OD Master!

Well, it's not actually as cool as it sounds, but I'm now officially an OpenDirectory Master! Today I ended up reformatting the server and setting everything up one step at a time, instead of the way I did it last time, which was "everything at once."

The moment of truth, when it finally happened, was nothing short of breathtaking. At first, I was able to add accounts just fine, which was our problem yesterday. Then, we were able ot see that the clients recognized something should be happening, but we weren't sure of the exact solution. Then it clicked, of course it had something to do with DNS! So I changed a setting on the client machine and blammo, the test user logged in perfectly!

We finished up the configuration of the PowerPC Macs (two G5 iMacs, three G4 iMacs, and one PowerMac G4) and tomorrow, we're distributing a new version of the system image we made on MacBook Pro 11 to the rest of the numerous intel-based Macs. From there, we'll be in business.

Tonight, I'm also setting up the software on the G3 iBook, which is just going to be an install of Mac OS X 10.4, iWork '08 and Office 2004. Much as I'd love to take the path of my Pismo and put Office'08 on there, I doubt that it would be appreciated. Tomorrow at some point I'll install Photoshop CS2 on the iBook, and with luck, be able to join it to the 10.5 OD server. If it works, Kate will have yet another machine she can have someone use. If it doesn't, I may put OS9 on it for her, along with Final Cut Pro 2 and recommend she have someone use it for on-site video capture. I presume it'll work though, as it's advertised as working, and the 10.5 system is nearly at a default configuration.

So, with luck that'll all work tomorrow, but the biggest and hardest part of the project is done.

Switching to Bridge

This is "Part three of an unknown number of parts" in a series I'm calling "Cory talks about how he manages his images." In Part One, I described the history of the schemes I used to manage my photos, including some of the rationale behind each of my switches to a new management system. In Part Two, I ponder the affects of various systems which I could use for photo management. It's also worth noting that I sat on this draft for a very long time, so some of the time is messed up.

This is no giant shock, because it happened several months ago, but I've recently switched to a workflow featuring Adobe Bridge for organizing photos. One of the main features of this system is a heirarchy of folders and Adobe DNG files that consist of my master images, Photoshop PSD files that have files that have been changed at all, and images I've already prepared for output.

Adobe Bridge is what we'd like to call image browsing software. It's capable of interpreting Camera RAW data, building little previews of almost all types of files in any given folder, and things like assigning keywords, ratings and other metadata properties to files. It's somewhat less efficient in some of these processes (particularly rating and keywording) than a few other options available for the Mac, but on the PC, it works great. (More on that later, I'm sure.)

One great side-effect of this system is that I can actually access my files from any computer that doesn't have Bridge or Photoshop installed. Another cool aspect of Bridge is that it doesn't even require I be using a specific type of computer, or accessing my files in a particular way. Because there's less overhead involved in using the files, I can feel confident hooking them up to a network server, or leaving them on a FAT32 formatted drive and using them with my mobile Windows PC as well as my Macintosh at home.

After using the iMac to convert just over thirteen thousand images to DNG format, then split the files into the four gig buckets specified by my workflow, I started using it to give keywords to the images in the first bucket of images, from when I got my first digital camera several years ago.

One thing I noticed at this point was that while Bridge "worked" it definitely wasn't the smoothest possible solution on the Mac. it lagged when loading any significant number of images, and during the process of keywording, something that's specific to the Mac version prevented it from being able to actually add a keyword to an image unless you follow a strange set of keystrokes for each image.

But alas... as a result of PHO382, I was switched to Bridge permanently.

Well that's enough of Bridge for now, but stay tuned for the next article in this series about digital workflow management, or whatever it is I'm calling it as you read this.

The iTunes/Safari Fiasco

Let me start this post by saying that my ThinkPad already has Safari installed anyway, so I really don't care if Apple pushes a Quicktime/iTunes/Safari update to my machine. In fact, I intend to go try out the new version of WinSafari pretty soon, because I really like it, save the fact that scrolling doesn't work with the TrackPoint.

So when I started hearing about how Apple is now "pushing" Safari on people who don't know not to uncheck the box, it gave me kind of a chuckle. A lot of people are saying it's wrong that Apple is distributing Safari like this, and that it borders on the practices of those distributing malware. Of course, I'll refrain from saying anything about the Windows Live applications that always want you to install more, more more, or the difficulty of installing any kind of Google product without getting Adobe Reader, RealPlayer and one or two other things with them.

The thing is that the apps affected by this updater on Windows are all actually part of the operating system on a Mac. Which is one of the reasons I suppose the updater is probably behaving that way. On the Mac, it's the default behavior to get you updates for apps that usually ship on the system or with the retail versions, even if you don't currently have them installed. I've seen iTunes come in on Software Update for a Mac that I chose not to install iTunes on. It's just one of the things Apple does.

In all reality, between typical Windows desktop clutter, and the fact that most people don't even know what's already on their computer, I doubt most normal people will notice this. All the people observant enough to know that there's a check box they can undo have already undone said check box.

It would be evil, however, if Apple were actually hijacking machines by setting Safari up as the default browser on people's machines, or changing Firefox/IE home pages to pages explaining about Safari.

Horrible Horrible Disillusionment

The good news is that my PowerBook G3 isn't actually dead. It's just that my power adapter has died. The bad news is that even though my G3 is now once-again alive, I'm coming to the end of a horrible horrible disillusionment about the state of the Mac as a computing platform.

In short, especially with Windows Vista, there's almost no advantage any more to owning and using a Macintosh computer. Even for photographers, web designers, and graphic artists.

This is where in previous blog entries, I would've tried to reassure you by telling you I'm not thinking about switching to Windows. But the truth of the matter here is that I've already got a great mobile Windows computer, that happens to run Adobe Bridge better than my desktop Mac computer.

To better explain the situation, I've got to ruin my next blog post and let the world know that I've officially taken my photography workflow to Adobe Bridge. It's probably a permanent move, and I'm overall quite happy with it. Even poorly behaved Bridge is fairly productive, and I've already got the first group of four gigs worth of DNG images keyworded, and I have been working on the second group. The workflow in question provides a clear path toward archiving things on DVDs, and it's a cross-platform solution.

In order to take advantage of the cross-platform nature of the Bridge workflow, I recently "acquired" Photoshop CS3, and installed it on my ThinkPad R61i. When I loaded some images into Bridge and started keywording a more recent set, I was surprised at just how fast everything goes. I don't wait for application of metadata, or for keywords to show up on images, I just work through the set, rather quickly actually, and all of the keywords are applied. The program doesn't start behaving oddly, and it can keep going for hours.

What a gyp! on my iMac, Bridge starts behaving very poorly after only about twenty minutes of keywording, and the whole program becomes unstable while it builds caches, applies metadata, and does anything other than sit idly. (Actually, I've also experienced extremely unreliable idle sitting Bridge. That was fun.) To use a trite expression, and to add insult to injury, the PC I'm running Bridge on is a low end business laptop with a slow processor and a slow connection to the external hard disc. It's got one gig more ram than my iMac, but the Macs at the School of Comm also have that extra gig, and they're just as bad at Bridge as my home iMac.

I've also noticed that I've got almost zero other Mac-only software. I like iChat and Mail, but Pidgin and Thunderbird have been doing a great job on my Windows machine. I browse the Web with Firefox, even on my Mac, and the other things in my dock are either not needed on Windows, or are available on Windows easily (like the whole Creative Suite group.)

So... while I'm not about to run out and replace my iMac this week, I'm really going to be looking at Windows desktop PCs and workstations when it's time to buy my next computer. I'm also going to be looking really hard at the Windows version of Adobe CS4, when that comes out, because as it stands, I can run Windows software very easily on my existing Mac hardware.

Such disappointment.

Photo Management.

This is "Part two of an unknown number of parts" in a series I'm calling "Cory talks about how he manages his images." In Part One, I described the history of the schemes I used to manage my photos, including some of the rationale behind each of my switches to a new management system.

I struggle with managing my images constantly. It seems like the photos I come out of my camera are always either receiving really esoteric naming schemes, or are being put into some trendy new piece of photo management software. On the other hand, images I download from the Internet, or are sent to me by people are stored haphazardly in an ill-conceived folder structure that tries to separate "pictures of friends" from "pictures of trains" and "pictures that are random."

My main problem with my personal photo collection at this point in time is the fact that it's poorly organized. Even when I find a great piece of organization/management/processing software such as Aperture, which is where my images are right now, I have problems with the actual tasks of applying metadata, coming up with a naming scheme, and deciding where in my library to put each image. It looks organized, but because I've got images from two or three different eras of management, and even a bunch of images that simply don't have good naming applied to them, it's difficult to decide where an image goes, or to find an image once I've put it in its place.

The answer, quite simply, is that I need to beef up my use of metadata and keywords. The thing I need to decide really quickly here, as I continue working on gathering even more images, is whether or not I want to continue using Aperture for my images, or if I want to look into other Mac-only programs, or switch to Adobe Bridge.

Enter Photography 382. This class is pretty amazing so far, the instructor is very energetic about the subject, and does a great job of explaining thing, which is awesome.  The focus of PHO382 is preparing digital image files for output, and the beginning of this is setting up a good workflow for acquiring, storing, backing up, and organizing digital images. The main tool for the class so far is Adobe Bridge CS3. We've been learning about batch renaming, applying metadata templates, and adding keywords to images. I expect we're going to continue learning various things about Bridge and picking things up about it as the semester progresses. So now, I just need to decide if I want to switch to it for managing my images, and when I want to do that.

I'll admit that Aperture isn't the best solution for everything I do, especially when my photos are considered, because Aperture lacks an equivalent on the Windows platform. I can't just copy my library or my folder structure out to a file server or onto a FAT32 disk and open it on a Windows computer, like the ones at work, or even my mobile computer. In addition, it's more difficult than it needs to be when I copy images from my mobile computer to my Mac, because the images are still in an unprocessed form, I have to apply my naming convention and do my organization when I get back home.

Another advantage of finding some other system by which I can organize my images is that I am not necessarily tied to the Mac as a platform. I love my Mac dearly, but I'm simply not sure if I'll ever buy another mobile Mac again, and I may not even buy another desktop Mac, depending on what Apple ends up doing in the next few years. Chances are very high that I'll have a Mac as my next desktop, but just in case, I like the idea that my option to switch to Windows is open. (In fact, I once needed to do just that, during my first semester at NAU my G3 PowerBook was always on its last leg, so I moved my then-Bridge-based collection of photos onto the Dell OptiPlex machines I'd gotten from surplus sales. The transition was really quite easy. Oddly enough, that Pentium III/933 machine got better SETI@Home scores than my 1GHz PowerBook G4 ever did.)

The main problem with having that multi-platform solution for image management, of course, is that I have no large-capacity storage areas that work with both Macs and PCs. FAT32 would almost be acceptable, except I doubt that a 750 gig fat32 drive is going to work too well. Add to that, I don't have Photoshop CS3 for Windows anyway. I may need to do research on software that lets Mac OS use NTFS drives, or software that lets Windows use HFS+ drives, because sharing drives tends to be a general problem for me, not only a photo management problem.

A big disadvantage I can see of using Bridge for my photo management is that it's not the best app ever for actually searching for things I need. Even the PHO382 instructor I have mentioned that he uses a piece of image cataloguing software, instead of only using  Bridge. I'm going to investigate this more as an opportunity for how I use Bridge (and maybe Aperture!) because I like the idea of having Bridge for setting up a lot of the metadata, naming, etc, as well as having Aperture if I want to search/catalog and do some of the things at which Aperture is great.

So I haven't actually made my decision yet, but there's a good possibility that I'm going to be moving my photo operations back to Bridge. Stay Tuned however, for Part 3 of the first-ever Strapped to a Desk multi-part series, on "how Cory manages his photos."

History of Management of Cory's Photos.

When I got my first digital camera (A Kodak EasyShare CX6220, for those of you who want to make fun of me for having owned a Kodak), I just imported my images into iPhoto. It worked well for the first thousand images, and I always thought of it as being fairly speedy. I painstakingly named and even added descriptions to many of the images, and some of my best, I posted to deviantArt. After awhile, and a trip to Michigan, iPhoto became unstable. Unstable enough that I actually lost what I think amounts to about two or three hundred  pictures I'd taken while I went to visit my grandmother in Michigan. I was, of course, unhappy, and to this day I still go on random searches for those images. They never turn up.

Then, in Fall 2005, I got my first taste of real photography, in Kate's Photo I class. I used dad's Canon AE-1 film camera for that class, and subsequently decided that I really needed to do more photography. I was, you could say, hooked on film. That Christmas, dad, knowing that I now intended to do more photography classes, and possibly even use it as a career for my real life, gave me the Nikon D50 I use to this day. It was a great camera, and it remains so, but it had something I didn't know anything about yet: Camera RAW, and more specifically, the Nikon Electronic Format.

A month or two earlier, Apple had released an exciting-looking new photo management application geared toward the needs of professionals, called Aperture. It looked like a super exciting program, with the ability to do most of the stuff I needed with my photos right in the interface of the program. I eagerly downloaded and watched tutorial videos, wanting to know more about its functionality. I decided it was the program I needed for my photos, since iPhoto had already failed me a few times, and I didn't have a modern enough version of Photoshop hanging around.

I downloaded Aperture, but realized I couldn't use it until I upgraded my computer to Mac OS X 10.4. This is an entirely separate debacle, but after getting and installing 10.4, twice, I finally got Aperture 1.0 working on my below-spec G4 PowerBook. It was an amazing program, I spent most of my time waiting for it, but it was amazing nonetheless.

Of course though, later on I decided that Mac OS X 10.4 and the speed of Aperture were unbearable, so I "found" a copy of Photoshop CS2, exported my photos out of Aperture, and installed 10.3 back on the PowerBook. At this point, I'd also acquired my first laser printer, and the solution seemed clear, I started right away creating my second photo organization scheme.

Using a MacBook Pro at the high school, I renamed and exported all of my images to one big folder. I then started using Adobe Bridge to rename the images a certain way. PIC_XXXXX.ext where XXXXX was a unique number I assigned to each image based on the date it was taken. Starting at folder zero and working my way through about two hundred folders' worth of images (at least that many) with thirty images per folder, I organized all of my images into neat little buckets of images, perfectly sized for printing contact sheets using Photoshop CS2. The idea was pretty good, I thought. I print out a bunch of contact sheets of my images, and it takes me less time to findt he image I want. Then, I pull the image out of my collection, do whatever to it, and save the derived file to a separate place. It turns out, I wasn't actually all too far off with this sytem.

Although soon, I was separated from my contact sheet binders, and since I'd gotten the much faster iMac in December, 2006 anyway, I decided I could safely move back to Aperture. And move I did, which was amazing because Aperture is very speedy on that iMac, I found myself tagging and naming and describing and sorting, until I stopped, which was cool, I guess.

Organizing photos is a difficult thing, and I'm currently not sure what exactly I am going to do in the future, with that. I'm currently in a class called PHO382, where one of the first things we're learning is all about managing images using Adobe Bridge CS3. At this point I haven't changed from Aperture, but in the next few weeks, I am going to try to decide whether or not I want to use Bridge or Aperture for my photos. This will be a permanent decision, and as I now have almost thirteen thousand images, it's a pretty important one. I'll keep the blog posted, so definitely consider this to be "part one, of an unknown number" in a series of "Cory talks about how he manages his images."

Mac World San Francisco, 2008.

Every blog and forum I read has had a commentary on MWSF 2008, universally considered the Christmas of the consumer Mac world. Having bought an iPhone just shy of five days before the keynote, I'll start off by saying I was somewhat worried that my shiny new device would already be out of date. Luckily, not only was the iPhone not replaced, but it received a nice software update. The most important feature is that which allows me to manually manage the music and videos on the device, just like my iPod.

The first thing Jobs revealed was Time Capsule. It's a relatively simple device, it's basically Apple's Airport Extreme base station hooked to a 500GB or 1TB "server grade" hard disc. The gist of the device is that you can easily set up Time Machine to automatically and wirelessly use the Time Capsule as its backup drive. You can use it with "all the Macs in your house." Simple enough, and I think it's a cool device, the only questions I've got so far involve whether or not you can add to the storage in your Time Capsule, or if it would be possible to own more than one Time Capsule, and concatenate the available amounts of storage.

Afterward, Jobs demonstrated some iPhone software updates. I installed the iPhone software update recently, and without a doubt, my favorite feature, the feature that might actually cause me to keep the iPhone, is the ability to manage my music and movies manually. It's how I use my 30-gig video iPod, and I'm glad it's available for the iPhone. The third major announcement of the keynote was new iTunes movie rentals. I'm really excited about that one because like Jobs says, I'm the kind of person who doesn't really watch movies more than once. In a way, it's a lot like a daily ticket on satellite TV, where I can watch the same movie several times in one day. It'll be like in December when I watched "Chuck & Larry" about five times.

Part of the iTunes update involved AppleTV. In this part, Jobs admits that they'd gotten the concept of AppleTV wrong, and provides updates on the software of AppleTV, including the new user interface and renting an HD movie. The whole experience looks really well designed, and I've got to admit that the AppleTV with its software update looks really nice. I don't really want one, but I also don't really have an appropriate television with which I'd be able to peruse the content.

By far, the most important part of the keynote, the one causing the most controversy online, is the MacBook Air. Let me start by saying that I think the MacBook Air is an awesome product, and it's something Apple hasn't had in awhile. Let me also say that it's not something I'm going to be buying any time soon. Even though I think it looks awesome, and would love to be able to bust one out during class, but the high price and the fact that I've already got three working IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, all of which have reasonable battery life, and good capability as note taking machines.

The main problem with MacBook Air, of course, is the price. For $1800 (retail) you get a 1.6GHz Core2Duo, from the new Penryn platform, 2 gigabytes of memory, and an 80 gigabyte hard disc. You don't get much other than that, of course, because being so thin, Apple had to make compromises somewhere, and they did it in reasonable areas I think. The backlit keyboard is full size, and the LED-backlit display is a full 13.3" glossy display, similar to the MacBook's display.

Not included are an optical drive, and a few "essential" ports. What I've noticed is that the biggest grouching people have been doing is the result of the ports. The MacBook Air features only a MagSafe power port on the left side, and on the right side behind a little door, one USB port, one "Micro DVI" port, and one audio output port. The biggest things the MacBook Air is missing is apparently another four USB ports, audio input, an internal optical drive, and FireWire. What bugs me about that is that the inclusion of those things basically turns the MacBook Air into a MacBook Pro, plus a few extra USB ports.

The problem with this, of course, is that the entire point of the MacBook Air isn't the thing those people want. Those people want a $599 mobile machine, as fast as a full-sized MacBook, with discrete graphics, basically adding up to a 12" PowerBook G4.

My take is that the MacBook Air is really intended as a companion Mac to a powerful desktop computer. I can see a lot of Mac Pro owners, or people whose desktops are high end iMac systems wanting one of these to use as their mobile systems, especially if they, like myself, prefer doing as much computing as possible on their desktop systems when they're in their offices or homes. MacBook Air is great then, for people who need something they can use on a plane or train, and that they need to be as light as possible. When it comes down to it, there will be people who are willing to pay this price for such a mobile computer.

Maybe if I were more patient, and hadn't already bought the ThinkPad, I would've gotten one, although I'm really happy with the ThinkPad, and think I'll have it for quite some time to come as my mobile computer. Maybe my next mobile machine will be some kind of MacBook Air successor.