Daily Archive for August 5th, 2008

Samsung S1050 date problem

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Doug
on August 5, 2008
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I just had the first problem with my Samsung S1050 camera.

I noticed that some of the pictures I uploaded had funny dates on them, so I went into the camera to look at the date setup.

The page has three items: the date at the top, 08/05/08, then the time, then a setting to allow you to choose whether you want mm/dd/yy, yy/mm/dd, etc.

After flailing around with it, and actually calling Samsung and confusing the poor guy on the phone so much he dropped my call (on purpose? hmmm) I finally figured out what the problem is.

The date at the top of the screen, where you can set the camera date, is ALWAYS in yy/mm/dd format, no matter what it says elsewhere. I finally figured it out when I was trying to set the month and it started at 7 and went up to 50. That’s not days or months, so it has to be years. Similarly the second field goes from 1 to 12, and the third from 1 to 31.

Last month’s pictures came in as having been taken in 2007, which is because last month was month 7, and I thought I was entering the month because THAT’S WHAT THE CAMERA SAID I WAS ENTERING! Or so I thought.

I looked it up in the documentation, and there’s a reference to this in the section for initally configuring the camera. But not in the section for setting the date.

So what kind of a bug is this?

I guess officially it’s a documentation bug. It’s not a software bug, because it’s working as designed. IMO, it’s a design problem; specifically a user interface problem. The data entry fields are not labeled as to function. However, at the bottom of the screen, there’s a place to choose your date display format. I thought that this meant that the data entry fields must be arranged according to the way you’ve chosen to format your date displays.

I think I’ll see if Tog has seen this one.

Internship 2008 final report

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Doug
on August 5, 2008
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I’m all done with my summer internship at the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. They had me working on some fancy Excel spreadsheets to help them predict the wind speed at the spaceport site. The internship was sponsored by the New Mexico Spacegrant Consortium, which does things like that.

I had a really good time, and I think I was able to help the Spaceport Authority a little bit. I plan to get back to them once I’m out of school and see if they’ll hire me.

Not only did I have fun, do something in line with my mission statement (”To contribute in a material way to the creation of a spacefaring civilization”), and get paid, I also get to give a little talk about my experience at the 2008 ISPCS conference. This means I get to go this year! Yay! I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get into this conference for a couple of years now.

I recommend you check out Spacegrant’s web site if you’re a New Mexico student looking for an interesting and well-paid internship, or perhaps a scholarship. Thanks, guys!

Oh yeah. My final report is available in the download area. Or just click here.