Our cat, Bitty* has not been feeling well of-late.

Well, she’s been feeling a LOT better since we stopped mopping the floor with ammonia and switched to Bac-Out by Biokleen. See, she licked the floor a couple times after we mopped and got seriously sick (pooping, vomiting, general malaise). Also, she turned against her hard kibble and lost a lot of her appetite.

All that said, we switched out floor cleaners, took good care of her, and tried some soft food for a few days - she loved the attention and the food.

That has lead me to the test for the week: All soft food, four brands, ten varieties. I’m going to blog about my cats likes and dislikes over each can of food.

This should be entertaining.

The contenders:

Iams Premium Pate With Gourmet Chicken

Feeding the damned cat - day 1: Iams Premium Pate With Gourmet Chicken from chadedge on Vimeo.
Initial response: Noms!
Final opinion: [opinion]

Iams Premium Pate With Select Oceanfish
The brand, the variety, the cost
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Iams Premium Pate With Wholesome Lamb and Rice
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Sheba Premium Cuts Chicken & Duck Dinner With Sauce, $1.20 (2.8oz)
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Meow Mix Market Select With Real Salmon and Crab Meat in Sauce
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Fancy Feast Elegent Medleys - Tender Turkey Tuscany
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Fancy Feast Grilled Ocean Whitefish & Tuna Feast (in gravy)
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Fancy Feast Salmon and Shrimp Feast (in gravy)
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Fancy Feast Turkey and Giblets Feast
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

Disney’s The Aristocats - Beef Dinner
Obviously, this one is going to be my favorite - I find it so humorous that Disney has a cat-food brand. Like cats care about the cartoon character on their packaging!
Initial response: [response]
Final opinion: [opinion]

*We also call her Bit-pants, Kitteh, fleabag, fluf-paws, baby-cat, and daughter.

I had some really great nights here. The snow falling on the trees, with the bright lights on the building making snowflakes even more brilliant.

Listening to Live, eating ice cream - the music way too loud but shomehow making the night seem quieter.

That bridge; man I miss that bridge.

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banker — A Wall Street Musical from Leveraged Sell-Out on Vimeo.

And The Official Obama/McCain Debate Drinking Game

So I’ve been working more on my ImageServer2 application (massive image asset library, replacing Extensis Portfolio Client/Server system) for my employer.

In preparing for the complete departure from Extensis Portfolio Client/Server, I have found the one piece of my application that has been missing is the massive asset import and conversion (two visual previews: one a 600×600 constrained JPG and a 110×110 BLOB preview saved in a database). The missing piece was handled by the combination of Client/Server from Portfolio, but without these tools I needed to create a mechanism to handle massive imports (hundreds of images from CD/DVD or the Web).

I’ve been researching conversion tools (ImageMagick, GD, GM, Perl, Altercast, etc) and have found a combination of Perl and GM (similar to ImageMagick in features, but much faster) will be how I accomplish media tranformation (seven formats).

I’ve been testing this conversion process on a Linux tower (a Dell Optiplex GX620 running Ubuntu 7.10), and am in the process of setting up an Apple G4 tower running OpenSuse 10 to take on the heavy work of image conversion and database injection.

It’s not been an easy process. I first tried with Ubuntu 6.0.6 PPC version, which has failed constantly. Therefore, I decided to give OpenSuse 10 (more current) a try. I’ve had various failures, and it looks like today I’ve gotten my system nearly installed without error.

Here’s what I ran into:

1. I was using a KVM switch to handle multiple machines (the G4 included). The KVM had a USB mouse and an Apple Aluminum Keyboard. The G4 didn’t recognize the keyboard in time during it’s disk boot mode so I couldn’t succesfully hold down the “C” key to initiate boot from CD mode. Switching to an older USB keyboard (or plugging a keyboard directly into the Mac) solved that problem.

2. The OpenSuse installation needed to repartition the installed drive on the G4. This process constantly failed as OpenSuse has an issue with converting Mac partitions. After searching on the Web for awhile, I found that if I used the Mac OS install disk (10.4 desktop in my situation) and used the Disk Utility included to manually delete the partitions on disk I was ready for OpenSuse to take over. What I actually did was deleted any resident partitions, then created a single whole-disk partition with the Unix Filesystem (when creating partitions, check the dropdown, there’s tons of options).

3. Back in the OpenSuse installer, I allowed OpenSuse to use it’s default partitioning method to delete the Unix partitions (Apple’s Disk Utility actually created three partitions - go Apple!), and the install continued without any other errors.

I’ve now rebooted post install and am adding the root administrator password, etc. Things are looking up.

Once the install is finished I’ll be installing Perl modules, GM, and crossing my fingers that all my conversions work like magic.

A few months ago, I created a sticker that I distributed throughout Seattle. As time went on, I got several requests to turn these into t-shirts.

Tonight, I got the last request that broke the resistance’s proverbial back (wow, that was horrible).

I’ve created a CafePress Web store for selling the “I Drink Your Mocha” t-shirts.

I’ve added a $2.00 markup to the shirts, I hope you readers don’t mind. My wife reminds me that I do way too much, for way too cheap (free most times!).

Better quality copy at Vimeo:

Micah and the Chopper Bunch from chadedge on Vimeo.

This time, it’s a little MotoGP video that I toyed with. Watch and you’ll understand how I wasted five minutes but made others laugh. No hard feelings, right?

It’s been two hours now. I miss my wife.

• PSD (Photoshop)
• EPS (Various originations)
• AI (Illustrator)
• JPG
• PCD (Corel maybe?)
• PICT
• PPT (PowerPoint)
• TIFF

The information I need to extract:

• Creation date
• Color mode
• Horizontal resolution
• Vertical resolution
• Width
• Height
• Any embedded description (I imagine EXIF)
• A blob thumbnail to embed in my database from the source asset

I’m at a crossroads as some of the above I can extract with GD or ImageMagick, however neither tool will give me 100% of the data from 100% of the images (in fact, even together I can’t get all I need). Ideally, I would bypass the PHP/Server-Side scripting tools alltogether and bundle a scriptable Mac framework into a RealBasic desktop application. That’s what I’ve been trying out lately, but as I’ve never coded in RealBasic before, and don’t know much about things like Core Image I’m a little lost.

Anyone have any success with a project like this? Thankfully, I have 2.1 million assets that already have this information stored for me, so the above issue will only be for new assets imported (which I have pushed out a delay on any importing for a month).

Update September 03, 2008:

I have upgraded ImageMagick on my server and have succesfully converted several formats, leaving PICT as the only one that’s giving me fits.

• PSD (Photoshop) - Great!
• EPS (Various originations) - Pretty damn good
• AI (Illustrator) - Don’t need to convert at all
• JPG - Great!
• PCD (Corel maybe?) - Great!
• PICT - Very bad results (see below)
• PPT (PowerPoint) - Don’t need to convert (removing from new version)
• TIFF - Great!

Ok, so here’s what’s happening with the PICT files: When I run a basic convert (or mogrify) I’m getting a very small thumbnail version that appears to be inverted. I’ve attached two smaller (GraphicConverter adjusted) previews of the input and output using $ convert Corb_AFP_026.PICT Corb_AFP_026.jpg as the flag.

Input (a smaller version of the original)

Output

See how strange that is? I’m not sure what special flags I need to add to handle the PICT files. It appears that Preview can read the files without error, and GraphicConverter handles them fine as well. However, a simple convert does not, resulting in the output above.

Any suggestions?

Update 2 (same day):

Looks like PCD is now in the mix of piss-poor conversion. I’m having the same output issue as with the PICT files.

Riding Jolene on a Sunday.

I thought I’d show you what the bike looks like from the start to the finish (the very shorthand version).

Amazing job, Patrick!

The starting out - notice the high bars, the “Sean-target” taillight, and the fuzzy seat. Oh, also notice the battery box is in the default location.

And the finished product. Notice the bars are now MUCH lower, the “Sean-target” is gone, and the battery box and taillight are housed comfortably under a custom bump.
Also, look at that badass front fender! I want one of those!