We spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways

Waterlily

Salmijärvi

These photographs were taken a week ago at Salmi, which is in the northwest corner of Nuuksio wilderness, showing lake Salmijärvi which is rather shallow at this end, and the water is full of various water plants such as waterlily.

Are you using Feedly? It has become a popular alternative to Google Reader which was shut down during the summer. I migrated to Feedly, and despite some awkwardness here and there, Feedly has been a competent replacement to Reader. I'm following 312 RSS feeds which are divided into 12 categories.

Recently Feedly launched Feedly Pro, and this generated somewhat heated discussion.

Some felt that features of the Pro version should be available in the free version. And others felt that the cost ($5/month) is quite too much. In any case, Feedly sold out in a one-time only deal the available 5,000 "lifetime" Pro accounts in eight hours, even though the price was set at $99. Rather nice chunk of money for investing in additional hardware, development, etc.

Of course, it remains to be seen what "lifetime" means here, and how well Feedly is able to deliver promises of improvements in the service.

I'm not sure whether I made a good decision, but I bought one of the 5,000 Pro accounts, mainly because of the search functionality. The search has helped me already to find a valuable news item I remembered seeing but not precisely where. Given how much I'm using Feedly for work-related information gathering and personal hobbies etc., Feedly has become valuable to me indeed. However, Feedly search is rather slow currently. I hope it gets better with code optimization and scalable hardware.

(Posting title is from the poem The Feed by M.L. Smoker.)

To a movement of legs and hooves

Street

Lamp

Rowan

Colors

Leaves

Yesterday I got into corruption. What I mean is digital things going wrong, and this wrongness causing new wrongness. It all started when I had the camera in hand to take out the memory card for transferring the photographs to the iMac.

I was a bit tired, and thus I wasn't sharp enough, and so instead of doing what I should have done I started up the camera, navigated the menus, and ... formatted the memory card. One second too late I realized what I was doing.

Well, what to do? I searched the net for software for rescuing photographs from memory cards, and there is a lot of that available. I tried a free one from the App Store, but that was only a demo, the full version was over 30 euro... and I'm cheap. So I bought the cheapest non-free app, costing something like 12 euro.

But even though the app installed and started up, it didn't show the memory card in the list of devices. In fact, no disks were shown. After searching for help pages (not much help), I finally found a link for downloading a different version of the same software from the web pages of the company. And finally the memory card was shown, I could do a search, and a lot of files were found, including the photographs from yesterday. And the recovery function seemed to work, fetching several hundred files.

After looking at the files I deleted some (preview images) and imported the rest into Aperture. ... But then Aperture crashed. Whn I started it up again, there was a message telling of problems with the Aperture Library, which had to be repaired. That took some time. When that was finished I (and the iMac) went to sleep (or I tried without real success).

Today I started up Aperture once again. And the Library needed repairs, again. I noticed that some of the imported photographs seemed to have corrupt data, and I deleted those. Finally everything seemed to be back to normal. I hope. I picked the best and deleted the rest, and uploaded to Flickr.

What you see here are some of the rescued photographs from yesterday, plus one taken today. I'm not sure whether the rescue operation was worth the effort, but at least I now know something of what to do if this happens again. I fact, it is surprising that the same thing hasn't happened previously.

(Posting title is from the poem The Rescue by Robert Creeley.)

Is Mac OS X Lion (10.7) good - or very good?

Leaf color

The photograph shows how it is out there: hot, hot. I have grown tired of the heat.

This time I'm not writing about photography, but about operating systems. If you are not interested in IT or Macs, you may want to skip this.

I have been using the new version of Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, since Wednesday, installing it on a four-year old iMac. The minimum requirement to have is a Core 2 Duo processor which the iMac does have. The maximum for memory on the iMac is 4 GB, but I have installed 6 GB, which seems to work well with Lion, even though it is not officially supported.

The best source of information on Lion has been the detailed review written by John Siracusa at Ars Technica. It has 19 pages of well researched information. There you find a lot of helpful hints on how to actually use the new features, and what is under the hood, including the dirty little details about the filesystem etc.

The price of Lion in App Store is 24 euro, and you can install it on all Macs you own or control, which is a very good deal for a major OS upgrade. And even though I had some worries about installing an OS without having it on a physical media, things happened without any hiccups.

How this is done technically is discussed in detail by John Siracusa, and it was rather interesting, as also the fact that there is a hidden recovery partition on the disk after installing Lion. (And if one really needs to have the OS on a media, it will be available in August on USB sticks.)

Lion should be more robust in terms of recovering from errors, and also against malware. This is very good news. There are a lot of improvements, many of which are under the hood, but some also visible to the user. As an example, you can now use full-disk encryption, which is great for those traveling with laptops.

The Lion upgrade seems to do quite a lot of cleaning up on the disks, as the amount of free disk I have on the iMac increased from a bit over 80 GB to well over 100 GB. (I'm comparing the situation when the systems have been started up and one user is logged in.) So, even though some disk space was taken by the hidden recovery partition, it didn't matter in the end.

I suspect what happened is that the Lion upgrade managed to do a good house-cleaning exercise of the old system, which had been upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, directly on top of the old OS. It is in fact quite surprising that there haven't been any problems on the iMac caused by the cumulative software updates; the safest way would have been making clean installations each time.

Well, lets get back to Lion.

The visual appearance of the OS has changed quite a lot, mostly towards a more subdued look. There are some glaring exceptions, such as the iCal and Address Book applications, both of which are on the ugly side.

In addition to the new look, there are a plenty of new things, many of which are borrowed and "macified" from iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). As an example, by default the scrolling direction (if you use a scroll mouse) has been reversed so that it follows the way how you use your finger on a touch screen. This requires two or three days of getting used to. (Or then you can return to the old way be deselecting an option in the Mouse preference pane.)

Some things are missing completely, such as ability to run PowerPC software in emulation (Rosetta). Also gone is the Front Row application used for watching movies etc. This was a bit of a negative surprise, as the children have liked it, but I suspect they learn soon to cope.

One of the biggest positive surprises has been the new version of Mail. After some initial confusion I have grown to like the new three-pane view, and there are nice touches everywhere. It is also fast, fast.

I have been using Microsoft Outlook (the Mac version) for a while, but now I think I'll return to Mail, as it seems to have evolved well past what Outlook can do. Some issues may crop up, but I think this is worth trying out.

I don't like the way iCal looks like in Lion. It seems too loaded with needless eye-candy, but I suspect I'll learn to live with it. I hope the Exchange compatibility has improved. (Mac version of Outlook isn't so great either.)

Speaking of mail, David Pogue wrote a nice item about it. His Lion review is also worth looking at, although it is nowhere as detailed as the Ars Technica one.

The general feeling of the system is that some things have evolved, some things have changed radically (usually for the better), and some things have taken a step back. (Nothing major so far.)

Apple seems to have a vision of how the OS should be like, borrowing heavily from the iPad and iPhone, but also allowing users to return to the old way, or just to not use the new features.

I suspect that whatever comes after Lion, things will evolve quite a lot. The iCloud service is probably a key direction Apple wants to explore next.

So, in summary: Lion does roar, despite the occasional cough here and there.

Roaring Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) - or so I hope

Raspberry

Berries

I forgot to include rasperry photographs to my previous posting which had the berry in the title. So here are two photographs of raspberries.

The new version of Mac OS X, 10.7, aka Lion, was released today in the App Store. This must have been the easiest and fastest major operating system update ever: download the update (and 24 euros is not a bad price!), start it up, wait a while (we went for a walk), and log in to the system. (I made an up-to-date backup in Time Machine before starting, of course.)

Everything worked as it used to work. Well, the system is still starting up: indexing the hard disk and making the first Time Machine backup, but I have been using it all the time. And dare I say this: the system feels more responsive than before.

Well, some things are ... different ... some would claim better ... but nothing disturbingly so. The Mail program has changed quite a lot in visual appearance, and that may take some time to get used to, but I already like some things there.

Of the upcoming iCloud service there isn't yet anything to report ... have to see in Autumn what that means for the user.

Anyway, so far so good. Knock on wood...

Dawn to dusk - and damning Apple (or not!)

Dawn, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Freezing, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Frosty, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Here are three photographs from today, dawn to dusk. The work day was in between; length of day is now 8 h 4 min. Here is a quote which I think fits these views, seen practically every day: "The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Haven't checked who has said this; found it in a book today.)

Andreas Manessinger wrote a posting on the iPad (and related devices), in which he managed both praise and damn Apple. Here is a quote concerning the iPad: "There is simply some magic in this device. If you have never tried it, please do. Try to scroll with a flick of your finger and marvel at how responsive the iPad is, and how direct your control of it is. Marvelous! You conduct, the iPad sings."

And here is some of the criticism: "I am totally fascinated by something made by a company that I absolutely dislike for their totalitarian control of computer users, or as they see it, “customers”. I don’t want to be turned into a customer."

I don't have an iPhone or an iPad, and have never in fact used either of them, so I can't comment on this front. But my attitude towards Apple is quite different - I'm happy to be just a customer. I guess I'm not a tinkerer, I just want something that works (most of the time).

I have used Macs almost since they came out in mid-1980s. I bought my first - a Mac Plus - in 1987, and have used Macs ever since. However, if the Unix-based Mac OS X wouldn't have come out in 2001, I would probably be a Windows user by now. Fortunately this in not the case, I'm a happy Mac user still. (However, I view iPads and iPhones as unnecessary luxuries.)

I feel as if in the early 1980s there was a memo, which was read by the people at Apple (concerning Xerox PARC and such stuff), but which happened to lay down in the rain the the gutter and get smudgy and corrupted before reaching Microsoft. So, what Apple did, it worked; but what Microsoft did, more or less sucked, and at least was a slightly brain dead implementation of the good ideas in the memo.

And things have been like that for decades. Every time I have used Windows I feel there is a zombie-like thing happening somewhere, not a thing to enjoy in the long run. But this is just a personal feeling, I have nothing against Microsoft as a company - it is doing a good job as a company, the same as Apple is doing, being a company.

I guess what the real reason behind the "brain dead" thing is that Apple is a device company, Microsoft a software company. And software is something that mostly doesn't work as it should. There is something deeply wrong with the way we develop software, the way the software industry works. On the other hand, devices are something which is much more concrete, and thus they are not always as bad as they could be if you left software people in charge.