WibbleBlog

No sniggering at the back there.

I’ve chastised enough lusers about lack of backups. So the hubris of the geek comes to bite me. You will notice the somewhat spartan design of the blog. It seems that Bluehost “upgraded” mysql at some point and all the files behind my wordpress database tables disappeared.

I’ve recovered what I can from an ancient backup, saved blog entries on my hard disk and the Google cache. I might have some more on another backup disk.

The shame.

I\’ve switched from gqView to gThumb to manage my photos. gThumb has a nicer interface and better tagging/search.\n\nI\’m using the svn head version as that has some nice additions to the ability to run external scripts and to the import behaviour. The developers seem very dynamic and development is going on apace.\n\nI\’ve taken to using the darkilouche GTK+ theme on gThumb and the GIMP. It is relatively easy to have a different theme for a given application. I\’ve simply changed the menu entry for gThumb so that the command is now

/usr/bin/env GTK2_RC_FILES=/home/ajj/.themes/Darkilouche/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /usr/local/bin/gthumb %U 

rather than just

/usr/loca/bin/gthumb %U

\n\nSimilarly for the GIMP. I find a dark environment better when looking at photos - there is a reason why Apple use that for their pro apps and why Adobe use a dark style on Lightroom.\n\t

Yes. I know it is evil and wrong. But I have to get my apple-i-ness where I can.\n\nWe\’ve had a bit of a tidy and a furniture move ready for Christmas and my computer now has a home on a nice big desk. Thus I have room for a full sized keyboard and so away goes my Happy Hacker Lite 2 with MS Intellimouse Pro and in comes my Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse.\n\nUbuntu Gutsy (7.10) has a shiny Bluetooth widget that pops up when you stick your bluetooth dongle in. It is essentially useless however.\n\nA bit of googlage and this thread on the Ubuntu forums shows the way. \n\nThe Apple Keyboard and mouse seem to need the –master option to be passed in /etc/default/bluetooth to get them to connect on startup, but other than that all is hunky-dory.\n\nThe mouse, of course, has only one button. A quick

apt-get install mouseemu

and editing /etc/default/mouseemu to use Option-Click (L-alt Click) for right mouse and Cmd-Click (L-Meta Click) for middle and we are away.\n\nI happen to really like the Apple keyboard and I\’m used to all the key-click business in OS X anyway. \n\nThis has me almost tempted to buy a wireless Mighty Mouse

Further to my post about using the Apple Keyboard and Mouse I came across a small problem - Metacity (the default window manager from Gnome) steals the key presses and was stopping the Option-Click from working reliably.

Googling failed me, so I took a wild guess and in gconf-editor I set /apps/metacity/general/mouse_button_modifier to <Alt_R> where it had been just <Alt>

A quick restart of metacity later and all is well. Left Option now does my right mouse click and Right Option does the “move window” that Alt-Click does normally.

I’m mildly annoyed that Gnome doesn’t provide a nice way of setting these other than the distinctly hack-ish gconf-editor which has to be invoked from the command line since they did away with the menu item it seems.

All working though. Which is nice. Now I just have to remember to use Ctrl-C etc rather than Cmd-C. Having an Apple keyboard seems to be fooling my finger memory - I’ve typed passwords that belong to my mac several times in place of the linux ones.

Maybe my fingers are trying to tell me something. I’m not sure that argument would go down well with L though!

Or something.

My previous weapon of choice in the RAW to JPEG conversion was LightZone, but that appears to be going the way of the dodo, at least on Linux. I was then faced with a rather hard choice - go back to the Mac and pay through the nose or stay with linux and use the nasty open source RAW tools out there.

As previous posts have shown, the financial choice was made quite readily and one thing that finally nudged me over was my discovery of Bibble Pro. It is a high quality application that is multi-threaded (great on a quad core processor) and has lots of shiny knobs for me to tweak on photos whilst making a simple “these are all fine, turn them into jpegs with these defaults” very easy.

I love it. So much so that I actually bought it - the first time I’ve spent money on a Linux app. Of course, that purchase was hedged by the fact that I get a Windows and Mac license too for the money and so if it turns out that linux totally sucks, I can head Microsoftwards without a loss of investment.

The thing that has really gotten me excited is the Andy plugin which simulates different types of B&W film and paper. The one shipped with Bibble Pro has a limited set of film and paper settings but I’m going to get the Pro version which is only $20 and has 66 film/developer simulations and 52 paper/grade settings. I was missing the joys of black and white photography and this has really brought it back - just desaturating the image in the Gimp isn’t the same. And whilst I don’t get the excitement of making enlargements and prints in a real darkroom the choices of paper and development setting make the image production process feel very natural.

All in all very good and highly recommended.

So I’ve had the new machine running for a couple of weeks now and it is rather nice.

My home made benchmarks are for conversion of photos from RAW to JPEG with Bibble Pro and conversion of video from DV to MPEG2 from within Cinelerra.

In the photo benchmark the old 2.4Ghz Celeron D/1Gb system converted 27 RAW images from my 20D to JPEG in 11 min 38s. The 2.4Ghz Core 2 Quad/2Gb system did the same set in 1 min 48 - a 6.5x speedup. Not bad. Of course this is biased by Bibble being multi-processor aware, but that is half the point of having multiple cores.

Since the video conversion was not multi-threaded, this is more a test of the raw clock-for-clock performance of the two chips. The result was a 2.33x speedup with the quad (from 8 min 34s to 3 min 40s).

All round pretty good I thought.

Or something like that.

I was all set to buy an iMac. Then intel were evil and dropped their prices. Given that I could now get a Q6600 (yes, a quad core 2.4Ghz Core 2 chip) for less than $300 and with whatever silly offer Crucial or OCZ are having today get 4Gb of decent (4-4-4-16 DDR2-800 for example) RAM for about $150 why would I pay St Steve $1500 for a 2.16Ghz Core 2 with only a gig of RAM.

I admit that a fully specced machine with monitor etc would pan out at around a grand, that is still rather a lot cheaper. With academic pricing, I could throw in Windows XP 64bit edition ( or Vista Home Premium), Photoshop Elements 5.0, Premiere Elements 3.0, Photoshop Lightroom and Office Professional and still come out under the $1500.

For comparison, getting the equivalents on the Mac (Photoshop Elements 3.0, Final Cut Express, Aperture and Office) would take the Apple total to $2000.

Of course, in the short term I’m going to stick it out with linux, but the temptation to head Windows-wards is getting stronger. Especially given that a number of people who’s opinions I respect reckon that Vista is pretty good.

Next up, what I’ve actually bought.

Everyone talks about the Digital Photography Workflow. This usually means the process of getting photos from the camera through to print with stops on the way for cataloging and archiving of the digital data.

\n

My current work flow is thus:

\n

(1) Copy files from CF card with USB card reader to \’DropBox\’ folder.

\n

(2) Use GQView to go through them and discard the obviously terrible ones (focus, composition etc)

\n

(3) Batch rename the files using GQView

\n

(4) Move them to the appropriate directory in my hierarchy. I store them by camera then in a folder named as YYYY-MM-DD with the RAW images in a RAW sub-folder.

\n

(5) Batch convert the RAW images using a template in LightZone as a first pass. Tweak those that deserve it.

\n

(6) Get prints using either RitzPix for simple 6×4\’s and EZPrints for enlargements and panoramas.

\n

For step 4 I have a perl script that I call from GQView as an \’editor\’ the script makes use of the wonderful Image::Exiftool Library (see bottom of post)

\nI could probably use some better colour management - I\’ve never really got the hang of that - and getting the files off the compact flash could be better streamlined.

\nThe real surprise to me has been that this process is simpler than the palaver I had on the Mac. Who\’d have thought it.\n\n

\n#!/usr/bin/perl -w\n\nuse Image::ExifTool \':Public\';\nuse File::Copy;\nuse File::Basename;\nuse File::Path;\n\nmy $Canon20Ddirstring = \'/home/ajj/Photos/20D/\';\nmy $CanonA75dirstring = \'/home/ajj/Photos/A75/\';\nmy $CanonA70dirstring = \'/home/ajj/Photos/A70/\';\n\nmy $filepath = shift or die "Please specify filename";\n\nmy $exifTool = new Image::ExifTool;\n$exifTool->Options(DateFormat => q{%Y-%m-%d});\nmy $info = $exifTool->ImageInfo($filepath);\n\nmy $datestring = $$info{CreateDate};\nmy $modelstring = $$info{Model};\nmy $dirstring;\n\nif ($modelstring =~ /20D/){\n        if ($$info{Quality} =~ /RAW/){\n                print "RAW Image from 20D\\n";\n                $dirstring = $Canon20Ddirstring.$datestring."/RAW/";\n                &movefile($filepath,$dirstring);\n        } else {\n                print "JPEG Image from 20D\\n";\n                $dirstring = $Canon20Ddirstring.$datestring."/";\n                &movefile($filepath,$dirstring);\n        }\n} elsif ($modelstring =~ /A75/){\n        print "JPEG Image from A75\\n";\n        $dirstring = $CanonA75dirstring.$datestring."/";\n        &movefile($filepath,$dirstring);\n} elsif ($modelstring =~ /A70/){\n        print "JPEG Image from A70\\n";\n        $dirstring = $CanonA70dirstring.$datestring."/";\n        &movefile($filepath,$dirstring);\n} else {\n        print "No idea. I give up\\n";\n}\n\nsub movefile\n{\n        local($dirst);\n        local($fname);\n        local($fpath);\n\n        ($fpath,$dirst) = @_;\n        $fname = basename($fpath);\n\n        if (-d $dirst) {\n                move($fpath,$dirst.$fname) or die "Argh. File move failed: $!";\n                print "Moved ".$fpath." --> ".$dirst.$fname."\\n";\n        } else {\n                mkpath($dirst, 0,0755) or die "Argh. Can\'t make dir: $!";\n                move($fpath,$dirst.$fname) or die "Argh. File move failed: $!";\n                print "Moved ".$fpath." --> ".$dirst.$fname."\\n";\n        }\n}\n\n\n

We recently moved H into her own room and this precipitated my moving all my junk out of it. This meant finding a new home for the PC that had languished up there not getting much use because, well, it is nicer to spend time with L downstairs.\n

\nHowever, with my burgeoning photo collection and the arrival of a Mini-DV camcorder, hooking a plethora of external devices to my laptop was getting increasingly annoying.\n

\nSomething needed to be done. \n

\nMy first thought, given how much I like OS X, was to ditch the PC and get a Mac Mini. They look cheap until you actually spec them decently, at which point they basically cost the same as an IMac. And I don\’t have a spare $1200 floating around to spend on *yet another* computer, when we have several perfectly good ones.\n

\nSo I\’m stuck with the hardware I have (see “Linux Hell” post). The only question then is whether to go with Linux or Windows (as previously discussed, getting OS X to run is possible, but not good). I just couldn\’t bring myself to use XP or run the Vista gauntlet. Given that L will still be using the Powerbook, I don\’t have to worry about linux quirks annoying her.\n

\nSo, linux it is. The gimp works pretty well, Evolution is a pretty good mail/calendar client, Firefox is a great web browser, there are very good video editing tools (Cinelerra is a very serious app). I\’m posting this with BloGTK. \n

\nI did succumb to a couple of upgrades. I got another Hyundai Q17 monitor on ebay for dual headed goodness. Great for photo/video editing! Also I had to get a firewire card to attach external disks and the camcorder to. Best Buy were my friend there. I expect I\’ll need to put more RAM in at some point, and will probably want to move to one of the new quad-core Intel chips when they are cheap enough and I\’m fed up of waiting ages for video to render. \n

\nSo far my feeling is that everything is useable and tolerable, but not as nice as OS X - either in look/feel or function. We\’ll see how well it goes.

‘Arghh.\n\nI recently bought a Mini-DV camcorder (I will post about that at some point). In theory these work well with linux - the firewire (IEEE1394) kernel drivers are good and solid these days and there are some good tools for handling getting the video off (Kino, dvgrab) and working with it (Kino, Cinelerra).\n

\nIt *should* just be a question of plug and play. But no. I get a permissions error on the device (/dev/raw1394). Lots of we instructions tell you that actually you should be using /dev/dv1394/some/other/guff, but reading the linux1394 website you find that the dv1394 driver is deprecated in favour of the raw1394 driver. OK. Probably good technical reasons for that.\n

\nSo a bit of digging and you find that you need to edit the udev config at /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules (obviously). Then you find this:\n

\n# IEEE1394 (firewire) devices\n# Please note that raw1394 gives unrestricted, raw access to every single\n# device on the bus and those devices may do anything as root on your system.\n# Yes, I know it also happens to be the only way to rewind your video camera,\n# but it\'s not going to be group "video", okay?\n

\n

\n

\nGreat. So basically, the people who develop the drivers have said “You have to use raw1394″ and the Ubuntu people (actually probably the Debian people) have said “Woah there. Can\’t have you using your firewire ports for anything.”\n

\nGah. \n

\nSo I ignored the warning and set the group of raw1394 to “video”, of which all users are members by default (to permit such wild behaviour as using a firewire port).\n

\nHowever, this is yet another classic example of OSS being totally user unfriendly. I\’m an experience Unix geek so it is like water off a ducks back to me, but I\’d have thought that most people would expect to plug it in and have it work - the way that all the help files (when they exist) say it does.