WibbleBlog

So my attempt to replicate Apple’s services has some hitches it seems.

DAViCal requires the PL/pgSQL language be installed for it’s database functions to run. That isn’t installed by default on bluehost and since I’m not a postgres superuser I can’t add it. Annoying.

Another point against MobileMe is that I can’t host wordpress (the horror!). But then again I could host it for free elsewhere. Tricky.

So I was suckered and signed up for MobileMe trials which end in December. I’ve been playing with it a bit and it is very slick.

Problem is that I’m a control freak. I like the webhosting I have at the moment and I can’t really justify paying an extra $150 a year just for shiny Apple goodness (I know, I know). So, what are my alternatives? Can I do everything that Apple offer for less with open source tools.

Let’s look at the components of MobileMe and what my current alternatives are.

• Mail - Lots of webmail choices (three pre-installed with bluehost)
• Address Book - Most webmail programs have some sort of address book
• Calendar - phpicalendar
• Photos - Gallery 2
• iDisk - Most web hosts provide a “Web Disk”
• Backup - Plenty of backup software out there that will write to a network drive
• Back to My Mac - ShareTool

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Looks shiny. Like the cartoon.

I refuse to try it on Windows. Once the Mac version arrives, I’ll give it a whirl.

It is based on Webkit FPS, what is holding up the Mac release?

So I’ve found time to tidy up after my database loss debacle.

I’ve also consolidated both blogs into one wordpress install, using Virtual Multiblog, so that I don’t have to mess around so much for upgrades.

I’ve also added a photo-blog to try to encourage me to think more about my photography. I intend to put up one photo a week - either one taken that week or one that has some relation to something that happened in the week. We’ll see how it goes.

<sigh>How many times does this have to be said.

I’m considering setting up a RAID 1 set with removable drive caddies and three drives so I can offsite a backup once a week. So I searched around to see if this would work and was a reasonable thing to do.

Two results. (1) Don’t use hardware raid - you’ll be screwed if it is your mobo that goes and not a disk. (2) A lot (a *lot*) of people think RAID is a backup. I can’t count the number of “Should I use RAID or Time Machine” questions.

Is this because some manufacturer has been pushing RAID as a backup tool? I suppose it is in the sense that it provides backup *hardware*.

On another note, this was posted with MacJournal (courtesy of the August 2008 MacUpdate Promo Bundle ).

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.