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Last week - and after getting a pretty good calendar but using iPhoto's print service last year - I found out that my printer's printhead needs some repairs (and it seemed that getting a new printer would probably be the best option, or probably even cheaper). However, I had a few photos I needed to be printed to be handled to my friends. So sure, as a Mac user, and lazy person, I decided to go with an option which would require the least amount of any actions of my side - the iPhoto print service.

Took about 4 days for my prints to arrive (which is fine, except that 3 days of that time photos were in transit, which is a loooong time here in Japan as everything usually arrives in 2 days AT MOST). But oh well, I could wait :)

However, once I opened the envelope, I was shocked! The colors were all off, skies were blown up, details were lost.. These were not the photos I took - the ones I got were automatically-balanced.

And it usually works for most people who shoot their stuff with crappy compacts (face right in the middle, skies blown up to hell, everything is average and boring). However, I was taking a different kind of picture. I was using external flash to make some "dramatic" feeling to my photo - skies underexposed and blue to the point of being dark-blue, and the person on the picture was lit with a cross-light of my external flash unit and the sun, making him pop-out.

Here's the original (click to see in full size):

And check out just what I got from iPhoto's photo service:

(iPhoto photo service: left; original, printed on my dying printer: right)

Now, everybody has different sense of what a good photo should look like, and iPhoto (FujiFilm) print service definitely works for, like, 99% or cases. Just don't ever think of getting your artistic/conceptual/anything-out-of-average photos printed. They'll "fix" the hell out of them and then some - to make them just an average stuff which comes out of any crappy point-and-shoot camera around.

Called Apple's support today and I'll be getting my refund. It is just a couple of bucks and won't change anything, but at least it'll make me happy to stick it to their asses, even though they don't really care ;) (oh.. they'll pay the postage, so cost to myself is zero)

Now I wonder which print services don't "fix" stuff for you…..

Was working on a remote machine today…

Thankfully the machine was smart enough to reboot itself :)

I've been doing some maintenance of my server, and wanted to do some spring clearning, deleting all spam files inside users' directories. These files are automatically created by spamassassin software. Also, wanted to get rid of Rails production.log files.

Doing everything manually is no fun, and I have to admit, I completely suck at shell scripting.. But if you never try - you'll never learn, so that's what I came up with.

Calculating their size

First, I wanted to find out how much space exactly files called spam inside all directories inside the /home directory take. That's the command which I came up with ( of course, I first had to cd /home ):

[root@me-ja home]# find * -name spam -type f -exec echo {} \; | xargs du -ks | awk '{total += $1} END {print total}'

2952880

A little explanation. I use 3 commands each piping its output to the next one (and the last outputs everything to standard output which is the screen. (more…)