You didn't get mad

I saw this over on imakeshinythings and thought it was interesting. That said, I agree with some of what the Teaparty believes (or I think they believe) but...

The actual author is unknown but he/she speaks volumes.

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in taxbreaks.

You didn’t get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn’t get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn’t get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

No…..You finally got mad

When a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

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All in with Xcode4

I've jumped on the Xcode4 bandwagon.
One word of caution, if you are using Hudson (now Jenkins?). Don't uninstall your existing Xcode3. Just 'move' it:

$ cd /
sudo mv Developer Xcode3

Now with your existing Hudson build environment, alter the builds to use /Xcode3/usr/bin/xcodebuild.

When you install Xcode4, it will install itself into /Developer, and you can begin playing with making Xcode4 projects auto-build with Hudson CI.

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Computer sysadmin's becoming plumbers

A sysadmin once had a problem with his pipes and he called a plumber to fix it. The plumber did his work and handed over the bill to his client. “WHAT??? So much for 30 minutes of work??” said the sysadmin. “I need to work whole day to earn this amount!”

“Well, my friend,” said the plumber, “when I worked as a sysadmin, I had to work whole day for this amount too.”

I'm not exactly sure where that joke originally came from, but it's still classic. Oh, and. I'm posting this with my iPad :) >>Keep Reading: Full Post and Comments

Boosting Aperture 3 Performance

There's an excellent discussion about performance expectations with regard to professional Apps in the Aperture Installation, Setup and General Usage Forums.

This guy, Kevin Doyle, who ever he is knows his stuff. And he's apparently spent a significant amount of his own time trying to help the forum members in that thread. It's over 9 pages in length.

While I do a number of things he's already mentioned, I had never tried defragging. I bought iDefrag based upon his recommendation. And the results? Fantastic! Aperture's even faster with a nice cleanly defragged volume.

So if you read that forum thread, and were hesitant about iDefrag, don't wait. It's worth every penny.
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Aperture Facial Recognition

When I think of Aperture 3's facial regonition, I think of the faces of all my friends and family. Smiling, joyous, not trying to hide their faces from my camera. However, Facial Recognition doesn't necessarily conform to my mind's meanderings about how it should be. Look at what Aperture correctly identified as a face from my library!

Aperture identified one of the faces that was painted on the chopper's tank! How cool is that?!? You should checkout the original photograph that shows the tank's detail.

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Aperture v3 Upgrade Version Checklist

This weekend I upgraded to Aperture Version 3. The process went so smoothly, I thought I would detail how I did it.

The upgrade process for Aperture isn't any different from the upgrade process for any other software. Nor even the process to upgrade from v1 to v2. The golden rule to remember is don't rush it. I know when my serial number came, I was practically drooling to "just upgrade". But I held myself back, because I knew if I did that, bad things could happen. Instead, I'd rather not be risking losing data and have a weekend where I'm pissed off. Here are the things I did to make it happen:

1. Went into Aperture, and deleted any projects/photographs that I could. The less data there is, the less time the upgrade will take.


2. Then I emptied the trashses. System, Aperture, etc.


3. Backups. I backed up everything. I backed up my OS drive, my Aperture drive. Everything. To do this I disconnected the Spolight drive, I turned the Drobo off. I also stopped Nambu (twitter), Dropbox, Evernote, etc. Then I fired up Super Duper and ran it's jobs. The process takes about 24 hours total. Not fun, but safety is priority number one.


4. Backed up the Aperture Library to as many different locations/hard drives as I could. When done, I dismounted and disconnected as many of these drives as I could.


5. Disk Utility. I ran the 'fix volume' (ie disk permissions) for each and every volume. Some consider this step as being overkill. I'd rather be safe, then sorry.


6. I renamed /Volumes/Applications/Aperture.app to Aperture_v2.app.


7. In Finder, I deleted where my Aperture Library normally was. I did this because I had 5 other copies of it, and I wanted to put the new V3 in the exact same location (ie a seperate hard drive, from my system drive).


8. Finally I downloaded, installed and ran Aperture V3. With it, I created a new v3 Library in the same location (same filename) as where the old v2 library was located.


9. Then I imported the v2 library. I started this process about 9am on Valentine's day (my wife was still asleep). By the time the evening came around (about 8pm) it had finished. To be fair, I don't know how long it took. It may have taken 2 hours, it may have taken 11 hours. I think I chose a good day to do the upgrade. I wasn't able to be on the computer at all. If I had been, I'd have probably been checking it every 5 minutes and wasted an entire day waiting for it to complete.

That's really the entire process I went through. Total time was about three days.

I don't intend to re-process many of the prior v2 projects that are now imported into the v3 library. I am doing it on the Cozumel project from our trip in December. I know I will want to edit more of those photographs (and post them to Flickr). The rest of the projects, I probably won't modify, so there is no need to reprocess them into v3.

For the curious, here's specific information:

• Aperture Library size: About 120GB


• Primary Aperture machine: Mac Pro, 2.28GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon, 10GB Ram. Filled with 1TB SATA drives. 1 4-port fw/800 Drobo, many external drives (all collected over the years).


• Backup Method: Superduper
  


• The import: I did not turn off Faces/Geo-Tagging. Both were left on. (Infact, I'm naming faces right this moment).

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Ohio Mega Millions Lottery not very Random?

Do you play the Ohio Mega Millions Lottery? Do you always check your ticket's numbers?

We do play the lottery on occasion. Specifically, when the amount of the Mega Millions goes at or above 100 Million dollars. We do an office pool, $2 per person. We purchase the tickets at lunch, on the day of the drawing and then email a scan of them all to whomever participated in the group buy.

Here's where things get interesting. We purchased our tickets Friday, January 22nd 2010 at a local Columbus Ohio Lottery vendor. We do the auto-lotto, so that it generates the numbers for us.

One would think "auto lotto" would be fairly random.

One would be wrong! Look at the these two tickets!

The Ohio Lottery Mega Million's random ticket number generator gave *two* tickets with the exact same numbers in one setting. Even statistically speaking, this should *never* happen. Yet it did.

It's one thing if the ticket's a winner, but if it's not, then for every two tickets your purchase you may in affect only be purchasing one ticket's worth of chances to win the lottery.

(Note: I blurred out the actual main parts of the ticket numbers, because each ticket is actually a $2 winner.)

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Mac Tablet Predictions: Mobile Bonus

I'm going to jump on the bandwagon (daring fireball and John Siracusa), among many others by now...

Yes, it'll have a ~10 inch screen. And do graphics. And video. No, it's not CocoaTouch, it's CocoaTouch+. It'll have iWork installed on it (Siracusa). One of the things everyone's seemed to miss is the way the Tablet will pimp Apple's Mobile Me.

Many of the people who will purchase the new Apple Tablet at launch already own one Mac. Maybe even a Mac and an iPhone, but definitely one Mac. So they purchase a Mac Tablet (to be one of the cool kids? who knows). But they want all their stuff on the Tablet, just like their other machine. I mean, who wants to be in the computer room on the desktop iMac, then later lounging on the couch with the Tablet and not have their bookmarks syncing. Or not be able to get to their files? (How many mac people do you associate with that can mount remote disk shares from other computers?^[1]) If it's not "just there" on the Tablet, people will have "issues" with the device.

A simple Mobile Me subscription solves all this. Everything's in sync and the user doesn't have to do squat. And it's more income for Apple. It'll be another neatly wrapped tie-in to another Apple product that prompts you to open your wallet even further for Apple's coffers, and there'll be many many people in line soon to do it. Heck, just think of 125k developers, many of them will purchase the thing. Not that they'll use it but they'll most assuredly better become aquainted with it to write code for it, not to mention testing (and bragging on #iphonedev about your purchase). And yes, count me in that group that'll be buying it. <sigh>

^[1] I'm not harping on Mac users. Most windows users have the same issue. Hell, most computer users have the same issue.
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