A Trip to the River

I got up too late to go to the seaside on Sunday. I did the next best thing and took the Skytrain to the river. The Chao Phraya River runs through Bangkok and is the coolest place to be on a hot day. Today wasn’t especially hot but the river breezes were still welcome.

I took the best river bargain available – a 3 Baht (about ten US cents) passenger ferry ride from Central Pier (Saphan Taksin Skytrain Station) to Thonburi side. I got great views of the river and the hi-so hotels on both sides. I’d forgotten how big the Shangri-La Hotel is.

The light was fading when I came back on the ferry. I was going to walk back over the bridge but I was lazy. I got this shot of one of the Chao Phraya River Express boats docking at the pier next to ours. My little Nikon Coolpix P6000 did a nice job and I think it is good example of “filling the frame”.

I like the warm tones.

Beautiful Bangkok Winter Morning

I saw this article from the New York Times when I got up this morning. Then I looked out of my window and saw this:

Bangkok Morning from the Apartment. Best viewed large on Flickr.

I couldn’t resist taking a panorama photo and posting it to Flickr.

If you are suffering from the cold, maybe there are standby seats available on the next flight to Bangkok. Think about it!

I’m typing this with the windows wide open and a cool breeze blowing through the apartment: no aircon needed. The loudest noises I can hear are people playing tennis on the court outside.

If I’d got up earlier I would have taken a bus to the seaside in Pattaya. It’s an easy trip from Bangkok and the traffic is reasonable on weekends. I’ll find somewhere else nice to go. I should be an earlier riser: it will get hot later.

On a technical note: I show panoramas using different focal lengths. This one is 24mm and it came out well. The other four came out with banding in the sky. The Photoshop CS4 “merge to panorama” tool did not blend the pictures well. I took them all with a consistent exposure at F8.

This one is fine and I don’t feel like being a perfectionist today.

Kässbohrer-Setra Coach

This is the first Kässbohrer-Setra coach I have seen in Thailand. It’s entering the Dusit Thani Hotel. The coach is operated by a big private coach operator Namptech for Assumption University (ABAC) “The First International University in Thailand”. Unfortunately it wasn’t loaded with students.The language of instruction at ABAC is English. Their graduates are prized by many businesses as the normal standard of English taught here is low.

I usually see an ABAC coach outside the Dusit Thani on weekends when I go to the nearby Subway Station. The university must have a regular meeting or function there.

Due to the high tax on imported chassis many buses and coaches in Thailand are re-bodied. That’s why this one looks newer than its registration (license plate) implies.

Canon MP610 Printer Problem

I was printing some photos for friends this evening when my Canon MP610 Multifunction printer developed a problem.

The printer’s display showed:

U052

The type of print head is incorrect. Install the correct print head.

That’s meaningless! The print head was fine a second ago. Why does it now say the type is incorrect. Also – what is the “correct” print head it supposedly needs? As far as I know there is only one type – the type that I installed when I bought the printer.

I looked for the on-screen manual on my laptop. Of course it was in Thai due to the problem I wrote about here. The installation software assumed that as my computer is in Thailand I wanted Thai-language software. Wrong!

I had to hunt online for an English manual. Of course this was a time my Internet connection went back to its old slow ways and the download took 15 minutes. I did not expect much from Canon’s troubleshooting guide and I wasn’t disappointed.

Canon MP610 Error U051-U052

I did as it advised. I removed all four ink tanks, lifted the lock lever for the print head and removed it. The printer is well-designed. Everything was easy to see, remove and re-install.

I keep the printer under a dust cover when I’m not using it so the inside of the printer was clean.

I re-installed the print head and the ink tanks, closed the cover and …

The same U052 error appeared. I tried once more but it’s a hard error.

So my MP610 is now a great doorstop. It does not even function as a scanner because this error comes up during its Power-On Self-Test and it won’t go on-line until the error is cleared.

My “Canon Service representative” is Canon (Thailand) on Sathorn Road. The printer’s too big to take on the Subway so I’ll have to take a taxi. I still have the original box.

The printer is just over two years old and has printed 3,372 items:

B&W Documents	1,303
Colour Documents	1,162
A4 Photos	269
4×6 Photos	603
T-Shirt transfers	11
CDs	24

I don’t think that is a lot of use. I’ve been very pleased with its printing up to A4 size. It works well with Lightroom and Photoshop as well as a general-purpose printer and scanner. My only complaints have been about the excessive cost of ink and the fact it claims an ink tank is empty far before it is.

Fortunately it is still in production so there should not be any problems getting it fixed.

I read somewhere that the print head is an expensive item. The Bangkok Frugal Photographer is annoyed.

I checked the Canon (Thailand) web site. They have email support. I sent them this message:

My Canon MP610 shows error U052 “The type of print head is incorrect. Install the correct print head.” I removed and re-installed the print head as the manual advised. The error still shows.

Do I need to bring the printer to you for service? Or can I purchase a replacement print head from you?

Thank you.

Site Performance

BKKPhotographer Site Performance. Click for a larger picture.

I took a look at the Google Webmaster Tools “Site Performance” metrics for this blog.

I was surprised that the page load times have shot up recently and they say the average is 4.8 seconds: slower than 72% of all web sites.

They don’t say how many samples they took, so the mean is not very useful. It looks like there was a spike in December but the load time has gone down again. The sloth could be related to problems with the pictures I include on almost every post. I have noticed that Picapp has been very slow recently.

The page content changes every time I make a new post and WordPress splits the page and includes an “Older Entries” link  after 10 posts. (I think that’s the rule they use).

I am not going to get too excited about the mean metric but I will watch the graph more frequently.

Please leave a comment if you have been annoyed (or pleased) by the performance of this blog.

I’m a Google Wave Previewer

I used be the first kid on the block (as the Americans like to say) to try new software. My PCs were full of Alpha-this, Beta-that along with utilities I’d forgotten I had. But since I’ve moved to Bangkok I’ve adopted a simpler life. I’ve minimised the software on my one Windows laptop to the tools I really need. I uninstall software I don’t like or use. My Compaq CQ40 is over six months old and it’s still humming along. I view that as an achievement – I am a firm believer in “software rot“.

However I made an exception for Google Wave. I wasn’t on Google’s invite list so I requested an invitation. I wrote the Wave team a humourous (for deadpan me) message telling them they needed testers from Thailand where the internet is slower than they are used to.

A couple of days later they sent me an invitation. I doubt a human read my request – Google is famous for automating everything.

Google Wave Preview. Don't try to use the URL to get your own preview. It's a one time code and I've used it.

I’m interested in Google Wave because it is just the kind of software we talked about at HP (Hewlett-Packard) back in the 1980s and 1990s – easy collaboration on projects over a network. It’s surprising how long it has taken to realise our “vision” (a word we used far too much). Maybe Google consciously referred to our “HP New Wave” name from 1988-9. (I doubt it – I bet half the engineers on the team weren’t born when HP New Wave came out).

I don’t have anyone to collaborate with and I need to view the video that explains the Google Wave approach. That could be challenging in Bangkok. Even though my internet access is faster than it was because of Google Public DNS and the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) it is still creaky, especially at night.

I note how much Google is drawing me into their software ecosystem. Currently I am using:

• Google.com as my default search engine. I have not seen a good reason to use Microsoft Bing. It’s one annoyance is that Google persists in showing its user interface in Thai. I’ve told Google via my account settings that I want my language to be English but it forgets.
• Gmail as a secondary email account. My primary email is a Yahoo Mail account I’ve had for over ten years.
• I have a Google Site but I don’t use it much.
• Chrome as my secondary browser. I use Firefox most of the time.
• Google Earth and Google Maps. I use Google Earth a lot for geocoding my pictures in Lightroom via Jeff Friedl’s plugin.
• Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. I downloaded the former mainly to try its face recognition software. I use Picasa Web Albums as an alternative to Flickr. Picasa will never replace Adobe Lightroom as my Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution nor Adobe Photoshop for heavy picture editing.
• Google Reader. It gives me too much to read – I have culled many sources I used to follow or I’ll waste too much time on topics of marginal interest. Reader shows many more ads than when I started but they are not intrusive. I note that I am still following seven Google blogs.
• Google Docs as a repository for certain information. I have not used it much for document creation yet: I don’t trust my Internet connection enough. Potentially I could replace my use of Microsoft Office for routine documents and spreadsheets.
• I have used Google Translate to translate this blog to Thai. Thai people tell me it does an acceptable job. It works in 149 other languages too. I used it to get a translation of some Thai comments somebody put on two of my Flickr pictures.
• Google Public DNS. It’s working well for me since I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago.
• I’ve used Google Webmaster Tools and Google Browser Size to optimise this blog as much as WordPress permits it. I wrote about the latter here. I have not changed this blog as a result of overlaying their contour map on this page however.
• I have Google Gears enabled for a few sites like WordPress – although I cannot see any benefits. It looks like HTML5 will supplant Gears eventually.

I don’t use Google’s Blogger to host this blog. I consciously sought out a smaller competitor with a good reputation: WordPress. Unlike with ACDSee Pro I have not regretted it.

I am amazed how much I’ve been drawn into Google’s world. But the Bangkok Frugal Photographer hasn’t paid them one satang for the privilege. Amazing.

Here We Go Again – Lightroom 2.6 Available

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6 and its required DNG Converter (5.6) are now available for download from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/. That’s a month since the 2.5 update came out.

This is the release many have been waiting for to support the Canon EOS-7D and Nikon D3s. I don’t know if they made any changes from the Release Candidate that has been available for almost a month.

What if for Lightroom 3 Adobe said that the product will only support DNG files? Then they’d only have to release a new DNG converter to support new cameras. I wonder if the photography community has enough confidence in DNG that they’d accept it. DNG is a mature technology: Adobe introduced it in 2004. DNG has immense advantages over a multitude of proprietary RAW formats. DNG is an open specification so it isn’t dependent on Adobe’s continued prosperity or whims.

Surely if DNG is good enough for Leica it is good enough for the rest of us.

Moreover Adobe could surely make the DNG converter more modular so users do not have to download the full product every time. They could release a new DLL (or the equivalent for the Mac).

This is a bigger concern for users on slower internet connections. I guess it isn’t on the radar screen for the Adobe team as they assume everybody has fast connections for their work machines.

I looked at the list of other defects fixed in Lightroom 2.6:

The crop tool would unlock a locked aspect ratio after a rotation adjustment

For Mac OS X 10.6 customers, visual artifacts could appear when panning an image viewed at 1:1 in the Develop module.

For Mac OS X 10.6 customers, the 10.6.2 update included a correction that prevented Lightroom 2 from opening more than two files using the Edit-in-Photoshop functionality.

Lightroom 2.6 provides a fix for an issue affecting PowerPC customers using the final Lightroom 2.5 update on the Mac. The issue, introduced in the demosaic change to address sensors with unequal green response, has the potential to create artifacts in highlight areas when processing raw files from Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and various medium format digital camera backs.

Lightroom 2.5 and earlier did not support the updated Panasonic DMC-LX3 aspect ratio modes added with the camera’s latest version 2.0 firmware.

From http://www.adobe.com/special/photoshop/Lightroom_26_ReadMe.pdf.

The Crop Tool fix is the only one that affects me and I have never noticed the issue. Again I wonder how Adobe decides what to include in a point-release.

By-the-by, there is something wrong with the Adobe Support Forums I’ve been accessing to ask and answer Lightroom questions. For the past few days the site has been impossibly slow. Other sites are fine with the new Asia America Gateway so it must be something up with the Adobe infrastructure.

Snow in England

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8419764.stm.

This is one of the many times I remember I am fortunate to live in Thailand. The weather is glorious here! It’s about 25 degrees with humidity only 35%. The skies are quite clear and I can see for miles from the apartment.

Here’s a comparison of the BBC Weather Forecasts for Bangkok, London and San Francisco. You can click on a picture to see it full-size.

Here are links to the current forecasts:

• Bangkok.
• Greater London.
• San Francisco.

Oldsmobile Cutlass in Bangkok

I re-found this picture on my Flickr photostream by chance when somebody made it a favourite.

It bought back memories because I rented a car just like it (even the same colour) from National Car Rental in California in 1982. I’d never been in anything so huge – let alone driven it. My car in England was a Mini.

I cannot imagine it’s a practical drive in Thailand for many reasons, its size being just one of them. But you definitely get noticed.

Google Browser Size

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-browser-size.html

I think this is a clever idea. It’s a “contour map” of this blog showing how much of the screen users can see at various browser sizes. They compile it from statistics Google gathers when users visit Google.com then apply it to a web page. They say it very important if you have a “Buy”, “Donate” or “Download” that the button is visible without scrolling.

Google Browser Size BKKPhotographer. Click to see full size.

The tool’s creators retell an anecdote about the positive effects of moving the “Download” button for Google Earth 100 pixels higher.

I don’t have any such buttons but it did make me wonder if putting my Calendar widget near the top on my right-hand-side column of WordPress widgets was the best choice.  I don’t know how many people search a blog like that but my intuition tells me it is a minority. (WordPress will have the statistics but I don’t think they share them).

Here’s the equivalent map for the Google.com home page. (Of course the contour map is the same – but it overlays in a different page). It shows that 5% of users don’t see the “Make Google Your Home Page” link without scrolling. I guess the map includes users who view the web from mobile devices with very small screens.

Google Browser Size Google.com. Click to view full size.

It does not allow for more sophisticated web sites that rearrange themselves depending on the size of the user’s screen. But web designers who are that sophisticated probably don’t need this tool.

I like the way the engineers took the trouble to make it possible for me to interact with the page even though it has the contour map overlay. If I’d had done it I probably would not have bothered. But that sort of engineering reminds me of HP in the “good old days”.

They don’t say anything about what they had to do to get the source browser size data from the Google repository. This is an unofficial “20% project“. I wonder what internal administrative procedures Google has in place. Browser size is harmless but they keep much more personal data that must be strictly guarded.