more blogs

I’ve added two blogs on Blogspot since this blog is mostly Java related. I’ve started learning Haskell so I decided to keep a separate blog for other coding topics not related to Java. The links are in the blogroll. I also started a photo blog.

summer photos

Now that summer is winding down a bit, I thought I would go back through a few of my photos and link to them here.

Photokit Sharpener

I have been using Adobe Lightroom for less than a month now. I think of Lightroom as a hugely improved interface on top of Adobe Camera Raw and currently LR’s biggest drawback for me is its inability to merge databases. I’m sure this will change.

Meanwhile, I’ve picked up Photokit Sharpener. I wish I had been using this tool all along instead of struggling with Smart Sharpen. The tutorial for Photokit Sharpener is excellent and my results after processing maybe about 30 or so photos has been very satisfying. I could never have gotten close to these results with my basic at best knowledge of how to wield Smart Sharpen in Photoshop.

Ubuntu and Frontrow

Photography is a hobby of mine and I have accumulated a probably 50GB of images. I switched from using a PC at home to a Mac for processing my images with Photoshop. I don’t use iPhoto but I really like Frontrow. Here’s what I want to setup at home: I have Ubuntu Server 6.06 running and would really like to use it as a media server, especially for my photos. I know I could just use Samba and file sharing but I’d like my Mac to see it via Frontrow so that I could browse all of the images.

I’m not sure exactly where the answer lies yet. I’ve spent a little time Googling and so far have only turned up the fact that I need to get zeroconf installed. I’m going to have to dig into Apple’s site next and find out if there is any docs for developers regarding what protocol is used for establishing a photo share as iPhoto does.

One side project I’m thinking of is some way to setup or even write a background process on my Ubuntu box that would convert incoming raw images to jpeg and then drop them into directories to be browsed via Frontrow. Do any Java libraries exist for processing digital camera raw images?