Download Squad listed three Linux applications that “make us hate Windows”: Apt-get (and its graphical interface Synaptic), Compiz Fusion and Amarok.
Compiz Fusion adds Vista and OSX “like” eye-candy to Linux, even in my old laptop, and it’s one of the reasons why current distributions are more appealing in recent years. Amarok is a really neat media player, probably is the best way to sync an iPod in Linux and the next version seems to be quite promising. So both of these tools are great but neither of them makes me feel like I need them everywhere, on every computer I lay my hands on.
But if there’s one thing anyone who uses a Debian based distribution just can’t live without is Apt-get, a better Windows Update that manages the updates of virtually all the installed packages, not only from OS and selected tools (Internet Explorer, Office, etc…), and hardly requires a reboot to apply them (usually only a new kernel requires a reboot).
Thomas Hawk, photographer and one of the minds behind Zooomr, posted an interesting post in his blog where he explains his process of handling the hundreds of photos taken each day. While not being exactly “rocket science” it’s interesting to check the workflow of a professional, whose archive nowadays is bigger than 5 TB, and compare it to our own because, as an amateur photographer, my organizational and handling problems are about the same, but in a much smaller scale.
My workflow nowadays is built around the fact that my everyday operating system of choice for some time has been Linux, which can be cut down to this:
Using F-Spot (recently I preferred it over Picasa because it’s a Gnome native application) I import all the photos in my memory cards to a Incoming folder in my storage device, I rarely delete photos. F-Spot already organizes those photos into folders with “year\month\day” structure, something I use to do by hand, so this keeps the bulk data roughly organized per date. I’ll do some basic tagging here also.
Quickly browse the imported photos and develop the ones “somehow interesting” with UFRaw, (I’ve been shooting exclusively in RAW for some time). I don’t have the huge amount of photos Thomas has so I don’t use the intermediate Maybe, I just rely on the different versions created by F-Spot.
Basic processing in Gimp, 95% of the time is things like Levels, Curves, Noise Reduction, Saturation and Unsharp Mask.
The output of previous step goes to a Processed folder, which contains lossless JPEG files (sometimes in a slightly smaller resolution). This is the starting point for the final touch, if any (most of the times is extra processing like a fake lomo look).
Pick some of the photos Processed folder and publish them to my Flickr and Zooomr accounts, usually the tagging and geotagging is done here.
And that’s it!
One of the differences I’ve found whe comparing both workflows, where I feel I could improve my own, is tagging and geotagging. I mostly do this in photos I’m about to publish, most probably because I’m lazy guy, but I’m facing the fact that doing it on an earlier stage highly improves the ability to browse and search larger collections, something I’m already in need as mine is reaching a point where is becoming hard to manage.
A photography workflow evolves throughout time, adjusting to someone’s needs and preferences, mine changed a lot in the last couple of years when I decided to shoot RAW and use Linux on my desktop, and this is the current iteration of mine, which will probably evolve in the future (having a decent Lightroom in Linux would be a fine reason to change it a little).
I’ve been a long-time fan of Launchy, and most of the other application launchers out there, for some time. And now I found out another good use for this neat little tool:
InfoQ has an interesting article gathering several thoughts and rants regarding the usefulness of Maven as a build tool, despite having used Maven with some success I must agree with some of the referred problems. Maven has a declarative approach to a project, rather than the procedural approach of Ant, which makes it easier to move around from one project to another, something that doesn’t happen in Ant; and not to forget the dependency management, which is indeed is a killer feature (although I admit I’ve never tried Ivy). But the documentation still is poor and sparse and it requires the team and build process do adjust to the Maven philosophy and structure.
Been thinking about creating a desktop client for Remember The Milk in WPF, I’m needing one and the guys at RTM have a neat API (WPF is for learning something new).
Must buy a tripod, need to do night shots.
Get a taste of EJB 3.0 and the Spring 2.5, just a small taste to check what I’ve been missing on the Java world.
Put my reading up to date, I still haven’t read this one (no need to buy me a copy, I already own one and it has been gathering dust for some time).
Take more photos: night photos, motion photos, street photos, concept photos and all kinds of photos I haven’t been doing lately.
There has been some ideas to make a few short movies, I sure hope we can turn them real. Another reason to buy a tripod…
Probably dump Windows on my laptop completely, I’m getting happier with Ubuntu everyday.
There’s nothing like turning your New Year resolutions public, or at least part of them…
Many has been written about Android, Google’s new platform for mobile applications, lately and the Java community is no exception. To catch up here’s a small reading list, most of it regarding Dalvik, Google’s tweaked Java virtual machine used in Android:
So Google unveiled the truth about GPhone: there isn’t one! Instead they created a Android, a free platform for mobile devices. After watching the demo video one thing comes to my mind, other than Sergey Brin’s poor performance, somehow it looks a bit like vaporware, just a neat prototype (and I’m not the only one thinking like that). Let’s see things will evolve from now on, but luring developers with 10 million ain’t a good start.
Apple released the latest version of its widely acclaimed browser Safari, but this time with a twist: a Windows compatible version with some pretty ambitious claims regarding performance.
…And now some eye-candy, a teaser for a new user interface from Microsoft, to be released next year, where everything is done just by touch. Literally!…
About myself