In between the Cupertino shows, the Beijing Wushu Team gathered at San Francisco’s Baker Beach to have group and individual portraits. With the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, the photos turned out great! What wasn’t so great were all the people in the background! Thanks to Photoshop, you’ll never know just how many people were cluttering up each shot!

To see the rest of the photos from our Baker Beach photoshoot, check out my smugmug gallery!

Beijing Wushu Team 2005 Photos

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I have finally gotten around to posting photos from the Beijing Wushu Team’s two-night performance at the Flint Center in Cupertino back in November.

The photos below are just the tip of the iceberg. To see all the action and excitement from the two performances, check out my smugmug gallery!

Beijing Wushu Team 2005 Photos

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A sizeable collection of Newton items is up for auction on eBay. John Venzon is closing his doors after seven years. It’s currently at $2,100 for over 13 Apple Newtons and accessories. I don’t have quite the number of Newtons as John does, but I do have some rare Newton items that I’m sure some collector will enjoy, including the Armistice Newton on a NuBus card.

Speaking of Newtons, the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference is scheduled for January 14-15 at the Warwick Regis Hotel in San Francisco. If you’re still keeping the green backlight shining, come to the conference!

Version 0.9.2 of Annoture has been posted onto my website.

There’s almost always a simpler solution to the problem. Hours after I released Annoture 0.9.1 to the world, I discovered an easier way to locate the current Aperture Library. I didn’t realize how many people would place their Aperture Library in a location somewhere other than ~/Pictures/. Since I haven’t switched to using Aperture full-time, I stuck with the default library location. I have since found out that many people are placing their Aperture Library on external hard drives or secondary internal hard drives.

I am now retrieving the Aperture Library Path directly from Aperture’s preferences file, located at:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Aperture.plist

There are two property fields that need checking, LibraryPath and LibraryPathOnRestart. If you change your Aperture Library location in Aperture’s preferences, you need to restart Aperture to load the new library.

Annoture 0.9.2 uses this preference to determine the current Aperture library location. Because of this, I removed the Aperture Library Path preference in Annoture’s Preferences window.

Thanks to Carsten H, Charles J, and Don K, for helping me debug this situation.

I squashed a bug today in Annoture. When selecting another location for the Aperture Library, Annoture did not correctly set the preference. As a result, when you copy annotations from iView to Aperture, no matches could be found.

Version 0.9.1 of Annoture has been posted onto my website.

I have my Aperture Library on my boot drive, but I suspect many people have chosen their primary Aperture Library location to be an external FireWire hard drive or a second internal hard disk. If you are installing from version 0.9, be sure to reset your Aperture Library location in Annoture’s Preferences.

Compare the Chargers’ broadcasters with those of the Colts during Michael Turner’s 83-yard touchdown run that ended the dreams of the Colts perfect season.

It was nice to see the Bolts come back after that disappointing loss to Miami last week. We still need to win the next two games against tough opponents Denver and Kansas City to have a chance of making the playoffs. Pittsburgh and Jacksonville have the last two wild card spots tied up for the moment. Let’s hope that they lose their remaining games of the season!

iView Keywords to Aperture works on both iView MediaPro 2.6.4 and 3.0.1. The script will add new or append to existing keyword groups in Aperture’s Keyword HUD.

Visit the iView Keywords to Aperture web page.

A post on Rob Galbraith’s led me to discover where Aperture is storing its auto-complete items for Keywords and IPTC fields.

Although Annoture copies keywords/people from iView media items to Aperture image versions, the keywords/contacts are not copied over to the autofill lists. Aperture keeps a list of keywords and autofill items here:

~/Library/Application Support/Aperture/Keywords.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Aperture.plist

iView 2.6.4 and 3.0.x maintain lists in two different places:

~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Favorites/
~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Vocabulary/

It wouldn’t take much to convert iView keywords to Aperture keywords and back, although going from Aperture->iView, you won’t get the hierarchical keywords. Note that Aperture has two types of keyword support, it’s hierarchical keywords system and an IPTC keywords property that appears to be used when importing already annotated images.

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Aperture.plist is chock full of interesting preferences. I’m going to enjoy looking through all of the properties to help improve my applications.

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Many members from the former Content and Access group at Palm were travelling this week, so we had a small group assembled for the ex-Palm Holiday Party. Today, we went to Pizz’a Chicago, which was voted “Best Pizza” by the San Jose Metro and CitySearch.com in 2005. We ordered the:

• Great Chicago Fire: Italian sausage, sport peppers, and fresh garlic (I passed on the cilantro). Mrs. O’Leary got real hot over this one!
• Sears Tower: Onions, sweet red peppers, zucchini, marinated artichoke hearts & black olives. The pinnacle of vegetarian pizzas!
• Wrigley Field: Pesto sauce, feta cheese, Teriyaki chicken, roasted garlic, sun-dried tomatoes. A home run of a pizza!

Six people came to the event, Greg, Fanny, Jon, Julie, Lisa, and myself. We passed the good word that Trevor and Julie’s son, Curtis, is in remission! Out of the hundreds of people that you come across during your professional life, the vast majority of them disappear from your life once you leave the company (perhaps only to reappear via LinkedIn). I’m happy that I’ve managed to keep in touch with those at Palm. There was a saying from my high school that the struggle to the summit is enough to fill a man’s heart. Our group at Palm aimed for Everest; we didn’t always make it to the top, but we all made it through and are better people from the experience. Isn’t that what’s important?

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New and old employees of Rotten Tomatoes got together on Saturday evening at Mezes, A Taste of Greece, restaurant in the Marina. It’s been some time since Rae and I last saw many of the RT people. We didn’t go to the Beijing Wushu Team performance in Berkeley, opting instead to attend and photograph the two shows in Cupertino. I’ll be posting up photos from that event real soon now. Going through 2400 images to find the best ones to show on the website takes time!

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