Category: Geek Stuff

SOHO Woes

I love working for myself and working from home. The amount of freedom and flexibility is surreal. This makes me not ever want to go back to a 9 to 5 (or 6, or 7, or 10) job ever again. But it does have its trade offs.

I’ve been working pretty feverishly on Neely’s digital signage project for a while. But it seems to take forever to get something done nowadays. Compared to some of my previous code-heavy projects, this is really taking a long time! And the only difference I’ve noticed is — Bryan’s age.

Before Bryan walked and talked, everything was simple then. Grace was able to handle most of Bryan’s needs. But now that Bryan’s almost 2.5 years old, the amount of attention required to satisfy his needs is amazingly time consuming. So what used to take me to finish a block of code before will now triple in time and effort just to get things moving along in the presence of Bryan. And when he does go to bed, I also need to wind down before I could get in the “zone” to get things going.

For the past few days, I’ve been going to bed at 10AM (after working through the night). Before that, my effective work hours have been between 2AM to 6AM. Yes, it’s only four hours, but boy, when nobody is around to bug you, things get done!

This is probably good when the new baby finally arrives because that’d make me the de facto night-shift guard. But wait, that’ll mean it’d take me even longer to get shit done even during my “alone time”… Oh crap!

Rediscovering Simplicity

I’ve been sweating bullets with this project I’ve been working on with Neely — he’s supposed to be demoing it at a major conference in New York with a partner in a couple of weeks. But I am still not quite where I’d like to be in terms of polish and grace.

Neely’s been telling me to just code for the immediate requirements and nothing more. But my philosophy has always been to look ahead just a little more and prepare for what’s to come as “no-brainer” feature requests. Apparently this type of thinking has been hurting my development time on this project…

I rarely read Wil Shipley’s blog entries because they are usually quite long and sometimes very technical. But just out of the blue I decided to read “something” today. And there I came across his coding strategy and philosophy on coding for only what’s necessary and nothing more.

I’ve always understood the idea of “push it out to the market first and fix it later”… But I just never felt right implementing that in good conscience knowing that I am purposely releasing a faulty software only to fix it when complaints flood in. But the way Wil explained it made a lot of sense to me and I think I am going to make what he says in that article my focus from now on — if there ain’t complaints, it ain’t broke. And if there ain’t requests, it ain’t a useful feature.

Live and learn…

Bye Bye Wii

So we said goodbye to our Nintendo Wii today. It was a surprise thank-you gift from Jason for hooking him up with a portfolio site (which ultimately got him a freelance gig which then turned into a job). We had mixed feeling having to let go of such a fun console. But we simply didn’t use it enough to justify it sitting there, collecting dust and being devalued every week. So I figured if we were going to sell it, the week before Christmas would be the best time.

I didn’t want to rip off whoever the next owner was (it’s that thing called “karma”). So I put up a fair price that basically got Jason’s money worth. And it turned out an old Japanese woman wanted it for her grandson… It was a bit hard having to explain everything, but we got through! 🙂

So now we are game-console-less again — More time with the physical puzzles for Bryan; and more time getting the LCD screen tan for me!

A Self Reminder of Why I Don’t Like Microsoft’s Software

I came across this article and realized another reason why I despise Microsoft and most of its software products — Ads, and lots of them.

The most obvious comparison is Microsoft’s MSN Live Messenger and Apple’s new iChat 4.0. The differences in the interface design is stunning. Notice how Microsoft tries to show off all those features that it has on the UI of MSN Live Messenger! Are they supposed to compensate for something else that’s lacking? And notice the ad at the bottom of the contact list — how annoying! I guess they just can’t stand giving something out free for nothing… When I installed it to play with, I had to download a third party app (MSN Live! Plus) to “clean up” the UI to get rid of 90% of the UI clutter.

MSN_Live_chat

Now compare that to iChat since 1.0…. Ah~~ clean and soothing… Elegant.
ichat4_chat

There’s something about the way Microsoft’s applications operate and how things are integrated that seem so… repulsive. It’s like they are begging not to be used. I don’t mind ads as long as they are not in my face like most of Google’s.

Another thing about MSN Live Messenger is the lack of tab support. I mean, Apple itself is late to the “tab” party, but through a plugin, its previous version was able to have tabs for multiple chat sessions. And the latest iChat also has a great way to support tabs. Looking at MSN Live Messenger though… If you are unfortunate (or fortunate?) enough to get hit up with more than a few simultaneous chat sessions, you can say goodbye to your spacious desktop real estate…

Another Inspirational Speech

A friend from college sent me a link to Professor Randy Pousch’s “Last Lecture” about play, work and life. Considering he’s literally dying of cancer (he was given 3 – 6 months to live in August, 2007), he seemed incredibly cheerful and upbeat about everything. It’s a great and very gravitating speech that just sucks you in. Even though I only got to see it online, his “full-of-life-ness” and positive energy are hard to ignore.

If you are short on time, skip all other parts of the video until you hit his speech. This is the 2nd best speech after Steve Jobs’ at Stanford. Love it!

Some similarities:
1. Both men had pancreatic cancer; though Steve Jobs survived his, Randy Pausch’s is terminal;
2. Both men delivered basically exactly the same messages — they both believe in Karma, paybacks, something greater than self; follow your heart in doing what you do;
3. Both men used stories from their lives to make outstanding points about life and everything else that matters;

Some differences:
1. Steve Jobs is a lot more serious and “corporate; Randy Pausch is the exact opposite;
2. Academic v.s. Corporate America;
3. Steve Jobs’ speech was short and sweet; he gets to the point and basically delivered what Randy Pausch did in 15 minutes; but Randy’s speech was just as unforgettable but it takes a lot to go back and dig out the “good stuff” buried in all those jokes and stuff;
4. Steve Jobs’ speech could’ve affected the stock market if he hadn’t made it clear that he was cured from his cancer!

Using Adobe Lightroom

I finally broke down and gave Adobe Lightroom a try. The verdict? It’s better than “Bridge + ACR”, but it’s still got some UI issues it needs to address to compete with Apple’s Aperture. However, it does have a few more controls that I liked to really fine tune each image and tweak it until I like it. And the RAW conversion seems to be much smoother and of better quality than Aperture as did Aperture.

So I guess I am ditching Aperture for now and going for Lightroom as much as I despise its badly copied Aperture UI. Finally, I’ve found my workflow! Hurray!

Why Apple Aperture Kicks Adobe’s Butt

I’ll keep this short and try to be as objective as possible…

I’ve used Aperture for quite sometime and loved it. The problem with Aperture, though, is its inability to interpret certain RAW files produced by my camera properly. It got me to question whether RAW conversion should have been done somewhere else, which led me to looking into Adobe’s solutions — Adobe Bridge + Adobe Camera RAW.

A few problems with Bridge:
1. Unintuitive interface — a lot of assumptions were made on that you understand what each feature does; I literally had to force myself to stop using it and hop on lynda.com to take a quick tour before all the other stuff even made any sense! Adobe, this is NOT how you design great software! Take a chapter from Apple — the way features are laid out and structured should be self-explanatory!
2. It relies on other Adobe software titles to do the heavy lifting; Bridge is really just an asset management and grading system. For RAW conversion, I have to launch ACR; for basic book layout, launch Illustrator or InDesign… etc. Aperture, on the other hand, has a straight forward built-in support for some of those features in ONE place.
3. I can’t grade images while viewing them in full screen mode! What gives!?? How else am I supposed to tell if an image is sharp? Through the stupid tiny, pathetic, inflexible magnifying glass provided by Bridge? That feature is a joke compared to Apple’s solution!
4. Grading has to be done by 2-key combos — a rating of 2 has to be done via

1
command

+

1
2

where as in Aperture, my fingers are a lot happier with just hopping through the numerics. No combo keys!
5. I can’t see the rating in the main preview image or window like I can with Aperture! So if I want to know what rating I gave to an image, I have to peer elsewhere on the convoluted UI! It’s extremely inefficient.
6. If I want to play with the potentials of an image, I am forced to launch ACR, but even then I can’t just make a new version of the image and play with it until I am happy with one version like I would in Aperture (without having to make a copy of the image, that is). I literally have to stop doing one thing just so I can do something else. In Aperture, editing, grading, cropping, keywording… etc can all be done simultaneously without forcing user to “switch mode”, or so to speak.

That said, there’s ONE advantage that Bridge has over Aperture, that is its “labels” feature. Besides grading images, I can label an image with a color for any purpose. But this is such a trivial feature that I wouldn’t switch my work flow just for that.

Now, the reason I am REALLY doing this is for Adobe Camera RAW. It’s a lot more flexible and can really sink its teeth into the wide dynamic range that my RAW files give me. The color adjustments made with ACR are also a little more pleasant and more flexible to control. But besides that, there’s really no way in hell I’d continue using this system once Aperture 2 is released with matching abilities in RAW conversion. And since Aperture has this great feature that allows me to two-way an image version with Photoshop, I really see no reason why I’d use any of those other convoluted and useless products Adobe has launched!!

So my struggle continues as I try to find a good work flow for digital photography. I’m a little frustrated with Adobe in that with its 20+ years of experience in making graphics software, its softwares still can suck so badly compared to a less-than-two-year-old Apple software! Yes, you can call me an Apple fanboy. But that’s just the harsh truth about Adobe.

Now I know I won’t even bother with LightRoom, Adobe’s answer to Aperture AFTER Apple launched Aperture (how embarrassing is that for Adobe having to catch up to Apple!). All the reviews about how LightRoom forces users into using “modularized” approaches is exactly the feeling I am getting with the Bridge + ACR combo. To that, I say “Thanks. But NO, thanks.”

Jumping to Conclusions

I’ve had a couple of clients who have changed their minds ALL the time even if the original specs had called for something completely the opposite of what they are asking of me now. This is all good when I get paid. Unfortunately the resulting code base sometimes just isn’t up to standards.

I found this post and agree 100% to what he’s saying. So it’s no more jumping to conclusions for me from now on even in reading code.

Argh…

Crazy for the iPhone

I express mailed an iPhone for a good buddy of mine in Thailand last week. Even though the phone isn’t officially supported there, he Jailbreak’ed it in no time upon receiving the phone (incidentally, his favorite American TV series right now is “Prison Break”!). His only regret? Not getting the iPhone sooner… He owned a HTC Touch just prior to the iPhone and hated every minute of it.

So what does his Windows-owning sorry butt wants to do next? He might be getting a Mac for the next computer purchase. Hah hah!

It just gets easier to get people on board to use Macs every year. And nobody ever turns back.