shahine.com/omar/

When our daughter was born and we moved to the burbs, I longed for a product that I could use to keep lists of errands and it would tell me when I was near a store that I could purchase them at.

This is basically “location” or “context” based tasks…

Looks like OmniFocus for the iPhone will do the trick.

Can’t wait till tomorrow!!!

Graffiti CMS is a pretty awesome blogging tool published by the folks at Telligent. I started playing with it a few weeks ago and immediately fell in love. I knew that others would as well.

Of course I knew that there would be a lot of folks running dasBlog who might want to move to Graffiti, after all, Graffiti 1.1 has built in import for dasBlog posts.

When I learned of this I contacted the folks at Telligent and got a pre-release beta version to play with. After exchanging a few dozen emails with Jayme at Telligent I sent them some fixed up import code that would allow a dasBlog user to import all their posts and maintain their dasBlog permalinks as well as categories. Moving from one blog engine to another is generally a PITA so my goal was to make it pretty painless and since I've spent a few years working on dasBlog I figured it would be pretty easy for me .

Moving from dasBlog to Graffiti is a two step process:

1. Import your posts using Graffiti 1.1 (sorry, if you imported earlier the plugin won't work).
2. Install and configure the plugin I wrote.

You can get the dasBlog301 plugin from CodePlex.

Enjoy!

Wohoo! At long last there is now a DNG Codec for Vista! Thanks Trevin for the pointer.

What does this even mean Omar?

Glad you asked.

Vista supports a "pluggable" system for Camera Vendors to produce codecs (code that understands a proprietary file) and represents it inside Windows Vista like a file that Vista understands (Jpeg, PNG, Tiff, BMP).

Why is this important?

Digital SLR cameras have a superior method of capturing photos called RAW format. Think of this as a sort of digital negative. It is usually a Lossless (no compression) and unprocessed version of the Photo which allows you to make significant changes to the image (think developing) without any loss in the original image after the changes are made. With JPEG (the typical format most digital cameras take) you are in a compressed format already and any changes typically result in information being thrown away.

Shooting RAW has some big advantages over JPEG (and some drawbacks). Mainly:

• Uncompressed Images
• Unprocessed
• White Balance can be altered (if you screw it up or want to change it)
• more data, typically 12 or 14 bit color (vs 8 bit for JPG)
• Can correct exposure

DNG is a format Adobe invented to create a sort of universal RAW format. You can convert images from many camera vendors into DNG. The benefits are that DNGs can often be compressed more than the native RAW files (my Panasonic Point and Shoot created 16MB RAW file and in DNG format they were under 7 MB) and you can alter the images in programs like Lightroom, Photoshop without the need for "sidecar" files (I'm not even going to go into that).

The benefits of having a Vista Codec are that any applications written to support the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) can no read/edit those files. Examples of this are:

• Windows Vista Shell
• Windows Photo Gallery (Vista only)
• Windows Live Photo Gallery (Vista and XP)
• Expression Media (Vista and XP)
• any .NET 3.0 application (Vista and XP)

This is great news. Thanks Adobe for finally doing something useful . Now if you would just fix Adobe Reader so that thumbnails consistently render in the Vista Shell.

According to Google, they fixed a complaint I had with their Calendar Sync Add-in for Outlook.

Previously, your Google Calendar email address needed to be the organizer or an attendee of your Microsoft Outlook events for the Outlook events to sync to your Google Calendar. Now, when you choose to do a 2-way sync or a 1-way sync from Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, all of your Outlook events will be synced to your Google Calendar.

Well, I just tried it, it sync’s more events, but still not all of them. And it’s completely random which events it syncs.

I don’t get it. How hard is it to ask Outlook for every event on the calendar? I’m baffled that this didn’t even work the first time they released it. Programming for Outlook is pretty hard and stuff, but sheesh.

I think, at the very least, they don’t handle exceptions to recurring meetings correctly.

I’ve written in the past about how badly behaved applications pollute user space with clutter.

Well it seems that a number of apps are never going to “do the right thing” so I’ve devised an effective solution.

I make the folder/files hidden.

This has the effect of reducing the annoyance, and making me feel better .

I’ve done this for a number of folders, some annoying and some useful that I just don’t need access to (but still like in my Documents folder since FolderShare syncs it to all my computers)