Halamka's recommendations for camcorder, TV and computer

LiHalamka's tech picks:k 20" iMac, Sharp Aquos or SONY Bravia TV and two firewire based camcorders. Good picks. I'll ask him to test the camcorders with iChat.

Leopard's account switching bug

When 10.5.3 comes out I'll check to see if this is fixed before installing it. Until then I'm on 10.4...

Macintouch Leopard: Bugs and Fixes

Leopard blocks switching between file shared accounts.

I file shared 2 user accounts on a Leopard (host) computer. From a second Leopard (client) computer I can connect (have read/write access) to the first shared account, then disconnect and connect the second account. But then when I disconnect and try to reconnect to the first account my request is ignored. The only way I can then connect to the first account is to create a new account on the client! But this new client account is also blocked if I switch to the second shared account and try to switch back. A second Leopard client computer on the LAN has the exact same problem.

But Tiger and Panther client machines on the LAN don't have this problem. They can switch between the shared accounts on the Leopard host computer with no problem.

I called Apple Technical Support of 12/10/07 and they were able to duplicate the problem on multiple computers. They are forwarding the issue to Engineering. I'm surprised there aren't more reports on this issue...

Experiments in DRM removal and re-encoding

We don't let much DRM into our lives, but I have a few FairPlay'd tunes I bought the kids when I was less strict.

I'd like to include them in the AAC CDs I put the childrens' playlists on, but our SONY car stereo doesn't do FairPlay. Of course I could burn a CD then re-encode the tunes to MP3 or AAC, but I'd tried that before and the results were awful. The re-encoded tune sounded like AM music (few remember how bad that sounded!).

This time, though, I'd try re-encoding at 320 kbps, no VBR, 44.1 sampling. I figured I'd also try the iMovie HD DRM removal trick. [1]

The iMovie HD trick turned out to be a nuisance -- I'd rather just burn a CD. Curiously, however, I got much better results this time than previously.

The original 5.6 MB FairPlay'd tune turned into a 52MB AIFF audio file which I then turned into two non-FairPlay'd AAC files:

• 128 kpbs (standard): 5.0 MB AAC (so smaller than the original - not good!)
• 320 kbps non VBR 44.1 AAC (max quality AAC using iTunes encoder): 12.5 MB
  

Here's the surprise. They all sounded reasonable using my Bose noise canceling headphones. I'd expect the AIFF and original FairPlay'd tune to sound identical, but I'm not sure I'd be able to tell apart the 128 and 320 kpbs re-encoded tunes.

I don't know why I got better results today than in the past. Maybe last time I tried re-encoding as MP3, and the AAC to AIFF to MP3 transformations are tougher than AAC to AIFF to AAC. Maybe my ears are getting worse.

I wouldn't try it for Jazz or classical music, but at least some pop tunes survived the AAC to AIFF to AAC round trip better than I'd expected. I would favor a high bit rate for the reencoding though; I really don't have very good ears.

[1] The trick relies on a quirk of iMovie HD that is not present in iMovie '08. iMovie HD will export the combination of a FairPlay'd soundtrack and a JPG as a non-DRMd AIFF audio file.

Very poor choices in list sorting: iPhoto trumps everyone

Coding Horror did a nice post recently on poor decisions in list sorting. He's a Windows programmer, so he wouldn't know about even worse list sort implementations by Apple's vaunted development team.

Here's the sort order of albums in iPhoto '08's smart album definition UI:



It looks completely random. Not much fun if you're looking for one of a hundred albums. The only saving grace is that if you know the album you want, you can type the first letter and navigate the list that way.

If iPhoto were smarter, and allowed one to include smart albums in the list, things would be even worse.

iTunes has much more powerful "smart list" (query) definitions that can include other smart playlists (queries) and here Apple did things right (actually, I think they quietly improved this in one of their recent updates):



So Apple isn't completely hopeless! It's just that their talent base isn't unlimited.

That should make non-Apple developers feel a bit better.

The single worst defect of Microsoft Access

There's a lot to dislike about Microsoft Access. Even so, I use it intensively. It's a cross between a chainsaw and a swiss army knife with an unfortunate tendency to occasionally remove vital organs.

Powerful, versatile, dangerous.

When I use Microsoft Access I backup my data files very frequently and I set every linked Access data file I'm not actively editing to 'read only' status to protect it (Access table security model ranks high in its sins).

So, lots of bad news. But one insanity stands out above all the rest.

Access has a compulsion to break queries when you use linked files. This is one of those mult-ipart design problems:

1. The crummy security models and lousy organizational tools means that serious work requires lots of linkages to remote ODBC and Access data sources. (This ability to link across diverse data sources is actually a great power of Access, it extends to Sharepoint's SQL Server tables.)
2. Links to local sources use hard coded paths.
3. When a hard coded path changes, or a referenced table name changes, a trap has been set. The first time one opens a query referencing the link to the changed item, the query breaks. Joins vanish. Column names get odd prefixes. There's no warning and no protection.
   

There are some partial protections:

1. Use the drive letter substitution trick to reduce the hard coded path problem.
2. Wrap linked tables in a simple query that you can validate first, then have all other queries reference these "wrapper" queries. It's easy to fix the wrappers, and you don't break all the other queries.
   

If Access 2007 had fixed this behavior I'd be using it today, but since it's buggy and has design regressions I'm sticking with Access 2003.

There, I feel better now.

Google Street View comes to the Twin Cities

About a week ago I noticed a non-working street view icon floating around Saint Paul. Ok, floating around the virtual Saint Paul in Google's server.

I wondered if it was a herald, and, yes, now we have Street View in the Twin Cities. Alas, for better or worse, the Saint Paul coverage ends one block east of my home. So I can't show the Street View image of our house.

I can show my favorite coffee shop though:



The images were taken in summer, so they seem a bit odd in our snowy December.

I wish to be among the first to welcome our Glorious Googlian overlords to the twin cities.

Will Apple abandon Aperture?

The Aperture bloggers I read are worried about Aperture's future. They've even wondering how they could migrate to another platform. How can they ever move their metadata? What about all those RAW images that will render differently in any other toolkit?

Cue evil laughter.

They're doomed of course. Once you commit to a program like Aperture you're owned. I know a thing or two about that business.

So would Apple really abandon a project they once seemed to have such interest in? Isn't digital media their core market?

I can think of a few reasons, based on my own experience and what I read:

1. Adobe Lightroom is doing well. It's said to be more popular than Aperture even on the Mac, and of course it's very successful on Windows.
2. Apple has done a miserable job positioning Aperture as an upgrade from iPhoto. It's their natural market, and they've blown it. The pricing is wrong, they don't migrate enough iPhoto metadata, and you can't edit dates.
3. Aperture is not staying ahead of iPhoto. In fact, iPhoto '08 seems to use a lot of Aperture source code (including the icky parts).
   
4. Aperture has a bizarre UI. It's pointlessly idiosyncratic. Tiny fonts, ultra-skinny scrollbars, it looks nothing like a Cocoa app. Heck, it doesn't look like a proper Carbon app. What the heck is it written in? Was it originally written for Linux?
5. Aperture is dog slow. It's not merely the fancy GPU based image processing, the database work is way slow as well.
6. Did I mention Aperture doesn't even have a proper OS X Help file? I think it must be a Java app!
7. You can't edit date metadata, you've never been able to edit dates, this hasn't been fixed despite several major updates. The fact that it's never been addressed speaks loudly.
8. Aperture has gone a long time without a significant upgrade, despite 1-7.
   

So, what do I think? Will Apple really abandon digital photography?

I don't think they'll give up completely, but I can imagine them giving up on the Aperture code base. I think a lot of iPhoto customers, and even many Pros, would pay for an iPhoto-Pro that could import Aperture projects and iPhoto Libraries.

If we don't see a really major update of Aperture by March 2008 I wouldn't recommend any new Aperture purchases. Even if Apple does provide a conversion path to "iPhoto Pro", I suspect there will be rough spots.