Monthly Archives: September 2009

The Best Camera

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iphoneThe Best Camera is the one you have with you. This is something that Chase Jarvis has been saying for awhile now, as he has been churning out hundreds of pictures from his iPhone. Some of them have pretty cool effects applied to them, and I have often wondered how¬† he got those done “in camera”. I figured he must be bringing them into Photoshop or something like that.

Nope. Maybe at first, but not any more. He has a new site¬†for sharing, and a new¬†application for the iPhone out. Here is the post where he shared it a few days ago. I just got to installing it yesterday. The picture at the top was my first shot. Goes to prove that a few new filters still doesn’t equal an unsuck filter for a crappy photograph. It kinda looks like a mouse on a golf course green, covering a¬†¬†hole…. right…. sort of? It’s actually a mouse pad. I wasn’t very creative last night.

The app is pretty cool. It has several filters that work well, and the ability to share right from that app with flickr, facebook, or the bestcamera site. I wish it had a sharpen filter, and a way to trigger the picture when the device is steadier. I find most of my images on this phone blurry. But, it is worth checking out.

Catching up on video.

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St. Anthony MainThis image has nothing to do with video, just wanted to put up a picture for the day. I took this in the excel park down by the falls, looking back at St. Anthony Main. Infact, the biggest blob of color is the sign that says St. Anthony Main. I was there without a tripod, and just couldn’t get a steady shot. So, I decided to go for more blur. I kinda like it.

So over the weekend, I caught up on some of the video podcasts that I had stacking up. First up was Photoshop User TV. They are actually on a bit of a break, showing some old content while they rebuild the set and show.

I also looked at some image reviews by David duChemin on the Within the Frame podcast. I am amazed that the number of things that he can say both good or bad about a photograph.

I also caught up on the amazing footage that Chase Jarvis has up on his bog about the commercial shoot he was doing for Lexar in New Zeland. Pretty amazing. It was a cool idea he had to document the whole shoot for people to see what it looked like. Nice that Lexar was willing to let him do it.

Last week, Scott Kelby had a guest blog by Aaron Greene where he talked about a documentary he shot mostly with the D90. Pretty cool. I have one of those! Only thing is, I don’t like the style of video. Where you see the focus pulls, and lots of motion from lack of tripod or stabilization. He has some great ideas, but it doesn’t fit my personal style.

Anyway, try to check out some of these video segments. Cool stuff.

Sent back the ReadyNAS

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readynasI am so done with anything to do with hard drives.¬† I am starting to want to stop doing anything that deals with creating files that take up lots of space and need to be backed up. (ie photography) But I know this is just “resistance”. (I have been reading “War of Art”, but that is another post coming up)

I gave up and sent the ReadyNAS back to NewEgg. I spent two long nights fighting with something that I thought was a plug and play device.  First, my drives were not recognized. Actually, the first of the three was, no matter which of the three I put in the first slot. Technically, the other two would appear as functioning drives, but on the volumes tab, where you specify drives, raid settings, and volume info, only the first would appear.

I first tried to upgrade the firmware, thinking there might be something flaky going on there. That took everything south. Couldn’t boot. Then tried to do TFTP boot, and a USB boot, but neither worked. It’s packed up and ready to ship to NewEgg. At least they didn’t give me any hassles. I am getting a replcaement, so the saga will continue.

New Job

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I start today out at Thompson Reuters. I have a new java contract for at least the end of the year. We will see how it goes with me and the project whether it lasts longer.

This marks the end of a great summer. I was able to spend a lot of time with the girls, and I am grateful for the opportunity. I have mixed feeling about starting. I would like to be able to pick Kate up from the bus everyday, and get to spend time playing with them and doing things like going to the zoo. On the other hand, I miss the working with a group aspects of my java jobs, and the sitting down and coming up with a solution to a problem. Maybe I will get to do it again sometime…

Many years ago, I was out at what was then called West Publishing working on some of the back end mainframe code for the Westlaw search engine. Now I am back on a team that is doing some of the conversion to newer technologies.

One of the things that I am psyched about is that this is a team that is practicing Agile methodologies, which should be a lot of fun. I haven’t been on a true Agile team before, and I am looking forward to it.

Two Wrongs Make a Right?

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More like two oops make a not so bad. I brought the removable drive with all my backups to a Geek Squad location inside a BestBuy store. Told them my sob story, and they told me they would fleece me to recover the data. Likely hundreds of dollars. Crap. I didn’t really want to give up on our baby pictures of Kate. The girl said she could plug it in and see what was there. She could see a bunch of home movies, and some empty folders. I was very confused. They must be seeing one of my first formatting/foldering setups I though. I left. Thought I might look for a different recovery place.

I got home, plugged in the drive, and saw what she had seen. Oops. I packed up and brought the wrong drive. Plugged in the second one, and there was the bad one. I decided to look around again. I found a folder called older, looked inside, and saw images from 2002-2007. These are all the point and shoot images that I taken that I thought I had lost. There were still here. I immediately backed them up to a working removable drive.

So… oops. Looks like I have most of the stuff I care about. What don’t I have? I don’t have the “backup” files from Annie’s and my computers from the last few years, and I don’t have all of my ripped music. I can spend several hours sometime to rip the music again, and there wasn’t a whole lot of value on the backups. Probably stuff we would have kept if we knew about it, but not so important that we can’t remember what’s there.

I still might get an estimate on data recovery from someone else. I didn’t do a format, the folders shouldn’t be that munged.

Big, big take away from all of this: Never have just one copy of a file. Even if you think it was just going to be a day or two until your new NAS was up (like me), don’t take that chance. ALWAYS have at least two copies.

Data loss means enough is enough

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openfilerI have been building a NAS for quite some time. That’s the problem. It was just taking too long to get going. I had it to the point where I had a Linux box with software raid, and LVM, and ssh going. I was using rsync over ssh from my Macs to get data there. But that just wasn’t good enough. I wanted Samba and NFS running securely with user accounts. I have got them to work before. It just takes some work. I decided that I would move on. Get something that was already working. Open source to the rescue.

I took a look at FreeNas and Openfiler. I thought that FreeNas would be everything I was looking for, then I realized that it couldn’t use LVM, so I would have to make static partitions. Not the worst thing in the world, but….

Openfiler looked to be the ticket. I decided to take it out for a spin. However, it would not recognize the data I had on my old raid array, or my other drive that was a backup of some of the data. I would have to repartition. So, I took one of the new 1TB external drives that I just purchased to hold my RAW picture files, and coppied everything over. Then, after making sure the data was there, I set to work setting up openfiler. This is not the most intuitive setup. And I had an idea of what I was doing, and wanted to do. I was getting frustrated. I could not create a share. It took me a couple of days to figure out that you had to create a folder, then tell openfiler that the folder was a share. As well, you must authenticate over LDAP, or Active Directory. They have a built in LDAP server, so I used that, but it was an extra layer of issues that I didn’t need.

If you are getting the idea that I should have just taken the time to get Samba running, I think that you are right. I was then messing with trying to get a rsync server working. You can’t do rsync over ssh. It won’t start anymore. It used to. It doesn’t now, and doesn’t return any error messages. Now I am frustrated.

So somewhere in this mess, I disconnect the “backup” drive from my Mac. (I had added some other stuff from my computer directly, so that when I when to add the data to the new NAS, I could plug in the removeable drive and just move it locally instead of over the network.) For some reason, the iMac does not think that it should be disconected yet. I was sure I told it to eject, but it must not have, because I got the message that says that I am an idiot for disconnecting a drive that wasn’t first ejected. Well, guess what, the fat32 partition table is hosed. Garbage there. Crap.

I am going to need a trip to the GeekSquad to try to get them to recover the data. I will have to spend more money than if I had bought an extra drive and had two backups. Maybe I need a blueray drive to do my 2nd backup. Anyway, I am screwed. Maybe. We’ll see.

readynasSo, I decided enough is enough. I ordered a Netgear ReadyNas NV+ from New Egg. It is a ready to go home/small business NAS that can take up to 4 drives. I will have 3 in a raid 5 configuration. It supports an interesting tech called X-Raid too that I will have to consider. It will let you replace the drives with bigger ones later one at a time, then rebuild when all are replaced. Pretty cool.

The box will do CIFS, NFS, HTTP (WebDav), FTP, and RSYNC. That coveres pretty much all the bases. It will send alerts when errors occur, and automatically rebuild when you put in a new drive. There are other nice things too, such as an iTunes server, and a media server that is auto discovered by media players. You can even set it up to access files remotely through an encrypted channel using netgear sotware you install on your laptop. You can even plug other drives into this box to share them.

I have debated something like this for awhile. What kept me back was the price and the ability to rsync. This device does rsync. This device will be far cheaper than the time is has taken me to putz around with other “solutions”.

I guess I am done for now with the “Building a NAS” series. I just wasn’t worth my time. Sorry.

P.S. It looks like I never did post my bit on getting LVM up. Maybe I will do that sometime.

Digital Wake Up Call Minneapolis

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wakeupcall

This blury noisy photo courtesy of my iPhone is from the Sheraton Bloomington, where last night the David Ziser show came to town. I took it while pouting that I didn’t win any of the over $5000 in prizes given away. It was quite a night. David had from 6-10 to cram in all the information he wanted to, but I think it was closer to 10:30 before we left, and he had to skip or gloss over a good chunk of material. He had a ton of information to give us.

Luckily he had a script, and it was all in a booklet that he handed out. Sort of like a powerpoint outline with advertisements. There will be time to review this later. Not only that, but there is a DVD that came with the program that has this talk and some other tutorials on it. I will have to take a look at that later and let you know exactly what was on that DVD.

I guess I must be a bit of a fan boy, as I picked up some of his other training DVD’s too. (I am a sucker for a sale price) Again, I will blog later about what I thought of them, and if they seemed worth it.

It was a good show. Definitely worth the $59 dollars to get in. He is all about the light, and how to get it quick and easily. As David mentions, there is no time to set up and move around softboxes at a wedding. His tips on how and when to use on and off camera flash seemed useful, and it will be interesting to give them a try.

The software tools part would have been pretty ho hum for me, except that he demoed a software package to layout books, prints, and collages that is simply amazing. It is called FotoFusion by LumaPix. It looks to be quite the time saver. Easier than Apertures layout editor that I have been using.

The marketing part of the evening was some of what I was most interested in, but we were quite behind at that point, and David had to turn into an auctioneer.¬† As well, I was starting to tune out. I was getting tired. We still have the printed materials, and the DVD’s, so I will have to check those out and see what he has there.

Anyway, glad I attended. If you get a chance to catch him in another city, I would recommend it.

Adobe Upgrade Scam

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Fake Adobe Scam

I got an email from what looked like Adobe. Adobe Systems Inc. Title: “Your Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended trial is almost over. What’s next?” It was an HTML email that looks identical to that of other email that I have received from Adobe. The only thing that was odd, was that it told me my trial for CS4 Extended was up, and they had a link for an upgrade. I recently tried Lightroom, but not CS4. Hmmmm……

I hovered over the links and got an address of www.adobeinfo.com. I thought that was strange. I went to www.adobeinfo.com and got some sort of privacy page thing. Then I googled it. http://www.aboutus.org/AdobeInfo.com that said it was a phishing site. I then tried further google fu, but couldn’t find people suggesting this was a phishing site. It sure seems vary odd though. I wouldn’t upgrade through them anyway…