Time Machine. A giant leap backward.
Boy did Apple ever get that slogan right. Let me preface this post by first stating this; I truly had high hopes for Apples new Time Machine found in the new Leopard OS X… had. Now that I got that out of the way, I can comfortably start my rant.
Time Machine for OS X Leopard sucks! No, it more than sucks; it sucks the biggest suckiness this side of suck universe. There is more suck packed in this one app than all of the os’s that Microsoft has ashamedly released in the last decade. I had suspected some of Time Machines downfalls in an earlier post postulating that Time Machine could in fact instill a very false sense of security. I have successfully realized the hard truth in this fact.
First let me tell you what Time Machine is good for; retrieving one, or perhaps a small handful of misplaced files or pictures or movies or schematics for building a HAM radio or whatever… Let me tell you how Time Machine does this; all space flight through starry backdrops aside, Time machine effectively uses Finder to dig through another disk or partition on, or mounted near your computer, looking for previous states of your current or selected location or file. Once you find a state that give you warm fuzzies knowing you won’t have to retype your entire book report or PHD thesis, you select “restore” and watch as Finder copies that file or picture or yada yada, into the present state. That’s right, “copies”. As in you open one Finder window and copy one thing from one location to another. Herein lies the problem. Finder is not the most adept tool for restoring or copying in this instance because, despite it’s ability to do so, Finder won’t preserve all of the touch data (Unix and Linux touch command that controls the attribute, modified, accessed and created dates) which can seriously mess up other backup and syncing programs that you should be using in addition to (or because of) Time Machine.
Further to this, Finder is acting as the user when performing this copy action. This is fine if all you need to restore is your files or pictures or movies or letters to Grandma… but Finder is tragically under-authorized to restore important things like user settings, application states, support, caches, preferences, (and the list goes on)… anything that might require root or admin access. Anything in the ~Users/adam/Library, for instance, and that is exactly the sort of inadequacy that might prompt me to exclaim things like “Time Machine sucks”.
When, you might ask, would one ever find themselves needing to restore their user Library folder? Well here is the scenario that had me pulling my hair out (noting that I take full responsibility for my stupidity but also noting that something similar and equally as tragic can happen to anyone). Those that follow me on Jaiku might recall a lot of talk last week about me rebuilding G4’s, moving G5’s, setting up Mac Pro’s, etc… Last week, an employee of a print and graphics outfit, for whom I do contract design, got a new Mac Pro. This spurred into motion a great shift of computers that involved no less then 5 computers as the now unwanted G5 made it’s way downstream, bumping another G5, a G4 PowerMac, a G3 PowerMac and a dead slot load iMac further down the chain of their useful lives.
Since I spend a great deal of time at this firm, and don’t own a MacBook Pro (a full Mac Pro sits happily upon my desk in the home office) I have managed to happily exist by syncing my home computer with whatever machine they’ll seat me at via a firewire drive I carry with me. I sync with Chronosync, a brilliant and powerful, hassle free application. The machine I had been using at the firm, until the arrival of the Mac Pro, was a G4 PowerMac (we’ll talk about the joys of working on a Mac Pro at home and a G4 at the office in future rants) but I was now about to move everything over to the G5 that was now available.
Migration assistant had served me well in the past and had done it’s job as expected in this instance as well. One thing I had overlooked, mind you, was the small but important issue that the touch information was altered to the extent that Chronosync would now view everything on that G5 as being newer than what was on my firewire drive, and I had Chronosync set to automatically sync as soon as the firewire drive was detected. I initially thought this wouldn’t be much of an issue since both machines, at the firm and at home, were in sync… or so I thought.
To shorten this story a bit, I’ll jump right to the part where I discovered that the caches, preferences, user settings and application states tend to have a way of resetting, or forgetting themselves in the process of moving from a G4, to a G5 to a firewire drive to a Mac Pro. Odd but totally true (yes I did already own up to my stupidity so you can just shut up now). What I was left with was a Mac Pro full of what it now considered unregistered software, empty address books, no bookmarks… Kind of puts a kink in productivity as I sure you can imagine, so I set forth to recover my entire user from Time Machine. Sure I could have just used my other Chronosync backup disks, but Time Machine seemed like a cleaner solution… at the time. Not to mention that Steve Jobs made it look so easy and fast.
So I just jumped into Time Machine, selected a state that my user was in earlier that morning, clicked restore and without a trial sync, file scan, folder analysis or any process that would do any sort of pre-check to see what complications might arise before beginning the process, time machine set my request into action. I identified immediately that all that was taking place was a “Finder copy” and knowing how Unix works (over writes instead of amends folders and folder contents) I immediately panicked. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
Time Machine, or the Finder as it were, chugged along happily for a few brief minutes before stopping to inform me that Finder does not have sufficient permissions to copy to the Library folder… after it already over wrote the folder itself with nothing inside. Not good. A messy situation just got much, much worse. Many people might not realize how critical the data in their user Library is. In short, your computer ceases to be anything you once knew and loved. The computer doesn’t really know who you are anymore. Applications don’t know you and many won’t even launch. The whole experience is unlike anything you may have had on a computer before. It is not a good experience at all.
How can Apple call Time Machine a backup and restore utility when it’s got no safety checks in place, no trial-sync, no scan, no prior assessment of any kind? How can Apple call Time Machine a backup and restore utility that replaces entire folders in true Unix fashion instead merely replacing files within? How can Apple call Time Machine a backup and restore utility that does not have sufficient permissions to restore anything, anywhere anytime?
Lucky for me, I am very conscientious of my data storage, maintenance and security and was able to recover my entire user from a Chronosync backup and was back up and running in a matter of hours. But had I not had an alternate plan and been like any average user out there, I would be screwed! So let this be a lesson to you; Time Machine might look cool but be very careful on what you are entrusting to it. It might cause more harm than good.
MacBreak Tech, the only Mac podcast that counts
I drive a lot from client to client so I tend to spend a great deal of time on the road. About a year ago I started to listen to podcasts religiously as an outlet for my ever increasing frustration with monotonous radio shows and repeating playlists. Some of the first podcasts I listened to then was BoagWorld, This Week in Tech and some Mac Radio show with two obnoxiously cheesy radio personalities pretending to care about Mac computers but are really just paid to pedal the latest offerings from their sponsors.
Along the way many podcasts have come and gone in my rotation as I grew tired of poor audio quality, lackluster hosts and overall poor choices of material to broadcast. BoagWorld fell by the wayside once it seemed that Paul and Marcus had lost the spark and chemistry they once had, This Week in Tech fell out of favor with me when it became obvious that Leo Laporte was clearly a tech pimp who’s opinions were constantly in conflict between one production and another (TWiT vs. MacBreak Weekly) seemly just to fuel what ever fire would get him the most advertising revenue. Countless other podcasts have come and gone and still do in my quest to find new things to listen to (the fact that I have the choice is what makes podcasts great).
Over the past year though I found a few gems; Spark, Search Engine, The Linux Action Show, The Vinyl Cafe, You Suck at Web Design, Alt Text, Buzz Out Loud, The Hour, and my personal favorite… MacBreak Tech. It’s this last one, MacBreak Tech, that breaks all convention as far as format is concerned. The CBC productions, Spark and Search Engine, are just that… CBC productions. The Linux Action Show and Buzz out Loud follow a familiar news, reviews and Q&A format. The Vinyl Cafe, The Hour, Y.S.A.W.D., and Alt Text are purely for entertainment… But MacBreak Tech? Man, if you are reading this blog then MacBreak tech is for you.
So you are a geek right? Of course you are. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. And by default you love Macs (if not than you are really off course and better look at getting your GPS navigation unit fixed). So, Mac geek, imagine passing the water cooler at the office and everyone is taking about Survivor, JailBreak (not the iPhone hacking kind that might interest you) or Grey’s Anatomy and you think to yourself, “Man wouldn’t it be great to hang with a bunch of Mac geeks like me?” MacBreak Tech is exactly that, a bunch of Mac geeks sitting around the proverbial office water cooler talking about the mac geekery that truly interests you. You coming away with a new opinion, perspective or idea and a new trick or tidbit of information that you might not have known previously. MacBreak tech is the ONLY Mac podcast worth anything right now. It is a true gem glistening from the inner depths of my iPod.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few email interactions with MacBreak Tech’s main host, PixelCops John Foster, spurred by a comment I posted after listening to one of their particularly interesting podcasts reviewing Path Finder (yes, I am THAT fanboy). Here is a guy that really and truly puts himself into a podcast. He is the same guy behind the scenes as he is in the show, totally approachable with little to no ego about him. A genuinely cool guy… in the geek sense of the word.
If you haven’t done so already, I strongly urge you to go into iTunes and subscribe to MacBreak Tech. You will thank me for it.
Unobtrusive is great but what about unencumbered?
So in the last few years javascript libraries and snippets have popped up like spring flowers gasping for light. One will round corners for you, one will make an image pop out at you, one will make a box spring open, one will make a drawer slide, and so on… All of these libraries, it seems, have their struggles and inadequacies much the same way a CSS/XHTML developer does; browser behaving badly. Where it gets infinitely more complicated with the javascript is that some libraries and snippets will inadvertently interact with one another from time to time, and that’s where a whole bag of ugly gets thrown upon the table.
What makes this worse? The fact that we can now just throw these bits of javascript sweetness in our html projects without the foggiest notion of how it works and how to fix it should the need arise. And since these are all open source projects, don’t expect great support, or any at all, for that matter.
And so this is the muddy water I currently stand in, waiting to sort out a scripting issue on a product while I tell my client base that we are doing everything we can.
Scott Kelby is making me better
So the other day I got my copy of Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System as you probably already knew. I waisted no time cracking the spine and jumping right it. There are features in CS3 I never knew existed and Scott was sure to make use of them. Within minutes I had a marked improvement in my images, so much so that I had to share with all of you. The left side is before and the right side is after.
Scott Kelby's 7-Point System
Oh, I am so excited. I just got a package from Chapters.ca today… It’s Scott Kelby’s &-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. I had heard an interview with Scott on The Digital Photography show and it all made so much sense.
I read into the book a bit today and honestly, as I expected, I come to the same conclusion about adjusting my images in post production that Scott points out here in his book but I had never identified a process or a method. I just kept farting around with my work until I got to the proverbial promised land of photo zen.
In Scott’s book he lays a methodology for identifying what needs fixing and building a pattern for fixing those issues quickly and concisely. I am really looking forward to giving this book a full read and I hope it will drastically improve my work flow.
If you haven’t already, listen to Scott’s interview and check out his book.
And the cycle continues
I am always quite amazed at how eager a couple is to book their photographers well in advance (in the Kitchener-Waterloo area at least). I no sooner finish one wedding season when I am already filling up spots for the next. I am in one of those fortunate positions that I can be selective about the number of weddings I take on and to a lessor degree, selective of the couples I choose to work with. More often then not I will be indirectly linked to the people I work with, like the friend of a friend who nows someone… that sort of connection
So as I am booking up next years slots (despite telling myself this past season was my last) it occurred to me; how many other industries can boast having their schedule determined for the next 9 to 12 months? I know I don’t have this luxury in web design where work is often determined on a month by month basis. I really ought to give wedding photography more love than I do. Perhaps when my girls are older and don’t care to see me on weekends and my wife grows tired of having me around the house, I’ll consider booking 25 to 30 weddings a year, but until then I’ll stick to my half dozen.
It would probably be much different if shooting weddings in the Kitchener-Waterloo area weren’t pigeon holed into the same handful of locations; Victoria Park, Waterloo Park, Rockway Gardens, Woodside Park, West Mountrose… It’s a small town with very little in the way of manicured parkland. I need to find some fresh locations that aren’t overshot to spark my creativity and passion for the art.
Keyboard tip: tab all controls
If you know anything about me by now it’s that I use keyboard shortcuts; lots of them. I try to make full use of the keyboard any chance I get. I find mouse movements too slow despite my extreme mouse acceleration (courtesy of SteerMouse) and I find using the keyboard save wear and tear on my mousing shoulder. Even the fastest mouse can’t get from one corner of a 23″ screen to another without some major motor function taking place in the shoulder.
Even when I do mouse a lot I still tend to have my left hand poised at the ready to strike hot keys with lighting speed; cmd+esc (QuickSilver), cmd+F1 (Radial menu), cmd+tab (app switcher), alt+tab (witch), cmd+space (spotlight), cmd+q/w/a/s/z/x/c/v/b/i/n… (you know what these do), and the list goes on.
So you can argue that there is a critical flaw in my keyboardian idealogy; what do I do when I am presented with a dialog box with buttons? For instance, “Do you want to save the changes you made in the document “untitledâ€?” Well there is a little known feature (from what I can tell) in OS X that you can turn on in the keyboard settings. It’s called “Full keyboard access – All controls”. By selecting this option you will be visually cued to whichever button is hot and whichever button are active. Hot button in solid blue is the one that responds when you hit enter or return and the “active” button is the one that will now have a little blue halo around it. Hit tab (or shift+tab depending on the direction you wish to go) and you will notice that halo jumps about from button to button. Here is the best part; hit the space bar and the active button is selected hence performing that action. So enter or return selects the hot button, and the space bar selects the active button. Once you get used to this you will never use your mouse on such panels again. You’ll notice this blue halo in everything you do now, not just on controls. You’ll notice it in your web browsers where it can be particularly useful. Play around with it and see what else is you can accomplish
New themer in the mix
RapidWeaver tip: Working with images
This is one of the most asked questions on the RapidWeaver support forums, “How do I wrap text around my images?”
In reality it is quite easy to do. In this tutorial I will show you how to drop an image into your document, size it and have your text flow around it.
- From Finder, drag an image of your choice onto you document. For best results, put it at the beginning of a paragraph.
- In many cases your image will not be the appropriate size. Select the image, go to “View > Show Media Inspector”.
- Using the up/down arrows beside the “Scale” box, reduce the size of your image to suit your needs
- You will notice that your image now sits inline with your text. To get your text to wrap around your image, select the image, go to “Format > HTML > Align Image Left/Align Image Right”
To see it with your own eyes, click the movie below.
Digital photography has no elders
In traditional communities there was always that culture where elders passed their wisdom down from generation to generation. In the days of yore this was done by song and story telling, then by scrolls and tablets, then by books, then by radio, then by television… Now it’s by blog. What’s most troubling today is the relatively short span between one who considers himself new and one who considers himself experienced.
This is painfully true in photography. Since the digital age, unimaginable technical advancements have made fine photography more accessible to the masses. There are now more people wielding SLR’s today than in any other period of time in history. SLR photography was once the territory of those who had to know what they were doing with a single lens reflex camera, but with the massive growth of the SLR’s popularity an interesting phenomenon has occurred; most people behind a digital SLR today have never used a film SLR and have learned everything the know about photography from someone else who has also never used a film SLR.
So why would this matter? Because most of the marketing, product information, specifications and terminology are all derived from the film world. You see, back when Digital SLR’s were first working their way into the market place there was probably this perception that the resistance would be great. Lens focal lengths were given relative to 35 mm frame formats to help the film photographers better relate, sensor sizes were compared to film formats like APS-C and “Full frame” (35mm), and “D” or “digital” was affixed every product as though these two varying lines might coexist side by side for generations to come. I don’t think anyone really expected digital to take of quite as fast as it did.
This rapid expansion on the SLR industry left us with a virtual knowledge vacuum, which is not only devoid of any informed wisdom about the art and science of photography, but is continually sucking in misconceptions and inaccuracies from all over the webiverse. There just aren’t enough of those old school photographers around to teach the masses that have populated this new and exciting age of digital photography. No one benefits more from this black hole of photographic know-how more than equipment manufacturers. After a few short years of digital dominance the market is ripe for the picking. It’s not enough to get an SLR body in the hands of unsuspecting consumers, whether they actually need one or not. Now that they have the body they’ll need lenses…
If I had a dollar for every time I have heard the words “prime lens” thrown around by people who really have no idea what it is, I could have bought a new one myself. And this is where so much of the trouble lies. Right now it’s all the rage to buy a “prime lens” or a “normal lens” and the prices of these lenses is getting to be outrageous! I am here to tell you that the market for a prime lens was all but dead prior to the digital boom for all the opposite reasons that get thrown out as arguments to buy them today. The science behind zoom lenses today is incredible, making a zoom lens today comparable to any prime lens; many are equally sharp, equally fast and equally light, but best of all, zoom lenses are and always will be more versatile. These arguments are going on a quarter century by now and all the newbies are dragging them up from the dusty depths of redundant argument vaults as though zoom lens technology hasn’t improved in the last few decades.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good prime lens. I have boxes of them that I dust off once every few years to remind myself that a camera bag slung over my shoulder containing two or three fast, premium zooms sure beats the days of carrying three camera bags holding 20 to 30 lbs. of glass in each. People are getting duped into buying over-priced gear just because that’s what their flickr friends say they need or because Scott Bourne said “such-and-such a lens has a gorgeous bokeh”. If I read one more time about some Joe Blow getting a 50 mm, f 1.4 for their Cannon Rebel because they wanted a “normal” lens I am going to SCREAM (true photographers will know why, everyone else will have to do their research). Trust me, the conversion to digital has given me an overabundance of “normal” lenses that I paid a great deal of money for (the price differential between wide and normal, again, true photographers will know what I mean) over the years and none of them say 50 mm on the barrel. On the flip side I now have a killer collection of super telephoto lenses.
The digital aspect of this new era in photography is still too young to be looking solely to other digital photographers for your knowledge. If the people you are learning from have never been in the drivers seat of a 35 mm SLR or a 6×6 or 4×6 medium format then you are possible missing out on the some of the finer details of the art and science behind photography. There are a great many exceptions to every rule but the truth of the matter is the entire digital platform is built on the wisdom of an earlier generation that understood light because they had to, gave conscious thought to composition because it was a rule, knew the science behind exposure because cameras didn’t, used aperture settings for specific effects and shutter speeds for others… There is a generation of photographers who knew, more than anything else, that the camera that captures the light, but it’s the photographer that takes the picture.