The Subtlety of Grandness

My father told me on today that he wants a Mac.

Really?

According to websiteoutlook.com this site is worth $153.30

At this rate, I can retire is about a thousand years.

The hard drive in my very first PC was 20 MB. I just got a 1.5 TB drive delivered. That’s basically 1,500,000 MB, or a 75,000-fold increase in capacity.

That PC had 640 kB of RAM. My current PC has 6 GB of RAM, or 6,291,456 kB, almost a 10,000-fold increase.

That PC had a 16 MHz CPU. My current PC has 4 CPU cores, each rated at 2.66 GHz, or basically 2,660 MHz. Each core can simultaneously process two threads, so I essentially have 8 logical cores.

That’s progress, folks.

It’s been a week and a half since I pulled a ligament in my foot while running. Worst.Pain.Ever. I could barely walk and it was sore for a week, but now it feels 100 percent. Even ran some errands to the Post Office and the UPS Store on foot and it’s fine. I’ll wait a few more days, since the treatment is two weeks to let it heal and I don’t want to push it prematurely, but then I’ll be running again. The conditions have changed in my convalescence, as the Indian summer has made way for a rainy autumn. Oh, well, I’m a Seattelite; wet is our friend.

I did get the 750GB Caviar Green, and I promptly sent it back to Amazon and ordered the 1.5GB model. I’m really serious about this backup regimen; I’m thinking nightly backups should be ideal. The Caviar Green is a great archival drive. Not as fast as the fastest drives (but the speeds remain respectable), but that allows it to use less power and run cooler and quieter than regular hard drives. Since only Windows is going to be writing to it to make backups, that makes it perfect for the task. I must say I was tempted to get a Caviar Black for my main drive, but I did some research and discovered that Dell didn’t skimp on my hard drive; I’ve got a very nice Hitachi Desktar 750GB.

I spent the weekend reorganizing my digital life. I’m in the middle of transferring my photograph collection from Aperture to Lightroom, a process that involves exporting out the master RAW files from Aperture’s monolithic library, transferring them over the network to my PC, and then having Lightroom import them into its catalog. Along the way, I’m having Lightroom convert the RAW files to DNG, which are basically digital negatives. DNGs are slightly smaller than RAW; I’m saving about 300MB for every 2GB of RAW files converted. But it also lets me consolidate my library into a single format rather than having to deal with different RAW types from my SLR and my Sigma DP-1.

Speaking of my DP-1, while I was going over the photos I’ve taken with it I was reminded of why I have such a love/hate thing going on with this camera. The DP-1 is a compact camera that takes SLR-quality images. The reason is it was the first compact camera in the world to incorporate an SLR-size sensor. And this isn’t just a regular, conventional sensor, but a Fovean sensor, which is pretty much the closest thing to “digital film” there is. In terms of megapixels, the DP-1 is rated at a whopping 14, but that’s a bit misleading due to the nature of the Fovean sensor. Nevertheless, this thing takes gigantic images with incredible image quality. When you look at them the photos just pop right out at you.

The downsides are that the DP-1 costs more than most consumer SLRs, is incredibly finicky to use, and is incredibly slow. The user-interface from the buttons to the menu system and settings feel like they were made by pocket protector-clad engineers. Steve Jobs would burn down Apple in a heartbeat if the R&D guys ever gave him anything as kludgy as this. Even worse, due to the many compromises needed to get the SLR sensor into such a compact body, the entire thing is slower than molasses on a cold day. The lens is so slow that taking a photo in anything other than pure, bright daylight is a total crapshoot. It’s difficult to get a clean photo in indoor lighting, and it’s downright impossible when shooting in dim conditions. And when you finally do take a photo, the camera spends several seconds processing it. You aren’t going to be taking action photos with this.

I suppose that’s part of the charm of DP-1, though. It makes you have to think about your photo before you take it. DSLRs let you shoot dozens of photos in seconds, but they’re so fast that you stop thinking about it. The DP-1, on the other hand, is old fashioned in comparison. But when it works, it pays off.

It’s also amazing to go through some of my photographic archives. I’ve shot thousands upon thousands of photos, and I was reminded why I don’t really throw any of them out. As I was browsing through a collection of random photos I found one that I had taken the morning the mother of one of my coworker’s visited San Francisco and toured the office. I snapped a photo for them right before I raced out the door to catch a flight down to LA for an event. It was just one of many random photos taken during a busy of time of the year . I later uploaded it along with all my other photos into Aperture and didn’t think anything of it since then. It was just a single photo amongst tens of thousands. But when I stumbled upon it I realized the significance of what I had. His mother had passed away suddenly in the past year. I sent him a copy and learned that this was one of the last photos he had with her. I’m glad I still had it.

Click to see Lightroom at 3,840 x 1,200 resolution.

I love Aperture, but there are simply too many limitations in it right now. Thus, I bit the bullet on a $100 Lightroom 2 upgrade today. I originally purchased both Aperture and Lightroom a few years ago (Ugh, that’s $600 of photo software right there), but I ended up sticking with Aperture because Lightroom 1.0 wasn’t as feature-rich. Flash forward to 2009 and now Aperture is the one with all the problems. First, it’s Mac-only, which is understandable since it’s an Apple product, but the problem is that my 2006 MacBook Pro is getting pokey and I really can’t afford another right now, whereas I have a top-of-the-line Dell PC that can crunch RAW images without breaking a sweat. Hence, I needed a PC solution, and Lightroom is both PC/Mac. My next problem is that Apple never added support for the Fovean sensor on the Sigma DP-1. Adobe added Fovean support in Lightroom 2.0, which means that my DP-1 has a new lease on life (I dislike Sigma’s proprietary software solution.) My third problem is that Aperture likes to work with one big library. Yes, you can have swap libraries in and out, but it’s not an ideal solution, and my photo collection was eating about 80-percent of hard drive space on my laptop. Given that I’ve got 600+ GB free on my PC, it made sense to move it to the platform with plenty of room to grow. Plus, Lightroom does a better job of creating catalogs that will help me disperse my photo collection over various drives should the need arise.

I’m really impressed with Lightroom 2 so far. It’s certainly more fleshed out than its predecessor, and I like that it’s a 64-bit app that’s taking full advantage of my Core i7 system and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. The speed is really amazing with 6GB of RAM, and I was able to multitask while it crunched smoothly in the background. Multi-monitor support is also a welcome addition that was missing in Lightroom 1.0. Being able to edit an image on one 24-inch LCD while having a full-screen preview on another 24-inch LCD is a lot nicer than having to work with the MBP’s single 15.4-inch screen. You can see for yourself by clicking on the image above and blowing it up to full size. Isn’t that pretty? The one thing Lightroom desperately needs is a magnifying loupe like the one in Aperture; it was my favorite bit of Aperture and it’s sorely missing in Lightroom.

Thanks to a fan I’ve got a fully legit version of Windows 7 Professional on my Dell Studio XPS desktop, and it’s awesome. I’m running the 64-bit version, and this is the retail code, only about 10 days before release. I toyed around with the Release Candidate a couple of months ago, so I had a taste of the goodness, but the retail version is even better. This is seriously Microsoft’s best OS release, period. Windows 95 had the hype, Windows XP was a huge step forward, but Windows 7 is near perfection. It’s fast, rock solid, secure, and even pretty.

What do I like thus far? Well, everything.

1. The look and feel is polished and refined, and I love the new changes to the taskbar and the desktop. It’s a huge improvement over Vista, where the glorified Flip 3D feature was a joke, barely better than regular alt-tab. Witness how brilliantly Expose works in Mac OS X; it lets you see all windows at once! Flip 3D just highlighted a single window at a time; you still had to alt-tab through them to find the one you want. Idiotic. Flip 3D is gone in Windows 7, and instead there’s much more useful functionality that lets you locate the application you want and navigate the clutter of windows on your desktop, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like a Mac rip-off.

2. I seriously wanted to rip the throat out of whoever designed Vista’s UAC system. I’m a power user, but every time I want to do something to my system I have to hit the “Mother May I?” button as many as three times. “Oh,” the UAC defenders proclain, “Linux and Mac OS X require you to give permission to the system, too!” But the key thing there is that they only ask you once! If I want to do something pretty docile to the control panel settings in Vista, I’ve got to acknowledge that I’m doing something that could change my settings, and then when I actually change my settings UAC kicks in and requires me to sign off again. Come on, Microsoft, I’ve already signed off. Why do you think people dive into the control panel in the first place? In Windows 7, UAC is still there, but it’s been toned down to be much more common sense.

3. Why does Vista require 5 to 10 minutes to shut down at times? It’s mind boggling. Windows 7 shuts down when you tell it to.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Now, it sounds like I’m praising 7 mainly by damning Vista, but that’s just part of the story. Vista was annoying, but it wasn’t as terrible as Apple would have you believe. Windows 7 isn’t just Vista-done-better, though. It displays a refinement and sense of craftsmanship that I rarely attribute to Microsoft. Windows 7 is Microsoft, finally, firing on all cylinders.

Wow, I started playing around with the latest build of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope and I finally turned the corner on it. Before, I had trouble doing anything. Now, the light bulb went off and I started using the guided tours, and that’s how I discovered how this thing is the next best thing to being in a planetarium. It’s like having all of the world’s astronomical data at your fingertips. I will admit, it’s not quite as cool as the 3D planetarium program that’s over at the California Academy of Sciences (I’d kill to have a desktop version of that; it’s just freaking unbelievable), but considering it’s free the Worldwide Telescope is a remarkable tool. My only real knit so far about WWT is that it has a 3D model of the solar system, but it fudges on the distances; if the Moon is three days travel from the Earth, then the Sun is about a month away based on this scale. I’d love to see a 3D model that has realistic scale.

If you’re fascinated by astronomy and astrophysics like I am, this is definitely something to check out.

Ugh, I spent this morning toying around with Ubuntu 9.04 and if this is “Linux for the people” or what have you, then they assume the “people” all have CS degrees. What a nightmare. Base install went well, but then have fun installing drivers! To install the Radeon drivers you have to do some voodoo in the terminal window, and as someone with experience with command line interfaces (oh, those heady days of DOS and UNIX back in high school and college) I finally figured it out, but I can’t imagine what Joe Sixpack is going to do in that situation. For example:

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri

Getting to install something as simple as Adobe Flash Player was a headache until I gave the system access to the “multiverse” repository online and then having fun with voodoo in the terminal window again. I finally gave up trying to get my audio drivers installed; again, facing a nightmare with the terminal window, as the download package from the company won’t install “out of the box.”

Then, as soon as I tried going multi-monitor, the desktop properties freaked out. And that’s when I said screw it and wiped the damn partition. I’m back to Vista, and I’ve got a whole new appreciation for Microsoft. Sure, OS X is pretty solid, but Apple’s engineers get to worked in a closed and controlled environment; Microsoft engineers have to make something that will run in the PC ecosystem where you have roughly a bajillion different combinations of hardware in the form of different CPUs, motherboards, memory, hard drives, optical drives, Ethernet ports, video cards, sound cards, etc. And the damn thing just works, somehow.

I was using Windows 7 RC for the past month, and unfortunately the trick that I found on the Internet to re-arm it after the 30-day evaluation period doesn’t work, at least not for the release candidate. So I’m back to Vista for the next month or two, depending on when I bite the bullet on Windows 7. Vista’s not as bad as Apple and others make it out to be, but it’s nowhere near as good as 7. The sheer fact that I’ve had to sit and wait 10 minutes for Vista to shut down in order to reboot and install updates makes me remember why 7 rocks so much. It’s just so much better than Vista in every area.