Posted by Doug
Wed, 19 Oct 2005 20:04:09 GMT
When I should have been hacking on my Rails apps, I decided instead to upgrade to Apple Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”. I did a straight “upgrade” and not a re-install. Overall it went very well.
I keep all my stuff installed via DarwinPorts. I’m sure that made my upgrade easier. All my stuff is in /opt and isn’t screwed with by the Apple updates. I guess I do have some stuff in /usr/local too that was left alone. Anyway, the upgrade took less than an hour. I immediately went into my Rails projects and ran rake. All my tests passed and I didn’t have to do anything to my system to get them to run. Of course, my system’s ruby, ruby-gems, mysql, and rb-mysql are all from DarwinPorts; so nothing really changed with the upgrade.
I’d like to say kudos to Precision Information Services for their RDoc Dashboard widget. That’s great! Much easier to use than the API.
I’m also using SlothCam to periodically fetch my daily statistics graphs from my server. This is handy to have a hot key that will graphically show me how my server is doing. Dave has a script he runs to fetch the graphs, merge them into a single image, and then use that as his desktop. So, he’s had a hot key (show desktop) that gives him the same information. Dashboard is a little less intrusive, I think, and let’s me keep a nice background.
Oddly enough, I’ve not really used Spotlight yet. Other than mail, I usually don’t have any problems finding my files. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m good at locating stuff or if I just don’t save that many diverse notes. I will admit to using the locate command a lot. We’ll see if Spotlight proves useful over the long haul.
I’m really happy with the new Preview. The big plus for me is the bookmarks. Since I use the PDF versions of my Pragmatic Programmer books, this will let me quickly jump to oft referenced tables and such without having to search or scan the document.
I’ve scanned through the 10.4 Mac OS X Hints, but I’d still like to hear what Tiger features you can’t live without or how I could milk more usability out of my Powerbook.
Posted in Software, Mac OS X | no comments
Posted by Doug
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:51:19 GMT
I had my Home Fileserver setup to share my data directories using netatalk and the AFP protocol. When both of my powerbooks were running Mac OS 10.3 “Panther”, it worked fine. When I upgraded Carla’s powerbook to Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” she could no longer connect. I’ve fought with this several times and today finally caved in and installed samba. It took me about 15 minutes from the time I installed until Carla’s machine could mount the drive, read, and write photos.
I don’t know why it makes me sad to use Samba over netatalk. Samba’s a fine piece of software with a long and glorious history. It just seems wrong somehow to resort to SMB when using Macs. Oh, well. We do what has to be done.
Posted in Software, Mac OS X | Tags Netatalk, Samba | 1 comment
Posted by Doug
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 15:00:09 GMT
I had tried and failed to get a single automator action to implement my photo workflow. Looking at the changelog for the unofficial Photoshop CS Automator Actions it appears most of the roadblocks have been cleared.
Here’s the back story. I have two Apple Powerbooks: one is mine and the other is my wife’s. We both shoot a lot of photographs. I want all of our photographs to live in the same repository and follow the same workflow. My wife has many talents, but performing complicated computer workflows isn’t one of them. My goal is to have an automator action that will take the images off the CompactFlash card, get them converted to the right format, and organize them into the repository: a simple “double-click here and you’re done”.
Some of the nifty new features of the PS CS Automator actions is better IPTC handling. It allows you to choose whether to append or replace the individual fields. Another improvement is to specify the date format when renaming from EXIF data.
Another really cool action is to filter from EXIF. This will let you only perform certain operations on images with ISO 1600 (like run a noise reduction script) or only resize images based on their orientation.
I’ll just add this to my list of TODO items. Last time I worked on this it took me pretty much an entire evening to decide I wasn’t going to get it working. Also, I have only upgraded Carla’s Powerbook to Tiger. I’m waiting to upgrade mine until either: 1) I finish the commercial Rails project I’m doing; or 2) I’m confident enough that upgrading from Panther won’t require any work on my part to insure my project can keep going.
Posted in Software, Photography, Mac OS X | no comments
