Cricalix.Net

As I was preparing to depart sunny Newcastle-under-Lyme for sunny Leamington Spa (that’s sarcasm folks), my neighbour mentioned that he was getting a mate of his to do his guttering, and asked if I was interested. I said, sure, and asked the gent in question for a quote. £500 all in says he - including the removal of all the junk.

In the end, it was £550, but that was new everything front and back, as well as some replacement tiles for ones that were broken (and I knew they were broken), and re-fitting some tiles that had slipped and were letting water in through the roof (which I didn’t know). Not complaining about that price at all, and the work looks fantastic.

This new job has ever so kindly thrown me in the deep end, which happens to be somewhere that I’m used to being. Task one was to investigate the portal software they use (Liferay) and how to integrate some document management software (Alfresco) into it. Cue lots of head scratching as I learnt about Java, Tomcat and finicky Windows Vista. Lots of browsing later, and a few ‘delete that entire tree, and go again’, I managed to find a way to make it all work. Not pretty though - Liferay and Alfresco don’t share a common authentication database, even when using the Alfresco portlet for Liferay. Came across something called CAS, a SSO specification that both Liferay and Alfresco can use. So that report has been sent up the chain, and I moved onwards.

The next task involved looking at some of the current Linux servers to see if various backups were being done properly. In short, they weren’t, but are a lot closer now. There’s a variety of distributions in use, which is all well and good, but makes supporting them as a sysadmin a bit harder. So that’s another document in the works - how to standardise the Linux servers deployed throughout the company, complete with build servers for custom packages, and deployment/update servers so that updates get pulled from internal once a single copy has been downloaded. It’ll certainly help with the fact that some of the hosts don’t even have ‘locate’.

I’m also evaluating (over a month or so) the current tape backup and management strategy. It works, but I’m fairly sure it can be done in a better manner. As always with this kind of thing, it’s a case of writing up a good business case that presents the current model and the associated costs versus the proposed model and associated costs and savings. It’s impressive how far tape technology has moved from the DLT-IV era - an order of magnitude with the current technology, and a bit further than that with the next generation that’ll be out later this year. I think it’ll be good to take the company from over 22 linear hours (3 parallel jobs) per backup run to just over 1.5 hours :)

The new work PC I received as my workstation came with Windows Vista - so we decided I’d be the lab rat to see how well it worked. Suffice to say, I’m running Windows XP Professional now, in line with the other guys in the department. Yes, it was that bad with respect the software I needed to use - like VMware Server. Boot the client application, no problem. Tell it to boot an image? Go away for 10 minutes and hope it’s come back to life by the time you get back (on a dual core no less). XP is also much snappier than Vista - and I had all of the fancy stuff in Vista turned off!

So, onwards and upwards. Unless I royally screw up, I see a lot of work ahead of me. Work that could be quite a lot of fun, and will certainly expand my skillset. Heck, I’m programming in Perl/Tk to parse backup software files and produce XLS output… the perl I’m used to, the Tk is cross platform, but writing out XLS? That’s new. I’m also pulling out my rusty skills as a Windows administrator, simply because I have to be able to solve some problems as part of the team.

All in all, it’s an excellent job change for me. My stress level has dropped, I’m not taking work home, and Leamington is a nice place (with some most excellent patisseries).

Now that I have a computer that can deftly handle my gaming and photography needs, I’ve started looking at Windows applications for doing RAW workflow.  I need said application to handle both MRW (my old Konica-Minolta RAWs) and NEF (the new Nikon RAWs).  Bonus points for handling JPEG and PNG.  More bonus points if it has a library type functionality with meta-data support.  Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom deftly covers all of these aspects, and has a non-horrible user interface.

However.

It’s horribly slow, even on a dual-core 2.13 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM.

• Scrolling through my collection (14K photos) is a case of scroll and wait for it to fetch data from the disk to display the next row of thumbnails. The overlay of the relative image number is also slow.
• It constantly chews 10 - 25% of CPU time, even when it’s just sitting open and not doing anything.
• It’s laggy. I can double click on a picture, and move my mouse to another picture, and it registers the double-click against the second picture, not the one I wanted.
• My disks don’t stop going when it’s open. I’m not doing anything (did a ‘build all previews’ to ensure they were done), just have Lightroom sitting open, taking 300 MB of RAM. The disks just keep getting hit. I popped open FileMon, and Lightroom is just constantly reading through the image library, even though I’m not asking it to do anything!

Point 2 I could live with - I’m not going to be playing EVE and using Lightroom at the same time.  Points 1, 3 and 4 are show-stoppers.  It doesn’t have to have all 14,000 photos open at once (and I’d expect it to run out of memory long before it could load that many), and it certainly doesn’t need to be running through the catalog and images constantly.  I’d be happier if there was a little status window or something saying ‘Updating thumbnails’ or whatever it might be doing, but there’s nothing.

So while it scores highly with me for the cataloging and meta-data aspects (and a not-too-shabby editor), the constant disk access and slow UI mean I’ll be looking at other software applications to find something that comes closer to my ideal application.

I installed Adobe Lightroom this morning, just to play with it and see what it’s like as an image management and editing tool.  Initially, I didn’t like the dark aspect of the program, but it’s begun to grow on me, and I must say that Adobe certainly have a fairly nifty program.  It’s got all the usuals (are they usual?) of collections, keywords/tags, metadata maintenance and so on.

I fed it my 70 GB photo collection, and told it to import in place.  It’s taken 4 hours or so to do that, and crashed once while trying - to be fair I was clicking all over the place as it was importing, but that shouldn’t cause a crash.  I’ve learnt that I have over 14,000 photos in my collection - I’m fairly sure several are dupes .  Others will be the processed and saved versions of the original JPG/RAW files.  Either way, that’s a lot of files to run through and classify/catalog/tag!

Next up (after I go and finish filing a ton of paperwork) - using Lightroom to edit both an MRW and a NEF file to see what the RAW handler is like (and I think it’s ACR, which is meant to be good).