Details on next week’s COBA meeting have been posted. Sorry for the delay in getting this out. Wedding planning has been very busy.

We’re looking for presenters to talk about uploading photos using pbase and Flickr, along with any other third-party image gallery sites that are out there. If you have experience with these and want to present next week, let me know!

Also, the deal for the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 is still going on until June 30 for COBA members only. $100 off the driveless configuration and $200 off the 1TB configuration!

Update June 2, 2005: The beta list is now closed.

I’m looking for a few people to test out a new piece of software that I’ve written. Requirements for the beta test are that you (1) are running Tiger, (2) are a regular user of Apple Mail, (3) make heavy use of mailbox folders, and (4) hate the speed at which you organize your mail messages.

If you’re interested in participating, post a comment below or send me an email!

Update: 4 more people needed to qualify for the deal! We have 6 people signed up! The promotion ends on June 30.

I posted details of the ReadyNAS 600 Deal that’s going on right now for COBA members.

• $200 off the 1TB ReadyNAS with 4×250GB drives. You can specify WD, Hitachi, or Seagate brand drives
• $100 off the ReadyNAS without any drives. You supply your own SATA drives for the box
• $1895 for 1.6 TB ReadyNAS with 4×400GB drives.

If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, you may want to consider the ReadyNAS. There’s a new review of the system on ExtremeTech. Check it out!

I’ve been using it to store my images for almost two months now, and the experience has been positive. I had one problem with AFP connections and Mac OS X, but Infrant’s engineers and support staff were extremely quick to respond and fix the problem.

Infrant Advantages

The ReadyNAS has been compared to the $999 BuffaloTech Terastation on sale at local Fry’s. Here are some points of differentiation between the two products.

Performance – By incorporating a 4 Channel SATA Controller and a Hardware RAID accelerator directly on the CPU, the ReadyNAS is up to 59% faster on writes and 102% faster on Reads. In comparison, the Terastation relies on IDE drives and Software RAID.

Serviceability – Not only do the Serial ATA drives offer better performance, but the availability of such drives in the next 5 years should facilitate replacement. IDE is an older technology, and many computer manufacturers have already started to migrate away from them. The ReadyNAS Chassis was designed to ease HDD installation and replacement; the Terastation was not (requires removal of 46 screws to replace one drive). Also, by storing the OS Image on compact flash, we enable replacement of the entire drive array at once. The Terastation OS resides on the HDD and does not allow all four drives to be replaced at once.

Interoperability – ReadyNAS offers NFS support for Linux and UNIX. HTTP support is also included allowing for easy and safe file sharing over the Internet as well as allowing you to easily set up an Intranet site out of a share.

Data Integrity – Infrant’s engineers come from an Enterprise NAS background and emphasize data integrity in all situations. User selectable options such as disabiling the HDD write cache, employing a FULL Data Journaling file system, and requiring hardware RAID, are all designed to eliminate potential RAID stripe issues and keep your data safe.

Last week at COBA, I presented on my annotated image library. After one and a half years, I have reached the end of arduous task of annotating 77,500 images. I’ll write about what I covered in the presentation in a future entry; right now, I want to talk about a recent project, Annotation Copier.

One thing that has been annoying me to no end is the fact that derivative versions of an image often lack the metadata that I worked so hard to enter. By derivative, I refer to an image that’s been converted or processed using several programs such as Capture One, Photoshop CS, DPP, and iView. If you stick to using just one program to do annotating and processing, you’re fine, but the minute you add one, two, or three more programs to the mix, things can get lost in the process.

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I was reading Dardy’s blog, in which he mentioned that he saw the last two Star Wars movies on opening day at midnight. “Wait a second,” I thought to myself, “I saw Attack of the Clones with him on opening day, but it wasn’t the midnight showing!” Dardy was quite insistent that we saw it at that time, so I looked back in my photo archives. Sure enough, we stood in line for six hours! My memories of the line were at dusk, so I figured we saw it on opening day in the evening! My bad, Dardy!

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What began years ago will soon come to an end: Steven Kam, JD. All that’s left now is the Bar exam in July. Then, we shall all bow down to Judge Drea… err… Judge Kam!

Last night, friends celebrated with Steven at Everett and Jones BBQ in Oakland’s Jack London Square. The place was packed, with live blues music blaring and Road House playing on the TV. The ribs, beef brisket, links, and BBQ chicken took some time in coming, but when they did, they were quickly devoured. I think the Viennasaur was outshined by the Furious Georgeasaurus; he was lightning fast when the food arrived!

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If you use Photoshop CS and have recently upgraded to Tiger via Archive and Install, you may have noticed that you can’t drag and drop files or double-click on them from the Finder to open them. The only way to open the files is via the File Browser or the Open dialog box. Needless to say, this is very annoying.

The problem is linked to the Archive and Install feature of the Mac OS X installation process. To restore the functionality, you’ll need to reinstall Photoshop CS. I don’t know if this problem is duplicated with Photoshop CS2.

I looked everywhere for a solution to this problem before finding the answer on Macintouch’s Tiger Reports pages. I didn’t enter the right Google search terms to find this answer apparently. “Tiger Photoshop CS Drag and Drop” brings up the listing quickly but not “Photoshop Drag and Drop Problem Open Mac OS X”.

Last night, I had dinner with Eric, Geoff and Livia at Gordon Biersch in downtown Palo Alto. With their jet-set lifestyles, it’s hard to keep up with these people! Eric just returned from French Polynesia, and Geoff and Livia were going to take a red-eye flight to Houston later in the evening.

I brought the Digital Rebel XT to Eric. Like me, he’s planning on using it as a walkaround camera to replace the big and bulky 1D.

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On tap for next week’s COBA meeting are the following topics:

• Infrant ReadyNAS 600 Deal
• Raw Shooter Essentials and Photoshop CS2
• An Annotated Image Library
• Tripod and Tripod Heads

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I wrote my first Workflow using Automator today. This is what I wanted Soybo to be, a system whereby a user can easily string together actions from a diverse set of applications. One difference between Soybo and Automator is that a user would be able to access these actions from various devices — a cell phone, a PDA, or another computer on the Internet.

At any rate, the Workflow that I created basically does three things:

1. Copies selected photos from a memory card to a temporary staging area on my ReadyNAS 600
2. Renames the photos using ExifRenamer
3. Moves the photos to the appropriate YYYY-MM-DD directories

Granted, I could have done this without Automator, but this new Tiger application makes things much easier. Now, my workflow for dealing with new photographs is completely automated. Good job, Apple!