Monthly Archives: December 2009

Surprise! Using the right inkjet photo paper really matters!

Posted on by
2

My mom’s inkjet printer gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago, and so one of my holiday-visit to-dos was to get her a new printer.  After a bit of online research, I chose a Canon Pixma iP4700, since it was cheap ($50), simple, well-reveiwed and compact enough to fit on her rather small “printer shelf.”   While I was putting it through its paces last night, I was shocked to discover that huge differences in photo quality between very-similar-seeming inkjet photo papers.

Here’s the photo I was using as a test:

My Test Photo

I chose it because: A) I like the photo; B) it has a good range of light and dark areas.  (Really, it was not a very mindful choice.)

The printer came with a few sample sheets of Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II, so I tried that first.  Worked great.  The image looked like it came out of the photo lab, with no fiddling of the print drivers at all.  Bravo!

Mom had a big box of Kodak Premium Picture Paper (Glossy) on hand, so I decided to give that a whirl.  It has a similar glossy finish and similar weight, so I figured it would work just fine.  Bzzzt.  Wrong.

Printing with the same settings as I used for the Canon paper above was a disaster!  All of the darker areas of the photo couldn’t absorb the ink, leaving a smeary, pixelated mess.  The lighter areas were better, but still visibly dithered.  Ugh.  Clearly, the printer was laying down more ink than this paper could handle.  And the color balance was totally off — way more magenta and less yellow than on the Canon paper.

I tried changing the print driver settings from “Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II” (obviously, the Canon printer is pre-programmed to know about Canon branded paper) to the more generic “Glossy photo paper” and gave it another whirl.  Nearly identical disaster, but with less ink mess.  Still horrible, grainy look

I took one more run at it, bumping the quality setting from “Standard” to “High.”  A slight improvement, but still couldn’t hold a candle to the print on Canon paper.  And the color was still way off.

I did some Googling around and found that Kodak has published sets of “recommended settings” for using its various papers in different printers.  Sure enough, the instructions for a very similar Canon Pixma model suggested choosing “Glossy photo paper” and “High” quality, and tweaking the color balance with less magenta and more yellow!

Unfortunately, the photos still looked terrible.

My conclusion: if you want really good photo quality, the paper’s compatibility with your printer really matters.  And there’s no way to tell from the specifications which papers will work best.  Clearly, the folks at Canon know something about how to design or specify paper that is optimally compatible with their ink formulation.  I suspect the same may be true of other printer + ink manufacturers, but really I have no idea if this principle holds for other brands as well.  We’ve had pretty good luck with generic matte photo paper in our old (but remarkably high quality) HP DeskJet 970Cxi at home.

There wasn’t much I could Google up on this topic when I tried, although there was some mostly-negative discussion of Kodak paper in non-Kodak printers here.

So, hopefully this article tips the balance a little bit.

Automated shame and software maintenance

Posted on by
3

Andreas Jung recently wrote “zopyx.trashfinder,” a quick-and-dirty script for assessing whether folks releasing software via the Python community’s “PyPI” repository are providing minimal metadata and actually making releases.  (Andreas has been on the warpath against sloppy release management, it seems, perhaps having been recently frustrated.)

Andreas has assessed the zope., plone., and collective.* namespaces so far.  He found 2 of 167 zope.* products with metadata problems, 2 of 117 plone.* products with problems, and 15 of 325 collective.* products with problems.

I decided to run an assessment against the Products.* namespace, which also contains lots of Plone add-on products.  The news is pretty good… out of 250 products checked, only 4 had problems.

CRAP: Products.Clouseau==0.8.4dev - description < 40 chars
CRAP: Products.Clouseau==0.8.4dev - summary < 10 chars
CRAP: Products.Clouseau==0.8.4dev - no author and no maintainer email given
CRAP: Products.Clouseau==0.8.4dev - no author and no maintainer name given
CRAP: Products.listen==0.7.1 - description < 40 chars
CRAP: Products.listen==0.7.1 - no author and no maintainer email given
CRAP: Products.listen==0.7.1 - no author and no maintainer name given
CRAP: Products.LoginLockout==0.2 - no release files, no valid download_url
CRAP: Products.PloneInvite==1.1-alpha - no release files, no valid download_url

While I think Andreas is being a bit (characteristically) tough in his conclusion that “PyPI is the public data toilet of the Python community,” given the low rate of problems, I really love the idea of regular, automated sanity checking like this, or as Alex Limi and I have called it, “automated shame.”  I hope Andreas adds the product maintainer or author’s name to the listing in a future release. ;-)

I’d love to see someone regularly interrogate all of the packages in Plone.org’s PyPI server with this query, and regularly publish the results to the Plone product-developers list.

Update: David Glick also referred me to Matthew Wilkes’ “mr.parker” which checks to make sure that PyPI packages have more than one authorized admins, in order to avoid the “hit-by-a-bus” factor.  Good stuff.

MailChimp and Salesforce integration: not even close to ready for prime-time

Posted on by
2

In the ongoing quest for solid, low-cost email broadcasting that has strong integration with Salesforce.com, I have had an eye on MailChimp, which offers a really slick, low-cost email blasting service that we had hoped could become a low-end replacement for Vertical Response, which has somewhat limited capabilities in its Salesforce integration.

MailChimp has a very slick email broadcasting system, and a very aggressive price point.  They claim to have a Salesforce integration, and so I logged in today and played around with a bit.

While much of the tool is really solid, the Salesforce integration is so rudimentary that it is actually completely, totally useless to us and our clients. :-(

MailChimp can only import ALL of the contacts from your Salesforce account — no support for campaigns, reports, or getting any kind of targeted subset of your contacts. That’s bad, but I had somewhat expected it.

What’s worse is that MailChimp can ONLY import the following fields from Salesforce:

  • first
  • last
  • email
  • salesforce ID
  • city/state/zip

That’s it. No custom fields. Zilch. I confirmed this with their tech support, who were very helpful.

Unfortunately, a Salesforce integration this limited is essentially useless for any serious organizational use.  Very disappointing.

The only glimmer of hope is that the tech support person told me the Salesforce integration is scheduled for an overhaul in early 2010, but didn’t have any details on the substance. So we will have to keep on waiting.

Bottom line: I had been hoping that we could recommend MailChimp as a solid, low-end, integrated-with-Salesforce email broadcasting solution.  But unfortunately the answer is, “Nope, not yet.”

I have had an eye on http://MailChimp.com, which offers a really slick, low-cost email blasting service that we had hoped could become a low-end replacement for Vertical Response.

They claim to have a Salesforce integration, and so at Drew’s suggestion, I logged in today and played around with a bit today.

While much of the tool is really slick, the Salesforce integration is so rudimentary that it is actually completely, totally useless to us and our clients. :-(

The details…

MailChimp can only import ALL of the contacts from your Salesforce account — no support for campaigns, reports, or getting any kind of targeted subset of your contacts. That’s bad, but I had somewhat expected it.

What’s worse is that MailChimp can ONLY import the following fields from Salesforce:

- first

- last

- email

- salesforce ID

- city/state/zip

That’s it. No custom fields. Zilch. I confirmed this with their tech support.

This renders the Salesforce integration completely and utterly useless. Very disappointing.

The only glimmer of hope is that the tech support person told me the Salesforce integration is scheduled for an overhaul in early 2010, but didn’t have any details on the substance. So we will have to keep on waiting.

Bottom line: if you were hoping we could recommend MailChimp as a solid, low-end, integrated-with-Salesforce alternative to Vertical Response, then I’m sorry to report that the answer is “Nope, not at this time.”

Groundwire is seeking a kick-ass CRM consultant

Posted on by
Reply

Groundwire’s Salesforce CRM consulting practice continues to grow explosively, and we’re again looking to hire a smart, passionate CRM consultant to build engagement and organizing databases for our environmental movement client organizations.  This is a great opportunity to work at the cutting edge of nonprofit technology and to be part of a tight-knit, collaborative team.

Full details at:

http://groundwire.org/about/jobs/CRM-Consultant

If this is you — please apply!  If you know someone that fits, please pass this along!

Noted in brief – 12/9/2009

Posted on by
Reply

Copenhagen overhype?

Posted on by
Reply

David Roberts thinks Copenhagen is a bubbling cauldron of media hype.

Consider: Copenhagen maxed out on journalist registrations, at 5,000. Supposedly there were more than 10,000 waiting in line even after that. The place is choked with journalists, not to mention folks from think tanks and NGOs who are supposed to be blogging on it. There are thousands and thousands of people in a tiny area, each under instructions from their bosses to update frequently and find fresh news, each exhausted and stressed out, each desperate for something, anything to write about. On the flip side, virtually nothing of actual importance to an international agreement will happen before the final days, perhaps the final hours, of the talks. So what are all those journalists going to write about? They’re going to write about “Climategate.” They’re going to cover NGO events and reports. They’re going to write “local color” pieces on, say, Danish police preparation. Most of all, they’re going to report obsessively every time any representative of any government says anything, or anyone claiming to represent someone who represents a government says that someone else representing some other government said something. You get the idea—every bit of pre-positioning gossip and bluster will be blown up to billboard size. There is, in short, immense incentive to exaggerate the significance of every piece of “news.”

via The ‘leaked draft’ non-story and Copenhagen journo-hype | Grist.

Noted in brief – 12/4/2009

Posted on by
Reply

2010 Washington State Environmental Priorities

Posted on by
Reply

Washington state’s Environmental Priorities Coalition has released their 2010 Environment Priorities.  These are the key issues that the entire Washington state environmental movement are going to drive forward via team offense.

The three 2010 environmental priorities are:

It’s a good list, focusing on the fundamentals at the intersection of the economy, health and the environment.  I’m looking forward to being a (small) part of the process.