Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
I’ve mentioned Adobe’s Lightroom application before – and not in a good light, as far as I was concerned. Admittedly, it was then in beta. It has now been released in all its glory as a fully-fledged version 1.0 application. And my verdict? I’ve given it the hook.
Its performance is still terrible, its metadata handling is poor, it costs too much and I really don’t need it.
Performance – really, scrolling through thumbnails is jerky and incredibly frustrating. There is no feel that there is a real connection between a movement of the mouse on the scrollbar and the scrolling of the images. As I’ve noted before, Google’s Picasa (a free application) has this down pat, and is an example to aspire to. Adobe doesn’t come anywhere close.
Metadata – in its favour, it does have a complete implementation of IPTC Core. However, it only reveals a few fields of EXIF metadata. Where is Orientation, for example? Lightroom seems to expose a grand total of 12 EXIF metadata fields. IDimager shows over 110 EXIF metadata fields.
I did like the Metadata browser of Lightroom – particularly the “location” hierarchy, which allowed me to identify a few metadata errors immediately. However, performance again is pretty poor, and turning on the option to enable Lightroom to update metadata directly in the image files makes it unusable – at least on my system.
All in all, Adobe’s Lightroom is not for me: overpriced and underperforming for what I am looking for. My ideal digital asset manager will be something like the offspring of Picasa and IDimager – a child having the Picasa’s lightning fast image library and search capability coupled with IDimager’s comprehensive metadata capabilities.
I mentioned that I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. In that last posting I mentioned that I had a showstopper of an issue – Windows Vista would not start when the Windows Home Server Connector software was installed.
Someone reported the same issue today on the feedback forum, and said that it was caused by a conflict between the Connector software and the CA Antivirus program for Windows Vista. A bit of testing on my part confirms this: either I can run the Connector software or I can run the CA Antivirus – but I can’t run both together. What’s also frustrating is that the Windows XP version of CA Antivirus does not have a conflict. Martin’s PC, which is running Windows XP, is happily sending backups through to the Windows Home Server box.
I’ve reported this to Microsoft, and I’ve just received an email to say that they’ve confirmed this, and there is a fix in the works, so I’m looking forward to getting this and carrying on with testing.
[…] CA’s Anti-Virus 2007 product and the Windows Home Server client software. I wrote then that Microsoft were aware of the problem, and that a fix was on the way. I’m beginning to wonder if I might have been jumping the gun. I’ve been following the […]
[…] 19, 2007 by Geoff Coupe While I’m still waiting for Microsoft to come up with a fix for the conflict between their software and CA’s anti-virus product, I thought I’d mention another oddity about the Windows Home Server software. Microsoft are […]
[…] Home Server client software and CA’s Anti-Virus 2007 product that I’ve been banging on about? Well, I discovered that there’s a workaround… I was watching a video podcast by Ian […]
[…] along with thousands of others, had been testing the software at home prior to release. There were some issues that I found, but by the time of release, the majority had been resolved. Technically, it was pretty solid, but […]
"I don’t want that man in office," she said. "I don’t think we should be paying him $150,000 a year when he’s not been truthful. We have to speak up. Of course, we don’t believe in sex changes or lesbianism. They have their rights, but we do, too."
"Mr. Stanton is not a role model. He’s proven that. I think for the sake of our young people today, you need to do what’s right, and that’s terminate him. … If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he’d want him terminated. Make no mistake about it."
"Do not give in to extreme pressure, because there is such a thing as the tyranny of the majority. … Make this judgment based on sound ethics, compassion, humanity, and truly show commitment to diversity."
I see lots of this sort of thing on gay blogs from the US and it makes me grateful that I live where I do. America has so much growing up to do about sex.
I am in stitches here…… I can’t believe it:
Ron: and that’s terminate him. … If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he’d want him terminated.
Peggy: Of course, we don’t believe in sex changes or lesbianism…. eh?
Of course, it’s not really funny is it – but what else can you do but laugh?
Agreed. I love the expression on my American colleagues’ faces when I tell them I’m slipping out to suck on a fag.
Damn. I was looking forward to the next bit…
Amongst other things, I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. Along with about 10,000 other people, apparently.
It is only the second beta, so one should expect bugs; and in that I’ve not been disappointed.
I’ve had a couple of problems with the Connector software. On one machine (which was running Vista at the time), it failed to find the server machine, even though it sits on the same subnet of my home network. That machine has now had Windows XP re-installed on it for other reasons, and now it is happily sending backups through to the server.
But far more seriously, on another machine (also running Vista) the Connector service will lock up the machine completely after some time has elapsed. The only way to deal with it once it locks up is to boot into Safe Mode, and disable the Connector service. I suspect that it is conflicting with one, or even worse, a combination of the 73 other services that the machine happens to be running. I see from the bug reports that I’m not the only person suffering from this, so hopefully Microsoft will get around to looking at it at some point.
Another bug that has started ringing alarm bells with me is that someone has reported that moving his 26,000 photos onto the server has corrupted the photos’ metadata. This would be a disaster for any photographer who uses metadata for digital asset management. I’m certainly not going to entrust my 24,000 photos to the current beta – at least not until Microsoft have identified and corrected this particular bug.
Apart from real showstoppers such as these, there are the usual raft of niggles, which while they may be somewhat irritating, don’t cause active harm. One example I’ve got is the fact that each time I reinstall the Connector software on a client machine, the previous examples live on like ghosts in the administration console. Take a look at this to see what I mean.
Those greyed-out icons cannot be got rid of, and represent previous instances of the Connector software on client machines.
So, on we slog…
[…] I mentioned that I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. In that last posting I mentioned that I had a showstopper of an issue – Windows Vista would not start when the Windows Home Server Connector software was installed. […]
[…] years ago, along with 10,000 other people, I started testing the beta of the first version of Windows Home Server. When it was formally released in November 2007, I […]
[…] of WHS was released to manufacturing in July 2007. I, along with thousands of others, had been testing the software at home prior to release. There were some issues that I found, but by the time of release, the majority had […]
I always thought we were missing something with those mad wilderbeest marches, now I know where they are going. While watching this, I found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVPV9BB4Q44&NR very similar to my usual morning warm up routine. Yours too probably.
Hmm, my morning warm-up routine is a gentle stroll with the dog. Much less life-threatening…
My morning routine is a fag and a cup of coffee, followed by ten minutes of whatever crossword happens to be next the loo. I fancy Gelert is telling porkies, though. I happen to know he spends each morning trying to defy the laws of physics in getting out the door in time for school. If he jumps out of bed and into his keks, it’s more like a Wallace and Gromit gizmo than matrix boy.
I have a definite love/hate relationship with computers. My working life was centred around them, and inevitably at parties I was asked advice on PCs. But they usually put me in mind of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
When PCs go bad, they can be really horrid. I’ve just spent a fun day working on Martin’s PC. It all began last week, when I decided to upgrade our home systems to Windows Vista. I had run the Microsoft Vista Advisor on the three systems, and it had suggested that Martin’s PC should have more memory, and that the graphics capability would not be capable of the Aero interface, but would be suitable for the basic Vista interface. OK, I thought, that’s no problem, I’ll just add in more memory, the Aero interface is icing on the cake, but not essential.
So more memory was installed, I took backups and installed Vista Home Premium. There was a slight panic when I found out that Vista was only able to drive the onboard graphics chip (Intel 845G) at the minimum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. However, Intel’s Vista Graphics Support FAQ claimed that Vista would support the 845G shipset using XPDM (XP Display Model) drivers. Off I went to the Intel site and downloaded the latest version of these drivers. Well, I say latest version – some alarm bells rang when I read that the 845G chipset had reached the end of their support life. The key phrase being "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to support new operating systems or improve compatibility with third party devices and software products". Still, if Vista would support the XPDM drivers, then I should be OK, shouldn’t I?
Well, at first, all seemed hunky-dory. The resolution went up to 1024 x 768, which is what the monitor wanted, and Vista Home Premium seemed to be behaving normally. I then spent several hours transferring across Martin’s data, installing applications and reconstructing his environment. Everything seemed fine until I decided, rather than logging off from one account and logging onto another, to simply switch users. Blam – a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). It was repeatable – every time I switched users I got a BSOD – but logging off and logging on was OK. So I decided to follow the apocryphal doctor’s advice (patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this". Doctor: "then don’t do that"), and not ever switch users. Martin was unlikely to do it, so I thought that he would be unlikely to trigger the BSOD.
I was somewhat amused to find that after rebooting the system, Vista helpfully told me that the BSOD was caused by the Intel graphics adaptor, and advised me to go to the Intel web site to download the latest driver. Obviously, no-one at Microsoft had been reading the Intel web site: "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to support new operating systems". Ho-hum.
Still, Vista seemed to be running, and Martin started to use the system. All went well for the first few days, but then he decided to use the attached Logitech webcam for a video call with a friend. The performance was awful – like trying to do it over a dial-up connection. And – horror of horrors, the dreaded BSOD started showing up. There seemed to be no way to stop it, or to improve the situation – and of course the other shoe dropped as I remembered the second part of Intel’s fateful words: "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to … improve compatibility with third party devices and software products".
Martin’s PC is a Dell Dimension 4500s; long out of production, of course. I bought it for him because it was nice and compact and whisper-quiet. The downside of its compactness is that it only has two PCI expansion slots available. It was at this point that I realised that the days of PCI graphics expansion cards are also long since passed – graphics cards today require AGP or PCIexpress slots – neither of which the Dell possesses. So there would be no possiblility of bypassing the problem by using a graphics expansion card. Really, the only way forward was to take three steps back, and reinstall Windows XP again.
And that’s what I spent yesterday doing. Naturally, the Windows XP re-installation CD dated from years back, so multiple trips to Windows Update were called for to bootstrap XP into the latest version. Well over 100 critical updates – including SP2 – were involved. Finally, this morning I finished reconstructing Martin’s environment and got all his data back just as it was. Computers, eh, doncha just love them?
Oh you rash fool! I’ve been warned not to touch vista with a barge-pole, and won’t be doing so until and unless all these problems are only a ghostly memory spoken of in myth. Much like my sex-life. Good luck with it.
Oh, I’ve always lived on the edge as far as computers are concerned… Vista is actually very good – as long as you have hardware that’s new enough, and which has Vista drivers available.. If either of those two conditions aren’t met, then bargepoles should indeed be deployed.
[…] sits on the same subnet of my home network. That machine has now had Windows XP re-installed on it for other reasons, and now it is happily sending backups through to the […]
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