I’ve been using Apple’s Aperture for quite some time for photo management – it works very well, and with a Mac Pro and a lot of RAM, it’s actually pretty responsive. (Version 1.5 on my G5 with half the RAM… well, not so much). However, I find myself only recently getting in touch with some of the tools it offers – notably the Spot and Patch tools. Simply wonderful – because, unlike Photoshop, I can easily apply the spot and patch changes to a whole set of pictures.

I’ve also just dumped a whole bunch of photos on my flickr pro account – and I’m wondering if it makes sense to keep a photoblog as well as put stuff on flickr. I guess I’ll answer this question in a few weeks when I start doing the international move again. Comments?

“…the Bush administration is abandoning the centerpiece of its massive $700 billion economic rescue plan and exploring new ways to shore up not only banks but credit-card, auto-loan and other huge nonbank businesses.“

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1290985.html

So, the Fed gets a loan from the taxpayers for $700 billion to bail out the banks and the sub-prime housing debacle, and now they want to use it for something else – which isn’t what the taxpayers were promised. Now that the election is over, it doesn’t matter – people aren’t going to notice, as they are so burned out by the 18 months of ElectionTV and are more worried about losing their jobs than anything else. To make things worse, the Democrats are pushing to have the US Government take a significant stake in the the Big Three car makers in the US, which is about the stupidest idea I’ve heard this month. The automakers have spent the last 5 years with their head in the sand, building massive, crummy cars that people don’t want to buy, and now they need to be bailed out.

The only solution I’ve heard that makes any sense for the taxpayers in regards to the auto industry is to have the government purchase a new fleet of hybrid or low emission vehicles over the next 2-4 years, and pay a significant portion of the tender up front. This will get the auto makers up to speed with the tech the consumers want (and Japan is providing, happily) and the government will actually get something out of the deal, rather than just giving money away for stock that is essentially worthless – until the US car makers start building cars people want to buy. Something tells me that’s not likely – GM is down to 8 months of operating capitol, and with management that bad, I don’t think a loan will help them out.

I’m setting up my Shuttle PC again as a secondary file server – as a backup against the primary, larger server. I ran into a slight problem with my primary server – I had some dodgy power connectors to some of my drives, and I thought the drives themselves were failing. Before I figured out what the real problem was, I broke the pool badly enough that any attempt to mount it made the system panic. As none of the data was critical – I do actually have backups of most of it on my primary desktop or I can download the ISO’s again – I wiped the drives out and went with a simpler layout of mirrored disks. Then, I shut the machine down, and won’t use it again until I’ve gotten a real power supply that will be consistent with my drives.

This left me with no backups of our Macs – which bothers me, especially with an international move coming up soon. So, the Shuttle is back in service to host a set of TimeMachine backups. I realized that I’ve set all of this up a few times, and each time I have to look it up again. The setup is after the jump.

On the Solaris server:

1. svcadm enable -r smb/server
2. zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed backup-pool/timemachine
3. zfs create backup-pool/timemachine/Odin
4. zfs set sharesmb=on backup-pool/timemachine/Odin
5. zfs set sharesmb=name=Odin backup-pool/timemachine/Odin
6. echo “other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn” >> /etc/pam.conf
7. passwd bwdezend
8. chown -R bwdezend /backup-pool/timemachine/Odin
9. zfs set quota=400G backup-pool/timemachine/Odin

On the Mac client: (replacing the odin_000000000000 with your ethernet address)

1. sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
2. ifconfig en0 | grep ether | sed s/://g | awk ‘{print $2}’
3. hdiutil create -size 400g -fs HFS+J -volname “Backup of Odin” odin_000000000000.sparsebundle
4. rsync -avE odin_000000000000.sparsebundle /Volumes/odin/.

Then, all you have to do is pick the network volume in TimeMachine (which should show up some time after enabling the TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes setting), and tell it to start backing up. It will ask you for your password for the network share, and then go about it’s merry way.

Yes, it’s official – the Dubai Mall is open. What this means for anyone from the US who lives in the UAE is that the closest Taco Bell is no longer a 12 hour flight away – it’s just 2 hours in traffic, and then 45 minutes waiting in the crazy long queue. I can confirm that the menu is pretty much exactly like it is in the US – with a few items missing. The only omission that bothered me was the total lack of 7-layer burritos. Soft and hard tacos, bean and cheese/beef and potato burritos, chalupas, gorditos, “normal” burritos and taco salads all present. They also had the crunchwraps and some of the desserts that we’d expect to find. Even the hot sauce packs are the same ones from the US with the weird little sayings on the front. And, most importantly, everything we ordered tasted exactly like it was supposed to.

The bad news was that due to the long long lines, we waited probably 10 minutes to order our food – and then had to wait nearly 30 more to actually get the items. The queues for ordering were pretty well maintained, but the crowd pushing in around the pickup area was just the normal mess you can expect in Dubai – no line, no order, lots of confusion, and lots of people shouting or pushing thinking this will make their food appear faster. It was a madhouse.

Unless you have a pregnant wife who has been starving for Taco Bell for 5 months or just like standing in the madness, I’d suggest waiting at least a week or so for the chaos to die down.

BTW: if you do go to the Dubai Mall, it’s still very much a work in progress. I don’t really think it should be open yet – in many areas, the mall seems to change color, because the huge video ads are color-casting the white walls that all say “opening soon”, and the escalators still have safety tape on them. Near the exit for the 3rd level of the parking deck there was a sign that had two options – “Quick Exit” and “Chaos”. I wish I wasn’t driving, as I almost didn’t believe what I was seeing but I couldn’t get a picture.

I’ve not had a chance to update my photoblog or take pictures these past few days – been running full tilt and I need a break. However, I do have plane tickets! So that’s official, and I’m just trying to get more and more stuff wrapped up. I hope to have a chance to take some shots and get them uploaded in the next couple of days.

So, I’ve finally gotten to do some real contract type photo work! A friend of mine used some of my pictures for a website he was contracted to do – Blue Oasis Pet Care – and this has lead to another project he’s working on, for PetZone, a Dubai based pet store. I’m really quite impressed with both. Most of the pet stores in this country feel very… sad. PetZone is a lot more friendly, and I’d even feel ok putting a pet of mine up there in the kennel or cattery for awhile. And I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about the doctors (vertrinarians?) the Blue Oasis… but I digress.

My wife and I went out and shot nearly 1000 pics for the PetZone site, and now I’ve got to meet with the webmaster and with the client and work on the list of shots they want and do editing. There goes all my free time that I’m not using for packing!

Solaris Nevada build 101 is out. I mentioned in a post late last week that for the ZFS Snapshot feature to come preinstalled, you would need build 100 or higher. I forgot to mention that you would have to use the pkg image install utilities to get it.

Anyway, I’ve updated the original post with a better link to the Solaris Nevada download page – http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd/ – which takes you to the current build’s downloadable ISO’s. I wish all of Sun’s download links were this easy.