Using the Canon T1i/500D with Photoshop Elements

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If you have a Canon T1i/500D you have a lovely camera, but it gets less lovely if you want to import the raw image files it produces into your copy of Photoshop Elements. The problem is that the camera has a new sensor design, which means that the CR2 files that it produces are not compatible with the Raw importer that Adobe supply.

They have recently released a Release Candidate for version 5.4 of the filter, but rather annoyingly they’ve only supplied the installer for the big, expensive, versions of Photoshop. Which I don’t have.

Turns out though, that you can extract the required filter from the distribution that they do send out, and it works a treat.

cameraraw_5-4_rc_win_052109.zip\extensions\AdobeCameraRaw5.0All-190509032617\Assets

  • Copy the file 1003 onto your desktop from this directory in the archive, and then rename it to camera.raw.8bi. This is the new version of the filter.
  • On your computer, find your way to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0\Plug-Ins\File Formats

  • If you are using Photoshop Elements 6.0 there is a directory in an analogous place for that.
  • Move your new file into this directory, overwriting the existing camera.raw file (you might want to make a copy of this file first, in case there are any problems later)
  • Now you can open the raw files.

Updating your raw importer is actually a good idea whatever kind of camera you have. Adobe keep adding new features to this tool.

Broken Bot Server

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The plan was to add Unreal Bot programming to our Summer Bash. This is a great way to use your C# smarts to control a player in an Unreal Tournament game and try your hand at writing game playing AI.

Unfortunately, fate had heard me thinking this, and so the server promptly broke. It is an aging Dell machine that sits in the corner of my office quietly chuntering to itself. I took it’s lid off, blew out the dust, re-seated the RAM and it still didn’t work. So I had a word with Adam, who came up with a pair of probably compatible memory SIMMs that I put in and it seems to work now, which is nice. It has twice as much memory as it used to have, and so it fair whizzes along now.

I then spent an entire lunch hour writing a Bot that gets itself stuck in corners.

Windows 7 is Speeding Me Up

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Aside from a few niggles with Nero, I must admit that Windows 7 is speeding me up. Moving around windows and getting things done is faster with the new system, and the generally quicker performance (apart from strange delays at certain times, for example importing Raw images into Photoshop) is much appreciated.

In fact, I like it so much that I’m not going to put Vista back on my machine.

Windows 7

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Decided to celebrate my completion of everything by putting Windows 7 Release Candidate on my laptop. I did an upgrade, which seems to have worked fine except for my Nero InCd service, which I didn’t even know I had.

The desktop looks much nicer and seems quite a bit snappier than before. The system has even spotted the broken battery and told me that I might need to buy a new one, which is quite clever.

Windows 7 is Lovely

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I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on my tiny netbook for a while. This week, having downloaded the Release Candidate I thought I’d step up to that. I had to do a complete re-install, which was a bit of a pain, but the effort is well worth it. Everything seems a lot more polished and there is some lovely artwork in the desktop and background themes that you get with the distribution.

From a technical point of view it doesn’t seem to have lost any of the responsiveness of the earlier releases and it found and used all the hardware in my device. If you are using Vista, or even XP, you should take a serious look at this, it really is very nice.

JSON and the Micro Framework

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Our entry to the Dare To Dream Different competition is coming along nicely. We’ve spent a goodly chunk of today working on how we are going to pass messages from the Micro Framework device and the server it is attached to. Number one son suggested using JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON.

We could have used XML, but this has always struck me as a rather verbose way to pass data. JSON on the other hand is nice and tight, and has the benefit that its entire syntax can be expressed on a single web page. We are presently writing a set of JSON classes for the Micro Framework. This is actually proving to be quite fun (there might be ready-written versions out there but I quite like writing my own versions of these kinds of things, just to keep my hand in).

If you are interested in a beautifully simple way to express a design for data structures you should take a look at this page and see how the author has done it. I’m also thinking that if you are looking for an exercise for your programming smarts you might want to create a library of classes that will read and write data in this form.

Once I’ve got ours working and I’m happy with it I’ll post it out there so that the Micro Framework can use this rather neat data structure.

Windows 7 on the Advent 4211 Netbook

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I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. I put the beta version on my little tiny Netbook PC, the Advent 4211 which has a little Atom processor and only 1G of ram.

By gum, it works well. I’m getting a better than Vista experience on a machine that just about runs Windows XP. I even took the machine to Portugal last week and used it to run PowerPoint and Visual Studio (at the same time bless it) during the presentation. It worked really well, the only problem was when I accidentally engaged screen magnification at the end and wasn’t able to turn it off. However, that got the biggest laugh of the session, so perhaps it was OK after all.

One thing that is very impressive is the handling of external monitors for presentations. When you plug a display in you get the four options of netbook only, clone, extend onto external display or external only, and you can manage them very easily by using the new Windows+P hotkey. But, better than that, it works in a very clever way. It actually picks sensible resolutions for each device, even if you are cloning the screen. My little netbook is widescreen, unlike most external displays. Windows 7 took this in its stride, giving me a stretched display on the netbook but a good looking display on the projector, which is exactly what it should do.

In fact, there is a whole lot of “exactly what it should do” in this version of Windows. Stuff seems to work the way you would expect and with a minimum of fuss. The operating system has been rock solid for me and I’ve not had any blue screens of badness. Good stuff, roll on release day.

I M Wright Speaks

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You’ve probably heard me go on about I M Wright before. He is the “Microsoft Development Manager at Large” alter ego of Eric Brechner. He wrote the book Hard Code, which is a wonderful look at how to create software properly. He also has a blog which is brilliant. And now he has a podcast too, so you can listen to the good word rather than have to read it. You can find the file here.

SmallBasic

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If you want to rediscover the joys of writing little programs and doing fun things with computers you could take a look at SmallBasic. It is inspired by the tiny Basic interpreters that you used to get with your Commodore 64 or BBC micro and lets you write programs using a very simple language in a friendly IDE.

I’m a great believer in starting to program by keeping your focus on the algorithms and things like this can only be good. Although I’m not sure about the Goto statement figuring quite so large....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

Bad/Mad Practice

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Alfred Thompson had a good post in his blog about software testing. Alfred and I are around the same generation (I hope he won’t mind me saying this) and we’ve both written software for money in the past. When I was writing my largest projects I didn’t make use of any kind of tester particularly, I just make sure that it worked before I handed it over. Alfred was the same.

Nowadays it seems that there is a trend towards developers handing stuff over which they haven’t really tested, on the basis that the test people who receive it will find any mistakes they made. Alfred (and I) hate this idea. I put quite a verbose response to this effect on his post you can find here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/01/27/how-not-to-develop-software.aspx

I’ve since talked to people in the business and was appalled to hear that this practice is not uncommon nowadays because developers are pushed to meet deadlines and the only way they can do this is by skimping on the testing they do. Ugh. I reckon this really goes back to Bad Management, in that a manager will get a good feeling if they are enforcing a strict regime with tight deadlines which the programmers are all hitting.

The end result though is that the testers keep sending stuff back for re-working because it has bugs in, the developers lose time on the next phase because they have to fix all these bugs, so they send the next version out (in time for the deadline) with more bugs and so on. The words Vicious and Circle spring to mind. Along with Bad and Product.

It turns out that one of my heroes, Eric Brechner, has written a lovely post about this that sets it out really nicely:

http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_brechner/archive/2009/01/01/sustained-engineering-idiocy.aspx

Poladroid

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I used to have a little Polaroid camera. I loved the way that the pictures appeared over time, and the strange way it had with colours. Nowadays such technology is being replaced by digital, but the Poladroid application does give you a way to recapture that old magic. It takes pictures and gives them the Polaroid treatment, right down to the borders and the way that they take time to appear. You can actually watch the image develop, and even take snapshots of the slowly appearing picture.

You can get the application from: http://www.poladroid.net/

3233155255     3233155309

A couple of snaps which have been converted.

Great fun.

Microsoft Tag

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Microsoft Tag is a new way you can put out links to web sites or whatever. The links are printed as patterns a bit like bar codes which you can read with your mobile phone camera. They use a cunning colour technology which means that even when they are snapped out of focus they can still be resolved into a readable address.

image

The tag for this blog.

The tags are linked through the Microsoft Tag site, which means that you can put expiry dates in them and the use of your tags is automatically logged so you can get reports on how much they are being used.

There are reader programs for most Smartphones including Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian S60 devices. To work the phone needs a camera and of course internet access.

I'm thinking that when paired with a Polaroid PoGo printer, which prints sticky coloured prints just the right size for some text and a tag, this would be a very neat solution. I'm thinking about having a Tag treasure hunt at the next departmental bash. You can find out more about Microsoft Tag here.

Lousy Software

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I hate bad software. It gives us all a bad name. I particularly dislike it when the program makes a job that could be simple a lot more difficult, whilst at the same time trying to seem friendly.

Yesterday I got a couple of photo album and paper things from HP. The idea was that I would print out some pictures and make some nice personalised gifts. I was further encouraged in this when I found that the package came with some HP Photosmart software that would arrange the pictures for me and put them into some nice looking templates.

That was the plan. I had this simple minded idea that I would pick pages from a template, drop pictures into them from my hard disk and then print out what I wanted.

Not so. First off the program insisted in cataloguing all my pictures. And I have rather a lot so that took a while. In fact, it got so slow that in the end I made up some directories holding a subset of my photos and turned it lose on that. Next it forced me to select from a slow moving and hard to use menu which pictures I wanted in my album. It then stuffed these into the album pages in no particular order, forcing me to move them all into the right place. I had no way of choosing the order of the pages, or deleting excess ones. But of course it saved the best bit until last.

Just as I was finishing off my design I noticed a "settings" option in the top right hand corner. Thinking that this might let me re-arrange pages or delete them I clicked it. It had some fairly useless options that were no good for what I wanted, so I tried to get back to my design. Which had vanished. All my work had gone away, without so much as a warning. Wah.

Sometimes there is great satisfaction to be had watching the uninstaller do it's business.

Deep Zooming with Ed

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Ed Dunhill from Microsoft came to see us today as part of the Inspiration Tour. He gave an excellent talk to a whole bunch of students. One of the things he showed us was Silverlight and Deep Zoom. This is wonderful. A bit like Photosynth, but you can create your own images into which web users can zoom and zoom and zoom. And zoom. Don't take my word for it, have a look at the Hard Rock Memorabilia site.

If you want to make your own Deep Zoom pictures you can download the Deep Zoom Composer for free here.

Windows 7 - Putting the win back into Windows

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I've been using Windows 7 as my main desktop for a few weeks now. I love it. There are a few rough edges, but nothing that would send me back to Vista. From the point of view of what you can do with it I've not noticed much different, although I haven't looked very hard to be honest. What I have noticed is the speed. Things happen an awful lot faster. Programs load and run at the kind of rate that they should do on a machine with a 2G processor.  File copying and archive unzipping are now happening at a proper speed. People I know are digging out old and slow machines that won't run Vista very well, loading up the Windows 7 test version and turning them into useable devices, which is very interesting.

It used to be that a new operating system meant a new computer. If the final version of Windows 7 manages the same level of performance of the one I'm using it could actually reverse this trend. One of the reasons why Vista didn't work very well in the early days was that some suppliers did a pretty poor job of supporting it with drivers, leading to lots of people with brand new "Vista capable" machines that didn't work properly. This must have made Microsoft a bit upset at the time, but with Windows 7 Microsoft might just get their own back on the hardware makers, since everyone will rush out and buy the operating system and have no need to get new machines.