Notes on photo sphere/panoramic EXIF metadata

• Google's EXIF/XMP metadata tag specification for panoramic images
• Panorama images with sky are to have a negative value for the CroppedAreaTopPixels tag. (The panoramic viewer of Facebook ignores the value altogether, though, and assumes the horizon in the middle of the picture.)
• If a camera or software normally produces panoramic images with cylindrical projection, then doing a vertical capture actually produces a transverse cylindrical image. There is no standardized value for the EXIF ProjectionType field to cover this. (One option is to reproject them to equirectangular — which, again, is not very well supported.)
• Facebook's document on what tags to set
• The Facebook web interface insists that FullPanoHeightPixels be half the size of FullPanoWidthPixels. Else you get “no new photos were uploaded”.

/ Tags: Photo.

Asana: sub-standard service

The Asana task management's web interface is visually convoluted, has kinda two or three layered windows, and is way too DOM-heavy. It is a PITA to load and use, because some 1st year programming student thought it was a good idea to hook an event to every goddamn keystroke, not to mention the automatic scrolling of the window once the <textarea> resizes. Seriously, wtf? And if you try to access it with an exotic browser, all you get is a "not supported" error and no way to continue entering the ticket system at your own risk.

It continues similarly bad when looking at the e-mail notifications. Useless top posting wheever you see. The mails one gets have a thread-like indenting even though tickets are flat by definition, given there is no threading view and/or threaded reply ("reply to this post") in the webinterface.

Asana also has some e-mail reception interface, which seems like a boon given the JS-overloaded webpage. Except, it does not work: mails sent are simply eaten (accepted) by the Asana mail system without posting the reponse to the ticket, or yielding an error message.

When pointed out to Asana support, their staff puts forward a sort of reality denial in their responses. Hey look, I just told you what mail (that I sent) was eaten by your system. I posted mail headers and relevant parts of /var/log/mail from my end, so you know the IDs and can look it up on your side. Why are you still asking about my MUA?

Posted 2012-05-01 18:05 / Tags: Rant, Software. / link