I’m a Photoshop user. I have been since my mid-teens, and I always gravitate toward it after running the gambit of options that crop up every few years. I think these days, ACR and the Smart Sharpen filter are the draw.
Regardless, these applications don’t run in Linux which caused me to jump between Windows and Mint for two weekends. Who wants to do that? It’s boring, and takes up hours even if you have a simple drag’n'drop recovery protocol (which I do). Sure, you can dual boot but why should I? That’s a UX failure and I just don’t want to be “in Windows” anymore.
VirtualBox came to the rescue with it’s awesome “seamless” mode. I simply put the Windows taskbar on auto-hide at the bottom, and keep my Mint panel visible across the top (personal preference), and Photoshop appears to be running in Linux!
OSX has had this for a few years with Fusion; someone forgot to send out the memo that it was possible in Linux.
I really like this compared to Windows.
This has moved here.
Ubuntu 10.04 is pretty awesome… but it also has some annoyances that make me wonder what the hell the developers where thinking. Regardless, Mint released a new version trailing Ubuntu (of course), which means I could switch to it.
So that’s what I did. It’s awesome. If you’ve never heard of it, check it out. It’s in that sweet spot between Windows XP and OSX. A perfect middle ground.
Ya, I know it’s nerdy… so what. This is awesome info to have at my finger tips!
I’ve moved my email home with the help of a Postfix/Dovecot/ClamAV/SpamAssassin config. I need to get the SSL authentication running tonight or tomorrow for an ideal configuration.
So, with the death of the primary SATA2 HDD in Celcius (it’s what I named the box, based on one of many snowboard/mtb stickers on the chassis), things rolled back a little. Specifically this blog, and my fiance’s photoblog. It’s a case of “not enough time to get it done”, which is a poor excuse in my situation; but shit happens.
The 3.5″ SATA2 HDD was replaced with a 2.5″ SSD rated with an avg Read/Write > 250MB/s. This new SSD syncs important data with the RAID5 housed in the chassis every 3 hours.
Celcius is quieter and using less power so my goal of an absolutely tiny footprint on the net continues. Future upgrades include CPU & RAM (currently using a fantastic AMD Opteron: 90w), and newer HDDs for the RAID (WD Greens maybe, it’s primarily backup & offline access).
So I’ve been super busy with work, and side projects. I just recoded my company website to use a series of patterns for easy extensibility and a performance boost. It’s just a case of putting theory into practice, and it worked out well.
Work has been interesting. I’ve been getting very familiar with the various objects and blur of layers in the project I’m on. It’s interesting, I guess. I’m not sure how else to explain that large amount of code that doesn’t do much.
I’ve taken on a small side project of building Jenz a new computer, reusing my workstation from 2 years ago with a new optical drive, hdd, ram and video card. The hardware went together nicely, and it’s in a mini ATX case, so it’s pretty small compared to the beast of a P4 she’s working on right now.
I’ve almost wrapped up awFlickr development. Last night I realized there might be an issue with my plan of sending data back to Flickr from un-authorized users, which I’ll have to look into. Oh wells.
Things are progressing well.
Yesterday I noticed a Monoprice wall post on Facebook about their house brand tablets being in a “Top 12″ list by a reputable tech review site.
After a little reading I decided to check out the price of these tablets, and what I found was shocking. Every model is about 1/10th the price of a Wacom with seemingly comparable specs and “good drivers” (based on user reviews). The largest tablet was just under $40, so I decided to make an impulse purchase and re-invest a portion of the revenue from a short photo session at the end of this month.
I haven’t used a tablet since I was taking “Drafting” through secondary school, so I’m very excited to see how this newer tech is different than what I’m used to.
A lot of random stuff happened since my last entry, but I’m distracted setting up my new work machine so I’m not sure where to start.
My ‘old’ HP laptop has been retired permanently. I replaced it yesterday with a mid-range Gateway NV44, which seems to be pretty great. I find the new textures to be a little confusing, I keep sliding my thumb on the touchpad when I’m trying to hit a lower key; user error’s a pain sometime.
I have a few work items to get sorted out and I need to rewrite my resume/cv to cover my last 3 projects since I’m going to be job hunting shortly. I’m going to start putting in longer hours next week to drain my contract to the last paid hour. I’m positive the extra time will be appreciated, so it’s win/win.
I’ve transitioned all of my computers to a Windows 2008 r2 domain tree and Windows 7. It’s been a bit of a pain, but overall it seems that I made the right decision with the software. However, this new Gateway machine has an Intel chipset that suffers from the classic Vista LUT bug. This means my calibrated color profile is unloaded any time a ‘fade to black’ is initiated by the operating system. I’m not sure if it’s entirely Microsoft’s fault, but at this point it shouldn’t exist. The ‘bug’ was introduced with Vista, a few years ago. Why is it back?
