Adobe Lightroom Quirks

The reason for using Adobe Lightroom is mainly because of the tight integration with other Adobe products, and a little legacy from my Microsoft days. So I had no real reason to look at the competition (Apple Aperture).... Until now (I guess).

The biggest drawback is that you can't open multiple catalogs at the same time. Something like having multiple personal folders within Microsoft Outlook. You can open them, access the content and if you want you can detach it again to save resources.
So opening a catalog means that you can't access photo's in other catalogs.... Therefor I use one (large) catalog. Mainly because I can't be bothered with the whole exporting and importing scenario to move (or copy) images between catalogs.
By the way, I suggested such functionality to Adobe (along with some other improvements regarding the syncing of catalogs). Now let's hope that they will implement this in version 3.0

This feature is something Apple Aperture since version 1.0 (if I recall correctly), and I get the feeling that I'm near the how far I can push Adobe Lightroom.

For the last couple of days I get the strangest behaviour from Lightroom. Importing photo's normally means you can add tags, and select a way of storing them on the hard disk. Lately it seems that Lightroom is having a mind of its own. Photo's end up all over the place. Tags are getting lost.

These problems are most likely cause by two factors in my opinion;

1. A relatively large catalog which I browse a lot
2. A lot of processing power going to other applications while browsing/editing photo's

I can accept that Lightroom is getting slower with thousands of photo's, but it shouldn't get a mind of its own when my iMac is busy doing all sorts of things.

Juniper NSMXpress 'Fun'

Today was one of those days. First the two NSMXpress appliances failed yesterday (version 2008.2r2). No way of connecting the client gui. The webinterface and SSH connections worked fine though. Picked one up for examination, and since I had some *cough*good*cough* experiences a while back I assumed the latest software had some undocumented bug.

A back to factory defaults (version 2007.3r1) worked fine, but due to certain hardware the 2008 version was needed. So I upgraded the appliance (again) and found (while waiting) that the security certificate, used between the NSM server and the client gui, had expired on Juli 20th, 2009....... So someone forgot to update the certificates in the 2008.2r2 software.
After fixing that, the client gui worked like a charm.

Click to read more ...

Wordpress Upgrade 'Fail'

Wordpress 2.8.2 fixes a XSS vulnerability introduced in v2.8.1. Since I don't want to be vulnerable, I did the automatic upgrade from within the admin panel.

The proces, which worked so far since v2.7, hung after approximately 30 seconds. After that the only responds I got was:

"Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute."

It took about 10 minutes to start feeling a bit uncomfortably. The upgrade failed somewhere along the line. At least so it seemed. Searching Google I found this link. It seems that removing the .maintenance file in the Wordpress blog root removes the message and should (re)start the upgrade automatically.

Guess what? It did. So kudos to the developpers for creating failsaves in the upgrade engine.

Scotland Holiday 2009

Two and a half weeks driving around in Scotland. The weather was extremely good, which we didn't anticipate, so we didn't have enough t-shirts etc. Who would have thought that over two weeks of sunshine was possible in Scotland?

Saw lots of ruins, castles, sheep, churches, sun, beer, whisky, ruins, castles and stuff. No need to get bored when you're over there. Only downside to the extremely good weather was that I wasn't able to shoot many of those typical cloudy/rainy Scotland photo's.

The trip started with the ferry IJmuiden-New Castle. After that it was Dumfries, Oban, Spean Bridge, Struan (Isle of Sky), Ullapool, Thurso, Ballater, Glenrothes, and back to New Castle. Basically a trip covering the best parts of Scotland (we did miss the Orkneys though).



Also available on my flickr page or here.

Photofocus Question - Tilted Horizon

Oh yeah... One of my questions was 'answered' in the Photofocus podcast #09 by Scott Bourne and Rick Sammon (last question of the episode).

My problem' is that when I shoot in portrait mode that the horizon is always a couple of degrees off. The right side of the image is significantly lower than the left side. No matter how hard I try. Even though the problem is easily corrected in post-processing, it's annoying as hell.

Scott suggested a using the virtual horizon (which isn't present on the D300.... hmmm which gives me an excuse to upgrade ;-)), or using a hot shoe bubble (which is a whole lot cheaper). Rick mentioned possible lens related distortion. It's not the lens, because the problem exists in the range of 10mm wide-angle to a 200mm telephoto. So I'll be trying a hot shoe bubble for a while. Let's see if that helps.

Citrix ICA Client SSL Error 61

The great thing about Citrix is that you can access company resources from almost anywhere. They have several solutions for remote access and thin client computing. They also have an ICA client for Apple OSX (Yeeehaaaaa).

I've been using the OSX ICA Client for a couple of months now to access my mail on the company intranet. Apart from some little quirks (like not functioning well when having two displays), the experience is good. Up till now.

Today, completely out of the blue came this error:

The error message suggests that I have changed something on my Mac, but not that I know. For someone who works with PKI, one would think that they would remember choosing NOT to trust a public VeriSign CA.

Click to read more ...

Dilemma Gigantica

Oké. At the moment I run a server at home. This server runs several services which I need (at the moment). These services include:

• File sharing
• Web server (mostly for testing and development, since this website is hosted @ Dreamhost.com SquareSpace.com)
• *cough*Download station*cough*
• Mail Server (serving several personal domains)
• SSH Server
• Local onsite backups

All this runs on an old (especially in IT terms) PC with Windows. The CPU and other peripherals sucks in electricity like you've never seen before (it's an old AMD Thunderbird CPU from the early overclocking days -> 2000/2001). Apart from being old, it's also responsible for about 70% of my energy bill (a 'rough' estimation). Besides that, it's also responsible for permanent subtropic temperatures in my study.

Click to read more ...

Apple Releases Safari 4.0.2

Apple released Safari v4.0.2. Besides the regular security fixes they also fixed the bug which made Rabobank Internet Banking 'go haywire'. So I could in theory move from Firefox to Safari.... In theory I said :).

Internet Data Retention Law is Live in the Netherlands

It's a fact. As of this Tuesday, the Dutch ISP's are required (by Dutch law) to log all Internet activity of their customers and store the data for 12 months (at the moment). Gitmo Nation has expanded a bit further to the east, according to the No Agenda podcast host Adam Curry (which is a great podcast by the way).

Anyway, the logging is no longer limited to the basic IP connection data, the new law requires the ISP's to log the following information:

General Internet Access:

• Loginname
• IP Address
• Name and address details of of all the parties involved (when available)
• Time and Date the communication took place
• Used service(s)
• The callers phone number in the case of dial-up Internet access
• The number called for dial-up Internet access
• DSL, phonenumbers, MAC address (when using public/ISP sponsored WiFi/Network access)

E-mail:

• IP address used to access or send e-mail
• User ID
• E-mail address of the sender, recipients etc. (basically the FROM, TO, CC and BCC fields)
• Registered e-mail alias addresses when available
• Time and date of the communications
• Name and address details of all the parties involved (when available).
• Method used in sending/receiving the e-mail (webmail, POP, SMTP, IMAP, etc.)

Internet VoIP:

• Phone numbers of both parties
• IP addresses
• Name and address details of all the parties involved (when available)
• Time and date of the communication (start and finish)
• Protocols used during the communication
• Successful and failed attempts to communicate

The 'fun' part is that the Dutch government won't (or can't) give a real reason why this information is required..... Why can't they give the proper reasons for creating and passing this law. Theoretically we still live in a democracy.

My thought is that it's probably based on some vague report by some high-profile consulting company that scared the shit out of the politicians (accountability??). Especially the terms 'child pornography' and 'terrorism' are most likely THE keywords on which the decision is based. And no one wants be publicly not against those two.... And so the privacy of the Dutch citizens crumbles, and crumbles.

Time to start using more and more encryption in all of your communications if you ask me, and start running your own services on a server in your attic .

/me is removing the dust from his PGP keyrings....

Data Robotics Drobo Review

About a month ago, I bought a Drobo to expand my hard disk storage. Normally you would buy an additional hard disk to add storage. Problem with that is that those drives will eventually fill up with all sorts of important information.
Every time you add or replace disk you need to move data around, which takes a lot of time.

The Drobo is an external enclosure which holds up to 4 SATA disk drives. The enclosure can be connected via FireWire800 or USB2.0, and is seen by the OS as a removable drive.

Your data stored on the drobo is secured when you use 2 or more drives. 1 disk drive is used for redundancy. So if one drive fails your data is still there.

Click to read more ...