setting up a shared photo library in Picasa3 on MacOS

setting up a shared photo library for several users on the Mac is a piece of cake – & here’s the recipe. Leave me a comment if this helps you out.

1. set up a shared folder space & optionally move all your existing photos into a subfolder of that
2. setup Picasa the way you want it & select the shared subfolder as the only “watched folder” via Tools -> Folder Manager & close Picasa
3. copy your ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Picasa3/ folder into the shared folder space – this ensures the permissions are picked up from the watched folder
4. rename your original Picasa3 folder, & set up an alias or softlink instead that points to the new folder
5. repeat #3 & #4 for each user
6. do a final permissions check & tidyup under sudo if needed

set up a shared folder space with appropriate permissions – for most people the easiest way to do this is either via chmod 777 the folder, or better, understand inherited ACLs & use sandbox to set up the permissions yourself. Plenty of info via google for this stuff – YMMV.

Picasa on Mac

google released Picasa 3 today for MacOS – timely indeed as I’ve gotten frustrated with iPhoto 6 (hate hate hate) needing to manage/import 20 000 tagged & sorted photos from my PC (with Picasa) onto my Mac (with iPhoto), and have been looking at Aperture 2.0 or Expression Media as an alternative.

A few things struck me immediately -

• Picasa3 on my iMac is really fast for sorting & scrolling through photos – admittedly on a 20″ white iMac – intel dual core 2.16GHz proc with 3 GB RAM
• it looks pretty good for a first release & is easy to use “out of the box”
• importing photos & emailing them with your google account is really easy – this will make my wife really happy
• unlike the PC version there’s no trail of picasa.ini files spattered all over the filesystem

a more detailed test run uncovered a few faults -

• tagging images sucks – you can’t easily see the tags all the time as it’s a pop-up window only & needs to be recalled each time
• my apple remote doesn’t work in slideshow view but my bluetooth keyboard & mouse are a fair compromise
• on importing photos, the “delete from camera” option doesn’t seem to work – maybe PEBKAC but I don’t think I made any mistakes
• something isn’t quite right in the “import & rotate” image workflow – I think the preview doesn’t show the image with the camera’s correct horizontal/vertical alignment, but the final imported version is OK

Conversely, the learning curve is short & sweet, and it was easy to set up a shared library between my wife’s account & mine on the same Mac – more on that in another post. For me this is good enough to hold off from getting Aperture for another few months – which has been a really nice app to use BTW just a big sluggish in the image department.

Above all, unlike that like that crappy iPhoto 6 (hate hate hate) it didn’t screw up my current photo library at all.

america becoming france

you’ve got to love this partially satirical article in TIME about how the despised habits of the French are coming true in the Land of the Free

setup rails on windows to use SQLite3

well the last time I looked at ruby, I did it all on OpenBSD. Seemed pretty easy at the time so I didn’t make any notes. Now I’m doing it on windows, MacOS X & amaxon’s EC2/ubuntu.

SQLite is no longer the default DB in rails, but for my dev PC I don’t want the whole hog. So back to SQLite it was. I consider myself a bit of a windows guru, so I wasn’t expecting any real problems. I downloaded  ruby & started to get up & running, installing gems, capistrano, ec2onrails, & finally sqlite3. I downloaded the SQLite3 DLL & command tool into SQLite3, added this to the path, & then tried to install the gem:

D:\ruby\bin>gem install sqlite3-ruby
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3-ruby:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

d:/ruby/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb install sqlite3-ruby
checking for fdatasync() in rt.lib... no
checking for sqlite3.h... no

nmake
'nmake' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

not good!! nmake shouldn’t be necessary for installing a gem. Turns out we need to instead use:

D:\ruby\bin>gem install --version 1.2.3 sqlite3-ruby
Successfully installed sqlite3-ruby-1.2.3-x86-mswin32
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for sqlite3-ruby-1.2.3-x86-mswin32...
Installing RDoc documentation for sqlite3-ruby-1.2.3-x86-mswin32...

which works a treat. I expect this will trip up a fair few people so hope this helps the happy googlers.

some questions on science

over on Thinking Matters there’s a whole lot of discussion around “what is science”, & “where can we draw boundaries between it and religion”. For me that nicely illustrates the difference between the two domains – science is inclusive, inquisitive, and able to be challenged, downsized and redirected – think flat earth, newtonian physics for examples of fundamental changes in the way we view the world that science has permitted and incorporated.

Specious teleologic arguments are used to imply that religion is separate, special, and should be treated outside this evidential framework. Fair enough if that’s your view, but I’ve yet to see why this is required, and why it is allowed to be used to “explain” what has already been explained by science.

evolution is the best example of where these worlds collide. Scientifically the world has accepted the Darwinian concept of evolution, despite some tinkering of how fast & how discrete the steps are by the likes of Steve Jay Gould and his opposing immovable force Richard Dawkins. The factual record is extensive & consistent. So when we review the age of the earth (6000 years give or take) from a biblical perspective, we are expected to put Occam’s razor to the side, and invoke a mysterious being (not seen for the last 2000 years in any verifiable form) who compiled all of this evidence, and asks us to ignore it.

If this approach was used anywhere else, for example in a court of law, you’d deem it unacceptable. So why put up with it here?

motorola marketing from the munchkin wrangler

motorola’s cellphone naming looks to me like the abbreviated names used in stock price tickers.  the munchkin wrangler has a different take & a few alternative options!

crashdump analysis on windows

after spending a couple of hours debugging my brother-in-law’s crashing computer (& in german, just to make it easier), I ran into this site http://www.dumpanalysis.org/ which is so good I might just have to buy a few of the books listed on it.

running OpenAFS on Ubuntu inside EC2

first up, kick off an EC2 ubuntu/hardy instance, ssh in as usual

apt-get install openafs-fileserver
# set cell name to muse.net.nz
# set cache size to 10Gb
# set cellDB to afsdb.muse.net.nz
# update /etc/openafs/CellServDB
>muse.net.nz #home
121.73.27.12 #afsdb.muse.net.nz
rm /etc/openafs/server/CellServDB; ln -s /etc/openafs/CellServDB /etc/openafs/server/CellServDB
# sweet!


set up OpenBSD sendmail to fwd all local user mail to a smart host

three changes required -

• configure sendmail to use a remote host for all mail in /etc/mail/submit.cf
# changes to fwd mail directly to smart host
#D{MTAHost}[127.0.0.1]
D{MTAHost}[smtp.muse.net.nz]

• configure local aliases mapping to remap users to a destination address in /etc/mail/aliases
# Well-known aliases -- these should be filled in!
# root:
root: root@muse.net.nz

• permit relaying on smart host (postfix in my case) in /etc/postfix/main.cf
mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, $mydomain, akai.$mydomain

The Perry Bible Fellowship

i ran into this earlier today, he used to write cartoons for the guardian, but in the ‘free press’ The Perry Bible Fellowship has a lot more freedom