Mehr Pro und Contra aus Der Zeit über das umstrittene Buch Hitlers Bombe

... man darf nicht über die Firma lästern. Sonst gibt es ja oft die Höchststrafe - You're fired! Oh, it's my lucky day ;-)
Aber irgendwie konnte ich es mir nicht verkneifen. Es passt gerade zu gut ;-)

Vielen Deutschen wird es kaum mehr auffallen: Im Ausland ist es definitiv scheisse, wenn man als Deutscher erkannt wird. Nicht umsonst gehören die Teutonen zu den unbeliebtesten Urlaubern weltweit. Sie nörgeln, sie finden alles schlecht, kein Hotel ist gut genug, usw. usf. Die Stories über Deutsche im Ausland füllen Bücher. Auch meiner einer versucht, seine Wurzeln nicht unbedingt preiszugeben. Gut funktioniert immer wieder: Ich bin Schweizer. Nicht ganz korrekt, aber da man immer noch in der Schweiz arbeitet, auch nicht ganz unwahr. Die Jungs südlich des Bodensees geniessen weltweit einen ungemein besseren Ruf, wohl wegen ihres Understatements. Etwas, was Deutschen oft fremd erscheint. Hier dominiert meist die eigene (nicht vorhandene) Grösse. Auch ganz gut ist: You're coming from Canada? Yes, of course ;-) Einige der T-Shirts aus alten Outage-Zeiten deuten das an. And why not. Sind doch die Kanadier weltweit beliebt. Keine Grossmannssucht, recht grün, sehr tolerant. Ein sehr angenehmes Völkchen. Das weiss man selbst in Timbuktu.
Am besten ist aber immer noch - zumindest hier in NZ - ein Kiwi zu sein. Und nichts leichter als das. Unterwegs im Gebüsch muss man sich nur an die Kleiderregel halten. Und die ist bei uns schon fast komplett. Nur die Longjohns fehlen noch. Die ham'wer aber auch bald und dann heisst es: You're coming from North or South Island? Uh - from South Island of course ;-)

The new MSR stove is commissioned. First coffee tasted quit good. But it took some time till the water was cooking.

Computer programs are already globalized. Down under they use as well Windows and down under they are knowing Linux too. In a supermarket I saw the magazine apc - High-Performance Computing. I was not that interested in the stuff they wrote about (beside a test of the Adobe Acrobat - a program I use more and more). More important was the DVD on the cover. Beside videos and test versions there was a full workable SuSE Linux 9.2. Okay, I thought, let's borrow the money and install it.
Today is I think the forth day I'm using it and well: It was for sure worth the 10NZDs. Here I want to talk about the tool Digikam. Like the name says it is written for digital cameras. The special name shows immediately that it is part of the windows manager KDE, beside Gnome one of the most popular desktops for Linux.
What does the program?
The program can be used as bridge between camera and computer. Means it can manage, download and remove pictures on the digital cam. The program offers functions for managing pictures on the harddisk. And finally the program is able to modify pictures by using the mighty ImageMagick functions.
Who can use the program?
My first experiences showed me, that the program should be used only by people able to deal unfinished software. Digikam offers much but still a lot of comand combinations lead directly to the nice Kde debug screen. The download of pictures from the digicam looks unstable. Don't know if the problem is the camera firmware or the Digikam software. Fact is that my Nikkon D70 must be use the PTP USB mode (change must be done in the camera configuration). Fact is that the camera entry Nikkon D70 in Digikam was not working at all. Workaround: Let Digikam autodetect the connected and switched on D70. Digikam called my D70 USB PTP Class Camera. A little bit strange but finally it worked. During the download of the last pictures (White Cliff Tour) some of them were damaged, partly unreadable. The unreadable ones I deleted immediately. Here again I don't know if the problem is really the Digikam program but I as long this is unclear the software must be used with caution!
What makes the program cool?
The problems look severe but anyway: I like Digikam. Why? First the picture management is great. Easily albums can be created. They are used to bring some order into the mess. The picture informations from the camera can be used for rotate the pictures automatically into the proper position. Something IrfanView (by the way: a really good picture tool for Windows) is not able to do till now. Very cool is the usage of so called tags. With them pictures are marked. Later they can be ordered with the tags. It does not matter anymore, in which album they are. This is very interesting when You want to feed Your blog: Create a tag Blog and mark all pictures You want to insert with it. Later one click on the Blog tag filters all marked pictures.
What makes the program a real useful tool?
Your sick of using five programs to prepare pictures for Your homepage? Digikam offers an intelligent alternative. The secret: The ImageMagick libraries. They offer a lot of possibilities to rework the raw files from the camera. Resize, convert, filter and even effects. Some may knew this libraries from other applications. Digikam is using batch processes. Means it sends not only one picture to ImageMagick, it sends all of the actual library. This is just great. If everything works fine, the preparation of 200 pictures is the work of 5 to 10 mouseclicks. All the other stuff the computer does. Means the computer is really doing its job.
Some tips:
Make sure that the ImageMagick libraries are installed. Unfortunately the standard installation of the SuSE I have here was not doing this. Therefore Digikam cannot use its batch processes.
My blog pictures are using normally the same size (320px x 212px) and the same picture format (png). The camera stores the pics as jpeg's in a little bit higher resolution ;-) Therefore I have to resize, sharpen and convert. Do it in this order. It looks like that not properly stored jpegs can create a lot of trouble. My problem was that I converted immediately after resizing. Quit a lot of png's contained information which made it impossible for ImageMagick to sharpen them. First sharpening before converting helped to get nearly all pictures through the processes.
For information:
I used Digikam 0.7.0 together with KDE 3.3.0 and ImageMagick 6.0.7-4.1
So and now I have to startup again Windows ;-)