I’ve been using the LR beta for quite a while. This is my first impressions of the final release, version 1.0. I’ll walk through the most interesting (to me) features and try to include any insights that I may have. Enjoy.
Get it from: Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Available for both Mac OS and Windows (XP/Vista).
30 day trial is available from Adobe, so you can download from Adobe and run at once, while you wait for the CD and printed manual to arrive.
To balance my recent Vista exploits, I decided to try out the latest Ubuntu Linux. I downloaded version 6.10 and burned a CD. The Ubuntu cd is a “live-cd” which means that you can boot on the CD and run the operating system without installing anything or changing your current installation. Here’s what happened:
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In my First Vista Experience blog, I didn’t like it. Having spend more time with it I must admit that my feeling for it has softened a bit.
I develop software for a living. That means that I’ve to ensure that said software work with Windows Vista, so when it got accessible I secured a copy, got it installed and started to move my development environment over to Vista. At first I was rather nervous, because the only report I could find about Borland Delphi 7 (no, the newer versions wasn’t supposed to be any better), was that it didn’t run in Vista.
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Coming back for a couple of days in Rome and a full memory card in my Pentax DS *ist camera, the first thing I do is, of cause, to copy the files to my computer and look though them .
Except that I got an error half way through the copy process.
This has happened before, but a re-insertion of the memory card (in my card reader) solved that problem and I didn’t think more about it. But now it happened again, with still about 46 images not copied of the card. Firstly I try the windows dick checker (right click on the drive->properties->tools), xcopy, xxcopy and Pc Inspector Smart Recovery which I’ve used for this before. Non of this worked. I’ve used the Inspector for this before and it worked really well, but this was with jpeg files and this is Pentax Raw files (.pef). Didn’t find anything.
So I try:
So TransPict wouldn’t respond, so I decided to reboot my computer. But I forgot to remove the memory card while doing this, and windows actually picked up on the fact that there was a problem with this drive. And fixed it!.
There where two bad blocks on the sd-card, and window fixed this as good as it could. There are errors in the two images in question, but they are just to images and I can live without them a lot easier than without the last 46 images (the last day).
I guess that I was lucky. There are probably more image media recovery program out there to try, but I’ll save that for next time. If that card had been in a whose way, the disk-fix by windows might have ended in a disaster, with a worse result than if some program (that actaully know and understand the image file format) had tried to rescue my images.
But it would have been even if I had take the words of TransPict at face value and just give up….
(as to why it was only 46 images – this wasn’t a photo vacation, it was family time)
Please read part 1 first.
Securing the beast
Now I’m getting close to wanting to move the box to a server room. That means that it’ll be directly connected to the internet, with no router and no nating. It will be attacked. A lot. If there’s any obvious hole in it’s defences, it will get owned.
I’m not a security expert, but I do know that there’s no such thing as absolut security. You just secure the box as well as possible, with the resources you are willing to use. It’s a compromise between usability, resources and security.
I see security as a triangle between, keeping the machine up to date, making sure that the installed programs are setup as secure as possible and keeping an eye on the box for strange behaviour (did somebody get through).
When you look at the security page at debian.org, all it tells you is to keep the packages up to date. I’ll start by looking at that.
This is my own personal notes on how I set up my new server box. It started out as my notes on how to turn a debian 3.1 Sarge installation into a LAMP box. At the moment it’s a rather detailed dummy’s and/or beginners step-by-step guide to making a LAMP box.
Preface
More on what LAMP is at wikepedia
Now Sarge 3.1 is a bit old at the this time, and a new version is just around the corner, but then I’ll learn how to upgrade a debian box when that happens.
I’ll try and be as detailed as possible. I really hate those how-to’s that go “they you press Y,, then N, and then… [do something that might as well be magic, unless you are a guru]”. I’ll try and link to the place where I picked up a bit of knowledge or the idea for doing something.
I’m not a linux wizard. I’ve been running a FreeBSD for a long time, as my webserver, but I can barely keep that alive and malware free. I’ll be trying to set up this box, so that it keep it self up to date and as secure as possible.
Now be aware that this is not the most clever, fast or secure way of doing this – this is just the way that I did it using the bit information that I could find on how to do what I wanted. Some of the stuff that I do is redundant and is redone later. Sometimes several times.
If somebody feels like added comments that tells how things can be done faster, better, more secure I’ll appriciate it and probably incorporate it into the doc.
(feel free to make comments on gramma and spelling – I’ll fix it and then delete your comment. I do appriciate it, it’s just kind of off-topic for the blog)
I never go far without my Pentax *ist DS camera. I take a lot of pictures.
Normally when I move pictures from my camera to my computer and do the first raw sorting, it’s a fairly manual process, involving things like the windows explorer (copy), a small file renaming tool (to rename to the exif date/time), IrfanView (browsing) and The Gimp (for crop and levelling).
I want to try and automate this process a bit, make it work better with raw files and add delta edition (the original picture is left untouched, changes applied is saved to a seperate file).
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I’ve been playing around with panorama software for a long time. It’s a nice way to spend the hours playing with pictures taken earlier. The basic idea is to take a series of pictures and stitch them together to make a larger pictures with a higher resolution of each single picture.
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The OpenOffice.org page has gone to a new design and while the main product is the 2.0 beta, they are using Seagull Egg logo…. guess who took that picture, yes! I did! Just move your mouse cursor over the image and it will popup a small message saying this! I’m especially proud about this as I’ve been using OpenOffice.org for a long time (it’s a replacement for Office) and it feels good to be able to give something back.