Geodoozer Sent Us This

Geodoozer sent out an email today with a link to all the pictures taken with the disposable camera at the Stevens Creek Cache. We did this cache awhile back so it was a nice surprise to get an email today with the pics.

Gallery and Photo Location

Peter Asprey has written a photo location extraction program that works with gallery. Try the "Click here to locate Photograph on Map" link at the bottom of the image. A bit crude but neat.

Do you think this guy's photographs are copyrighted? I couldn't tell by the two copyright notices and watermark on every photo.

Bread Mold Under The Microscope

I captured some pretty good shots of bread and bread mold, they're in the microscope gallery.

Decipher Challenge II

r fsd dl fdn lbsf st htsn htsn s rsf s g m hs htsf s v rpp s r msts ms hs n s bs r htsf s s c bsd gs sf s cn ts x s htsn v sss ndl bsht wsn ts qsn n p syr v stc fsyr v sr fsl n b rtsr hsn sll csdn st ssr hsn sylmr fsn s rsx fsd hc rcsyl l vr ss r ssdn msk wshc hwsr dn ss c d j rps l vr ssf ssr fs htsll sff s k hs

M successfully defeated the first cipher, a simple substitution cipher of a quote by Mark Twain. Above is the new cipher, using a completely different scheme (or does it?). I'd like to see a computer that solves it. However, I don't think you will have too much of a problem with it. The devil is in the details or lack thereof. And the question remains: Who said it?

Heard On The Street

"Can you spare $0.18 for some rubbing alcohol so I can help this little girl I got up there?"

I could go for waffles about now.

The way things change... and stay the same.

From The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (pp. 147-148) by Peter Matthiessen:

"...[O]r why, in order to catch a plane leaving for Santa Cruz at eight in the morning, from an airfield less than four minutes from town, one must be picked up at the hotel at six. Though I should have known better by this time, I questioned the logic of the latter, and immediately the whole airline office became extremely excited and upset, as if I were some sort of anarchist. "Aduana, aduana!" they all shouted, rushing forward to the counter. But in fact the customs, outward bound, is never more than a five-minute affair. The taxi drivers know this perfectly well, of course, and will appear at six forty-five if they decide to appear at all. Nevertheless, for fear of being stranded another four days in Corumba - the same fear which permits the Bolivian consul to pocket my cruzeiros - I will rise on the day of departure at five-thirty and be waiting at the hotel door at six a.m., in need of coffee. By seven a.m. my bag will have been checked through customs, and then I will wait from two to twenty-four hours for the departure of the plane. (The departure depends less on the machine's state of repair than on the number of passengers: flights on this continent are off for hours and at times canceled altogether, with the most absurd excuses, when the manager considers the number of passengers insufficient.) This protocol is invariable and inflexible throughout South America, where the punishment of airline passengers is, if possible, even more cruel and unusual than that inflicted in the United States - except that after a while the senselessness of it all is no longer infuriating. One becomes stolid and resigned as any dray horse, aware that an infusion of logic, honesty, and efficiency into this world would create a chaos impossible to imagine."

I understand where this guy is coming from. Flying out of or into Augusta can be the same way. The only difference is, he wrote this description of air travel in South America 45 years ago.

Photo Mapping Update

Gallery, the photo gallery software that runs my photo gallery and many others on the web recently had a poll concerning the use of GPSs and photography. The Bad Muffin, a conservative macophile these days, previously sent me a link to some mac software that could link photos with their locations by way of the gps route/track data and time-correlation. It's a great idea, and has been possible to do "by hand" since GPSs came to the consumer market, but is only now becoming convenient. I'm hoping the developers of Gallery will add this capability in a future release. This would be especially handy for geocaching and photo search based on visual displays instead of keywords.

This site has a working example of the types of things that could be done. The descripion of how he did it can be found here.

I still haven't found a decent Java API for interfacing with the non-NMEA formats (ie Garmin protocol) my GPS can provide.