8th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community. The Multimedia Metadata Community has already organized a series of 7 successful workshops in the past taking place in Aachen, Berlin, Graz and Klagenfurt. The Multimedia Metadata Community welcomes and encourages submissions from outside the core community to broaden aspects and extend the active and successful community and network with new members. The event is organized as special session of the 9th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services.

Deadline is 2007-12-14, more info here.

Social networking platforms like Xing and LinkedIn are there to link people – but how to link social networking platforms? I have profiles on both Xing and LinkedIn and quite disjoint sets of contacts. But there is now way of synchronising profiles and exchnaging contacts between the two platforms. I have some hope in Google’s OpenSocial though.

I happened to be in New York on Oct. 26, so I went to the Apple Store at 5th Avenue to get my copy. Here are some pics (those through the glass are not good due to heavy rain): http://www.flickr.com/photos/80179728@N00/tags/leopard/

Some might have always known it – but here’s the proof: There is a nice Web application by Yahoo! Research called WorldExplorer, that visualises tags of geotagged Flickr photos on a map (I heard about it at Mor Naaman’s talk at ACM Multimedia). Go there, type Vienna into the search box, go to the right zoom level and you will see that “Zentralfriedhof” (central cemetary) is the by far the largest tag!

Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof!

I have developed a plugin for iPhoto that exports the metadata of a set of images as MPEG-7 XML document. More info here.

The C++ unit testing framework CppUnit can be built on many Unix-like platforms, thus also on Mac OS X. However, to make usage in C++ based Xcode projects more convenient, I’ve created a Xcode project that builds a Carbon framework.

The project is based on CppUnit 1.12.0, made with Xcode 2.4 and build universal binaries for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). The limitation is that the graphical test runners are currently not supported, however this should be possible at least for the Qt test runner.

The framework project is available here, the framework binary package (including the header files) is available here.

I’m currently working on an MPEG-7 export plugin for Apple iPhoto 6. I started with the excellent tutorial and code sample by Dean Jackson (http://cuboidal.org/computers/mac/iphoto/exportplugins).

In the recent ADC newsletter Apple announced a export plugin API for iPhoto ‘08. The SDK is available for download (ADC membership required).

In order to create nice PDFs from PS files, Type-1 fonts should be used and Type-3
fonts avoided. The typical way to do this is to invoke dvips with a printer configuration
file that ensures using Type-1 fonts:

dvips -P cmz

This will use the font mappings in the config.cmz configuration file. However, that
will not work in some cases due to missing font mapping.

To find out if the problem exists, search the created PS file for DVIPSBitmapFont.
If this is found, Type-3 files are embedded.
The problem can be solved as follows:

1.  Determine the name of the font(s). You find that in the PS file after

DVIPSBitmapFont, e.g.
%DVIPSBitmapFont: Fd cmex9 9 1

2. Open the configuration file, e.g. config.cmz
   It will point to one or more font maps, e.g. psfonts.cmz
3. Open the font map file.
4. Locate the corresponding Type-1 file you want to use on your system
   (*.pfb), or try to download it if you do not find it locally.
5. For each missing font, add a line to your font map file:
   dviName type1Name <pfbFile, where dviName
   is the name of the font as references in the DVI file (i.e. the name you found in
   your PS), type1Name is the name of the Type-1 font you want
   to use and pfbFile is the name of the Type-1 font file.
   Example: cmr9 CMR9 <cmr9.pfb
6. Running dvips the next time will use the correct font.

If you want to embed fonts in your PDF, that’s not all (the following information is
for Adobe Distiller, other PS to PDF tools will handle font embedding differently):

1.  In the Distiller preferences menu, go to Fonts folders and add the
   directory where you’ve found the .pfb file of your Type-1 font.
2. In the Distiller settings profile you are using, go to Fonts. You can
   browse the font sources (now also the directory you’ve just added) and can
   select the font to be always embedded.
3. Note that the font name displayed there must be identical to the
   Type-1 name you specified in step 5 above. If it is not, change your font map
   file to make it match.
4. That’s all

I have written import and export reports for the genealogy software GenJ for supporting and XML representation of the GEDCOM format. More info here.