WTVN Radio • Columbus, Ohio • Sunday morning from 8 until 9
Who's in the corner?
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Sunday, February 15, 2004 |
Random thought:
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Adobe Photoshop CSAdobe Photoshop has long been the choice of professional photographers and serious amateurs. Photoshop CS sets a new standard for photo editing by expanding on Photoshop's existing strengths and by adding some features that will make you wonder how you got along without them. Adobe has a new family of products under the "CS" (Creative Suite) medallion. I'm trying to get my hands on an evaluation copy of InDesign and the other parts of the suite, but Photoshop CS is included in the current version of Adobe's Video Collection suite. You'll hear about video in a later program, but Photoshop deserves to be in the spotlight all by itself. It's difficult to do justice to an application like Photoshop on the radio, so I'll provide some samples of work I've done here on the website. You may already know that the Clear Channel stations in Columbus are all moving to a single building on Fifth Avenue west of the Scioto River. Stations that were at The Continent moved on February 1. WTVN and the stations that are on Dublin Road will move sometime this Spring. Late last year, after the building had been stripped down to bare concrete and before construction had begun, the company held a "party" in the space and I was there to take pictures. Click any of the images below to see a larger (although not full size) copy. Some of the "large" files are more than half a megabyte, but the original files were larger than 2 megabytes.
Or maybe not. Photoshop CS has improved the "color replacer" function. It's still not "perfect" (meaning that it can do only what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do) but it works better than any similar function I've ever seen.
Impressed? Yeah, just a little!
If you own one of the pro or semi-pro digital cameras noted below, a plug-is is available to allow Photoshop CS to manipulate "raw" images from the camera. This means you can start with an image in the camera's highest possible quality setting and edit it in Photoshop. Photoshop can show and edit raw files from Canon (EOS-1D, EOS-1Ds, EOS-10D, EOS-D30, EOS-D60, EOS 300D Digital Rebel/Kiss Digital, PowerShot 600, PowerShot A5, PowerShot A50, PowerShot S30, PowerShot S40, PowerShot S45, PowerShot S50, PowerShot G1, PowerShot G2, PowerShot G3, PowerShot G5, PowerShot Pro70, PowerShot Pro90 IS); Fujifilm (FinePix S2 Pro); Leaf (Valeo 6, Valeo 11); Konica Minolta (DiMAGE A1, DiMAGE 5, DiMAGE 7, DiMAGE 7i, DiMAGE 7Hi); Nikon (D1, D1H, D1X, D100, Coolpix 5700, Coolpix 5000 - with firmware version 1.7); and Olympus (E-10, E-20, C-5050 Zoom).
Not new to this version, but incredibly easy to use: Perspective correction. If you've ever taken a picture of a building and have then been disappointed because the building appears to be falling over backwards, you've encountered perspective "distortion". I used "scare" quotes because the problem isn't technically distortion. The camera lens simply did what it was supposed to do. The resulting image looks wrong, though.
Photoshop makes fixing this problem nearly automatic.
Now all that's left to do is to press Enter.
* Initially, I wrote "rectangle" here, but realized that the figure I was showing wasn't a rectangle, but a 4-sided figure that would be converted to a rectangle. It's been so long since I've used geometry that I couldn't think of the general name of 4-sided figures. A Google search for +"4 sides" "not equilateral" +"not parallel" turned up a "Basics of Geometry" outline that defined points, lines, and geometric shapes. Just too much?If Photoshop CS is too much (money, $650) or too much (to learn) then consider Adobe Photoshop Elements, Photoshop's little brother. Photoshop Elements replaces the complex adjustments panels with easier to understand (for amateurs) controls. While users lose some flexibility and control, they gain quick operation and ease of use. Oh, and it costs a lot less, too. If you need all the functionality, Photoshop CS is your application, though. Accept no substitutes.
Scope this calendarNot everybody owns (or needs) Outlook to keep track of appointments and tasks. For $30 you can have an organizer program that can be synchronized with your Palm device, that can handle repeating events as easily as one-off tasks and appointments, and that communicates with a neat (and free) on-screen clock.
If the application has a shortcoming, it's that there is no address book function. It's "just" a calendar and to-do list. Nothing else. But it handles those two functions very well. The program allows the user to create single or recurring events, to color-code various types of events, and to set reminders for upcoming events. CLICK ANY OF THE IMAGES BELOW TO SEE A LARGER VIEW.
Calendarscope also provides various views of your schedule -- daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. The Task and TaskPad views show all scheduled tasks, including those that are active, overdue, or completed. Calendarscope allows you to synchronize your data with Palm OS handhelds or print your calendar. You can also choose "Save to HTML" if you want to publish your calendar on a website or put it on a corporate intranet. As with many applications that have been written by Russian programmers, Calendarscope is both flexible in terms of operating system requirements and conservative in using system resources. Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/2003, Pentium 90 MHz or higher processor, 32 MB of RAM, and 3 MB of available hard disk space.
For more information, see www.calendarscope.com/. Exciting news: I found a bug in UltraEditUltraEdit has been my favorite text editor since about 1997. It seems longer, but I see on the UltraEdit website that the application wasn't invented until 1996 and I'm sure I wasn't one of the first few people to use it. But UltraEdit has served me well over the years because of its ability to edit any kind of file I throw at it -- text, binary, you name it. Version 10 was released earlier this year and I've been using 10.10 for the past few weeks. In early November, I noticed that when I saved a file that had word wrap turned on, if my cursor was anywhere on a line that wrapped, the final space in the line above the line the cursor was on would be deleted. Eventually I figured out exactly what was happening and wrote to the author with a complete explanation. His reply: We fixed that in version 10.10a. I thought I'd found my first UltraEdit bug. And I suppose it was, but it had already been fixed. Less that a week later, I wrote a little macro -- similar to ones I had written many times before in earlier versions. There wasn't much to it. All it was supposed to do was examine a log file, find a domain name, copy the line with the domain name, hop over to a "result" document, and paste the line of text there. It worked perfectly -- I could see the macro skipping down through the file, stopping briefly at each appropriate line. I could see it hope to the other document and return. Perfect. Except for one thing: The line of text never got copied to the results file. I thought I had lost what's left of my mind. I rewrote the macro with minor changes. I closed UltraEdit and restarted it. I rebooted the computer. Nothing worked. The easiest macro in the world wasn't working. So I sent a note to the support folks. We chatted back and forth (or is that forth and back?) for a couple of hours and finally I received another macro. "Try this," the note said, "and see if it works." It did. I thought I had done something incredibly stupid. As it turned out, I had uncovered an obscure bug that had crept into the code. An hour or so later, another e-mail arrived with an attachment. Version 10.10b (Beta). "Try this and see if it solves the problem," the message said. I wrote another macro and the result was exactly what I expected. What a memorable day! Nerdly NewsIt's patch time againLike an old pair of jeans, Windows (and most other operating systems) need security patches from time to time. Microsoft announced a major security patch late Tuesday, but the patch wasn't available on Microsoft's website until Wednesday. The patch is designed to correct long-known (SIX MONTHS) flaws that, according to Microsoft, could allow "an unauthenticated, remote attacker [to] execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the process using the ASN.1 library. In the case of most server and authentication applications, an attacker could gain SYSTEM privileges." On an automotive level, this is like giving the town car thief the keys to your car. For complete details and the patch, follow these links:
If you don't care about the details and just watch the patch to fix the problem, you'll find it at http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com. You must use Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 or higher to use the Windows Update service. Litigation as a profit centerIt seems that all someone has to do is come up with a good idea (say, for example, Google) and some company you've never heard of before (American Blind, for example) hires a phalanx of hired goons to shake down the company. It's all perfectly legal, of course, because it's done in court. American Blind is annoyed because they say Google infringing on its trademarks by returning non-sponsored Web search listings from competitors when certain terms are queried. Now it seems to me that if I open the Yellow Pages to search for window coverings that I'll probably find several providers on the same page. This may be shocking news to American Blind and the company's lawyers, but that's the way directories work. When a consumer is looking for a product or a service, the consumer probably would like a choice of providers. That's how Google's "AdWords" work. Google's listings come from an index of something like 3,000,000 website pages. They are ranked by a formula that Google considers "proprietary". In addition, Google sells keyword-based listings in its AdWords program. Those listings appear at the top of the page and on the right edge of the page (and are clearly denoted as advertisements). The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, fails to take into account different kinds of searches and results that Google provides. American Blind has also named America Online, Netscape Communications, CompuServe, Ask Jeeves, and EarthLink in the suit. The new American business model seems to be: If you can't make a profit selling your product, sue somebody with deep pockets.Let us know what you think about this program! Write to: |
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All I need to do is use the crop tool and make sure that "perspective is checked. If you don't select the perspective option, this won't work the way you want it to. 
First, the clock. You've probably seen DS Clock in other screen captures that you see on this site. If I capture the full screen, DS Clock is there at the top of the screen. I've configured it to show the time in GMT and Eastern along with the full date, the week or the year and the day of the year. If I hover the mouse over DS Clock, it displays any current Calendarscope reminders. Whether you use Calendarscope or not, DS Clock is a most useful utility. 
