To Photoshop (or not)

To Google in the OSX DictionaryBrandnames turning into verbs is nothing new. Google turned 'verb' a while back officially, and can be found in several dictionaries all over the world. You could think that the brand owner would like it this when a product (or brand) becomes a commodity. Well, not every brand.....

Adobe has a section on the 'Photoshop' usage on their website [mirror]. It seems that photoshopping is a bad verb. Why? I don't know. No matter how good or bad an image or photo is altered or with what tool. The most common remark is 'PHOTOSHOPPED'. All this means is that people associate image manipulation with Adobe Photoshop. There's a reason that this piece of software is on top of the image manipulation food chain. It's simply the best (and probably the most expensive by the way :) ).

After looking for 'google' in the Apple OS X Dictionary, I also tried 'photoshop'. and guess what I found:

to Photoshop in Apple OS X Dictionary/me sits back and wonders when Apple (or even me) receives a letter from an Adobe attorney :) for the incorrect usage of the Photoshop brand.

OS X Calulator and Internet Access

This Little Snitch pop-up appeared after I launched the default Calculator application on Apple OS X.

Calculator Surfs the InterwebsWhy on earth would Calculator need Internet access? Looking for floating point error updates? Anyone else has any conspiracy ideas?

Apple Favors Own Products, or FileVaults Screws Up

Apple FileVaultSomething everyone would do I guess (the favoring part at least :) ). But Apple is doing this in a very peculiar way. When you run OSX with a ton of third-party applications you won't notice things, since everything runs as it should. But when you're going to use FileVault, things change. A lot....

FileVault is the way Apple secures your data. When turned on the OS creates a sparse iage of your userdata. So everything stored within your user directory is encrypted using AES-128.

The use of FileVault screws up certain system files. One of those is (or several for that matter) is used to store the default applications. Like FireFox for Internet instead of Safari. Every time you reboot your system the default application settings are read.
This weekend I also found out that at least one handy program also disagrees with FileVault. Little Snitch won't properly save it's registration info when you're using FileVault.

You know what the worst thing is? This BUG is present since Panther (OSX 10.3). I wonder if this is going to be fixed in Snow Leopard. To be honest, I doubt it. If they can't figure it out in 4 years, they probably never will.

As a security savvy nerd I want to use FileVault on my MacBook, but the problems with FileVault made me decide to uninstall this feature. Too bad that there are no other real alternatives. Truecrypt (or PGP) is nice, but it can't encrypt your hard disk (from which you boot) or even your user directory. Check Point seems to have software, but there's no way of buying it easily. So it seems that's it's mainly reserved for corporate environments.

UPDATE: w00t... They solved this annoying 'feature' Apple OS X 10.6 a.k.a. Snow Leopard. Way to go Apple. Although it being several OS releases/years too late!!!!

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.

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.