The above picture is a first version of my homebrew ColorChecker. I made it by first looking for a good neutral matte white paper, which became Tetenal Photo Archival Matte, for which I then made a printer profile using ArgyllCMS. Generating a printer profile (actually it’s profile of the paper+ink+printer+driver configuration combo) means I can print images with a reasonable level of confidence the print will be color accurate. Then I made a custom sRGB version of the ColorChecker target (look for inspiration here). Then I printed the custom sRGB image of the ColorChecker with the printer profile applied. Then I measured the target using my spectrophotometer, so I know what colors the patches actually are. I scaled the print so that the target could fit inside the manual area of a traditional 14mm DVD case. The DVD case has a dual purpose here, first it keeps the target straight/upright and when closed it protects the target from dust/moist. To stick the target to the inside of the case I used 3M Photo Mount, which is Ph-neutral to prevent the glue from deteriorating the colors.

Initial tests are very encouraging, camera profiles generated from it work quite well, especially when shot using a decent hot-shoe flash.

The most problematic part of this all, is the notion, it’s all okay, “because it’s easy to change back”. This is the biggest bullshit argument in history. First how easy it is to do anything is very relative… There are lots of computer users which are simply not capable of changing this default, or any default at all anywhere… I suppose this is the audience where they intended to receive this revenue from… Since lots of default-changing-capable folks will most likely be changing back to Google anyway.

And of course there is a bigger point to be made here. I don’t want any external party to have any influence on how my operating system is defaulted. I mean… Will the release after Lucid have the Picasa/SmugMug uploaders disabled in F-Spot, only leaving the Flickr uploader available, because Yahoo paid for it. The other uploaders would obviously be “easy” to add back, because then it would be all okay… And an advertisement here-or-there never hurt anybody too…

While I do get it’s not particularly easy to build a stable company on open source software, and we shouldn’t expect Mark to endlessly pour money into Canonical, but we could ask ourselves, how viable Ubuntu would be in the long term if these kinds of decisions need to be made.

I’d much rather have them cut back on shipments of free CDs amongst other things…

Open up your noisy phone camera image in GIMP, then go to Filters, Enhance, Despeckle… And obviously the Despeckle dialog turns up… Enable the adaptive median (but leave recursion off). Set the radius to 1, and leave the black and white levels at their defaults (respectively 7 & 248), and behold the results:

First download the Balder FreeDOS floppy, and save it somewhere convenient on your disk. Then connect your USB stick to your system, make sure you unmount the stick’s filesystems before proceeding:

# sudo umount /media/usbstick

Then wipe the USB stick using dd to make sure it’s completely clean. This step is not really required, but this does make sure you won’t run into any other problems later on. Make sure you know you have the correct device file, making a mistake with this can really screw up your Ubuntu install, as an example I’ll be using sdu:

# sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdu bs=1M

Then we start qemu booting from the Balder boot floppy image:

# sudo qemu -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdu -boot a

If all goes well you’ll see FreeDOS booting from the floppy drive.

A:\>fdisk

Then partition a single large volume, the following should have the same effect:

A:\>fdisk /auto C:

Then format the partition and copy system files:

A:\>format C: /V:FREEDOS /S

Then you can copy any other DOS utilities you might need from the Balder image to the C: drive, which in essence is your USB stick. Then close qemu. Then we can verify if the stick boots properly like so:

# sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdu -boot c

If you want to place some extra files on there like a BIOS flash utility and a BIOS upgrade file you issue the eject command, and then disconnect and reconnect the USB stick:

# sudo eject /dev/sdu

I hope this works for you as well. Good luck and be careful!

The usual suspects inhabiting the bag are obviously a laptop of  some sort and it’s corresponding power supply. Another indispensable item would be a nice travel mouse (in whatever variety you would like: wired, wireless or bluetooth). Since wireless access is not available everywhere, it’s a good idea to keep a couple of feet of (snagless) Cat 5e UTP cable in the bag for wired network and/or Internet access.

Modern laptops usually have an SD card reader built-in, however if you use CompactFlash you’re pretty much screwed, so keeping a cheap generic USB card reader in the bag is often a good idea.

Having operating system reinstallation media in the laptop bag is a good thought for longer trips as well… The Ogio HipHop messenger bag actually has a CD sized compartment for this particular purpose. Having some writable media (like a USB memory stick) in the bag can be useful at times as well.

There are a few less obvious things I tend to keep in my bag:

First of which would be a USB-Serial (RS232) converter, and a Cisco Rollover cable. It’s not that I need these on a continuous basis, but if I don’t keep these permanently in my bag, I will have forgotten them when I do need them.

Another item I rarely need, is Tylenol and some bandaids… Keep them in your bag, and one day they will come in handy (be it for personal use or someone else).

Keeping a random (interesting) magazine in the bag as well can be handy to pass time during public transportation amongst other things. I’ve heard of other people carrying an English dictionary as well.

If you own an iPod, keeping an iPod sync/charge cable in the bag can be a good idea. I generally put a few standard usb/mini-usb cables in there as well.

And last of course, I keep a pen or two, a notepad and some business cards in there too.

After zeroing the complete disk surface no bad sectors were reallocated, since the drive (as most WDC’s) can provide SMART information via USB to DeviceKit/palimpsest. This may sound as-if it’s the most common thing in the world, but it’s not, it’s not a fair assumption any random USB drive will supply SMART information via USB.

The drive can do about 28MB/sec sustained (benchmarked during the full surface wipe). So this is a real world figure for sustained sequential IO.

Another nice feature is the fact that the drive does not seem to require a split USB cable to draw more power from the host system than a single port can provide.

Having said that, I am still slightly sad about this, GIMP is one of those iconic open source applications that have been around for more than a decade. Luckily we’re not saying farewell, just until we visit next time.

Early server solved this issue by having a special chip on the motherboard the handle the PCI Hot Plug events. Later on this was more or less standardized by using ACPI to handle this for laptops and possibly some desktop computers. And indeed the HP Mini needs ACPI PCI Hot Plug support to allow the Yukon 2 chip to be detected on the PCI bus after it’s been booted.

Somehow Ubuntu does not “detect” ACPI PCI Hot Plug is required and does not load the appropriate module. Luckily this is easily fixed by adding “acpiphp” to “/etc/modules”, and presto the Yukon 2 works as expected even if no Ethernet cable was attached during boot.