Aperture

I can't say that I am power photo user. Heck my main camera is my iPhone and I honestly rarely shoot with anything else anymore. You know the whole philosophy the best camera is the one you have with you. When I do want to edit pictures I use photoshop. I have been a photoshop user for 15 years now and I am comfortable and can get around in the app. That being said it is expensive! I am currently running PS3, because I have not wanted to bite the bullet for an upgrade. I have been toying around with trying out other apps for my photo processing.

My current workflow is to take pictures on the iPhone. Sync the iPhone and use iPhoto to get the pictures off the iPhone. At the end of an import iPhoto asks you if you want to delete the pictures off the iPhone. Works like a champ! My wife also has an iPhone and iPhoto is great at detecting it is a different phone and runs the whole process again.

Next I use iPhoto to organize my events. This often includes combining pictures that my wife and I took. Often we are at the same event and both taking pictures. Once they are all organized, I fire up MacDaddy and upload them to SmugMug. MacDaddy integrates spectacularly with iPhoto and makes uploading to SmugMug awesome.

Now the next time I sync my iPhone I have iTunes set to sync over my last 20 events. This way I always have our most recent photos on our phones. Again the sync works perfectly for both myself and my wife. And on the topic of Apple Kool-aid. The event sync works to our iPad. Oh and it works to our appleTV. We often listen to music through the appleTV and have the screen saver set to pull events. Turns the TV into a big fat photo album

We are happy. Photo's everywhere, nice seamless process.

Now enter the app store and the ridiculous discount they are selling Aperture for. I did a very quick research scan on Aperture. Most said it was iPhoto on steroids. Afraid the price was going to go away I pulled the trigger.

First impression, Aperture is a good photo organization tool, but it is anything but iPhoto on steroids. The entire work flow that I documented above, does not exist in Aperture. You can use Aperture to get photo's off your iPhone, but it does not delete them. This means you have go back one through one and delete them. This step alone is a deal killer for me. Apple thread on the topic. Beyond that the entire event synchronization process back to the iPhones, iPads and AppleTV are dependent on the events being in iPhoto.

SmugMug does not directly support uploading photo's from Aperture like it does iPhoto. They do link to a 3rd party plugin that will do it. Before becoming a SmugMug customer I ran my own photo site based on an opensource tool called coppermine. There was a 3rd party plugin for iPhoto, which the developer gave up on and it stopped working after an iPhoto update. Needless to say I am once bitten twice shy about 3rd party plugins.

There is an option that allows Aperture to use your iTunes library. This would require me to use iPhoto to sync the photo's off the phones. Then start Aperture to organize and edit. I have not tried it yet because I am not too keen about using 2 programs instead of one. I am also a bit hesitant to have both iPhoto and Aperture hitting the same library because I can imagine it will lead to corruption.

I was expecting an application that gave me better photo editing, organization and syncing than iPhoto. Looks like Aperture has much better editing and organization, but that it completely lacks the synchronization features of iPhoto.

Looks like I will be staying with iPhoto for my photo library for the time being.

I also received a very strong suggestion to try Picasa as a photo editor which at free I am going to give it whirl next time I need to do photo editing.

More ZFS awesomeness!

I recently had the "privilege" of getting to interact with my ZFS server at an administrative level. I use my ZFS server as a file server. I access it from my Apple, Linux, and Solaris hosts through NFS. I also access it from my windows hosts through CIFS. CIFS is Sun's implementation of the Microsoft SMB service. There is a known bug in OpenSolaris 2009.06 where the SMB service can hang, and the only way to fix it is to reboot. Think of that irony! How do you cause a unix server to reboot, install a service to support windows. The bug is fixed in OpenSolaris next, but with the Oracle acquisition of Sun, who knows when that is going to see the light of day.

Back to the privilege I was talking about. My SMB service had hung yet again. It honestly does not happen that often. Down to the server room I went. Shutdown my running virtual box VM's, and issued the reboot command. The server did not reboot, which was odd. Tried a shutdown command and the server hung. This was starting to get weird it had never done that before. At this point I had no choice but to power cycle and of course the server did not come back up. The screen was full of errors that a quick google led me to the worse case scenario, my disk was blown.

Now I know many of you have heard me beat the drum about bad disks. It is why I built the ZFS server in the first place! My complaint has been about my Western Digital drives that fail just after they turn a year old and are out of warranty. When I cracked the case and pulled my OS drive, I saw that the manufacture date was 21Nov2003. I bought the computer in December of 2003 and that drive has been on-line pretty much 24x7 since then. One really can't complain about a HD that ran 24x7 for over 6 years! The drive was a Maxtor which was bought by Seagate. BTW I only by Seagate HD now, and well I have not had one crash since leaving Western Digital.

I just happened to have another SATA disk laying around, doesn't everyone? I popped it in and re-installed OpenSolaris. The whole time from crash, to OS disk swap, OS install, to running again was less than an hour. While I was back up and running, what about my data?

My data is stored on a separate ZFS pool. I had been wanting to test a zfs import and export, and well it looks like I was getting the chance. I ran the import command, shown below, and zfs saw my zfs raid with all of the disks.

#zpool import

pool: tweetie

id: 16215195261796119547

state: ONLINE

status: The pool was last accessed by another system.

action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier and

the '-f' flag.

   see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-EY

config:

tweetie ONLINE

raidz1 ONLINE

c7d0 ONLINE

c7d1 ONLINE

c8d0 ONLINE

c8d1 ONLINE

Next up I ran the zpool import command with the -f flag to force the import. Note if I had not crashed and had exported the file system this would not have been necessary, but hey who is complaining?

# zpool import -f tweetie

And that was it. My file server was back on-line and ready to roll!

SDO is GO!!!

Space is closer than I dreamed of....

It all started with a tweet. Don't most things these days? Okay maybe it started a little further back. Yes from an early age I was enthralled with space and NASA. Once I was a teenager I realized I would not have the right stuff, my eyes, and gave up on my dreams of being an astronaut. I did make my way into an engineering field and have always followed what is going on in aviation, space and with NASA.

Enter twitter: a true geek's dream. Now I could follow and even interact with people at NASA and other people with similar space interests. And that is how it started. One day a tweet caught my attention. NASA was inviting people to participate in a tweetup for the upcoming SDO launch and 15 entrants would be selected to participate in person at Kennedy Space Center.

To be honest, I did not believe in a million years I would be selected, but I still filled out the form. To my shock, I received an email from NASA, letting me know that I had been selected as one of the 15 twitter correspondents! SDO is scheduled to launch on 2/10/10. Oh and if this is not already blow your socks off cool, Endeavor is scheduled to launch on 2/7/10. Really the opportunity not only to participate in the SDO launch, but the opportunity to see a shuttle launch!

Obviously a lot is subject to change, because launches are often delayed, etc, but if everything goes as planned here is the schedule that I have been given by NASA for my trip:

02/06/10 Travel to Titusville, Florida where my hotel is

02/07/10 4:39 AM EST Endeavor launch

02/08/10 All day twitter correspondent activities for SDO

02/09/10 Twitter correspondent activities and SDO launch

There are also many local tweetups scheduled. Check out this website to see where they are. Also make sure to follow the #SDOisGO hashtag.

SDO is on twitter at http://twitter.com/NASA_SDO

To learn more about the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO, check out the homepage.