Its typical, you get a nice camera (or two), go on a couple of trips, and you’ve very quickly created gigabytes of photographs that you then need to sort through. Automator doesn’t quite have the ability to bring in Riya for marking the people in your photos, or rating their quality, so you spend your Sunday afternoon just marking, annotating, rating, deleting, aligning, color-correcting, sharpening, etc.

I’m using iView Media Pro, and always wondered about the Subject and Scene options in the Metadata. iVMP has the best metadata editing I’ve found in any DAM. There just seem to be perhaps too many metadata options.

Turns out there is this whole history to photography. In fact, there are 28 groups of terms called NewsCodes that are used to help fully annotate media. These NewsCodes might specify that a media archive is of “cartoon”, “criminal”, “nightclub”, or “derivative securities” and that the location was “underwater”, “aerial”, “rear view”, or “offbeat”. The IPTC NewsCodes offer a complete listing of the currently suggested vocabulary. And they’re ever so thoughtful to offer a Windows program for viewing and saving the NewsML files.

iVMP allows you to easily bring in Vocabularies like the IPTC NewsCodes, except in simple text format. They’re easy to manipulate, and I’ve formatted the Scene and Subject Code files that you can drop into (remove the underscores, or merge the files into your existing vocabulary files):

~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Vocabulary/Default/

Maybe I’ll put together a quick viewer or formatting utility if there’s interest.

O’Reilly is hosting and pushing their new OpenBooks, which are all of their books that are either open-source, and/or out of date. Many of these books have been available for awhile, such as Creating Applications with Mozilla and Version Control with Subversion, aka the red-bean book.

There are also some oddities like Programming the Be Operating System. Yay old skool.

via void*

Eye-Fi produces a card, Eye-Film, that is an SD card that can geolocate photos taken on it. This is an incredibly smart and easy way to add location to photos and still use any camera you choose. It does this by measuring the Wifi signals in the area and talking to Loki (no, not that one)

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.

Awhile ago I created a GoogleMaps template for posting location stories on BlogSpot, such is GreenerEarth.

I recently put together another project, the Forest Images Registry Project (or F.I.R.), for GreenerMagazine in conjunction with Dirty Greek and SustainaBlog. This project is a response to the recent US Government decision to approve the sale of US National Forest lands to raise money for rural buildings. See the recent Environmental News Network press release.

The FIR is to gather photographs and stories of visitors to these wonderful forests before they’re gone and to hopefully raise public awareness of the situation and contact their government representative with the citizen’s viewpoints.
If you would like to contribute images, check out the Forest Images Blog and join the Flickr! Group and triple-tag your images.

fir:forest=nameofforest
and/or
geo:lat=latitude
geo:lon=longitude
and/or
fir:state=statename

As a colophon, the Forest Images Registry Project site is written in Ruby on Rails (edge) and uses the Cartographer and rflickr plugins. The site is undergoing very active development, so stay tuned for some upcoming features.

Publishing technology books, especially related to any online tools or programming languages is a very fast paced, and dangerous, situation. Books take years to produce, write, publish, and distribute. More than likely, if you started writing a book on the newest technology now, it wouldn’t be out until mid-late 2007. During this time, the tool or language you are writing about will be in a new version, used in new ways, and be sitting next to 5.4 x 10^6 books on the same subject on the bookstore/library shelf.

Magazines deal with this problem by publishing on a month-to-month basis. But an article can still take several months to publish and is limited to several pages, at most, in length. Not enough to cover an entire language/tool.

The answer, currently, is to publish online, early-editions of your books. Push them to excited “beta” (so Web2.0) customers who are willing to pay for up-front copies, and give feedback to the publisher. This is similar to a beta program for the commercial Operating Systems. Developers want information now.

Pragmatic Programmers Beta Books was the first of this genre that I am personally aware of. You can purchase the PDF version of the book now, and get updates for the lifetime of the book. They are currently offering Rails Recipes and Pragmatic Ajax: a Web2.0 primer ($20.00 pdf/$37.45 both)

Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) (did I just hear Beaker?) is offering Ruby for Rails: Ruby techniques for Rails developers ($22.50 pdf/$44.95 both), which looks like quite the tome, at 600 pages. This seems like an extra reason to get a veritably 0g digital copy.

O’Reilly Rough Cuts, is a bandwagon jumper. They already offer all of their books in online format via their ‘Safari’ service, but charge extra now for their version of the beta books. In addition, it appears that when you pay for the beta book, you only get access to it until it is published. You then have to buy the full copy when it is released. They are offering a Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and Flickr books.

I like the idea of getting access to books now, rather than waiting for eventual, and typically belated, publication. By using a digital, ‘published’ book, I can use a more trusted resource than your various flavors of search engine (and often tainted responses – which tend to propagate bad coding practices). I don’t have to keep an aging, dead-tree copy of a v1.0 (or 2.0) book on my shelf and look at it years later and laugh at how out-of-date that language/tool is now (you go with your BASIC and setting up the TRS-80 books).