Since your hero last blogged I had some visitors, traveled to a destination wedding in Bermuda, moved to a different state, and I’m sure some other blog-worthy things…none of which will be discussed today! No, first I have something much more exciting… a short word on color profiles!

Super high level overview: Color profiles basically tell your computer how to output images for a certain device – be it your monitor, you printer, etc. Beyond that, they are also software dependent – most browsers only support the sRGB color profile.

Now you may be wondering why I’m talking about all this. I might even say this is embarassing considering the thousands of hours I’ve probably spent using Photoshop… I realized a couple months ago that I’ve been saving and uploading all of my photos to the web with the Adobe RGB color profile and I’ve been doing it for more than two years (approximately 700 photos). Why did I do this? Well Adobe RGB was set as the default color profile in the Photoshop “Camera Raw” plug-in that I used when processing my photos.

What happens when you view an Adobe RGB image with software that only does sRGB? Basically it sucks the life out of your image. Colors are dulled and people are turned into zombies. On some photos it’s not that noticable…on others it’s definitely noticable.

Here are two screen shots from a browser that only supports sRGB. The left photo is sRGB, the right is Adobe RGB. Can you see a difference? I think it looks like my skin is going to fall off in the right photo (both due to the jowling and the grayish hue).

After a few marathon sessions spanning a couple months, I’ve finally finished replacing all of my flickr photos with sRGB versions! Huzzah! Lesson learned. I imagine in a couple years that this won’t be a big deal – some browsers already support multiple profiles, and hopefully that trend spreads.

This problem has been bugging the crap out of me since I started using GoDaddy hosting. All of my old mod_rewrite stuff stopped working and I had to find roundabout ways to get mod_rewrite working. I talked to GoDaddy support which is usually great but they told me they couldn’t help. I scoured the tubes o’ internet and found lots of people with the same problem, but not too many answers, and none that worked for me…until today! The problem was that Apache MultiViews were enabled by default in GoDaddy hosting (at least in their shared hosting 2.0 environment).

Apache.org docs say the following about multiviews:

The effect of MultiViews is as follows: if the server receives a request for /some/dir/foo, if /some/dir has MultiViews enabled, and /some/dir/foo< does not exist, then the server reads the directory looking for files named foo.*, and effectively fakes up a type map which names all those files, assigning them the same media types and content-encodings it would have if the client had asked for one of them by name. It then chooses the best match to the client’s requirements.

After I finally figured this part out, it was easy to disable. Just add the following to your .htaccess file in any directory which you do not want to use multiviews:

Options -MultiViews

So… this post is really just for random people scouring the internet tubes, probably not most of my normal readers…but it’s better than nothing.

I got two pretty awesome presents yesterday…

The first was a red Swingline stapler. Anyone who’s seen Office Space knows the story of Milton and his red stapler. (For those that don’t, just go rent the movie or watch it on Comedy Central.) The story behind it is I have been working as a subcontractor for a few months for a place where I used to be an actual employee. Since becoming a subcontractor, my workspace is constantly moved almost daily between cubes, offices, and random tables. While I was in a meeting yesterday someone put a red stapler on my desk! I still have yet to figure out who put it there, and everyone I have asked has denied it. I’m not sure if it was intended as a gift or not but I am keeping it until someone asks me, “Have you seen my stapler?”.

The second gift was a black iPod classic(named “The bPod”) as an early Christmas present from my awesome wife. I have wanted an iPod for quite a while but had a few hangups. I was too lazy to rip all my CDs, I’m not usually an early adopter and iPods kept improving every year or so, and I tend to over-think any purchase above $10. Since the iPod Classic came out, and the iPhone/iPod Touch is a pretty huge leap, I figured it was about time.