Monthly Archives: May 2007

Photoshop CS3 / Dell Monitor colour profiling issue (Mac OSX)

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my good friend Dan has been exploring the quirkier side of Photoshop CS3 recently. It seems that when he hooked up his shiny new Dell monitor to his MacPro that it reset the CS3 Colour space to a Dell RGB one… that then forces all images and colours to be converted when they are saved out for web. Here’s the lowdown:

The problem I was having with PS CS3 web export was to do with the color profiling set up.

The Dell monitor(s) installed automatically impose a Dell RGB color space on PS leading to a color shift when you go to ‘save for web’. This is because the default profile (Dell) is automatically converted to sRGB when you select ‘Save for web/devices’. The shift in tone, gamma and saturation levels means that the colours become lighter and quite obviously different to the original.

To ensure this doesn’t happen (and that your colours are correct when they are exported out as GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs etc.) go to:

1) Edit > Colour Settings

2) Change your RGB space to ‘sRGB IEC61966-2.1′

This seems to fix the issue that I was experiencing and sets a precedent for future set ups.

my new friend

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been entertaining a new boat guest.

This is Dame Margot Fontaine and she’s very curious. She likes to drop in during the day to see what I’m up to.

She officially belongs to my neighbour Beth.

Margot Fontaine

Update: Beth’s been away for a month now, getting her boat replated and I haven’t seen little Margot for ages… =(

Old Man River

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This is a video clip from 2005 that I took of a very talented musician: Ohad Rein. He’s a solo artist who is also a member of an Australian band called ‘Nations By the River’ and has played with the likes of the Sleepy Jackson and Gomez.

His MO is a little peculiar – he travels round the world, stops off for short periods and then assembles a band to play his music. Everywhere he goes, it sounds different.

I was fortunate enough to see OMR in late 2005 – I saw them by accident at a gig at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden, where my friend Arda was playing, and they were so good that we all went to see them again the same day. We saw them one more time, for their final gig at the 12 Bar club in Denmark Street, before Ohad left for warmer climes.

The gig was amazing – a tiny venue, about 30 people there and the band managed to rouse us into a frenzy by the end with a stunning Bob Marley cover. The band’s own songs were great and I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to get hold of the album they recorded whilst in London (you can only buy it in Australia). I’ve received a copy in the post today and I can’t wait to listen to it.

Anyway here’s the clip. It might give you the slightest clue as to what’s so special about this man and his music

Host spoofing in Mac OS X

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This is a handy way to test sites that are in the process of being moved from one domain to another, or even to create your own “invisible” internet.
Normally when a user requests something from a web-based domain, their computer will connect to a Domain Name Server (DNS) and request the correct IP address for that domain. As you can see for everything that is requested on a web site you will have at least one and possibly two net requests (one for the domain translation to ip and one for the asset itself) taking place. This can slow the whole process down.

What you can do is log a set of special domains (frequently used, personal, etc) in your /etc/hosts file. This is a kind of static file DNS server if you like. This is always consulted first and you can in fact use this technique to override any web address. By creating a web site that responds to requests on a certain domain (even if it’s not registered to that server) and by “spoofing the host,” you can create extremely secret / secure web servers as they have no visible presence on the internet, except to those users who have manually set their host files up.

We’ll be using vim which is a slightly nicer version of vi the linux/unix text editor. It’s a little unwieldy at first – all keyboard commands and odd-shortcuts but it’s a doddle to use once you’re comfortable with it.

Anyway, here’s how to do it:

1. open Terminal

2. type

sudo vim /private/etc/hosts

3. press I (for Insert)

4. scroll to the bottom

5. hit return to enter a space

6. type the following line

# TEMPORARY SPOOFED IP FOR TESTING

7. hit return to enter a space

8. type the following line

123.456.789.101 www.example_domain.com

where the ip address and the example domain are those that you wish to use

9. hit return to enter another blank line

it should look like this

# SPOOFED HOST
123.456.789.101 www.example_domain.com

10. hit escape

11. type

!wq

to save the file

¡IMPORTANT! You will have to re-start your mac to refresh it’s internal dns

Windows Users: It’s pretty much the same process, with the hosts file living in c:\windows\system32\etc\ (on WinXP) usually and you can edit the file notepad.