Photo Restoration…

I have some moderate skills with photo restoration but I am by no means an expert.  Recently I had a photo that I needed restored that was beyond my skills (and patience).  I searched online for a a company/freelancer that would be able to perform the work that I was incapable of.  I found a company called Radix based in India that looked like they could handle the work.  They appear to be primarily web/general programmers but they also perform restoration (samples).  I contacted them and they sent me instructions for uploading the photo so that they could give me a quote.  The quote came to $40 USD.  Using paypal I sent them the funds and a few days later they sent me this:

Radix provides one free revision but I didn’t see anything that I wanted revised so I approved their work.  After approval they sent me appropriately cropped files for 5×7, 8×10, and 12×18 prints.  The approval email also contained a full-size image.

Use the “Request Free Quote” section on their main web page to get started.

Cheers,

-J.

On vi(m)…

For years I avoided using vi(m).  It was old, ugly, and difficult to use.  So, my editor of choice for a very long time was emacs.  Eventually I dropped emacs for pico.  When I started learning regular expressions I turned my eyes back to vim and until recently used it without too much knowledge of how to really take advantage of it.  That means I could move around, edit text, and throw regexes at it for simple searching and replacement.

I moved up a step on the ladder of vim-dom this weekend.  I was working with an xml file and I decided to change the structure and make all of the attribues into elements.  I pulled out my vim quick reference guides and my regular expressions book and went to work.  An hour later I had the entire file converted and xmllint was happy with it.  Without vim it could have taken me days to accomplish the same.  All hail vim!

Cheers,

-J.

On perception…

As part of the project to archive all of the paper I have from business school I am building a database of the documents.  The fields that I am looking for are pretty simple: Title, Source, Author, and Date.  Many of these documents are photocopies of sections of books (textbooks or otherwise).  One such copy is called “A Perfect Failure: The Bay of Pigs” and in looking at it I thought that I saw an author name.  It looked like a perfectly good Italian name and in reading it in my mind it sounded like “Fee-As-Co-Eys”.  After I added the “name” to my database I realized that it was not a author’s name, but a section name, “Fiascoes”.

What’s the point?  The point is that the confirmation bias is everywhere, even when performing the simplest of tasks.

“When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.”

Cheers,

-J.

Praise for Open Source

About a year and a half ago I completed my MBA.  School, no matter what variety, means lots and lots of paper.  I am willing to guess that I have well over 20 reams of paper as a result of course packets, slides, and handouts.  I keep all of these organized by class in three ring binders on the top of my bookshelf; they’re too large to fit on the shelves.

This wall of knowledge should be impressive.  Instead it is ugly and inefficient.  If I want to use any of the documents as reference I have to know what I am looking for and where it might be.  Searching for an article on emerging markets could mean paging through three or more binders.

Recently I set out to turn this collection of dead trees into a digital desk reference.  The first step, presently ongoing, is to scan all of this paper and organize it.  I will write more about that in a future posting.  I think it will make an interesting guide for other folks who want to archive their lives.

Scanning is only part of the equation; I also want this to be a useful digital library that I can expand as I add more items to it.  Rather than use some commercial database I have decided to use web technology.  I could have taken the simple route of creating a static HTML document with the documents listed.  The nerd in me thought that was inefficient and instead wanted to use a xml file combined with javascript to dynamically build the HTML document. (Note: I could have just used xml and xslt as well, but I want to be able to give this archive to other people who aren’t as nerdy as myself.)  I created an xml file and then set to figuring out how to make javscript read it.  This turned out to not necessarily be an easy task, until I found XML for <SCRIPT>.  It’s a fantastic javscript xml parser.  It’s open source.   It has given me all of the examples and methods necessary to do exactly what I want to do.  Now I have an index file generator and I never have to edit the HTML; I just add an entry to the xml file.  Good stuff.

Cheers,

-J.

 

Addenda 2009-04-08:

So, it seems that I’ve been making my life just way too difficult and there was no need to seek out XML for <SCRIPT>.  Still, should I ever need to turn my eye back to a hosted application that needs to save or retrieve XML data on the client side I will definitely turn back to it.

Re-Cheers,

-J.

On software…

I am a huge fan, supporter, and sponsor of FOSS software.  I am of the same mind regarding commercial software.  More on both topics will be coming in future posts.  NOTE:  I do not support software patents, so please, no screaming in any comments.

Over the last few days I have been struggling with purchasing the 2009 Macheist bundle.  Why?  Because I’m only interested in a couple of the applications.  After a trip to the grocery store tonight I realized just how stupid that is.  My purchases at the store came to just over 34 dollars and here I was agonizing over spending 40 dollars on software.  Duh.  DuhDuhDuh.  I came home and purchased the bundle.

Even if I don’t use all of the applications my contributions will still go to charities that I care about and it looks like I can donate the licenses that I don’t use myself, depending on the developer.  Everybody wins!  Yay!

Cheers,

-J.

Hi, I’m a Mac

On March 7, 2009 I became a Mac by procuring a Macbook Pro.  The time since has been an incredible blitz of new information, new learning, and re-energizing of my love of computing.  The purpose of this blog (or blag[1,2], as per Randall Munroe at xkcd) is to create an archive of…well, whatever I see fit to post.  I don’t know if it’s a diary, a document storage area, or just a place for pedantic or demented ramblings (based on undisclosed criteria).  Such is the way of the eenterwebnet.

Cheers,

-J.