(AKA Aperture on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard crashes upon importing certain images) I spent the last two days collecting, anonymizing, and organizing over 1,200 images submitted by various folks to a photography contest that I run. Like last year, my plan was to use Aperture to actually look at and shuffle around the images, but when I attempted to import them by reference, Aperture crashed. When I re-launched Aperture, only a certain number of images had been imported, and successive imports of the remaining images continued to cause Aperture to crash.

I finally isolated some of the images that Aperture refused to import without crashing, and after saving and re-saving them in various combinations, I realized that it was metadata that was causing the crash. (read more »)

I did a random search for “Eric Cheng” on Flickr today, and it was cool to see which photos Flickr thinks are “most relevant” and “most interesting“.

lemon shark at the surface, bahamas

The “interesting” images seem to be ranked by number of times viewed. I have just asked Flickr to enable stats for my account; it should be interesting to look through. Although… because I am not a fanatical tagger, my popular images are probably just the ones that I added to groups or included in the embedded slideshow on my photo page.

Panorama of the Apple booth at MacWorld 2008 (best seen large, on black)

This afternoon, I took the BART over to San Francisco where I met up with Adam Tow and Victor at the Moscone Center to check out the MacWorld Expo floor (mostly for the MacBook Air). Although it was fun, I was pretty bored after about 2 hours. Since none of us have business to conduct at MacWorld, we just wandered around aimlessly. As usual, I took some photos. (read more »)

After the Apple keynote yesterday, Alex IMed me and asked, “did you pre-order your MacBook Air?”

Although it looks like an incredible machine, the MacBook Air isn’t something that appeals to me for practical use. Like Alex, my notebook is my main machine. I have a big desktop at home, but I am on the road a lot and rely on my MacBook Pro for all correspondence, web work, plus quite a bit of photo and video editing. This means that I use apps like Aperture and Final Cut Pro, which both are heavy on screen real-estate requirements and their use of Core Image. Core Image relies on the video GPU to do its heavy lifting, and the MacBook Air’s lack of a dedicated graphics card is a real downer. I’ve heard that the regular MacBook will actually run Aperture fairly well despite the fact that its 1280×800 screen is not high enough resolution to officially support the app, but it seems like it would be a painful experience. (read more »)

On January 15, the Australian Federal Court ruled that Japan is breaking the law by killing whales in the Australian whale sanctuary. Australian jurisdiction of those waters around Antarctica is not universally recognized, but the ruling seems like a good precedent.

Yesterday morning, I received an e-mail from a friend who is currently on the Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin in Antarctica (satellite is cool):

… when the Yushin Maru did not respond to our radio contact about today’s Australian Federal Court decision banning whaling in these waters, we decided to send two of our crew members on board to deliver a letter to its captain. The letter stated that they intended no harm and were simply there as messengers. It requested that they be released to our ship upon delivery of the letter. Instead, three Japanese whalers attempted to throw Pottsy (Benjamin Potts, Australian citizen) overboard while travelling at approximately 17 knots, then finally settled on tying him to the ship. They did the same with Giles (Giles Lane, British citizen), but were more agressive with Giles and used a lot more rope. Still, it doesn’t seem as though they will be harmed.

Japan said that Potts and Lane were not tied up, but there are photos all over the internet showing that they were, indeed, tied to what looks like a pipe along the wall, and to some sort of tower.

There are lots of articles online about the stand-off: [BBC] [Reuters] [Google News (collection)]

And speaking of Sea Shepherd, 10% of the final sale price of my Canon 1D Mark II (on eBay) goes to them. I really like the way eBay’s allows auction sales to support non-profits.

My buddy Al Vinjamur is running a trip to Alaska this coming June 22-29, 2008 to photograph Kodiak bears on the Katmai coast of Alaska. I went on this trip last year and came back with some kick-ass bear photos. I’ll bet it’s the best bear-viewing trip on the planet.

If you’re interested, continue reading… (read more »)

Last March, I went up to Napa with Livia, Corinne, and baby Jack to see Osvaldo Golijov at the Niebaum-Coppola winery. I knew Ozzie was working on a piece for Youth Without Youth, Coppola’s upcoming movie, but I didn’t find out much about it other than a few descriptive vignettes over dinner.

I just found a short feature on Osvaldo on The World’s website, where he talks about the challenges in writing a film score after working primarily with classical musicians.

I’m not sure when the movie is coming out, but I’m looking forward to its release!

Every once in awhile, I meet someone with whom I enjoy conversation until they say something like, “Oh! You’re a Sagittarius! The planets and stars are aligning like [insert coincidental celestial event here], and that means that [insert random jumble of words here].”

Today, that alignment of mysterious bodies and events occurred in my residence, and it all revolves around poo. I usually am well-stocked with regard to the necessary items a comfortable session requires, but today, I am out of:

1. toilet paper
2. tissues
3. paper towels
4. water

Yes, water is off for the entire building, for the whole day.

This has probably been the lowest post in the history of echeng.com. But I’m sure it will get a lot of search hits because it has the word “poo” in it.

I’m leaving the house now.

Vienna Teng takes a break between sets

Vienna Teng performed this evening with Karmen Buttler at Bazaar Cafe, which was the first place Vienna Teng ever performed in public (back in 2001 or so — and just 1 song!). The Bazaar Cafe is a fairly small venue (but very cool — you should go), and it was so packed with people that it was literally impossible to move around. I even had to resort to crawling under the table in order to get from one side to the other. (read more »)

amanda with a bobble-head from taiwan

Monica and Wuy cooked up a yummy dinner a week ago for Mandy’s (belated) birthday. I really like hanging out with those guys. [photos @ flickr]

If this article is true, then I am going to move all my domains to GoDaddy and boycott Network Solutions. (via Alex)

Now the accusation is that Network Solutions are spying on the users of its whois service, by recording the searches and then reserving the domain. This doesn’t bankrupt them because they can drop the domain before the five-day grace period ends. This has the result that for those five days, the customer can only buy the domain from Network Solutions, other domain name companies are locked out.

I should probably move away from them, anyway. GoDaddy, which manages many of my domains, is much cheaper; it’s got a pretty crappy-looking website and cheap-sounding name, but it works.

My screaming turtle image seems to be making its rounds around the internet again. Luckily, it is a popular enough photo that someone who “knows” me always finds it and takes it upon himself to email both me and the folks running whatever website it ends up on.

Today, someone uploaded a captioned version of the image to I Can Has Cheezburger, and it made it onto the front page. Luckily, I see lolcats stuff all over the place, and enjoy the humor (when it’s funny, that is). It’s an honor to have my image on the front page over there. (Emily from lolcats wrote to ask whether it was ok to leave it, which I appreciated).

I also am periodically forwarded the image as part of some terribly-bloated Word / Powerpoint document with wildlife images embedded in it. I hate getting those.

Gizmodo ran around CES with a TV B Gone, wreaking havoc upon dozens (if not hundreds) of displays at the show. I found the video they posted to be hilarious, although I’m sure that many of the folks at CES were not amused. (Dear Gizmodo — please allow embedding of your videos)

Frankly, I’m surprised that something like this didn’t happen earlier. Those devices have been around for a long time.

My Canon 1D Mark II digital SLR body is up for auction at eBay. The shutter was replaced 13 months ago and only has approximately 7,000 actuations. 10% of the sale price goes to Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

It was my 2nd camera (1Ds2 was primary), and has had much less use. It’s in great condition!

The donation option that eBay now has is great! They credit your donation toward sale fees, in effect subsidizing your donation. Of course, I suppose my decision to support Sea Shepherd will preclude whalers, shark finners, and seal clubbers from bidding on my camera. But that’s ok with me.

Anagrams are cool. Generated using Stearnest Meanings via Loan a groan. Be sure to check out the funniest anagrams.

GG’s visits always coincide with strange scenes

I have some photos to share of various friends who have been in town for the holidays. Vienna Teng has been in town for the past few weeks. She came over to hang out and put on a shark suit. It’s not quite the same hilarity that her penguin costume evokes, but it was funny nevertheless. The next day, Tammy Loh came up to Oakland to have lunch with me at Cafe Fanny in Berkeley. Pat Suh is also in town, and we met up for a few hours one afternoon before she drove off to Tahoe to snowboard. And finally, GG Clark showed up from Australia. GG and her crew met up for dinner at Buca di Beppo in Palo Alto before headed over to Salar’s place for some hot tubbing. At around 1am, someone exclaimed randomly, “it’s bow and arrow time!” — which although bizarre, made perfect sense at the time. (read more »)

John Lilly is the new CEO of Mozilla! John is an old friend from Stanford days who hired me to be an intern at Apple ATG / ARL back in 1997. Unfortunately, I only see him at Adam Nash events these days. As is the case with people I don’t see often enough, quite a bit happens between encounters (e.g. John has a baby, John’s baby becomes a little boy, John becomes CEO of popular browser company). [read John's post]

Damon Cortesi wrote a cool perl script that sucks down a user’s tweets from 2007 and creates pretty charts via a Numbers.app template on Mac OS X. If you need to, you can use this tutorial that tells you exactly what you need to do to make it work.

My use of twitter has been relatively consistent since I started using it back in March of 2007. For some reason, the script reports activity in January, even though I can’t see any by going “older” via the Twitter webpage. It looks like I also use twitter consistently throughout the week. The “tweets per hour” chart isn’t very useful in my case since my time zone changes on almost a weekly basis.

If you’re interested, you can see my entire chart below the fold. (read more »)

The waterfront warehouse district of Oakland after Friday’s Northern California storm

I was sitting at my computer not long ago and happened to see some beautiful light glowing through spent clouds above the buildings crowded around my window. I grabbed my camera and ran up to the roof to see if I could get some interesting images. Actually, I ran up there twice because the battery in my 1D Mk II was dead the first time around. :) (read more »)