Welcome to Nerdville

Brian Guthrie blogged today about an article in The Economist about the VT tragedy. The Economist is a publication I have a great deal of respect for, but in this case they’re flying their European socialist flag as high as ever. Here is the quote from the article that Brian used:

When it comes to most dangerous products—be they drugs, cigarettes or fast cars—this newspaper advocates a more [classically] liberal approach than the American government does. But when it comes to handguns, automatic weapons and other things specifically designed to kill people, we believe control is necessary, not least because the failure to deal with such violent devices often means that other freedoms must be curtailed. Instead of a debate about guns, America is now having a debate about campus security.

Later in the same article, they state:

Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.

Let us not confuse the availability of guns with the legality of gun ownership. For reference, please note the availability of illegal drugs. Tightening regulations is one thing, but when reasonable firearms for self-defense (e.g. Glocks, non-automatic weapons, non-explosive weapons) are withheld from all but the police, you merely catalyze the growth and ubiquity of the weapons black market, which peddles its wares primarily to those with the urge to do real harm.

I’m a proponent of gun control. I do believe that the way we manage the sale and distribution of (especially) handguns in this country deserves to be revisited. But I also believe that the ability for an individual to buy a gun for self-defense, not having any intention or expectation to use it in public, is a boon to the overall safety of the country (or any country). In my mind, the critical issue to be addressed is how to better regulate the sale of arms to people like Cho, who clearly demonstrated (non-criminal) characteristics that would not inspire trust in any gun seller. Because those characteristics were not readily available to the gun seller, they had no way to know what his intentions might be.

The issue of gun control is divisive, as it sets forth premises that are so broad, socially, that there is scarcely a way to determine their accuracy. It was precisely these types of anecdotal premises that spurned the “war on drugs,” and as history has demonstrated, politicians are seldom very adept sociologists.

I am an amateur photographer in (most of) my spare time. When I’m not actually making photographs or blogging about photography, I tend to explore some of the eccentric intersections of photography and technology. One of those intersections is Adobe’s XMP, or Extensible Metadata Framework specification. XMP was conceived as a drop-in replacement for IPTC (literally “International Press Telecommunications Council,” but also used improperly to refer to the IPTC’s IIM, or Information Interchange Model), and allows you to store a bunch of information in the headers of graphics files.

IIM was put together around 1991, but its development was frozen in 1997 after XML started to take hold. XMP uses a subset of the XML format RDF (Resource Description Framework; I feel like there are too many frameworks in this post already), so it’s a lot easier (and more fun) to work with… Once you get it out of the file.

In order to extract the XMP data, I used a little tool available from a kind soul at the W3C. Specifically, I compiled the jpeg-xmp-2.2 package (yes, in OS X; it built with about 1,000 warnings but works fine) and got my filthy mitts on the rdjpgxmp tool, which simply reads the XMP data from a JPEG and spits it out in raw RDF format.

Here’s a sample of what my RDF file looks like. That’s a dump of the XMP from a photo I exported from Adobe Lightroom with my basic copyright information attached. As you can see, there is a lot more than just copyright information embedded in it. They manage to work in some of the stuff typically carried by Exif as well as the “IPTC Core,” the junk that was formerly only found in the IIM payload, which Adobe has graciously provided a synchronization process to preserve.

The output of rdjpgxmp has a ton of blank lines at the end for some reason, so we can use a bit of simple bash trickery to do away with that.

The -v switch tells bash to only display lines that don’t match the pattern, and if you look closely you’ll see that there’s a space in there.

So, now that we have a fairly clean RDF output from the shell, we can get it into a Ruby script and mess around with it. I just used a simple shell execute to get the output of rdjpgxmp and then used REXML to get down to the title of the photograph.

Pretty sweet, yes? Using REXML’s fabulous support for XPath syntax, it’s easy to get right down to the correct element. Now it would be a simple thing to write scripts to pull different bits of data, insert them into databases, rename the files themselves (perhaps based on their XMP title?), or do anything else you can think of. There is also a companion tool, wrjpgxmp that allows you to write to the XMP data. There is a wealth of potential here.

Here’s more information about everything:

• The original IIM specification, now defunct
• IPTC’s new IPTC4XMP specification, meant to smooth the transition to XMP
• An O’Reilly article about how to use REXML that I used as a reference
• The W3C’s XPath spec.

When asked to comment (for the six thousandth time) on the Don Imus debacle, the Rev. Al Sharpton, described by CNN as a “civil rights activist,” said (and I quote):

Somewhere we must draw the line in what is tolerable in mainstream media. We cannot keep going through offending us and then apologizing and then acting like it never happened. Somewhere we’ve got to stop this.

Stop what, Reverend? Stop negotiating the response to each infraction of your personal rules of permissible speech? Stop determining what people are allowed to say on the radio and on TV through democratic and free-market-based consensus?

I suppose we should ask the Reverend to make us a list of what people should be permitted to say and censor everything else. Yes, that sounds like the American way to do it.

On the horizon I can barely make out the death of satire.

Today, April 7th, is the 74th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition, that scourge on the freedom of Americans to indulge themselves in the firewater and forget the sorrows that daily consume them.

I, for one, will be celebrating this important day the way all nerds should: drinking myself into a hole from which I can only escape by following that most terrible of all roads, the Road to Hangover.

Have a good one, nerds!

Thanks to Aaron Johnson’s pretty swell article about the Microsoft Log Parser (included in the IIS admin. toolkit and also available for separate download), I am now well on my way to Microsoft log-parsing heaven. If such a place exists.

Here at work we are faced with a similar problem to Aaron’s (no, the other one) where we are required to generate server log-based statistics that aren’t covered by standard web stats packages like AWStats et al. We have to count occurrences of specific URL variables within the requests and things of that nature. Hopefully Log Parser 2.2 with its completely awesome SQL interpreter will be able to give us the data we need in a format we can use.

Yes, we use ColdFusion here (for the time being), and yes, it does suck. A lot. Its largest points of failure are interoperability and extensibility (mostly due to a widespread apathy in the programming community; it supports extension through Java classes/beans/whatever, but not many people spend the time to build the kinds of things PHP has available), and also huge, gaping language deficiencies. But more about that later.