I finally got around to renewing my driver’s license, which was slightly cough cough out of date. I just got the new card in the mail, and as I was replacing the old one in my wallet, noticed how much a few years (3, to be exact) has changed me, at least in the eyes of the DMV camera. The wife says the previous picture (on the left) looks Pilsbury doughboy-ish, and I think the new picture looks like I’m either a felon, or a roadie for Metallica…
(From Apple’s new iPod pages):
Slideshows Anywhere
Mesmerize friends and family with a glorious multimedia experience, offering them a breathtaking slideshow accompanied by the music you already have on your iPod Photo.
I don’t know about your friends and family, but I don’t think mine are going to be “mesmerized” by a 16-bit, 220×176, what, 2″ diagonal screen…? Breathtaking? Hmm.
My camera can do slideshows, hooked up to a TV, also. No music to accompany it (although I certainly can plug in my ipod to the tv at the same time). I dunno. It seems like a nice incremental add-on to the iPod, and how they’re actually getting an extra 3+ hours of playback time (I think my iPod claims 12 hrs, color ones 15) I don’t know… but that’s a nice improvement. Definitely not enough to plunk down another half-grand or so, though.
In fact, I typically take my laptop with me on trips where I’m likely to encounter a lot of family… and viewing photos on a 14.1″, 24-bit screen (or on TV–it’s got composite out), is easy there too. Actually, the 60GB iPod Photo costs $600–about the price of a really nice, used, or new entry-level laptop. But I guess you don’t get the pocket-able form factor: bad for typical mp3 usage, but I’d argue better for photo usage. I guess that’s the rub: is this device trying to do too much? For me, I think the answer is yes; but I think it’s likely to be a success, based on the reputation and cool-factor alone. Apple generally makes really well designed hardware and software… so I wish ‘em luck with it. It’s better than supporting a lot of the mediocre stuff so many other places put out!
Just got my ACDSee 7.0 upgrade “offer” email (the first of many I’ll receive, I’m certain.) It’s overall pretty good software. In case you don’t know, ACDSee is essentially photo browser/organization software. I’ve been using it for 3-4 years, and have had a legit license for it for the last 2, 2-1/2 years. But almost every new release since 2.2 has been slower (often, they claim they’ve made it faster), and had minor, but not insignificant, bugs. Plus, the company that makes it (ACD Systems), has probably the lowest-value upgrade/patch policy I’ve ever seen–even compared to Microsoft and Apple! They have marginally useful image printing and editing software as well (which I mostly don’t use due to owning PhotoShop).
A few of the bugs I’ve run across have been easily reproducible and I’ve taken the trouble to document to them how to do so. And still, some are not fixed in major new releases. Their tech support essentially claimed one of the issues wasn’t possible, and that I should reinstall my OS (oh, that old trick). (I finally figured out it was an issue with a network drive no longer being accessible–causing 20 second delays before a dialog would pop up–really, I think they should have been able to diagnose this!) They seem convinced to change the keyboard shortcuts with each new major release. There are almost never patches, and essentially every new release results in a ton of spam from them about a pricey upgrade. At the current rate, they’re putting out a couple major upgrades a year, at the “discounted” price of $40 each. I don’t recall them EVER offering minor upgrades for download for free, with bugfixes or otherwise. So a couple times, I’ve plunked down the bucks for an upgrade, hoping at least to have the bugs I reported to them fixed, and had mixed results. Once it actually did get faster for large directories of images (from essentially a failure condition, to “taking a long time”). But I was treated to totally-changed menus and keyboard shortcuts in exchange. Grrr.
Essentially, ACDSee seems to be mostly getting away with a $80/year “subscription” plan, making it, year-over-year, more expensive to keep current than either Mac OSX or Windows–and believe me, both of those are way more important to me than my image browser. In fact, it seems a good chunk of the most important functionality in ACDSee will turn up as part of Longhorn, and newer versions of iPhoto. As for me, I don’t plan on wasting any more time or money on ACDSee’s upgrades… version 6.0 works more or less, and philosophically, I can’t support a company that treats me more as a cash cow than a customer. If I end up needing more features, I think PhotoShop Album is going to get my next software-god tithing… I got slightly burned on trying out v1.0 of it, but hear the newer version is pretty great.
Got a call from Ubaldo, who is visiting family in Florida… prince.org is down, his site is down, the machine is hosed. I was in the car, driving back from a party down in Mountain View (with the baby screaming, he was hungry, and we were trying to hurry up and get home). I told him I’ll check it out as soon as I got upstairs, wondering what was causing this issue…
Well, it’s the second time mysql has crapped out in a bizarre, troubling way. It’s running, but all the threads are busy–up to the maximum (500 in my case). Can’t connect to it due to error “too many connections” or similar. Even on the local machine, as real and mysql user root, can’t consistently get an extended-status out of it. Finally I got a ‘mysqladmin shutdown’ to sort of work… although it seemed to hang. So I killed it, and noticed about half the threads had been killed… but still, can’t connect to mysql… the client apps all hang. Nothing interesting in the error log. Finally, out of desperation, do a killall -9 mysqld_safe ; killall -9 mysqld. That does it, but we all know things are going to be ugly. Try to restart mysql, it hangs. Reboot machine (I know, this shouldn’t matter). (And it doesn’t.) Sigh.
Start doing myisamchk’s. On several tables, it segfaults! Nice! Check mysql.com–looks like a bug in myisamchk has been fixed in later versions (I’m running 4.1.3). What the hell–download the latest RPMs (4.1.5) and install them. Myisamchk doesn’t segfault anymore! Repair all tables (including one with 2.1million forum posts with a fulltext index… fun!) Read a little on the web while I’m waiting for the myisamchk -r’s to finish… seems the unresponsiveness might be a result of the tables in the mysql db being corrupted… make sure to repair those (again–segfaulted on 1st try pre-upgrade). Restart mysql accidentially before finishing all repairs (don’t ask). It works though! Shut it down nicely this time. Copy all datafiles to another directory, so I can make a full backup offsite later. Restart mysql. Everything’s happy.
I do have a copy of the extended-status output while it was hung at first… will dig through there. One thing that seemed to stand out was the first thread listed said “delayed”. I have recently added one table that I do INSERT DELAYED’s into. I changed the code to not use delayed, we’ll see if that seems to help. This has happened twice in about 5 weeks now… we’ll see if another 5 weeks go by… of course it’s a newer version of mysql, too, so, anything could happen, good or bad.
Well, I upgraded WordPress to 1.2.1 to address the minor security issue. Guess I’m safe from the hordes of marauding hackers that hit this site! Oh wait, no one hits this site yet, because almost no one knows about it…!