From the category archives:

Gulker labs

Diggin’ hard down in the image mine

by cg on October 3, 2009

hockney_blue_door.jpg

While my spouse spent the day watching football, I was mostly engaged scanning photos and investigating image database software. We are determined to move the Gulker Photo Archive ahead, which turns out to be a non-trivial task.

We did manage today to assemble, for the first time, about half the images – maybe the better half – that I consider to be my best work in digital form. Said images are all now meta-tagged, IPTC-encoded and otherwise ready (we hope) for the digital future. The image of young David Hockney, above, is counted among them.

I’m proceeding with the data schema I’ve loved since my old, old days developing tech for the San Francisco Examiner – the image files live in an arbitrary file system, each file carrying its metadata while various products catalog and/or browse the data. Currently, Micosoft’s Expression Media, Adobe Lightroom, iPhoto and Adobe Bridge are in contention (Apple’s Aperture having been discarded as just too problematic). Bridge is head-and-shoulders above the rest as a browser, but the image databases are another issue completely.

It turns out that no database product does the job satisfactorily. Expression Media crashes, losing all recently created data, whenever it encounters a pdf file. My newspaper and magazine clips are all scanned as pdf thus the version of the product I have (1.0) is a non-starter, so we’ve sent off for the 2.0 upgrade.

Adobe Lightroom 2.0 ignores pdf files (huh? no pdf? Adobe? what am I missing here?) but does a very nice job of cataloging files that have been properly scanned and metatagged. Not sure why 2 similar Adobe products – Bridge and Lightroom – have such different interfaces (Bridge being the better IMHO), but I’ve stopped trying to answer these questions, and I used to work there.

So, jury is still out, but Lightroom’s nice web export is interesting, if only we could include the metadata easily. We also did some grunt work, scanning in and labeling a box of prints in the garage (Box 9). We continue to try to provide a vector from digital file to physical media…

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So, really, we’re not a lush, or, at least, not a complete lush. We do enjoy pinot noir, among other vintages, but we also spend many hours a day working on hard problems like finding exactly the right data and physical schema for my photo archive.

Today we took advice from Peter Krogh’s book (The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers) and friend Scott about the lowest-cost method (in labor and other resources) to catalog my (at this point) 41 years in photography.

We have, roughly, some 100,000 digital images created in the past 10 years or so. Worse, our garage contains about 200 boxes stuffed with prints, clippings, negatives and transparencies, which may constitute a similar or much larger number. Almost none of these images, of course, are cataloged, digitally or otherwise.

Krogh’s book makes the point that the greater part of a photo’s value is the ability to find it. A mediocre image that is well tagged with so-called meta-data is more discoverable, and thus, potentially, salable than a fantastic image languishing, unheralded, in one of the boxes in my garage. Krogh proposes a work flow that automatically attaches info, with relatively few keystrokes, that make photos far more searcher-friendly. We’ve already started doing this for InMenlo assignments.

As for the garage stash, we decided ‘in-situ cataloging’ was a good match for the Krogh/Loftesness hybrid work flow. Basically, we’ve printed out a bunch of 3×4-inch sticky labels with box numbers – Box 1, Box 2 etc. – and are slapping them on the Kodak 11×14 and 8×10 Kodabromide boxes that hold the vast majority of my archive. We then scan as much of the box’s contents as seems wise – from a few prints to the whole contents.

The result is an archive of high-res images (both prints and negs go to high-quality, high-res scanners) of the best images with pointers in the keywords field to the location of the print or neg. Other photos of similar vintage, frequently the outtakes, are in the same boxes, so there is at least a vector to these previously utterly unavailable images, and I’m not stuck scanning thousands of images to get the few I care about.

In the process, I’m editing, and thus adding value (if you believe Krogh) to the archive. The artist’s hand is visible, as it were.

Next up, we’re thinking about integrating 2D barcodes on the boxes, the prints (with removable, archival labels) and on the web. In theory, a prospective buyer could point their iPhone cam at one of the photo archive’s barcoded web-page images, and buy it with a click. We at the archive could find and ship it quickly. Ka-ching!

Nice having an electronic payments genius for a close friend. But, getting back to my other favorite topic, drinking wine, did we mention the unwisdom of posting after a few cups of the grape…?

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A success over at black ops

by cg on September 15, 2009

chicago_2006_300px.jpgGulker Labs’ new black ops center (aka the garage) has produced its first result, even though it’s barely up and running (and far from complete).

In its first few minutes of hardware trials, it found the lost Chicago portfolio (image, left, is one of the photos), lurking deep within a disk image backup file. Not bad for ancient, crufty code written long before Mac OS X existed

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A real Silicon Valley garage operation

by cg on September 11, 2009

gulker_labs_garage

We got home from Fry’s today with the bits and pieces we needed to get Gulker Lab’s latest ‘op center’ up and running, right here in our literal Silicon Valley garage. As the temperature this afternoon climbed into the high 80s (one of the reasons startups seek funding is to get out of too-hot, too-cold uninsulated garages), we lashed together a previously-idle Mac mini, a large, cheap (on sale) Chinese monitor, a very large storage array and a few unspecified peripherals. The major necessity – 26-buck powered speakers with subwoofer, completed our powerful UNIX- (actually BSD-) based workstation. The industrial-strength vacuum cleaner is handy, too.

The odor of hot plastic as we fired up the new rig was, well, intoxicating. However, right here and now, it will be a good thing to dispel any rumors or hearsay (without spilling the beans about what we are up to). We are NOT:

- doing anything with the PENGUIN pattern-recognition and link discovery code we wrote in the late 90s. The Narus STA and other, more modern advances are way out ahead of our decade-old code in practice, if not in principal. Besides, we think it’s unethical that a bunch of clowns in DC know which fetish porn DVDs you rented while the spouse was away.

- BTW, the ‘antenna farm’ on my roof is really just a bunch of Radio Shack products aimed at improving reception on the FM set in the family room and indulging my hobby of short-wave listening. Really. RF is so yesterday, in any case.

- while it’s true that the demo code I wrote for peering, self-syncing databases could well have rescued the TSA from its numerous, ongoing, embarrassing ‘no-fly’ blunders, this effort has nothing to do with that. TSA, basically a jobs program, doesn’t want to fix problems. It just wants to get bigger.

- despite the advanced, high-resolution imaging device some trained observers may note in the photo above, we are doing absolutely nothing involving ‘remote sensing.’ Those pernicious rumors involving me with the KH-11 upgrade, and even more laughably, KH-13, are just that, and don’t even go into MISTY (especially that ’signature suppression’ patent stuff) or Rhyolite (I’m not that old fer chrissakes).

Really, we’re just a geezer who has a hard time hacking Wordpress templates, so don’t expect too much. We’re only having fun!  Investors, please note we are available Tuesday mornings, after our Scott-and-Lily walk, from 8 to 10 AM,  for term-sheet discussions…

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No sooner had we replaced our Mac’s 320 GB hard drive (it was full, getting slow and we were seeing ‘disk full’ errors) with a server-grade 1-terabyte unit, than our pre-ordered copy of Snow Leopard arrived.

No sooner had we installed the new OS, but our backup hard drive, began throwing ‘disk full ‘errors (via Apple’s Time Machine backup program). Sheesh.

So we just bit the bullet, and ordered a 2 TB backup drive, and a 1-TB replacement for the only other sub-terabyte drive left in my Mac tower, which machine, as of this evening, has 5 terabytes of disk storage. With luck, this will get me through another year. By which time, Lord willing, I will be in the market for 50 terabytes and a new computer…

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Capturing a vision, digitally

by cg on June 10, 2009

ameugny_signs.jpg

The argument of whether photography is art is not something I want to touch with a ten-foot sable-haired No. 3 paintbrush. Let us just say that, in my experience, there are times when a photographer sees something, and it sparks a vision.

That vision might lead, as it so often did in the case of photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, to an idea for a print. The photographer would figure out (or would serendipitously arrive at) the time and place to snap the picture. Said photographer would then take the processed negative into the darkroom and begin the labor-intensive practice of making the print.

Photographers have a huge collection of techniques for manipulating prints – burning, dodging, water baths, hot swabbing, bleaching (to name a few) – to achieve a vision that may lie outside the range of unmanipulated film and paper. Since these were manual, analog techniques, some of which require skill and practice comparable to an artist with brush or pencil, each print was a performance, and it was rare that two prints would be exactly the same.

In the modern photo world, good photographers spend no less time putting their vision into a form that successfully translates to a print (or, increasingly, a screen of some sort). The available tools for manipulating image files are vastly larger (Photoshop alone has hundreds) and the time spent is scarcely less, in my experience, than it was in the old analog days.

The big difference is that everything the digital photographer does is captured in the image file – both the original information and everything the photographer does to nudge the image closer to the vision. Once the photographer has a successful interpretation, that image can be reproduced any number of times, with great precision in every case.

While my goal as an analog photographer was usually a print, my goal as a digital photographer is the ‘digital master file’ that captures both the image and my intent (so-called ‘meta’ information). The photographer’s version of a ‘digital master’…

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We find ourselves this morning with a small arsenal of recently-written scripts (AppleScript in this case) to ease the blogging process, not to mention a newly-hacked Automator (another Mac OS ’scripting’ tool) that, along with a couple features in Adobe Acrobat 9 considerably eased our annual tax preparation marathon. Cut way down on the search for deductibles… 10:28:26 AM

A New York Times feature article this morning describes Twitter as ‘subtrivia.’ Complete with journalists dueling for Tweet supremacy… 10:44:11 AM

njudah-cover-225.pngThe first edition of the N Judah Book has arrived. This edition of 25 is signed and numbered by your humble photographer… 1:00:08 PM

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A rainy day at World HQ

by gulker on November 26, 2008

Wild oak and a streetlight

It’s been a dark and rainy morning and so far we’ve been to the market, the gym and the hardware store. It started to pour rain as I made my way back from the hardware store, so I ducked into a Starbucks for shelter and a latte that made me remember why I don’t like Starbucks.

Yesterday we hauled home some shelving material and screws and such and cobbled together the contraption, left, that we’ve christened The Vertical LAN Rack, and, yes it’s a Gulker Labs project. Six months ago I couldn’t have dreamed of such a project, so useless was my left side – we still have issues, but rehab has been working wonders.

Today I switched out a broken light switch, another project I wouldn’t have attempted previously. Before that I wrestled our turkey ino the biggest salad bowl together with my ‘top secret’ brine and lifted the whole works into the refrigerator for an overnight soak. Now I’m sitting at World HQ’s mighty Mac console – configuring our new, streamlined LAN – good rainy day work…

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So yesterday we were thinking about software and how, in my case, I’m not buying much thanks to all the great new products, mostly free (and mostly Google) that are available for my Mac and iPhone.

What I am buying, it occurred to me as I read from my Kindle during a solo lunch an hour or so ago, is content. As I checked email at the table, I saw this link on a tech writer’s list: ebooks sold more than $40 million in Q1 of this year, up 25% from Q1 2007.

Compared to a projected $100 million for iPhone Apps in the first 3 months of the App Store, eBook sales may not seem overwhelming. But then again, $40 million per quarter is a pretty good business in the normally threadbare world of content. And those figures only represent relatively large publisher’s sales: there are a whole host of smaller eBook publishers that are probably flying under analysts’ radar – Adam Engst’s ‘Take Control’ books come to mind (although I now see those titles in places like Amazon).

What this says to me is that writers have an opportunity similar to the one that has made successes of any number of one-man-band programmers. You may have wondered why so many programmers offer perfectly wonderful, if usually small and focused, applications for prices like $9.99.

The reason is that if you sell 10,000 copies off your web site, you can make on the order of $100,000. Should you sell 100,000 copies, you’ve made a million dollars, before expenses (which include credit card transaction fees and pizza – basically pretty small). I’ve known at least a few programmers whose products have produced these kinds of numbers.

It would now seem, witnessing phenomena like Take Control and the plethora of self-published content on Kindle (much priced at $9.99 and even less), that writers now have the same sort of opportunity. Write an engaging or useful book, price it right, and either promote it yourself or with the help of a publisher, and voila, some interesting income could be yours.

Unlike print publishing, the incremental cost of publishing is very low, and you don’t have to deal with returns, shipping, retail space et al. Unlike software, you won’t spend an eternity answering support questions. And you may never have to do a book signing…

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Word Processors

by cg on July 1, 2008

One of the writer’s mailing lists to which I subscribe has a thread on word processors of yore. Writers of similar vintage to myself have been bemoaning the loss of ancient software like PFS:Writer (I ran it on my Apple IIe). One writer admitted he has kept WordStar running, even on his most recent machine. Many correspondents bemoaned the loss of these older, simpler products.

Which brings me to Writely, or Google Docs or whatever this product is called. In any case, it’s Google’s browser-based word processor, and I’m in my second year of toying with it.  In that time, it’s become my dream word processor – with maybe 10% of MS Word’s ‘features.’ It’s a beautiful, simple, utilitarian piece of software, even without considering its sharing and collaboration features.

I just started my first long, maybe book-length document in it (and my first run at a book in 5 years). I love the fact that I can get to my docs anywhere (even from my iPhone)…

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