Google Maps is flailing tonight. Slow to load, pretty much worthless. Of course nothing on their status page, but I'm used to that.
I about gave up, then I remembered there's an alternative. I tried Bing Maps. It's been a while. Bing maps were always good, but they've gotten even better. Very impressive.
Google better get their reliability up a bit ...
I've been planning to switch to Google's two factor authentication once it was a few months old (time for bug fixing), so James Fallows recent experiences only confirmed my schedule. Interestingly he's not the only recent victim. I assume, based on my personal experience, James' wife was the victim of a keystroke logger infection (was she using a Mac client?) or password reuse.
It worked pretty much as per my notes. Google's setup process takes about 15 minutes, including installing the authenticator app on your iPhone or Android device (other phones get SMS authentication). A few things to note ...
Two factor authentication means I'm willing to enter Google credentials on relatively untrusted machines (given https encryption). That means ...
See also:
Update 4/18/11: I've found a hole in the system. You can set any computer to save 2nd factor authentication for up to 1 month, but you can't revoke this remotely and there's no UI to undo the change locally. Since the extended authorization cert is saved as a cookie, you need to delete cookies on the machine to re-enable Authenticator requests. So you should really reserve extended authentication for trusted machines. A corporate laptop, for example, should not be considered a trusted machine.
Update 5/1/11: I'm surprised how often I need to generate a single use application specific key. For example, I just had to do one for the Google's iPhoto PIcasa image uploader. I'm up to about 13 of 'em. Bit of a pain really. I've contemplated storing one for general reuse in my password database but haven't done that yet.
Update 7/4/11: I still rely on two-step verification, but Google needs to do a lot more work on this.
Update 9/8/11: I rethink it all.
Google is terminating old content on mine on two services.
They're terminating pre-Google Blogger accounts that haven't migrated and they're terminating Google Video data. For various reasons I've data in both places.
Must be time from spring cleaning.
Personally, I don't mind losing the data. I'll say good-bye to the Google Video data; for one thing I don't think YouTube has the privacy controls GV had. I'm disappointed, however, with the way Google is doing this ...
... On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)
We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already...
.. Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.
If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.
The classy approach would have been to provide a one click transfer from GV to YouTube.
Remember this as you migrate to the cloud.
Some parts of Google Calendar are pretty cool. Event import ain't one of 'em. I've gotten CSV import to work, but it's more than ugly. It's dumb [4]. Worst of all, if you make a mistake you can hose your calendar. There's event undo, but not import undo [1].
So when I had to enter 15 games from my son's calendar, I tried typing them in. That got tedious fast. I'm no good at data entry; I get bored. I make too many mistakes.
Instead I tried a middle-ground that worked pretty well. I dumped the event list into Numbers.app [2], then I wrote a simple Concatenate function [3] to construct Quick Add friendly statements like:
Baseball: LINWOOD MONROE - HIGHLAND PARK at HIGHLAND PARK on May 17, 2011 at 4:15 PM for 2 hours
I then pasted the statements into Quick Add one after the other [4]. Unfortunately Quick Add doesn't allow one to specify a target calendar, so they all went into my personal calendar. I had to do a search on "Baseball: " to find them all, then edit each one to move it to the shared family calendar. Even with that quirk it was relatively painless to enter data this way.
Which says something about how bad CSV import is!
[1] I though I'd read that Google was introducing a rollback option for calendars, but I can't find it. Must have been my imagination.
[2] I bought it on the app store for a pittance, and I'm getting quite fond of it. The font display is surprisingly bad, but that's not unusual in OS X (Mac Classic fonts were better, and Win 7 is best). Where it bests Excel is layout -- you can put as many table/spreadsheets on the work surface as you want.
[3] This doesn't work very well in Excel. In Excel a reference to date produces a date serial number in Concatenate. I believe this is a defect, and it's probably as old as time. I'm glad Numbers.app goes its own way. The function looked like this: =CONCATENATE("Baseball: ",E3," at ",F3," on ", C3 ," at ",D3," for 2 hours")
[4] A smart import function would use quick add style NLP to process any number of lines into events, then it would allow a user to correct the list, then it would import. With an undo option of course.
[See the updates at end. My initial impression was based on dated material.]
I finally consolidated my images with Google's Picasa web albums: Migrating images from SmugMug to Google's Picasa image store - Lessons in data lock and business models.
It was a painful process.
After i was done I reviewed my newer images. They don't look nearly as good as they should. In particular they looked better on SmugMug.
Turns out Picasa web albums don't support color management (ICC, colorsync, etc). (See also - all these discussions get "closed to new replies" pretty quickly.)
Please cover your ears while I scream.
Ok, you can uncover now.
I used to use sRGB profiles, so the lack of color management was less apparent -- even with Mac/PC gamma issues (newer Macs quietly converted to PC Gamma). Now I use Adobe RGB color profiles, and I get to see how badly Picasa's color management sucks.
Sometimes you just can't win. I've started a newer thread on the online help forum, but I doubt there's any good news. I wonder if I'm going to have do my own image sharing and give up on the online services.
Update: A google support tech tells us that Picasa Web Albums will use the colorsync profiles of images uploaded with Picasa 3.8. I've a question pending on whether this is also true for Google's
Update 4/5/11: More from Google ...
Uploading via the Picasa Web Uploader should also preserve your color profile, and I tested this with Firefox 4 and Safari 5 on Snow Leopard and it's looking good on my end. Photos 1600 pixels or smaller are still color managed, but their thumbnails currently aren't (to help decrease load times)
Update 4/9/11:
your color profile is also preserved on photos 1600 pixels or smaller, but the thumbnails for these smaller photos (when you're on your album page, not a photo page) don't preserve your color profile. This only affects thumbnail previews, not the actual photos themselves.
If I understand this correctly, Picasa now preserves color profiles. Thumbnails for images smaller than 1600 pixels displayed on an album page are not color managed (how would the browser manage conflicting directions from hundreds of images?). A photo page should always use the preserved color profile.
See also:
Life is fractal. That is, sampled at scales small and large, it resembles itself. Sometimes I think this is profound, especially when looking at smoke rings of galaxies, but maybe I'm just having flashbacks.
So you don't need to spend 15 years in healthcare IT to understand why progress is slow. You only need experience migrating an address book between a PalmOS device to a Windows platform to OS X to Google Contacts (see also: synchronization is hell). That will tell you everything you need to know.
Similarly you don't need to be a corporate CEO to understand the strategic role of switching costs. It's very easy to switch between Subaru and Honda, not so easy to change checking accounts or move from Microsoft Office to Google Docs. Business strategies differ [2]; though this is never discussed in the sycophantic business book business. You only need to look at moving photo libraries from SmugMug to Picasa Web Albums [1] to learn this.
I am doing this now, and it's an interesting process. As expected, the switching costs are high. In most cases it's not worth the bother; if you have the original collections in iPhoto or a similar app it's best to abandon the old image libraries and start over. I'll explain first what you can move and what you can't, and what the implications are.
What you can move
What you can't export from SmugMug (what you lose)
This data lock story has interesting implications:
Fortune 500 corporation or photo hobbyist, fractal life means lessons are easy to learn.
[1] Why am I moving? SmugMug decided years ago not to invest in OS X support. I gave them a few years, but then I reluctantly migrated my newer images to Picasa web albums, which had significantly better OS X (and later mobile) support. Now, in the interests of simplifying my online life, I am consolidating and giving up my old collections.
FWIW, here's why I would start with Picasa today, though a professional photographer would certainly prefer SmugMug. My decision has nothing to do with price, SmugMug is $30 a year and if I promoted SmugMug I'd probably pay nothing (referral fees). In fact, since Google charges differently for storage, they might be marginally more costly.
[2] Companies with captive customers face terrible temptations, companies with mobile customers have different temptations. Think of the relationship between divorce laws and the status of women.
Update 3/26/11: I downloaded a few albums, but it was pretty tedious to connect what I downloaded to the album names shows in SmugMug. I have the originals, so I focused on a few albums for a group where I probably didn't keep every original. The rest I vaporized. One less vendor to deal with.
See also:
An 18 megapixel image has twice the data as an 9 megapixel image.
So does that mean a 135 mm telephoto and an 18 megapixel sensor can do as well as a 270mm telephoto and a 9 megapixel image?
No.
Why not?
Because when you crop the 18 megapixel image, and double the apparent size, you also double the image noise.
