After waiting for the barrier to entry to become feasible for my pocketbook, I finally jumped into the DSLR world by purchasing a new Nikon D5100. Thus far it has been an absolutely wonderful camera and has provided me many photos that I will cherish for many years to come. My first one thousand exposures or so were taken with an incorrect date programmed into my camera. Every bit of date related metadata in my images is off by exactly one year. Looks like I forgot it was 2011 and put 2010 into the settings. I use Aperture to process, organize and edit my photos, but I could find no way to increase the year by one on all of my images.

Enter ExifTool. The amazing perl script that will read and save metadata to almost every digital photo file format known to man.

ExifTool makes it easy to increase the year by one, with this simple command that can be run on an entire Directory, or individual file:

exiftool -AllDates+="1:0:0 00:00:00" DIR (or filename)

Now, I peeked inside my Aperture Library and found the directory called “Masters”, where all Master image files are stored. I ran the following script inside the directory and it took care of business. My semi complicated find command ignores files with spaces, ignores Canon, iPhone and other unwanted files. What I’m left with is my Nikon pictures, which I can then run the exiftool command on.

#!/bin/bash
 
function is2010() {
	fileName=$1
	creationYear=$(exiftool $fileName | grep "Date/Time" | sed 's/^.*: //g' | awk -F":" '{print $1}' | grep 2010)
	return $?
}
 
imageFiles=$(find . -type f ! -name "*(*" ! -name '* *' \( -iname "*.jpg" -or -iname "*.nef" \) ! -iname ".*" ! -iname "IMG_*" ! -name "CSC_*")
 
for f in $(echo $imageFiles)
do
	if ( `is2010 $f` ); then
		exiftool -AllDates+="1:0:0 00:00:00" $f
	else
		echo "skipping $f"
	fi
done

While talking about how excited I am for tonight’s national championship game, I spilled boiling hot green tea all over my foot. It went through my socks and down into my shoe where it continued to sit and further burn my skin. It hurts bad. If the Ducks lose tonight, the pain from my foot should override the devastation from a BCS loss.

UPDATE: If you want to see some seriously gross foot burn action follow this link. I’m warning you, it is quite disgusting. I guess burns get worse after a couple of days.

The subject matter of the average iPhone photo is so comically different from what you see come out of traditional single-use cameras. By all known and accepted photography standards, my phone snapshots are horrible. They are out of focus, framed poorly, the lighting usually sucks, but they have a certain quantity of “realness” thanks to the impulsivity that usually plays a role in their capture.

An almost complete trail of where I’ve been over the last couple of years. Missing ATL, LAX and DENVER, but close enough!

I love my garage. It is, with out a doubt, my favorite room in the house. Here are some photos of my latest efforts to organize my server infrastructure. At the bottom of the gallery you’ll find a little video tour I shot with my iPhone. If you’re curious, I’ve got an AppleTV running Ubuntu 8.04, a Dell D520 Laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and a Dell XPS 720 with Ubuntu-Server 10.04 installed.

If you find yourself needing to limit the types and the length of input in a UITextField object, the below “tutorial” should suffice. Make sure you configure your nib (.xib) file to delegate control to your class (usually your view controller class).

Complete the setup of your class to be a delegate for UITextField by adding “UITextFieldDelegate” to your list of Delegates in your header file.

ViewController.h

@interface QuickFactorViewController : UIViewController <UITextFieldDelegate> {
	IBOutlet UITextField *inputParameter;
}
 
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UITextField *inputParameter;
 
@end

For my code, I used some constants which are defined at the top of your class implementation file (*.m file).
ViewController.m

#define LEGAL	@"0123456789"
#define MAX_LENGTH 9

Then you need to implement the “shouldChangeCharactersInRange” method as stated by the UITextFieldDelegate protocol. This example will filter the input so that only numbers are allowed. It will also only allow up to 9 digits to be entered.
ViewController.m

- (BOOL)textField:(UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange:(NSRange)range replacementString:(NSString *)string
{
	if (textField.text.length >= MAX_LENGTH && range.length == 0)    {
        return NO; 
    }
 
    NSCharacterSet *cs = [[NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:LEGAL] invertedSet];
    NSString *filtered = [[string componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:cs] componentsJoinedByString:@""];
    return [string isEqualToString:filtered];
}