Category: Gadgets

Forget the Prius: I want one of these!! 330MPG!!!

I just ran into a problem with my new Kodak P850 camera, and eventually managed to resolve it. I’m posting about it in the hope that it may be useful for others.
I was using the Kodak EasyShare software that came with my P850 to review a number of digital pictures for inclusion in my last blog entry (about Tommy). In several of the pictures, I noticed a white blob in the same place in each shot. At first I thought it was a stuck pixel on my laptop (no), then that it might be a bug in the EasyShare software (no). I opened one of the most obviously affected images in Photoshop Elements and verified the existence of the defect.
I was puzzled. Had the problem always been there? I looked back through my library. The early pictures were just fine. The problem showed up as a single white pixel in a picture taken on April 10, and over time grew to affect a small cluster of pixels. It was hard to see except with a solid dark background, but once you knew where to look it was present in everything. (For an example, look at the hi-res version of the picture of Tommy in the preceding blog entry. Look at the middle of his left ear and scan right towards the edge of the cushion.)
At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. Was this a CCD defect, like a dead pixel in an LCD screen? What was the warranty position on such things? I surfed over to the Kodak web site and drilled down through consumer cameras, P series, P850. I wasn’t even sure what terminology I should be using. The web site offered an interactive troubleshooter, but none of the questions seemed to address my symptoms.
Eventually I found the FAQ. I didn’t know what question to ask, so I had to scan through the whole thing, 10 entries at a time. On the last screenful, the question
What are pixel defects and amplified digital noise?
appeared. This looked about right. The symptoms matched what I was seeing.
The solution was to upgrade the camera firmware from version 1.00 to 1.01, then use the Calibrate Imager function to, er, calibrate the imager. The firmware download was easy, but installation was fiddly: it doesn’t seem to work with a dock. Instead you have to use a USB cable, remove your SD card, copy the new firmware file to a suitable location*, transfer the firmware to the camera using EasyShare, restart the camera in order to update the firmware, restart the camera again, and reinstall the SD card. Then, and only then, I was able to run Calibrate Imager from the camera’s maintenance menu.
The final test was to take a few uniformly dark images to see if any pixel defects were lurking. So far it appears that answer is no – but I’ll be checking regularly. After all, this pixel defect just crept up on me….
Meanwhile, as the FAQ points out:

NOTE: Using the Calibrate Imager feature to reset the imager on the camera will not fix pixel defects in pictures you have already taken. You may be able to edit existing pictures with image-editing software on your computer.

Doh!
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* I had to put it on my Desktop under Mac OS 10.4.7; the EasyShare application wouldn’t allow me to select the mounted DMG image.

Here‘s Alec (not on his blog) discussing a problem with his BMW bike. The thread begins:

I just got ferried home by BMW recovery’s agent in Warwick; long story short I was riding from Preston (Lancs) to Farnborough, making fuel and rest stops as I felt necessary.
I pulled into Sandbach, stopped, fitted-up for rain gear, had a bite to eat and pulled off bound for the motorway. I got about 200 meters down the M6 when I suddenly lost power, freewheeling somewhat. I pulled in the clutch and tried a rolling restart, but the bike wasn’t having it, the rear briefly locked (so grab the clutch in and roll!) and thus I pulled to stop on the shoulder.
I tried rebooting the bike…

The subsequent discussion points the finger at “a dodgy firmware update”. It’s the kind of analysis we’re used to seeing in the wonderful world of PCs, cellphones, and similar gadgets, but I had fondly (naively) hoped that other engineering disciplines had more, well, discipline. A better attitude to quality. How disappointing.
Can the BMW 1200GS display a BSOD?

I had a slightly disconcerting experience today. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been having some electrical work done, and this morning the guys came by to finish up the last installation and then map out the new circuit breaker configuration. As you might expect, the latter involved a lengthy period of flipping breakers on and off to verify which breaker controlled which appliances, lights, outlets, etc.
At the end of the process, I had to hurry in to work for a meeting, but before leaving I wanted to check that Internet connectivity was OK. I logged in to one of the Macs (the one connected by Ethernet to the Belkin WiFi access point), brought up My!Yahoo!Page!, declared success, and headed off to the office.
This evening my wife asked if everything had gone OK with the electricians: she was unable to get to the Internet from either her PC or her Mac. (Don’t ask….) Both of these systems use WiFi (802.11G)… so what was going on.?
I tried to log in to the Belkin AP from the Ethernet-connected Mac. It failed – “bad password”. After a couple of retries, I found was able to log in without a password. It soon became apparent that somehow (presumably due to all the power cycling) the device had been reset to factory settings. No passwords, default ESSID, no wireless security, no specific MAC restrictions, PST TZ, and wide open to all comers… but unusable by my wife’s systems, because each was configured to use only my ESSID. (There are about 5 neighbours’ wireless networks reachable from different parts of our house, some with no security.)
I re-entered all of the configuration information (yes, I had a back-up copy!) and we’re now back to normal operation. However I’m distinctly uncomfortable with the idea that power cycling the access point could leave my wireless network wide open. That’s not my idea of fail-safe.
(Perhaps it’s an “NSA feature”.)

A correspondent reminded me that I hadn’t yet posted my final thoughts about my big trip, as I’d promised. So here goes.

• First and foremost, everything went exactly according to plan: the travel; my meetings in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Prague; the TAC meeting in Louisville, and the colloquium at SeeBeyond’s facility in Monrovia. Thanks to lots of people for all their support, especially Susan, Pam, Pavel, Ruchi, Vijay, and Greg.
• With respect to Sun’s global engineering facilities, it’s ever so easy for a senior person to fly in for a quick visit, give a talk, shake a few hands, and disappear on the next flight out. The first time you show up, people are understandably cautious: is it going to be worthwhile taking the time to work with this visitor, or is he or she just another tourist? (Cf. Dilbert’s “bungee boss”.) On your second visit, people tend to open up, and you can accomplish a lot more.
• Oddity #1: I visited a reasonably large bookshop in Bangalore, and two things struck me. First, there were as many business books as works of fiction. Second, many kinds of fiction and non-fiction works were shelved together. For example, science-fiction and science were shelved as a single subject; likewise whodunits and true crime. (And based on the computer books and magazines, it would appear that there are no Mac users in India… 🙁 )
• Oddity #2: To get to the United Airlines Red Carpet Club lounge at Frankfurt airport, you have to go through an extra security check. Apparently the regular airport security is viewed as insufficient.
• The new airport terminal at Prague is probably the most elegant (and functional) that I’ve ever seen.
• Los Angeles is easy to navigate around, as long as you get precise directions. I downloaded turn-by-turn directions from LAX to my hotel in Arcadia into my Treo, and everything worked out fine. However instead of getting return directions, I relied on reading the original directions in reverse. Bad idea: within a few miles I found myself inadvertantly exiting the freeway into a maze of residential streets. Fortunately I had time to recover, but the lesson was clear.
• Seamless voice and data connectivity worldwide is a reality. It’s not cheap – my voice and data roaming charges in India, the Czech Republic, and Germany totalled $400 – but performance was flawless. However with airborne WiFi becoming a reality, I think I’m going to have to investigate Skype.

So I zoom all over the world, blogging like crazy, and then I get home and go quiet. Why? No special reason; I’ve just found myself running around, dealing with lots of small matters since I returned.

• As I was packing up on Wednesday morning, I found that the latch on my 15 inch PowerBook wouldn’t catch. This used to be a perennial problem with PowerBooks and iBooks, but I thought Apple had solved it. I guess not…. On Thursday afternoon I took the machine to the Genius Bar at the Apple store near my home. The “genius” looked at it, and said, “Oh yes, routine fix, it’s under AppleCare, good, but it’s an offsite job, have you backed it up, and is there a test account the technicians can use?” (Because, apparently, if they can’t log in as part of fixing things, they are liable to wipe the disk.) I raced home, backed up 32GB onto a handy FireWire drive, added a suitable account, and made it back to the store at 4:55 PM, just in time for the 5:00 PM pickup. Right now the system has been fixed and is on its way back from Texas(?!) to Massachusetts. Weather permitting (see below), I should get it on Monday.
• I had a lot of fun photographing all sorts of stuff on my recent trip, but although quite a few shots came out quite well, I was also very frustrated. Take my attempts to photograph birds in Bangalore. The Nikon Coolpix 5600 that I was using is a perfectly good point-and-shoot camera, but with only 3x optical zoom I was never going to get really decent pictures of those herons and kites. So today, after studying the various online reviews of digital cameras, and stalking the aisles of Best Buy and Circuit City to check out how the various controls felt on different cameras, I bought myself a Kodak P850. Like my Nikon, it’s 5.1 megapixels; unlike the Nikon, it has a 12x optical zoom with image stabilization. If all goes well, you should expect to see the results in my Gallery in the near future.
• And in fact, the first pictures that I upload will probably be reminiscent of those I posted this time last year. We have another blizzard heading our way, and Sunday is likely to be meteorologically interesting…

It’s every business traveller’s nightmare: sleeping through the alarm clock. In this case the alarm clock was my Treo, and I slept through it because I’d switched it to “silent” mode during dinner last night. So at 5:15 a loud buzzer sounded in my room. Not the phone (why not?) but a noise disturbingly similar to a fire alarm. I jumped up, checked my watch*, and realized that this was the time that my driver was to pick me up!! 10 minutes later I was dressed and out of my room, and by 5:40 I was meeting my colleagues at the airport. I was marginally awake, and acutely concious of the lack of a shower!
Check-in for the Jet Airways flight to Hyderabad was a breeze. Inevitably the only available seat was a middle…. Never mind, it’s only a 45 minute flight. (And since this is India, we’ll get a full hot breakfast on the flight.) We’re bussed out to the stand to board the 737-700, which is almost full.
By 7:25 we are fed and descending towards HYD. The first officer comes on the PA to announce that the temperature in Hyderabad is already 30C (86F).
I’m visiting the ex-SeeBeyond facility in Hyderabad with a number of colleagues from the Bangalore office. Last time I was here with my colleague Dale Ferrario, we both noticed the complete anonymity of the office, with no SeeBeyond signage to be seen. I’m sure he’d be pleased with what greeted me as I walked into the building this time around:

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* There’s an odd thing about my watch. It’s a Citizen Skyhawk, an exquisite piece of engineering, solar powered. You set it to UTC, and then it can display various time zones (on the digital display or via the hands) with just a press of a button. It has just one, glaring weakness: it can’t cope with time zones that are not an integral number of hours away from UTC. India is UTC+5:30. [Corrected – thanks Amateur Blogger.] So while I’m here, I keep the watch on Karachi time (UTC+5) and mentally add 30 minutes whenever I look it it. A firmware upgrade would be nice….

Check out this piece at BoingBoing, them write to your congress-critter:

If the controversial Analog Hole bill makes it into law, US technologists will have to obey a law whose most important details are a trade-secret.

Imaging Resources has a detailed review of the new Kodak V570 camera. At about $400, this could be a must-buy.

Ultrawide angle zoom lenses are tricky and expensive to make, not to mention bulky. Kodak sidesteps these limitations by combining an ordinary 3x zoom lens and a 23mm equivalent fixed focal length ultrawide optic in a single camera.

A couple of days ago we woke up to find that one room was without power. No lights, no power to the wall sockets. While we couldn’t think why that room should have been singled out, the fix was obvious – a circuit breaker must have tripped, so I went downstairs to reset it.
Except it hadn’t. All of the circuit breakers were fine. None had tripped. None was even a little bit wobbly. I became puzzled, and more than a little bit nervous – if the breakers were fine, this suggested a wiring issue. And wiring can mean arcing or heat…. It was clearly time to call an electrician. Specifically, it was time to log in to Angie’s List.
A couple of hours later a young electrician turned up. Initially, he was as baffled as I had been. Was there a secondary panel somewhere in the house? (None that I knew of.) We searched from basement to attic, without success. Which breaker covered that room? Ah, well, bit of a problem there: the 40-circuit panel was unlabelled, unmapped.
Since we bought the house six years ago, we’d only made two changes that involved electrical work: a yard sprinkler system, and bathroom extractor fans. The electrician identified the breaker that controlled the fans, and pulled it. This looked like it might be the culprit: there were several circuits connected to this one breaker. He added a temporary splice, reconnected the breaker, and everything came back to life. Excellent trouble-shooting!
But of course this was just a short-term solution. The next day the senior electrician came by, and we assessed the situation. The 40-breaker panel dated back to the 1970s; it now had at least 42 circuits coming in to it, and it wasn’t up to (current) code. So next month we’re going to replace it with two 30-breaker panels, which will give us some headroom. And this time we’re going to label everything.