So here it is the day after Memorial Day. I could say I had a productive holiday, worked around the house, tending to business and what not but I would be lying. For the most part, I just rested the weekend. The only thing we did of consequence as a family was spend some time in Old Salem. It is always good to visit the historic part of the city. Nothing ever changes there but it is such a beautiful place just to walk the cobblestones and see the historic places. Plenty of tourists around as well. Madeleine had a grand time just being herself; she has so much energy that I can not keep up with her. Appears time for me to get back into shape.
But before getting into shape, Memorial Day holiday is time for BBQ and I did my bit. Ribs on Sunday with potato salad and baked beans; Hamburgers and corn on Monday. All very good eats. Ate so much, I probably could go without eating for a day or two.
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So what time I had left for the weekend was spent on catching up with my reading and my photography. I am still going through the photos from the Dance Recital and the Celtic Festival from earlier this month. Also had to take care of some of the photos from the Old Salem trip too. It has been taking a bit longer to do the photos as I have to been experimenting a bit on them especially on the Dance Recital. My experiments in photos will be the subject of an upcoming feature this weekend.
One thing about the photography of late is that my hard drives are ready starting to fill up. An event like a dance recital will use up my 2GB flash card in my camera. Put a string of such events together and hard drives start shrinking tremendously.
So it looks like I will be in the market for another external hard drive soon. I am stunned to see that 1 TB drives are going for $120 now a piece. It was just a year ago or so, that I paid $100 for my 250GB. Prices coming down fast and that is good. At the rate I store photos now, I will need 100 GB/year. Of course, if I start doing more with my photography, then that usage will definitely jump.
See ya later…
It has been six months now since I got my Apple iMac and I have never regretted buying it.
Perhaps it is the combination of the more powerful hardware compared to my old slow Dell along with the more efficient Mac OS, but it seems that I can get more done faster on the Mac. Straight from the outset when booting up the Mac, I can start working on it in 30 seconds whereas on the old Dell, I had to wait over 2 minutes for the system to boot and be operational. Similar effect with powering down. It does not seem like much to be concern about but it was those sort of aggravations that made me want to switch to the Mac.
It has taken some time to get comfortable with the different operating system. Certain habits I have picked up in the Windows world have no counterpart with the Mac OS; whenever I am editing a document on the Mac, I continually use CTRl-End to get to the end of the line. That keystroke combination does not exist on Mac programs. Still, I do not mind giving up those little things for what I received in return.
Everything about the OS seems so intutive. When I think about doing something in whatever program, I try it and it works. No guessing, no cryptic series of steps to do something. A simple click or keystroke and it works. Having said that, though, I find many things sort of hidden from the user but when I discover them, it uncovers some powerful functionality. For example, using the Option+Shift+4 key combination gives me a cursor to snag parts of the screen to save as an image. In Windows, you could use Alt+Prt Scrn to get the whole screen or buy a program that allows what the Mac gives you for free.
The Preview application is a wonder of a program that allows me to see any file, text document or image. It is quick and powerful. No more separate photo viewing programs. It even allows basic photo editing.
Another great thing about the Mac is the integration of the applications with each other particularly with the Apple branded applications. Using iMovie to make videos, I found it could add in photos from iPhoto or Aperture, music from iTunes or Garage Band. Now this sort of coupling of applications with the OS was considered to be bad when Microsoft did it but I do not think Microsoft ever made it as easy and effective as Apple has done with its products.
Still, I had to make some compromises. Giving up all of the software I accumulated over the years, meant losing some nice games and utilities. Indeed, losing access to games is probably the most significant loss as most game developers only develop for Windows or consoles; the Mac world is still relatively small compared to the rest of the computer world in number of homes using the system.
Using the Mac has been a great learning experience and one that I am continually learning every day to become more productive and creative as well.
Nope, no regrets at all.
Apple has it big media conference this week. This conference highlights the innovations in Apple’s music business which is focused on the combination of iTunes and the iPod lines. As usual, there is always something to talk about from this conference. Relative to previous conferences, the announced updates were modest. The Nano line of iPods were updated with a new look, sleeker & thinner with a larger screen for showing video. More colours too. I have never really understand the attraction of seeing video on a screen the size of four postage stamps. On the other hand, the iPod Touch, which as adopted the new look of the iPhone is a much better way video viewer with its larger screen.
As it has in the past, buyers will get the iPods for a lower price and/or larger storage ability.
Of course, anytime there is an update in the iPod line, iTunes gets an update too to handle the new technology. Much of it is under the covers and if you do not have an iPod now, it is sort of irrelevant except for two things. There is a new way of viewing your music which is by album through a mechanism similar to cover flow. Looks better than the old list view of albums and if you are a listener of music by the album collection, this may work out well.
The second thing is the new Genius suggestions. part marketing ploy and part organiser, the Genius API will scan your music collection to suggest like music for a particular song based on genre and other factors. In some ways, it is like a smart Shuffle function.
Also, Genius will suggest songs from the iTunes Store library that could complement your selection based on how other iTunes users bought in concert for the same song. For example, if I am playing Bruce Springsteen song, it will suggest buying the album the song came from, similar Springsteen tracks from other albums and then songs that other people bought or playing with the song you have. Much of the benefit of the new feature depends on other iTunes user uploading IDs of their song collection to Apple’s iTunes Store and allow the service to do the cross-referencing.
On both counts, Genius seems to be a good feature to have and appears to be implemented well. Of course, I could do without the blatant marketing pitch on buying more songs but I will endure it.
Playing with Apple’s Aperture program for photography editing. First impressions are that it looks to be a solid application that provides most of the functionality that Adobe’s Lightroom provides. The interface is similar enough to Lightroom that it did not take too long to come up to speed on it. Probably will need some more practice on it before making a firm decision on whether to go with that program or Lightroom.
Speaking of photography, Flickr is revamping its site in a big way. Users will be getting a new home page which you can get now ahead of the official release which I did. It looks better organised in some respects. Groups you belong to are more visible now as is the stats page of all of the views of your photos. One thing I do not like though is the comments listing. Before comments for your photos and comments you left on other photos were kept in two distinct lists. Now they are combined in one listing. this makes it a bit more difficult to see what is happening in terms of activity on your photostream especially after a recent posting. Let’s see if that changes in the official release.
Being a programmer never was the first thing I imagined my life’s occupation to be growing up. I always had dreams of more adventurous jobs: test pilot, military soldier, doctor. But reality and an understanding of what avenues for success were available to me lead me to business school. Even then, I chose the more glamorous major of marketing with visions of being the key creative person in advertising or marketing campaigns. What I ended up doing after graduation was spending four years in the retail trade working as a retail manager. I did ok in that field but never really excelled as my heart was never in it and I always sought something different. When I left the trade and went home, I had to figure out what I was planning to do with my life. Some research let me to return to college to take up programming and receive a diploma in it. It forever changed my life.
When I first started out in programming, I specialised in the language PowerBuilder. At the time, 1996, it was considered to be the superior of fourth generation programming languages like Visual Basic and consequently it was in high demand. That skill led to jobs in Florida and Europe and I rode it for it was worth. But I always considered myself very forward looking. In this field, employers always were looking for the hottest new solutions to address their business problems. When I returned from Germany, I was aware of Java as the new language of choice for development. In quick fashion I started learning how to use it and for several years as the language grew in size and complexity, I grew along with it. It was with these skills that I found a position in Winston. But times are changing again.
It was two years ago that I sensed that as a leading edge language, Java was fading. That was typical of mature languages. The new trend was towards scripting languages like PHP, Python and Perl, a part of the LAMP paradigm where components were built on open source technologies. So I have a practice of doing my personal programming in PHP. This website and the sub sites run on a PHP engine using MySql as the database. Much easier to use than Java and more widespread today in running web sites. Knowing this language I hope to keep my marketability as a web programmer high in the face of outsourcing and off shoring the very skills that my family depends upon for keeping us comfortable.
Yet I sense a new shift now. These shifts happen way too fast now for me to keep up with them. Web 2.0 technologies are everywhere exemplified by AJAX applications like the ones behind Google Maps. Flash and now Microsoft’s new tool, Silverlight, are making web sites more immersive doing things that even AJAX sites can not do especially in video. As more people acquire faster connections, they yearn for more involved websites with all sorts of eye candy and immediate feedback. In my experience the most useful of websites are those that display information which is best handled through plain html.
So I have a decision to make: do I plunge in and try to learn as many of these various technologies as I can to diversify my skill set to stay competitive in the workforce as a computer programmer? Do I try to become a master of Google’s Web ToolKit APIs? Will it be similar to the experience I had in spending my free time learning the Mobile Java APIs (used in cell phones and PDAs) for several months back in 2000-2001 and then find out that the whole industry demand for the technology had collapsed? Or do I stay with the technologies I know and build on those for there is still a demand for applications that require basic functionality and nothing more.
I am now at an age that I do not have many re-inventions of myself left and with increased family responsibilities, my time is scarce. I may take the plunge or maybe not. For now, I am a computer programmer by trade and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Question is will I stay relevant?
With all of the going ons in my life, one thing that has been put on the back burner has been my oft-discussed move to the new iMac computers. As a priority in my life, it has been downgraded quite a bit. But like many other things in life, sometimes waiting for something may prove more advantageous than rushing in.
This week the iMac received a bit of an upgrade with faster CPUs and more default RAM for the same price pints as before. Apple also released a new top-end version of the iMac, a 24″ monitor version with a 3.06 GHz CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics card making it more a gamer’s machine than anything else.
Considering that the desktop line received a major overhaul last summer, it is premature to expect any significant upgrades for the iMac. This year, it is the MacBooks that will get the overhauls as we have seen first with the Air version.
The Leopard version of the Mac OS will be getting a new update in the very near future and may get another one yet by the time I get to buying the iMac. So far I am still comfortable with my decision to switch but holding back for a bit looks like a prudent decision if not a totally voluntary one.
The new 20-inch 2.66 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,499 (US), includes:
- 20-inch widescreen LCD display
- 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus
- 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB
- 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm
- a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory
- built-in iSight video camera
- built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
- mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately)
- built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
- the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.