The Cloud and you

Two things I can say for sure:

The cloud will fail.
The cloud will get better.

How much any of these two things means to you is dependent on how willingly, and how totally, you embrace the cloud.

Obligatory history lesson starts here:
In 1979 I built my first computer. I soldered the chip-carriers (2, I think) to the tiny PCB, and I soldered all the discretes in their rightful places and I attached power and it had life. A little while later it died (faulty character generator, if you must know).
From then on I had various computers (PET, TRS-80, AMSTRAD 464/664/PCW9512, CoCo, Amiga, Atari, Jupiter Ace, Sinclair Spectrum, IBM XT, IBM AT, a multitude of clones, home-brews and lately Apple Macs.)
All have failed in some way or another.

Lessons learnt from the above history? Technology will fail you (usually when you need it most) and technology improves if it lasts long enough.
Obligatory history lesson ends here.

Therefore, the cloud will fail, but it will improve.

If you are going to use the cloud, decide the level of failure you can tolerate, then use the cloud up to that level, and no more.

One example I know of:
A small business was having server problems - capacity and hardware were below par. The owner, a fairly tech-savvy guy, crunched his numbers and came up with a solution using Amazon. Unfortunately, like a lot of small businesses, the risk analysis was pretty much non-existent, and Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity were words heard once in a management seminar. But, hey, it's Amazon - what could go wrong? Well, Google "Amazon Cloud outage" and you will have a good idea. His business is still going, but some of his customers are tending to use the business less these days, and some are still in "negotiations" over goods supplied late.

Amazon are doing a lot to make sure this doesn't happen again, and so is the small business owner.

Between them, (with lots of hard work) they should be able to put this incident to rest. Out of it will come an improved cloud service, and a chastened, but wiser small business owner.

Why I use Open Source Software

Don't get me wrong - I use and advocate the use and support of closed source software any time I feel it is appropriate to do so. But it's not that often these days.

But I don't think the following scenario would have been possible using closed source equivalents, and I am damn sure that the cost of using them would have blown my budget out of the water!

I run a network. It has over 400 users, many of whom are mobile, work abroad for extended periods of time, and work all the hours God send us. Planned downtime is a rarity. Unplanned downtime is happening more frequently, but due to outside problems (power outage, internet congestion etc) rather than internal problems - although we have our fair share of those too!
I use Open Source software wherever possible and I do so because it is generally a better "fit" for the network tasks I have than some proprietary software. And I can usually bend it to fit what I want - I can't do that with closed source.

So when I get an OS solution that works, I tend to generally leave it alone. Oh, I apply security patches, but rarely do I update anything that's working unless I need the new feature(s) or they come with a security update.

That's why you can find installations of Apache 1.3 still working on intranet machines, why I still have working Slackware 11 installations and why some un-maintained programs are still doing the business on the network - they work and they are on internal machines with no security implications.

So when a power outage along with a faulty UPS takes out a machine that has been working steadily for the last 5 years as a dhcp server, a nat box, a wireless sign-on web page, a transparent proxy and a router for several private IP ranges, I take the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and software with thanks. When it happens on the Friday of a long weekend ( Friday through to Tuesday ), I am even more thankful for the opportunity to work on it uninterrupted.

Here is the setup:
Hardware: 4 disk rack mount 1U box with dual Athlon processors and 2 gigabytes of RAM ( A bit light these days, but should be enough) and 2 disks only installed
Software: Slackware64 13.1, standard full install. Main packages are Squid, Apache, dhcpd, dnsmasq, and some custom start up scripts for adding addresses to ethernet cards and starting iptables with the nat table entries and port redirects for the transparent proxy.

The process went something like this:

Install Slackware. ( 30 Minutes )
Get dnsmasq working as DNS server only
Get dhcpd (installed version) working. (15 Minutes )
Get Apache in default mode working then configure for my defaults. ( 15 Minutes )
Get Squid. Get Slackbuild script for Squid. Compile Squid. Install Squid ( 45 Minutes )
Read Squid documentation (BIG package, lots of changes since I last used Squid in anger!) (4 Hours )
Implement necessary changes to Squid configuration, test, and repeat. ( 12 hours, including Internet searches, reading Blogs, Wikis etc. )
( Transparent proxying using Squid was a hack in Squid 2, that has been elevated to "built-in" in Squid 3 - but judging by the Blog pages and wiki's it is problematic in Squid 3...)
Curse Squid (5 Minutes)
Get a copy of Squid 2, try to compile in 64 bits on target box. (2 hours, failed )
Curse Slackware ( 30 Seconds )
Find, install, configure and test an alternative to Squid for transparent proxying (TinyProxy )( 1 hour )
Install, test, debug and eventually modify the PHP pages for the wireless page signon. ( 3 hours)

Test all functions from various areas of the building ( 4 Hours )

Total time taken: ~ 28 hours on the software, spread over 2 days.

All the software was available, free and easily downloadable - no feature crippled demos, no limit on the number of connections/users/CPU's, nobody upselling, nobody bombarding me with phone calls/emails for stuff I don't want/don't need and am quite capable of finding for myself if or when I do, and no expiry date where they get a chance to do it all again in 12 months time.

And that is why I will put up with the occasional failure (looking at you, Squid*) in the Open Source model - they don't market this stuff, they just make it useful!

(* By the way, I am quite happy for Squid users to prove me wrong - it is a BIG package, and has over 170+ options, so there is every chance that I screwed up and not Squid - but TinyProxy went in, I did a minimal config and it just worked...)

Seeing things in Black and White

I never tended to do black and white photographs.
I said things like "the world is in colour, why monkey with it?" or "monochrome is monotonous" or any of several other throwaway lines that really meant only one thing - I did not know how to create a black and white photograph that had punch, drama and flair in any measure or combination.
Now I have a clue (yes, a small clue, but a good start!) how to go about doing it - I am not there yet, but my B&W conversions are starting to look interesting, at least to me :-)

So, what changed?

I read this book - which, while interesting, was mainly using Lightroom (which I have never used - yet!) and so was not of immediate use to me - until I came across this blog post by Bob Rockerfeller which ties it all up nicely, and provides the Lightroom to Aperture mappings (where they exist) so you don't have to....

But the key to it all is experimentation. Consider this series of images


Above: The Original

Above: Just sliding the saturation slider all the way left...

Above: using the Red Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Blue Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Green Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Yellow Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Orange Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Low Contrast Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Higher Contrast Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Highest Contrast Preset in Aperture

Above: After my experimentation...

You don't need me to point out the differences, ( but in case you do look at the white lanterns on the front of the engine, and the metal panel between the buffer stops).

The last one is the one I like best, and although a little dark, it does have detail in all the brightest whites (unfortunately the sky is beyond anything but major surgery in Photoshop) and the hills in the background have appeared, as have details in the houses to the left.

So, from a so-so colour original, I appear to have made an interesting (well, to my mind anyway!) black and white shot, using some of the techniques laid out in the book, translated into an aperture workflow via Bob Rockerfellers site.
It was actually easier than it sounds!

Hope you like it, and if you are encouraged to go have a look at the site selling the book, check out some of the others on sale there - they are cheap ($5), written by some people who really know their stuff and make great lunch time reading.
Bob Rockerfellers blog I am still evaluating, but the information given there seems accurate, helpful and worth at least a little of your time.

As always, comments, suggestions, critiques and emails always appreciated.

Where are we now?

It's been two months since I wrote anything in this blog.

So what's been happening to slow me down?

Well, work got busy with some more politicking about who controls what. I won't even mention the disgusting antics of the Senior Management .
Personally, I got busy with some consultation work for an overseas venture that looks really interesting.
And something had to give. My photography went on the back boiler. As did this blog.
Apologies if you were looking for anything here or in Project 52 or Project 12.

I anticipate a change in circumstances for me over the next 3 months or so, so hopefully the posts will be more frequent.

In any event I was invited to an event a local radio-control yacht club was running yesterday. I had photographed their club events a year or so ago, and they invited me along to the national event they were hosting ( I probably would have been welcome if I hadn't taken my camera, but I took it anyway!).

The weather was a bit of a disappointment - partial cloud cover and very little wind - nice for humans, useless for sailors!

Last years pictures were full of drama with bow waves and churning wakes, this year not so much.

Here is a snap from last year:


And here is yesterdays efforts:


As you can see, no bow waves, no chop, and to my mind, less dramatic.

I'll put up a gallery later on with some more yachting pics from 2009/10 and 2011.

Hope you like them!

Web Makeover, Part 2

In the original Web Makeover article, I spoke about using Aperture 3 to produce "web journals" then incorporating them into my RapidWeaver site.
That worked, but any updates are a long-winded process.
So I investigated Rapid Album, a plug-in for RapidWeaver specifically for producing my photographic galleries. And it does the job.
But that doesn't mean I have stopped looking - and I am considering hand-coding my own solution, which is something I do at work a lot, but I really don't want to have to do it for this site - I could use the time for something much more productive :-)

I have checked out a new "plug-in" from the SymfoniP people - Gallery Box - which produces a Gallery a lot like many "off-the-shelf" websites that I have seen. They have the pictures in box with a "carousel" of thumbnails along the bottom. There are lots of options and it seems to work well. I might use it at sometime in the future.

But for now the quest continues for my version of the "perfect gallery" - I know it's out there, somewhere.

Software "Updates"

Yesterday was all about Realmac Softwares RapidWeaver.

I have used RapidWeaver since version 3.5 and I have followed along the sometimes bumpy ride of updates, right up until version 4+

Version 5.0 was released on December 1, and apart from the usual bug fixes and a “resource” feature (single folder storage of all your websites assets, replacing per page assets), there was not a lot that I could see to recommend it as it was a paid upgrade.

Then along comes the Mac App Store, and RapidWeaver 5.0 is now priced at £23.99. At that price, an upgrade was definitely in my near future.

So, do I upgrade using the untried and untested Mac App Store route, or I do bite the bullet an pay a few extra pounds and stick to the more traditional method?

To test out the Mac App Store I bought a copy of GarageBand 11 to see what would happen to my installed GarageBand 09. I suspected that, as the user has no control over the installation destination, then it would overwrite my existing install - and that is exactly what happened.

So for RapidWeaver, I chose the traditional route. I saw the price at £26.62 and thought, “OK, that’s a few pounds dearer than the App Store” - but of course Realmac had chosen not to display the VAT along with the price, which was a nice surprise when I got to the checkout.

End result was I got RapidWeaver 5.0 from Realmac at £31.94.

Oh, and by the way, after downloading the software I found some obvious bugs that shouldn’t have made it out into the world, and found that I had been pointed to the initial 5.0 release, not one containing the bug fixes Realmac brought out a few days later (V 5.01, then V 5.02). An update from within RapidWeaver brought me up to the latest version.

So, was it all worth it? Like most things, it depends. I regularly maintain 6 web-sites, and occasionally work on about a dozen more with RapidWeaver so I can’t afford to have it not work properly. Thankfully, I can run both V 5+ and V 4+ on the same machine without too many problems - you just need to be rigorous in keeping the project files separated! (And having both installed was another reason why I should have gone the Mac App route!) Also, you must upgrade to the latest versions of all your plug-ins (preferably before you install V 5).

If you maintain many websites with RapidWeaver on a professional basis then be cautious - there are still issues lurking about with the V 5 “upgrade” that could cause your re-publishing time to be very much longer than you are used to, and also colour picker problems - but Realmac say that they are working on these problems.

Incidentally, there were separate issues with the App Store version as well, which means that the App Store version is now on V 5.03, while my version number is V 5.02. Hopefully this will all come together in the near future.

If you upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6.6 and have the Mac App Store then go that route. If you are still on 10.5.8 then you have to go the Realmac website route.
Assuming, of course that you want to upgrade given the issues.

For your reference:
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/forums/index.php/forums/viewthread/42058/
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/forums/index.php/forums/viewthread/41461/

I have downgraded to the latest V 4 release, and that’s where I will stay for my production sites. I will still experiment with V 5, but I will not use it for anything important until the bugs are ironed out.

Bottom Line: RapidWeaver V5+ wasted a lot of my time - and while it cost me money too, the time lost is something I can never recover.
Not happy.

A pleasant kind of madness...

I am an aspiring photographer.
Some days I think I could approach world-class. Others, meh!

So today I left the house while it was still dark, rugged up warm against the cold (-5.5C) and proceeded down to the shore, where I set up my tripod and camera and started to wait for the light.
I was about 45 minutes early for sunrise.

So what does one do to pass 45 minutes in the cold?

Simple - one puts in ones earbuds, starts up the 60's classics playlist on the iPhone and dances.

Yes folks, if you hear of a crazy person standing on the shore before dawn, doing an incomprehensible series of movements that might, in some far out place in the world, be construed as dancing, then I was that person.

And you know what? I had a ball!

And I even got this - not world class, but I like it.



As I say, a pleasant kind of madness.