Aperture arrived today. Good thing my replacement 4GB RAM modules also arrived today from OWC.

The first thing that Rae and I did after installing the software was to watch the Aperture DVD Tutorial. This was a great introduction to the features and functionality of the program. Some of the material was lifted from the web tutorials on the Aperture web page, including the guy with the British accent! Alas, he did not pop up ala Microsoft Bob to highlight the features of Aperture during the DVD.

I am writing an AppleScript that transfers annotations from my iView catalogs into Aperture image versions. My file structure for my annotated RAW images has been well-documented, and it will make writing this script relatively straightforward — if anything in AppleScript can be straightforward! A tricky part was mapping iView’s annotation field names to Aperture’s. Fortunately, I found the IPTC Rosetta Stone. Since Aperture’s IPTC field names are identical to IPTC, it was a snap to map iView’s field names over. There were some strange mappings, like Event and People in iView to FixtureIdentifier and Contact in Aperture/IPTC!

Read the rest of this entry »

Los Charros Taqueria in Mountain View is my favorite place for burritos in the South Bay. I almost always get a super wet burrito with carnitas with no cilantro. Let’s break down the order:

• Super: The super burritos come with guacamole and sour cream. Regular burritos do not. Sometimes I fluctuate between super and regular wet burritoes at Los Charros.
• Wet: A layer of melted cheese tops the burrito. Delicious!
• Carnitas: Los Charros’ carnitas is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. I much prefer their version to the soupy and soggy mess that I find in other Mexican restaurants.
• No Cilantro: I hate cilantro! I must have the gene that predisposes me to detest this green herb. Usually this means they don’t put salsa in the burrito, which is fine by me because I douse it with Los Charros’ homemade salsa and healthy servings of Tapatio sauce.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are currently 962 people in my Address Book, of which 231 of them have accompanying images. It’s very time-consuming to:

1. Find the next entry without a photo
2. Locate an image of the person
3. Attach the photo to the entry

To make things go a little faster, I wrote an AppleScript that deals with step one.

property groupName : “No Image”

tell application “Address Book”
set theGroup to group named groupName

repeat with aPerson in people
try
if not image of aPerson then
end if
on error errMsg number errNum
if errNum is -2763 then add aPerson to theGroup
end try
end repeat
end tell

Make sure that you have a group named groupName before running this script. Error number -2763 occurs when the image does not exist in the person. The script then adds that entry into the selected group. As you add photos to entries, remove all the people from the group and run the script again to repopulate the group.

My next step will be to write an AppleScript that searches through my image catalog for the person’s name. That will be for another day, however.

Eric posted a link to Synergy:

synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. Learn more about how it works.

The Mac OS X version is a little rough on the edges, but the application works as advertised. I’m running Synergy with my Quicksilver and my Quad PowerMac G5. I’ll probably hook up a PC laptop so I can be even more efficient while coding and doing web development. My Gigabit Ethernet hub is saturated with cables, so I have to use Mac OS X’s Internet Sharing to get the PC laptop onto the network. The Quad G5 comes with dual-Gigabit Ethernet ports so it makes providing additional network connections a snap!

If you have multiple computers on your desk and are looking for a way to reduce keyboard/mice clutter, check out Synergy!

My PowerMac Quad G5 arrived less than a week ago. This review covers my experiences the past week that I have had the Quad. My installation checklist went as follows. As you will soon learn, this was not the way it should have been done.

1. Open Box
2. Install RAM
3. Migrate Data
4. Software Update

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the PR for the upcoming Worldwide Newton Conference 2006. I spoke at the inaugural conference in Paris a year ago.

—-

Attention all GREENskeepers:

The 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference is scheduled to take place immediately following MacWorld San Francisco, January 13-15, at the Warwick Regis Hotel in downtown San Francisco.

The tentative agenda includes speakers (Larry Yeager, Paul Guyot, Adam Tow, and others), panel discussion, “how-to” sessions, demonstrations of the latest in Newton software/hardware, vendors(?), and more.

Registration will cost $40 US, and will be available via PayPal on the very nice site that our man Grant has updated with the latest conference information. Even if you are not sure if you will be attending, you can still register your interest on the site.

Worldwide Newton Conference Site: http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/

If you’ve got ideas you’d like the conference organizers (WWNA) to consider, please e-mail them to wwnc@mac.com.

This is a great opportunity to get together with your fellow Newton users, and fill your head with green. For the most up to date information, keep your eyes on Newtontalk, and visit the official site, http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/.

For as long as I can remember, my PowerMac G4 has not been able to sleep nor restart properly. Whenever I put the computer to sleep, nothing I did could bring the computer back. When I restarted it, the fans come on, but the display either stayed black or remained frozen in the Apple logo screen. I had always chalked it up to the computer being on its last legs, but I have finally traced the problem to my D-Link DFB-A5 FireWire/USB 2.0 PCI card adapter.

Apparently, many other people have been experiencing the same problem. In all my searches, I never came across this page. I wish I had, because that would have saved me a lot of headache everytime I was forced to shut down the computer to restart it.

There is an updated driver for DFB-A5. It seems to work if I don’t have a hard drive plugged into the card, which is pretty useless given that’s the reason why I bought it!

The Quad G5 comes with two FireWire 400 ports, but only one in the back. I have five FireWire hard drives that I use from time to time and one FW card reader that’s always plugged in. I could daisy chain four of the FW hard drives and the card reader to one FW400 port, using the FW800 port for my LaCie drive. I could use the Cinema Display and get two more ports, but none would be available in the back of the computer. Another option would be to access the drives using USB 2.0. I want my computer to sleep, so until there’s a PCI-Express card that works properly, I’ll have to choose from one of these solutions.

Or… I could get a 4-drive FW enclosure for my hard drives. Anybody have experience with something like this from FWDepot?

Aperture Checker determines whether or not your computer has the necessary horsepower, RAM, and graphics ability to run Aperture.

On my 867MHz Quicksilver, it said:

Aperture cannot be installed on this computer.

• Aperture requires at least a 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5, a 1.8 GHz iMac G5, or a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4.
• Your graphics card does not meet the minimum requirement for Aperture.

It’s too bad there are stiff system requirements. Since PowerBooks and iMacs have their graphics chip soldered onto the motherboard, they are out of luck unless they bought the most recent revisions. Many photographers like the 12-inch PowerBook since it’s more portable than its 15 and 17-inch siblings. Unfortunately, the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 chip it uses isn’t on Aperture’s list of supported video cards.

Update: Looks like it just left Anaheim today, meaning it won’t come in until Monday, November 21.

====

Damn. It won’t be long now.

Shipped on Nov 16, 2005 via FED EX GROUND
PMG5 QUAD 2.5 CTO

Estimated delivery: Nov 18, 2005

Did you know that the Beijing Wushu Team is in town and will be performing in Cupertino on Friday and Sunday evening! I last saw them in 1995 when my Stanford Tai-Chi class went into the heart of the lion’s den at Zellerbach Auditorium. Coincidentally, Rae was also in attendance, but our paths would not cross formally until 2001!

If you haven’t seen them perform, you’re missing out! This is the team from which Jet Li came from! Get your tickets today from Ticketmaster!