• India Aged Monsoon Malabar Coffee A light but surprisingly oily bean, makes an Incredibly smooth cup but has less caffeine.
  tags: coffee india +

Tuesday afternoon, the south facing wall of the building at 13th St and First Avenue buckled. A phalanx of NYFD trucks were onscene through the evening making sure the building wouldn’t collapse. I didn’t find out what happened until late this evening on my way back from the ECFCPUG get together. A construction crew was scaffolding the building while one police car stood by.

This corner is home to Mee Noodle Shop & Grill, an East Village institution. There were two handwritten signs posted about them being closed, their awnings were in a heap near the construction.

I’m somewhat heartsick about this. I’ve been eating at and ordering from Mee since probably sometime around 1998 (shortly after Ginsburg died) when Dave insisted I experience Chinese take out which didn’t suck. I know the waiters and the delivery men; the cashiers and cooks are all familiar and have been there for years. Those people all work as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone work. I’m worried about them and hope they’re able to absorb what will hopefully be a very short loss of income.

Every year for the past decade I’ve felt that I managed to accomplish more than I did previously. Throughout most of those years I couldn’t see how I could possibly do more than I was doing. But every year I did more. Until now.

The Laffer Curve has been in the news recently after the recent surge in US tax revenues. The Laffer Curve is a simple economic theory which shows that government revenues decrease when taxes are too high or too low. It points to a sweet spot where revenue is maximized by a tax rate that isn’t too low or too high.

The Laffer Curve of my life looks something like this:

Currently I’m on the right side the hump and have Too Much Going On. Time’s not being wasted, but my productivity, as measured by accomplishments, has fallen off a cliff.

Getting back to the place of maximum accomplishment will take some time, because I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to finish. So, the slogging will continue for now.

10.4.2 is out, apparently the iPhoto Color Shift Bug was not fixed.

update: FIXED! (iPhoto 5.0.3 update)

As I type this, Noemi is sleeping on my chest. Michelle is back at work full time and for the summer I’m taking care of the girls. Noemi five days a week, Lila and Noemi three days a week. When Noemi’s a little bit older she’ll join Lila on babysitter days. So until school starts again I’m doing my best to cram working time in between full-time daddy duties.

FCP 5 broke my FXScript compiler and I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet. While fixing it, I’m also porting it to AppleScript Studio, since that satisfies a near term and long term goal simultaneously. Once that is functional, which should be soon depending on available time (of which writing this is taking away from) I’ll release an updated beta of Joe’s Filters which will remove watermarks for registered users.

There’s plenty of other stuff dragging on me as well which I don’t want to waste time enumerating. Identifying demands helps a lot, but it’s still frustrating how long it takes to get anything done and how tired I am at night.

• The Anti-Semitic Disease, by Paul Johnson A fascinating and long-ranging survey of the historical effects of anti-Semitism on different cultures.
  tags: anti-Semitism history pauljohnson +

I got an email this morning asking if I knew anything about the iPhoto color shifting issue with edited images. I hadn’t been paying much attention to this while working on other stuff, but once I looked for the problem it it was very apparent and troubling.

Based on a lot of good information in the MacInTouch iPhoto Report, a massive thread on Apple Discussions and my own experience with Apple’s image manipulation tools, I think I’ve found the basis of this bug. James Bailey’s observation on MacInTouch specifically identifies the problem:

Using Photoshop 7.0 to help diagnose this, here is what seems to be happening. My original photo seems to have an embedded ColorSync profile of sRGB IEC61966-2.1. […] Opening the duplicated and cropped photo I do not get the same warning which means that Photoshop thinks the embedded color profile is now ColorSync RGB – Generic RGB Profile for the new file. [emphasis added]

That describes exactly what I’m seeing.

SIPS, Apple’s Scriptable Image Processing System offers tools for working with images and manipulating things like ICC color profiles. I have two photos, DSC04737.JPG and DSC04737_1.JPG, the second is a duplicate of the first with a few lines cropped off the bottom to trigger the color change.

When opened in Photoshop, I see the following Color Management warnings:
DSC04737.JPG
Embedded: sRGB IEC1966-2.1

DSC04737_1.JPG
Embedded: Generic RGB Profile

However, when checking with SIPS, I see this:

$ sips -g profile DSC04737.JPG
profile: Generic RGB Profile

$ sips -g profile DSC04737_1.JPG
profile: Generic RGB Profile

SIPS appears to wrongly identify the embedded profile in the original image, believing it is Generic RGB. It gets slightly more interesting, and confirms another suspicion of mine: With 10.3.9, SIPS can’t find a profile in the unmodified image and returns the following:

$ sips -g profile DSC04737.JPG
profile: <nil>

$ sips --extractProfile profiledump.icc DSC04737.JPG
Error: No profile in image

At this point I’m comfortable pointing to the underlying ColorSync foundations updated in 10.4 as the culprit. (These are used by SIPS and presumably by iPhoto too, despite iPhoto’s unique EXIF parsing engine, the foundations are meant to be used throughout the system.) My only hesitation is whether or not this problem appears on 10.3.x after installing QT7.

Comparing the two images without color management in Photoshop shows that the image is permanently changed. Unfortunately, this means that whatever caused the conversion applied a lossy correction to all pixel values. While there is the potential to somewhat reverse this problem with some profile voodoo and dumb luck, the result would be twice shifted and especially prone to visible artifacting and posterization.

Based on the above, I’m guessing that when iPhoto reads the originals, it wrongly interprets the files before applying changes to it. This would mean the modified files are ruined before iPhoto’s adjustments are even applied.

If I were feeling especially adventurous and had lots more time, I might try replacing all or some of the ColorSync frameworks with versions from 10.3.9. I’d find the files to replace here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/
ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/
A/Frameworks/ColorSync.framework
/Versions/A/

Of course I’d be doing that at my own risk, with the knowledge that I could render my computer unbootable and only with a full backup ready to go. But it is an interesting theory and I wonder if anyone’s tried it yet.

Rumor has it that this is all fixed in 10.4.2. (update: not fixed