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Mr TIFF

inventingthefuture.ghost.io

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Re: Mr TIFF

#141

Post by tyg13 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #106
flancian wrote: post #87

I had downloaded the final Aldus TIFF specifications document, hoping to find the author’s name. However, the name is seemingly written in white text on white paper - making it invisible. What? Is there an explanation for this that I missed? Was it an Easter Egg left by the author?

I've found a number of hidden items in PDFs masked in the same way. The one that comes to mind immediately are Dell product code names hiding in official spec PDFs. (The PowerConnect 6200-series switches are "Kinnick", for example.) I always assumed it was a lazy redaction method and people weren't necessarily aware the text wasn't actually redacted.

Depends on what format you view it in. For the printed version of the spec, it's sufficient ;)

Re: Mr TIFF

#142

Post by kilibe »

John, your 10,000+ hours of research isn't just documenting inventions—it's lighting up the lamps for those hidden geniuses. Stephen Carlsen's story reminds me that our digital world stands on the shoulders of countless 'Mr TIFF's. RIP, and thanks for making his name eternal. PS: What's your next invention-hunting target?

Re: Mr TIFF

#143

Post by geokon »

piltboy wrote: post #99
geokon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not super knowledgeable about this stuff.. but out of curiosity, what advantage does it have over NetCDF? I wrote a program processing GeoTIFF data. When I had started this project I chose GeoTIFF mostly b/c i wanted something simple. And I could load them in to Java's BufferImage class and manipulate them that way. But it seems all the pros exclusively use NetCDF and GeoTiffs are for noobs (working with atmosphe…

Generally speaking I would classify TIFF and its variants as imaging formats (or for very simple numerical datasets), and NetCDF as more suited for raw data, in particular multi-dimensional data with time series, etc. For forecast and climatological data I find NetCDF is vastly superior, but also much more complicated to work with due to the capabilities and how open the format is. Just have a look at the complexity…

Yeah the complexity of NetCDF was the ick factor that made me use GeoTIFF. It's just not the level of complexity I wanted to deal with in-program. I didn't want to wade through the details to understand the format, and I didn't want to then lock users to some subset

Seemed easier to let users preprocess their NetCDFs into GeoTIFFs manually. I have a bunch of hacky scripts to massage NetCDFs from different sources in to compatible GeoTIFFs

> meaning that you can stream subsets of GeoTIFF files without having to scan through the entire file for each request.

Interesting. My performance bottleneck right now is the user selects a small regions and then the program has to read in GBs of global precipitation maps (from IMERG) and cut out tiny squares. In the extreme cases it can mean ~2 minutes of waiting for a result. This means the user can't casually select and try out different regions with quick feedback. If you have a beefy machine you can keep it all in RAM sometimes and it works better.. but it's not ideal (my 16GB machine can only handle simpler scenarios)

I'll take a closer look at in the future. At the moment I just use Java's default TIFF reader and ImageBuffer class. Maybe it'd be easy to convert to COG format and adapt in a COG reader

Re: Mr TIFF

#144

Post by darkwater »

svat wrote: post #138
darkwater wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the author was specifically investing over this, had a clue on a similar name and even edited the same page himself.

I don't know what “investing over” means, but all I can say is (repeating myself): try it with a friend, without giving them the benefit of hindsight. (Very few visitors to a Wikipedia page read its talk page, very few of them will further look at the archives of the talk page, let alone read every single comment and its corresponding commenter's name, and in this case as soon as the author knew the spelling to look…

I mean that the author was literally writing a book about this and literally conducting an investigation about who was the real author of the TIFF spec. He interviewed other people about it, he had a name that had a typo in it, he even found a white-on-white line in a PDF with the real name. He was clearly putting effort into the research.

We are humans, everybody can miss things, I mentioned "hindsight is 20/20" but still, it was in the Wikipedia discussion page for the TIFF article all the time. It's a matter of fact and some random HNer found it in minutes/hours.

I repeat myself, it was probably better that he didn't found that out and went to write a hand-written letter to the alleged author's home address, it created a much deeper human bond, which is especially meaningful since Stephen Carlsen passed away not much later.

Re: Mr TIFF

#146

Post by hellojohnbuck »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #109
hellojohnbuck wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks oisin, it's a beautiful story and his ex-wife gave me permission to share.

A huge number of us labor behind the scenes with no public acknowledgment or credit. For each idea brought to life we might hope for -at most- an epitaph carved in expired patent claims. This story is touching.

thanks daniel. i swapped a few emails with stephen's ex-wife and they melted my heart. i asked if she was OK with sharing this story of a humble genius with the wider world and she said, yes.

Re: Mr TIFF

#147

Post by hellojohnbuck »

4ndrewl wrote: post #57

The great thing about TIF was it's extensibility. Flexible (data could be stored as tiles or in stripes), multiple compression options etc. Well documented spec, easy to bolt on extras either as public tags - GeoTIFFs added projection metadata - or private, for your own needs. Back in the day, to improve a desktop application's performance I found it was simple to create a custom reader and writer to handle cases whe…

Carlsen's TIFF extensibility was what Milne and Lentczner used as a guiding principal when building AIFF, as did Leak on QuickTime years later.

Re: Mr TIFF

#148

Post by hellojohnbuck »

kilibe wrote: post #142

John, your 10,000+ hours of research isn't just documenting inventions—it's lighting up the lamps for those hidden geniuses. Stephen Carlsen's story reminds me that our digital world stands on the shoulders of countless 'Mr TIFF's. RIP, and thanks for making his name eternal. PS: What's your next invention-hunting target?

hi kilibe,

thanks for your interest.

i have concentrated on apple in the era when jobs isn't there to cancel or squash ideas and invention. many folks, not unlike stephen, come out of the woodwork. and i have slowly connected with them.

last week i documented (through interviews) tom gilley's work on apple's first hand-held pen-driven tablet called scribe. this included innovation and invention of suppressing electro mmagnetic interference, removng contemporary tech's weight, stretching battery output and so forth - as well as writing a slimmed down version of the mac/os and handwriting recognition rather than writing one completely from scratch (which was what newton/dylan) were doing.

so there's a lot of conversations to document.

Re: Mr TIFF

#149

Post by hellojohnbuck »

hellojohnbuck wrote: post #148
kilibe wrote: post #142

John, your 10,000+ hours of research isn't just documenting inventions—it's lighting up the lamps for those hidden geniuses. Stephen Carlsen's story reminds me that our digital world stands on the shoulders of countless 'Mr TIFF's. RIP, and thanks for making his name eternal. PS: What's your next invention-hunting target?

hi kilibe, thanks for your interest. i have concentrated on apple in the era when jobs isn't there to cancel or squash ideas and invention. many folks, not unlike stephen, come out of the woodwork. and i have slowly connected with them. last week i documented (through interviews) tom gilley's work on apple's first hand-held pen-driven tablet called scribe. this included innovation and invention of suppressing electro…

i do like the 'lighting up the lamps'
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