The Unreasonable Man

DER HERR:
Hast du mir weiter nichts zu sagen?
Kommst du nur immer anzuklagen?
Ist auf der Erde ewig dir nichts recht?

Ah… this must another typical blog post about Linux, then. People blog about Linux only to say that they would like it to work, and it almost does.

Over the past few days I updated my Ubuntu desktop. The usual: the first time the update does not work (and I find out after a day of downloading). Three days later, Ubuntu has fixed the issue and updated the updater, so now the update works (if you can follow all that). So now after the update, I can no longer see the content of Samba drives. Linux, even in its Ubuntu guise, has a ways to go - shame, since it is very cool. If only Desktop Linux’s Achilles’ heels of Samba, wireless cards, graphics adapters and audio cards worked. It seems a matter of honour for Linux’s designers to not make these things work; to say “well, if you cannot recompile your C-compiler after you switch to a different desktop manager and a different distro you’re not much of a man, are you?”.

The comparison with Apple, which comes immediately to mind, is unfair. Since Apple only has to make its OS work on one box, of course it works. But it does! Sympathy for Ubuntu only takes me so far - I just want something to work, reasons be damned.

Clearly, I am Dr Faust, and Steve Jobs is Mephistopheles. A working computer is Gretchen, a desirable young girl… I want her. Yes, I think I shall call my iMac Gretchen from now on.

Der Tag graut! Liebchen! Liebchen!

A sad story here (in The Independent), about a 17-year old Iraqi girl who was killed by her father in front of her mother (and with her brothers’ help) for falling in love with a British soldier.

“Is this Islamic justice?”, people will ask. Not exactly. It is stupid macho Arab male justice. This is easy to confuse with Islamic justice, since most Stupid Arab Macho Males (which is of course not all Arab males!) are Muslim.

Also, of course all religion encourages this “this is the way and you shall not question it” kind of thinking. Especially religion that needs to be taken literally, and of course most adherents will tell you that Islam must be taken literally.

And Western forces are in Iraq why?

Also sad: the soldier would not have been told that any such relationship would endanger the girl. What? Are British forces that ignorant? Surely they know that is the way in Iraq?

The Guardian, which I have previously praised, enclosed a DVD movie in last Saturday’s newspaper. The original 1954 Japanese “Godzilla” (Gojira). I just watched it.

Apart from the attraction of the idea of a newspaper just enclosing an entire movie DVD for free (not here, ever?), this movie itself was also quite entertaining. It carried many message: Japan being destroyed by America; Atom bombs and H-bombs, the danger of messing with nature, Faust.

Of course amongst all this loftiness, Hollywood stil managed to drag everything down intyo the gutter, by regionalising the movie. I hope I have not inadvertently permanently made my iMac into a region 2-only player. The evil of H-bombs, killer dinosaurs and deals with the devil I can deal with - Hollywood, I am not sure.

It is Sunday and I am back from teaching photography. I listen to “Cowgirl in the Sand ” by Neil Young, a song I discovered just a week ago when my son played it in the car. Which is ironic since it is “my” music, from some time around 1980. It still amazes me how stupid the music industry is: all the thousands of songs I wold gladly pay $1 to download as simple MP3s. Instead I go straight to limewaire, of course. Hey - the music industry’s loss. The film industry is about to do the same and cut off its nose to spite its face.

While I listen to the excellent guitar work (why does no-one make guitar music like that anymore?) I read an article on Haaretz about a Jewish pig farmer. Funny world.

And a world where we misunderstand one another all the time. Who here reads Israeli news, African news, Communist news, anarchist news, German news, religious news, or Arab news? (I was going to add “Chinese news”, but that is not news, that is propaganda.) And if you do not read the stories of these other tribes, how can you expect to be well-informed?

The great thing is that in 2008, thanks to the Internet, we can all be well-informed.

So someone sent me a “Plaxo” request. Plaxo is one of these networking sites, like LinkedIn.

I signed up. And now I will sign off again. What useless crap! No wonder Plaxo is still called “beta” after about eight years.

The system needs all sorts of personal details. The ‘edit profile’ button that appears after you sign up does not work. The email you add all need to be validated (why not just believe me, with the first one having been validated?). These validations then hang, at least using any browser on a Mac.

The worst thing, however, is that with all these things I am a pawn in a power struggle. Between Google and  LinkedIn and Facebook and Plaxo and God knows what others, all these people try to, by owning everyone’s information, be the central go-to networking hub.

Guess what? Forget it. No-one will want to sign up to six networking sites every day to see what’s new. These guys will have to interact. Until that time, go on dreaming.

Just like with IM clients (AIM, MSN, Skype): it’s all about them gaining world domination, not about the customer. Customer be screwed. If they did not think that, they would interlink with other systems.

I’ll come back when there is one system, or when they interlink. Just like Skype: I refuse to use two, three or six IM systems. You wil look for me forever of MSN, AIM, and all the others.

So I just cannot print properly from Aperture.

Take a picture like this, which looks fine one Mac, PC and any other computer:

That looks fine when printed from a PC. But when I print from Aperture on the Mac, I get dark, muddy colours, at least a stop or two too dark. Aperture and printer settings? I think I have tried them all. See this thread [link]. HP drivers for the Mac not being good? Well, if that is the case, that does not help me much.

So in the mean time I print from the PC, which seems a bit odd. But none of the suggestions I have received from many helpful people have helped yet. I am sure there is a solution out there somewhere. A beer for whoever helps me find it.

In my daily job I make technology decisions based on my view of trends. This is not difficult: the trends for the next five years, say, are usually quite clear.

The same is true in general IT. It is entirely clear that in some years time, all devices will be networked. From my PC to my car to my iPod to my cigarette lighter - oh no, I forgot, we do not have those anymore - every device will; be talking to every other device.

Microsoft has a problem with this. Windows will become less important. One reason I can sit here talking to you on my MacBook Air (shorter name please, Apple) is that the OS is no longer where it’s at.

But nor is the ‘net quite there yet. Yes, I do my email via IMAP/Gmail now, and that works. But .Mac is useless, or rather, premature: my iDisk is slower than a snail (1 GB would take all day to copy, and that’s a typical media file size), and to access my desktop from my laptop I have to spend two days engineering.

But it will come. When connecivity speeds catch up, we will see this brave new world. Thin clients, SaaS, cloud computing, MS Live Mesh, .Mac: all this and more. “The year of the cloud”.

I fear that like the year of the CD back in the 80s, this will be a few years in the coming, and will be a gradual process until suddenly we realise it’s been here for years. Dot Cloud.

Still trying to get Aperture working. Hey, I am willing to do things the Apple way if I must.

But only when that makes sense. Now in my continuing effort to organise my thousands of images, I found the ‘relocate’ button. Unfortunately, that relocated files but no directories, so my 2008 images -like all 18,000 of them - are now in one directory, instead of in neatly dated directories as before.

And I have no idea where half my images are. Groan. Clearly this can be done - but I would like to know how.

(click for larger).

An alternate version - on my Macs and PCs, these look different on every machine. Colour management is an issue, since I have no idea whether the previous one or this one look better on your screen:

Get it? Eye Pod?

Another Eye shot. As you see, I very much like sharp objects against foggy backgrounds.

(Click for larger)