Archive for February, 2009

Learning iPhoto 09

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

I’ve been playing with face recognition in iPhoto 09. It helps with tagging photos, but it wasn’t clear to me exactly how to get going with it. Curiously, there is no match for “face” in the Help, so that was not, um, helpful. Fortunately, Gizmodo is helpful, with “iPhoto ‘09: The Definitive Review and Tip Sheet”.

Now iPhoto should be done guessing photos of my oldest daughter, so I’ll get back to telling it when it’s right.

Update: the problem was that the help cache was out of  date. Here’s how to clean it. Now the mystery isn’t why there’s no help, but why this problem lingers so long in MacOS.

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Making vCards from an LDAP directory

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

We’ve got an LDAP directory at the office with names, phone numbers, and email addresses. It’s handy to get that all into my address book, which can import vCards. So here’s a Python script that does just that: ldap2vcard.

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Web site rants, part 1

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

I’m sure this will be a regular feature (web site rants, that is).

The support web site for Canon printers (and probably other products) has a search timeout. I was trying to find some helpful information about how to get my Canon Pixma iP1600 to actually feed paper, instead of just grinding for a while. It’s never been very good at doing that. I went away from the computer for a few minutes to see the block structure one of my daughters built. I come back, and the search session has timed out.

There are lots of web sessions I want to time out (my bank account comes to mind). But a search in the printer knowledge base? What’s up with that?

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