A week ago, the Firefox crop circle (finally) made it into Google Earth. This is a screenshot of how it looks like:

Now, as Asa found out, today the photos also made it into Google Maps:

Very nice! And well done, dear friends from the OSU Linux User Group!

(thanks to bagawk on #osu-lug for the Google Earth screenshot; thanks to Asa for the link to the Google Maps location!)

Today, I am mo-blogging from Oregon State University, while I am here for work and “turkey week” reasons.

I came across this neat poster for the Open Source Education Lab featuring the Firefox Crop Circle. (The OSU LUG, in case you didn’t know, were the people who made that famous crop circle last summer, realizing an idea by the two former Mozilla interns Matt Shichtman and John Cary!)

The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent us a cake for the upcoming release of Firefox 2!
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Truly, there have to be things you are looking forward to at work. Here at the Mozilla Corporation, this is currently the Firefox 2 release:

(picture of my boss’ office window)

I can’t wait for the Fx 2 release. And a little bit, I am even looking forward to the Veuve Clicquot

Last week, I was on vacation in New York City where I met a German friend of mine. Both of us brought digital cameras and we got, let’s say, pretty trigger happy.

It wasn’t till after the vacation that we realized that both of our cameras had mentally stayed where they came from: My camera’s time zone was set to Pacific Daylight Time, his to Middle European Summer Time. All in all, this adds up to a difference of 3 or 6 hours respectively to the actual time the picture was taken, and 9 hours between the two cameras. Perfect to find the morning pics between the evening ones and vice versa.

When putting the photos together into a gallery software, this results in a totally messed up order and a pain in the arm to fix it for more than 1.2 gigabytes of pictures.

Searching the internet for a remedy (for the pictures and the headache they made me), I stumbled across a fabulous little tool called jhead. It is an EXIF header and thumbnail manipulator that flawlessly works also on bigger amounts of files.

Not only is the syntax quite straightforward and easy to understand, it also has an armada of neat little options for fixing numerous ugly things that may happen to JPEG header files when taking digital photos.

This is what I did:
jhead -ta-6:00 nyc/p*.jpg # friend's pics
jhead -ta+3:00 nyc/cimg*.jpg # mine
jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S nyc/*.jpg # rename uniformly


Besides the time zone issue, I was also able to automatically rename the files according to the (now correct) timestamp so that the pictures taken by different cameras now have uniform file names and can easily be sorted by name.

Thank you for saving a few hours of my life, jhead. Here are the photos.

This fast food restaurant claims you can have things your way. However, your decision ends at the stubborn door. It’s too bad

(seen at Burger King, 4th Street, Corvallis, Oregon)

Again I was making some photos in Karlsruhe by night while waiting for the train.

This man is obviously on his way home, drinking his last beer while waiting for the train to leave.