Archive for April, 2008

Photo management software that doesn’t suck?

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Dear Lazyweb: I’m looking for something to manage my photos. For now, I use a hierarchy of folders to divide things up by date. QuickLook and Preview are my primary viewing tools. I only have a couple gigs, spanning maybe a hundred discrete events, so I’m not a very heavy user.

iPhoto uses 80% of my CPU at idle. Just sitting there, open. It only exports web galleries to .Mac, which is worthless to me. “Events” feels like a waste of code… they could have just autosplit albums on import and let albums optionally be strongly associated with dates. And I still don’t like how iPhoto hides all the image files in its bundle in the Pictures folder, making it nigh-impossible to find the files with any other tool. Verdict: Not interested.

Aperture 1.5 crashed on launch, repeatably. I’m hovering just above the minimum system requirements anyway. Shame, it looked decent. I haven’t ruled it out… but if it’s anything like Apple’s usual products it won’t run very well on my Powerbook5,4 anyway.

So what else is out there?

I used iView Media Pro a half-dozen years ago (yipes!). It was a bit clunky but it worked. Has anybody else used it more recently?

Bridge looks worthless to anyone who’s not heavily invested in Adobe products. Right out.

From what I saw, Lightroom looks more aimed at photo editing than organization—the opposite of iPhoto—which makes it a bit less suitable for me. It also looks heavy. But I’m still very interested in it. Does anyone around here have a copy I can fiddle with?

Not interested in Photoshop Elements; Save For Web isn’t quite enough to justify the endless you-must-be-an-admin-user style nightmares.

Posted in Asking, Doing | 3 Comments »

Back to WordPress

Monday, April 28th, 2008

I moved back from TextPattern to WordPress. It sucks less than it used to. The theme (“Modern”) isn’t my work. I hacked it a little bit (narrower sidebar, tighter top, page template includes sidebar).

The TextPattern importer brought in all the posts and all the categories, but didn’t associate them. This is annoying.

I installed an OpenID plugin and poked it a bit. If you use OpenID, let me know if it works.

Update: Categories imported. Google told me I didn’t want to use the default TextPattern import script, I wanted to blah blah edit blah blah PHP blah blah I hate WordPress.

Here’s the script I ended up writing: do-categories.php.txt. It assumes both textpattern and wordpress tables are in the same MySQL database, to join across them. You should change the table names. First run the two queries interactively (phpMyAdmin?) to verify that everything looks right. Then put this in your wordpress top directory next to wp-config.php, fix the extension, and php do-categories.php. It’ll print out the things it does—another opportunity for sanity checking. No warranties express or implied yadda yadda. Thanks to Alex Brie’s script for guidance.

Posted in Meta | 3 Comments »

Add an ssh key to another user on a different system without logging in

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Scott liked my terminal style from yesterday, so I’ll reprise it.


heian:<<<umi-misc/pubkeys$ ssh cse125@neathat.com -p 14522 sudo ls \>/dev/null
[sudo] password for cse125: (echoed, which is unfortunate)
heian:<<<umi-misc/pubkeys$ cat djc_hmac_rsa.pub | ssh cse125@neathat.com -p 14522 sudo su -c \'cat \>\> ~djc/.ssh/authorized_keys\'
heian:<<<umi-misc/pubkeys$

Now DJ can use his key on that server.

The sudo ls is to enter the password and get the sudo authorization ticket. We can’t enter the password with the cat, because ssh sees its stdin isn’t a terminal and refuses to allocate a tty. A stupid workaround would be (echo "mypassword"; cat ... ); | ssh ..., but I like the two-phase solution more, for some reason.

Posted in Coding, Doing | 2 Comments »

history meme

Monday, April 14th, 2008

I picked this up from Stephen Lau on Planet OpenSolaris, though he traces it back to Planets Mozilla and Gnome.


heian:<<<hiroi/jauricchio$ uname -a
Darwin heian.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar  4 21:23:43 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh
heian:<<<hiroi/jauricchio$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
95 svn
80 vi
70 make
59 cd
29 ls
18 ./build/neathat.app/Contents/MacOS/neathat
14 sudo
11 ssh
8 rm

It appears I’ve been doing a lot of CSE 125 lately. That accounts for the 18 runs of our debugging build, 95 subversion statuses, updates, and checkins, and 70 makes.

Posted in Coding, Doing | 1 Comment »

Marriage Proposal Via Self-Referential Patent

Monday, April 7th, 2008

This makes me several intellectual kinds of happy. Patent application #20070078663

Why are my most productive days in terms of code also the days I read the most interesting blogs & news?

Posted in Thinking | Comments Off

Tokyo Trains in 1991

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Lyle Saxon of Tokyo Linux Users Group posted a few videos from 1990-1992 Tokyo. He compares train ticket gates then (hand-punched tickets) and now (magstrip and Suica), but the more shocking video is conductors pushing people onto packed trains.

Now, I’ve been to Tokyo, and I rode the trains at rush hour, and it was one of the most… compact experiences of my life. But that didn’t prepare me at all for this. I cannot even imagine riding a train like that every day to work. It’s insane.

Via Jim Grisanzio.

Posted in Japan/Japanese | Comments Off

Being evil with DTrace

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Many people who know me know that I like Ruby and DTrace very much, and I sometimes take an interest in security. This article made me very happy, by combining all three of those: Being evil with DTrace

Via Ben Rockwood.

Posted in Coding, Ruby | Comments Off

Paul on tracking bugs

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

I’ve always wanted a Trac for the world. Rwanda: wontfix. China: worksforme.

Posted in Quoting, Thinking | Comments Off

Rushi on link quality

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Professor Varghese: So where in the networking stack do you think most data gets dropped?

Rushi: Level 3

Posted in Quoting, Rushi | Comments Off