Category: Geek Stuff

Bowing Out of Apple Aperture

I wanted to love Aperture. And I did. But it’s time to let go.

I was going through a few thousand images that I’d rated and enhanced in Aperture to look for stuff for my portfolio. I wanted to polish up a few images that I thought were good enough to make it into the professional portfolio. But it soon became evident that even 3GB of fresh RAM doesn’t satisfy Aperture’s hungry appetite for more! Spinning arrows, lagging waits and delayed responses were frequent. Somehow I don’t remember Aperture being so unpleasant to use — and this was Aperture 2.0, the version that supposedly offered performance enhancements.

Another bummer I discovered with Aperture 2.0 was that its new RAW engine v2.0 doesn’t support my Fujifilm S5 Pro at all. This means the RAW image rendering on my camera’s RAW files still looks very weird (blocky, blotchy and making images more like JPEGs) — basically when used with my camera’s RAW, it’s the old v1.1 engine with features enhanced around it.

So this drew the line for me. I am officially dumping Aperture. I will spend the next few months retrieving all the RAW masters and bring them in to Adobe Lightroom as their permanent home. Unfortunately this means I will lose ALL the edits and enhancements I made to all the images. But the upside is the images will probably look better with Adobe Camera RAW’s rendering engine. And I’ve gotten fairly efficient in using Lightroom that I can probably zip through those edits pretty quickly anyway.

The war is over. Adobe Lightroom has won. This proves that having a beautiful, extremely streamlined and intuitive user interface isn’t everything. Performance and proper support of RAW rendering, even with an inferior interface, can do wonders in a photographer’s workflow. I will just have to be more selective in what I deem “edit worthy” when I port the images over from Aperture.

Apple, I love you and all. But Lightroom will probably take over the professional photography workflow application market when Lightroom 2.0 is introduced. You can safely kill off Aperture now — it gave Adobe a good run for its money and made them haul ass on a software that was supposed to be dead. Gently unplug Aperture’s life support and put your resources elsewhere (i.e. save up to buy Adobe out right!).

Short Life Spans of the Information Age

Brian and I are supposed to start a project on a site that would help consumers make more informed decisions on products they consume on daily basis. It’s going to be a site where anyone with Internet (or heck, an Internet phone like the iPhone) would be able to find out immediately all they’d need to know about a certain product they are buying: materials used to manufacture them, labor conditions, political influences of the manufacturer, environmental impacts/footprints….etc.

So I was doing some reading and research on the underlying software and how I’d build or modify it to work the way Brian had envisioned. I went back to some bookmarks I saved for this project from a couple of months ago and was surprised that some of them had already gone offline! And then I dug deeper and did more reading and realized that a lot of useful info on how I’d approach the project had all but disappeared!

We have all been relying on the availability (or the perception of) and immediacy of the Internet too much nowadays. We expect everything at our finger tips through the power of Google. But most of the time we fail to retain the information the good old fashion way — make a copy of it… This is frustrating… So I guess from now I will just use OSX’s “Print to PDF” feature more liberally when I see a keeper on the web….

Can’t Get Enough of Firefox 3

Fine. I am a technology whore.

Once I had a taste of Firefox 3 Beta 3, using Firefox 2 just wasn’t the same anymore — the speed, sleek look & feel… But there had to be a way around the random and frequent crashes!

So I surfed over to Firefox Mac Community Builds site and tried my luck there with one of the daily builds optimized for Mac OSX. And BINGO! Now I have a running Firefox 3 Beta 3-ish version that runs rock solid with none of the other issues I experienced with the official generic build from Mozilla. The stablized memory is also a welcomed change.

New problems though: There’s no cursor blink in text areas when typing in web based forms; some plugins still don’t work… etc. But I can live with these drawbacks given the advantages I gain in return.

So now I am a happy surfer again!

Firefox 3 Beta 3 Crashes — A LOT!

I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 2 for almost two weeks now. Other than a few minor glitches, it’s been a pretty stable release. I was generally pretty happy especially with its fixes on memory leaks, not to mention its sheer speed.

So when Firefox 3 Beta 3 came out today, I rushed to download the latest living-on-the-edge version. What a mistake that was… Beta 3 chokes and crashes on the tiniest things; page render screws up quite a bit; the bookmark menu is huge and un-resizable… I could go on.

On the other hand, the new UI is REALLY gorgeous and is very Leopard-ish. And again, the speed is amazing as does its memory management. I guess that means they’ll need a couple of more beta versions before 3.0 goes gold…. ๐Ÿ™

So now I am back with 2.0.x… ๐Ÿ™

Conditional Commenting Using Multiple IE on VMWare

As most web developers know, testing for Internet Explorer is a necessary evil that comes with the job. Fortunately a few tools has made the process easy:

1. VMWare to run Windows XP with (and Vista if necessary; but yuck!);
2. Multiple IE app;
3. Conditional commenting using alternate stylesheets if push comes to shove (coding to standards is easy for all other browsers but IE; this is when you don’t want to alter your “standardized” stylesheet just for IE fixes; kudos to Microsoft for making this possible);

But #3 failed me today, and I had to find out why the hard way — Internet Explorers installed via Multiple IE will always default to the latest version of the IE installed (credit). Meaning, if you have IE6 and IE7 installed, even IE6 will always declare itself as IE7 when it comes to conditional comments (but not in browser agent, thankfully). After applying the simple registry hack (oh, the good old Windows registry, you…) and a quick reboot, everything worked as expected.

Here’s the hack (in case the link provided above disappears for some reason):

… by removing the รขโ‚ฌล“IEรขโ‚ฌย key in the registry subkey

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[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector]

, Internet Explore defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number prebuilt in the program.

Apple Mail RSS Reader — For the Critical RSS Feeds I Can’t Afford to Miss

After the last mishap in missing the California editions of The Secret Workshop, I’ve decided to make use of Apple Mail’s built-in RSS reader for a change. See, I don’t really get the time to follow all the RSS feeds that I’d like to. So I keep on missing out on stuff. So now that It’s in my mail client, every time I check for emails I’d be able to get an update on the latest openings of The Secret Workshop…

The only caveat is, I go to bed at weird hours. And those workshops get filled up almost immediately within half of a day of a workshop location being announced. So unless I am diligent in checking my mailbox every 4 to 6 hours, I could still miss out on the next convenient location…. ๐Ÿ™ This is when an iPhone would be a sweet device to have!

Another Microsoft IE Rant

Ok, another pointless ugly rant on Microsoft IE.

Engineers who came up with the guidelines for Microsoft IE must have their heads filled with tofu… umm, wait, I like tofu. Their heads must be filled with turd. Simple standards are simply ignored or conveniently misinterpreted by the IE’s rendering engine. It makes debugging a living hell from the perspective of a web developer no matter how much time I’ve already spent doing this for a living.

And then today Microsoft went and made an offer to buy out Yahoo for a cool $44.6B? Give me a f*cking break. How about spending some of those billions on fixing the damn IE and ensure future developments of IE adhere to standards?

The World Wide Web would be a better place without Microsoft. But then again, without scums, how can we appreciate the beauty of all the other standards-adhering browsers? Nonetheless, if I ever meet the guy(s) who was in charge of defining the renderer guidelines, I might just kick him in the nuts. Idiot.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 Graphic

Just out of curiosity (and because I am a new-tech whore like that), I downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 2 to check it out. I was surprised to be greeted with its “welcome” page upon first launch. It’s got a nice retro illustration of a robot destroying some high rises.

firefox 3 Beta 2 grphics

Seems like going retro is hip again.

Some quick thoughts on Firefox 3 Beta 2 on my Mac:

1. Snappier performance;
2. Some nice visual effects (like the tabs sliding from side to side);
3. Crashes from time to time;
4. Bookmarks a little messed up; but I simply used the “manage bookmarks” feature and reverted back to a previous backup the Firefox had made when I installed the beta;
5. Many addons don’t work; I had to use

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about:config

to add a new

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Boolean

variable

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extensions.checkCompatibility

and gave it a value of

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<strong>false</strong>

so that Firefox won’t check for addon compatibilities and disable them. Some addons still won’t work, but most will likely work as advertised. Others already have un-advertised beta versions out for this beta release!

So far I like it enough to want to keep using it full time.

On Facebook

I started using Facebook more seriously when Brian told me that’s how his brothers stay in touch with their high school friends. So I thought that might be a cool way to hook up with friends I’ve lost touch over the years. So the nightmare begins.

First of all, the UI design of the site sucks. And it doesn’t just suck a little, it’s a design disaster from usability standpoint. Every time I want to do something simple, I have to think about where that feature may be, or if clicking on that button will do what I think it’d do. In UI design terms, the site has very low “affordance” to usability, meaning it’s not very intuitive.

One thing I like about Facebook, though, is how it allows outside developers to develop mini-applications that allows users to plug them right in to the existing infrastructure of the site to “enhance” existing features. But I hate how abundant and frequent people have been, or sometimes are forced to be, sending invites to add those mini-applications just because they are there. Over a short period of time, the UI get cluttered up and is littered with trivial and useless crap that other people have too much time doing. So I simply ignore 90% of them.

Facebook started out with noble goals and intentions. But all it is now is a slightly more improved version of MySpace (which belongs to all-time horror site of fame). It’s arrogant to say this, but when “ordinary people” with no design sense are given the ability to do whatever they want, they will make absolutely the worst design decisions ever, hence making the Internet a worse place to be. Sorry to be such a web design Nazi. ๐Ÿ™

Having said that, at least Facebook doesn’t yet allow people to mess with crazy backgrounds, obnoxious auto-play audio tracks, movies and other crazy things like MySpace. And for that, I reluctantly still use it from time to time just to respond to messages. And I’ve gotta to admit, it’s gotten pretty easy to find people on that thing than even Google!

Time Salvaged from Curropted Lightroom Catalog!

For some reason, my MacBook Pro has been failing to warn me when it’s running on reserve power before the battery runs out of juice and shuts the computer down unsafely. And today I’d almost wasted days of work on Lightroom due to a corrupted Lightroom catalog

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.lrcat

file when my MBP abruptly shut off. Adobe’s documentation was less than helpful (another evidence that it’s the new Microsoft!). But thankfully, this article from Jonathan Kingston’s blog has an alternative way to salvage the catalog, and days of my life, back….

Life is good again. Thank you Mr. Kingston!

On Apple Newton

I used to have one of those Apple Newtons back in grad school. I bought one as soon as I got my first job right out of my undergrad, you know, as a pat on the back kinda thing. But boy, how time has changed…

I think Newton still has one of the best handwriting recognition softwares out there a decade after it was discontinued by Apple. After I sold mine, all kinds of Palm and Windows CE people have tried to get me to buy one of those toys. But the results were always the same — once you’ve used a Newton, everything else just sucks in comparison. Now, granted things have come a long way since, but I’ve also learned to stop relying on those PDAs… that is until iPhone came along.

Damn you, Apple. Why must you toy with my feelings.

So I have my sight set on the iPhone (though I don’t really need it per se; but I am sure Grace could benefit from having one)… as soon as I can afford to feed another mouth come this June…

Ways to Stay Awake and Focused Without Caffeine

I’ve been doing some pretty hard times trying to put together a beta release for Neely’s venture. And since caffeine and I don’t really mix well, and through trial and errors, I’ve discovered a few ways to keep at it without external chemical stimulants (that work for me anyway)… Besides, I think chemical stimulants are just for the weak-minded… ๐Ÿ˜‰

1. Take a shower — this helps to keep me stay awake for at least until that ‘freshness” wears off (about an hour or two?).

2. Keep the stomach full — it’s amazing what an empty stomach does to the morale. By having late night (or early morning, depending on how you want to look at it) semi-meals, I can plow through quite a bit of code more clear-headed. Maybe the stomach protests hunger by telling the brain to shut down in order to conserve energy.

3. Get lots of rest prior to “the long haul” — people don’t realize how tiring it is when the brain is bitch-slapped for hours on end for attention intensive tasks like programming. So sometimes I do activities that are relaxing and don’t require the brain for a while, like playing with Bryan for 20 minutes.

4. Get up and walk around about once every 30 minutes just to get the blood flowing.

5. Drop and do some push ups.

6. When “in the zone”, stay in the zone. DO NOT STOP until you can barely keep your eyelids open. Sometimes I stay in the zone even when I am asleep. All my dreams would be about how to solve particular programming problems I’d gone to bed with — pretty freaky.

7. Power nap for 15 minutes — this is usually followed by a quick shower. All this before diving into code.

Starting usually at around 2AM, I’ve managed to stay up until around noon of the same day by doing these things. And they seem to work well for me personally. I mean, I’ve tried coffee and even RedBull. But they just make me super duper hyper that I end up not being able to concentrate at all. So I guess my body just isn’t made for coffee…