed, you'll find out as soon as the article is ready.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-10-03T16:50:57-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/2a62685142177c2fa2528ed54b6fca74-9.html#unique-entry-id-9http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/2a62685142177c2fa2528ed54b6fca74-9.html#unique-entry-id-9S95 HDR review but some of the google keywords seemed to indicate that people were looking for how to actually use the feature rather than now good it is. So Here you go. As well as this I'm currently working on a PNG Optimizer cleanup article where I'll go through refactoring the original script in preparation for continued parallelization work, hopefully I'll have it out this week. ]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-30T22:03:22-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/0af1cf957a1616b634e32c2a7169b07f-8.html#unique-entry-id-8http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/0af1cf957a1616b634e32c2a7169b07f-8.html#unique-entry-id-8quick article to explain some of the important things to consider when making such a purchase. It isn’t aimed at expert audiences but I think it should be helpful for most people who want to get a nice camera for occasional events and family pictures or experts who want a link they can send to friends who have questions.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-30T19:44:56-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/2c9d0ddb15d5753cbbab36dee2e7a570-7.html#unique-entry-id-7http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/2c9d0ddb15d5753cbbab36dee2e7a570-7.html#unique-entry-id-7original article. Unfortunately I got the inspiration to take the pictures when I was in my backyard and noticed the sunset and by the time I got around to doing auto-bracketed shots to compare to the in-Camera version the sun had set enough that the scene wasn’t nearly as vibrant and interesting. Due to the unfair advantage I’ll have to do a different comparison later. I did however get a regular photo and an in-Camera HDR shot of a rather nice sunset with some far off mountains. I also have an example of ghosting due to an improperly stabilized camera :|...]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-29T22:44:16-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/2e592ec491138f4335ee8cb89ce617f1-6.html#unique-entry-id-6http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/2e592ec491138f4335ee8cb89ce617f1-6.html#unique-entry-id-6admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-23T17:56:24-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/07c87a7092672b70da46ce9f6b7c54e5-5.html#unique-entry-id-5http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/07c87a7092672b70da46ce9f6b7c54e5-5.html#unique-entry-id-5admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-23T16:25:24-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/c8b554c0d06b69727a7fdcf89da9117c-4.html#unique-entry-id-4http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/c8b554c0d06b69727a7fdcf89da9117c-4.html#unique-entry-id-4a comparison between a regular photo taken with my new Canon S95 and one taken with the S95 set to HDR mode. The beauty is you don’t really have to do anything too different; just set the camera to SCN select HDR and take photos (with the camera adequately stabilized of course.) Bracketing is done for you and the images are combined in the camera rather quickly. BTW The Camera can also do regular bracketing to allow for manual HDR processing.]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-20T20:49:24-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/a2c916c94d648a0ce49883fe008fc759-3.html#unique-entry-id-3http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/a2c916c94d648a0ce49883fe008fc759-3.html#unique-entry-id-3admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-04T20:06:36-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/161ff7982be857d4cafffd472cfd901a-2.html#unique-entry-id-2http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/161ff7982be857d4cafffd472cfd901a-2.html#unique-entry-id-2PNG optimizer script that I have up here. I was always meaning to make it multithreaded in a stage of articles and that is what I have planned for my next update hopefully coming sooner than the latest ones.

Update: First Instalment is ready]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-04T17:42:39-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/80458e1bd4e32320ffd43a6b1c71d00e-1.html#unique-entry-id-1http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/80458e1bd4e32320ffd43a6b1c71d00e-1.html#unique-entry-id-1

1. No table support. I was able to copy and paste a table in but using the rich text type of page (where the automatic stuff RapidWeaver does works) links in the table appears outside of it... I ended up having to do a straight html page and doing all the markup for the one table.
2. RapidWeaver templates have a tonne of css and js files that YSlow complains to me about and are totally ruining my score.
3. RapidWeaver won’t manage all my files for me like .htaccess files and doesn’t have and easy way to just make directories and put things in them. I wish I had more fine grained control.

Anyway the site is up and I probably will never suffer anything from these gripes (other than the time spent trying to get that damn table right,) so I guess now I have to look into generating some more content.
]]>admin@ragingsloth.comRaging Sloth Home2010-09-04T14:45:15-06:00http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/4024f1e2631fe3b460564fd36b74264e-0.html#unique-entry-id-0http://www.ragingsloth.com/files/4024f1e2631fe3b460564fd36b74264e-0.html#unique-entry-id-0