April 30, 2007
When all you have is a hammer...
I'm trying to order a copy of Lightroom, since the evaluation period is over, and I'm being frustrated by Adobe's awful site. For some reason, they've implemented their online shop in Flash. It may have seemed like a great idea at the time, but it doesn't work well in Safari, and none of the usual web form keyboard shortcuts work quite right. Far from convincing me that Flash is a flexible solution that I should use on my websites, Adobe have succeeded in annoying me enough to want to avoid it at all costs. *sigh*Technorati Tags: lightroom
April 27, 2007
Travel madness
It's quiet here, I know. My schedule has gone mad. I'm spending a brief 48 hours or so back in Norwich, after spending the last three days in Utrecht at the Government and ICT conference, where Sourcesense had a stand.
On Sunday I'm back off to Amsterdam for Apachecon EU, where I'm doing a talk on Web 2.0 with Cocoon 2.2.
So, basically, don't expect anything much round here for the next few days!
April 21, 2007
Floating rail link gets support
This article on the BBC 'Floating' rail link gets support can have only one possible response.
Monorail, monorail, MONORAIL!
April 16, 2007
April 14, 2007
links for 2007-04-14
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Mac os x internet connection sharing is broken on my machine. This hint provides a workaround.
April 12, 2007
Aperture vs. Lightroom
I have been less than pleased with Apple's Aperture as a replacement for iPhoto, as my very brief review may have indicated. I found it to be incredibly slow, so much so that I was actually avoiding photo processing, since it was making my entire machine crawl and the endless spinning pizza wheel was a common sight. I also found it somewhat obtuse to use (even after reading through the manual and watching the DVDs). I kept having recurrent problems with RAW files from my Canon 350D not being recognised properly. Combine this with the somewhat botched iPhoto import (which gives duplicates of any photo I've adjusted in iPhoto, since it doesn't hide the originals) and I was less than satisfied overall. It didn't seem like the slick, polished application I'd hoped Apple would ship.
All this meant that pain and frustration became associated with photography - which as a result meant I ended up taking less photos, having expensive kit lying around and a hobby I was annoyed with. Clearly something had to change.
So I started playing with Adobe's Lightroom a few weeks ago, to see if it had improved from the horribly buggy and unusable beta I tried out ages ago.
The short story is that I shot and processed some 400+ photos over the Easter break, and found Lightroom to be a dream to work with compared to Aperture. First and foremost, it's blazingly fast. It remains to be seen whether this is a result of only having a few hundred photos in the library as opposed to the 12,000+ sat in Aperture. I'll try migrating my archive of photos over the weekend and report back.
Another bonus is Lightroom is much more intuitive. It does pretty much what I'd expect (even though I never learnt my way round other Adobe products like Photoshop), and although there's a few things that bug me (cumbersome keyboard shortcut to switch between "Develop" and "Library" modes, hacks and third-party software to do flickr uploads), I'm already zooming round the interface and using keyboard shortcuts that I somehow never mastered in over 6 months of owning Aperture.
Friends have assured me that Aperture is not that bad, and that I must be having teething troubles - but I'm on a Mac because I'm not interested in fighting through teething troubles any more. I expect my software to do the right thing, to get out of my way and to let me be productive (whilst gently pushing me in the direction of best practice when needed). Clearly Aperture is falling down somewhere in that area, at least for me.
So anyone messing with digital photography but finding iPhoto too restrictive or Aperture too painful might want to look at Lightroom. I'm now cheerfully considering cutting my losses, forgetting my financial investment in Aperture and forking out another $200 to buy Lightroom instead. And when you realise that's $200 of my lens-buying budget, you'll see what a serious proposition that is!
Technorati Tags: photography, aperture, lightroom
Open Source careers
Next week I'll take a couple of hours out of my current madcap schedule to go and talk at City College Norwich, where the Foundation Degree Business Computing students are just completing an assignment on Open Source. One of the things I hope to impress upon them is how experience in Open Source development (and the resultant peer recognition) is an increasingly valuable metric in the modern IT skills market.
Of course, it helps to have people like Matt Assay reporting that working for an Open Source company is the best way to boost your career. And of course I'm speaking out of enlightened self-interest: more students with Open Source skills means more potential hires for Sourcesense, and of course more individuals involved in the Open Source projects that I care about.
Meanwhile, what about choosing between a startup and an established business? Which is the bigger risk? It depends on whether you want a life-changing journey or not, and it's a debate I have with friends and colleagues frequently. Next week will also mark the seventh anniversary of me leaving big companies to work on building something different, so look out for some interesting news ...
April 11, 2007
links for 2007-04-11
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This is the missing step to make the lightroom/flickruploadr integration work.
April 10, 2007
Easter
I'm heading back to Norwich tomorrow after a few days offline and in the open air down in Cornwall. Meanwhile, here's my favourite photo from the time off.