Category Archives: English

Windows Photo Gallery – It’s Really Bad

Photography, Technology, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today I was processing some images in Adobe Lightroom so I could send them to my brother. After the images was done, I did a quick preview of them. The default program on Windows Vista is Windows Photo Gallery. I was not pleased with the result, so I entered Lightroom and checked the export settings only to find them being set to maximum quality.

Then I opened the images in both Adobe Photoshop and QuickTime PictureViewer and to my surprise I discovered that the photo was looking better there.

Take a look at the sample image for comparison:

Windows Photo Gallery vs QuickTime PictureView
To the left: Windows Photo Gallery, to the right: QuickTime PictureViewer

Before you start complaining about the photo being totally awful, and that this has nothing to do with Windows Photo Gallery, but more my camera or my skills. Let me explain to you that this is not the photo itself as a whole. This is a crop of the top right corner of the image. In other words, it’s the background, not the main subject.

From this crop you can clearly see that Windows Photo Gallery renders the dark areas differently than QuickTime PictureViewer (and Adobe Photoshop).

I guess this has something to do with Windows using it’s own JPEG-library which differs from the real deal.

You have been warned.

Why do Acer fill their computers with crap?

Technology, , , ,

A few days ago I was preparing a new Acer laptop for a customer. Instead of the 30-day trail version of some antivirus software, we usually install a full version of another antivirus software. So I open up Programs and Features, which it is called in Windows Vista, and while scrolling through the list looking for McAfee, I found the following programs.

  • Alice Greenfingers
  • Backspin Billiards
  • Big Kahuna Reef
  • Bookworm Deluxe
  • Bricks of Egypt
  • Cake Mania
  • Chicken Invaders 3
  • Chuzzle
  • Diner Dash Flo on the Go
  • Flip Words
  • Jewel Quest Solitaire
  • Mahjong Escape Ancient China
  • Mahjongg Artifacts
  • Mystery Solitare – Secret Island
  • Orinon
  • Zuma Deluxe
  • Turbo Pizza

I don’t know about you. But this is a list of games I would probably never play. I can’t really see our clients playing them either. It is probably faster to do a complete reinstall rather then removing these games.

Problems with iTunes and Windows XP

Technology, , , , , , ,
iTunes
iTunes

A few weeks back I bought myself an iPod nano, 4th generation. While the iPod has been great so far, I can’t say the same about iTunes. In the beginning it complained about not being properly installed, and it spontaneously crashed while I was updating the library or moving files to my iPod.

After a day or two it told me that a new version of iTunes (8.0.1) was available, so I downloaded it instead. The installer wanted to remove the old version first, and afterwards it yelled about this not being a 32-bit system. Come to think of it, the first version also did that. However, this time it didn’t want to continue. So suddenly I didn’t have iTunes at all.

I’ve tried different techniques involving changing the .msi-file with a program called orca, but without any results. So now I have to either run regular Windows XP, not the 64-bit version, or “upgrade” to Windows Vista. For the time being I’m running a 32-bit Windows within VMWare workstation.

This makes me wonder. Are there really so few people running Windows XP 64-bit that Apple has decided not to support this system? I know I shouldn’t be running Windows at all. Being a Linux dude and all. But that doesn’t change the fact that Apple doesn’t support 64-bit XP.

I tested Songbird, a open source music player, which support iPod. This doesn’t, as far as I know, handle coverflow, which is a nice way to navigate through music. So until I find a player which supports the iPod, with coverflow, I’m stuck with iTunes. It would also be nice if this program supported podcasts. But who doesn’t these days?

Configuring Static Routes on CentOS 4

Linux, Technology

Last night we did some upgrades on a system in our datacenter. Among other things moving a few services from physical computers to virtual ones. One of these new machines needed contact with three different physical networks, and even more subnets.
If you don’t want to read about my whole example network, skip to the “fun part”.

In this blog entry I will use some bogus internal network addresses. We had the following:

eth0 directly connected to 10.0.100.0/24
eth1 directly connected to 192.168.0.0/24
eth2 directly connected to 192.168.10.0/24

Our new (virtual) server was configured using 192.168.0.1 as default gateway, via eth1. But we also needed to reach the following networks via eth2:

  • 192.168.20.0/24
  • 192.168.30.0/24
  • 192.168.55.0/24
  • 10.50.0.0/16

Configuring this “on-the-fly” is easy. All we have to do is run the following commands as root:

route add -net 192.168.20.0/24 gw 192.168.10.5
route add -net 192.168.30.0/24 gw 192.168.10.5
route add -net 192.168.55.0/24 gw 192.168.10.5
route add -net 10.50.0.0/16 gw 192.168.10.5

As you have guessed, 192.168.10.5 is the gateway being connected to eth2. Now the following is taking place:

Traffic for 10.0.100.0/24 is directly pushed out eth0, no routing needed.
Traffic for 192.168.0.0/24 is directly pushed out eth1, no routing needed.
Traffic for 192.168.10.0/24 is directly pushed out eth2, no routing needed.
Traffic for 192.168.20.0/24, 192.168.30.0/24, 192.168.55.0/24 and 10.50.0.0/16 is pushed to gateway 192.168.10.5 via eth2.
Everything else is directed to gateway 192.168.0.1 via eth1.

Fun Part

To make this routing permanent, meaning it will return upon reboot, we need to store this information somewhere. In this case we’re using CentOS 4, so the file we need to edit is /etc/sysconfig/static-routes. Per default this file doesn’t exists, at least it didn’t on my machine, so I created one and entered the following:

any net 192.168.20/24 gw 192.168.10.5
any net 192.168.30/24 gw 192.168.10.5
any net 192.168.55.0/24 gw 192.168.10.5
any net 10.50.0.0/16 gw 192.168.10.5

Also, check the files /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethx, replace x. Only eth1, in my example, should have a line which says “GATEWAY=192.168.0.1”. If anyone of the other files also has a line which starts with “GATEWAY”, something will most likely go wrong.

I’m not sure how interesting this is for anyone. But at least I hope someone will benefit from it. I might start some more “in-depth” articles about network configuration in the future.

Please leave a comment if you found this useful, or ask questions if there is something I can improve.