Fluid Flow

These days, I am trclifton. I guess that I was a little late to sign up with Google and Facebook. Now, I don’t even try for anything simpler.

But that wasn’t always the case.

In 1994, I first logged in as tclifton. For years, it was easy to sign up for anything as tclifton. But that changed as the internet became more popular.

Yahoo was the first site I used where tclifton was already taken.

I kind of miss the days when I was the only tclifton around, but trclifton works fine for me too.

That is how I described my first memory upgrade on my Mac SE, 21 years ago.

I don’t recall how much of an upgrade it was, it was probably doubling the memory from 1 to 2 megabytes. But it required cracking the case, removing the motherboard, and a stiff drink.

It was an ordeal. Mostly because I had never done it before and, while I was somewhat fearless, I was mucking with the most expensive thing I had ever owned.

Flash forward.

Today, I doubled the memory on my Macbook Pro, from 2 to 4 gigabytes. It was a two minute outpatient procedure. The installation took less time than finding the necessary screwdriver.

I think we have made strides here.

Thank god I downloaded the trial version and didn’t purchase the upgrade.

Aperture 3 provides over 200 improvements. Notably, Faces and Places have been called up from iPhoto. While my photography doesn’t lend itself to Faces, Places is important. It took me a little while to figure out how to use Places, but once I did, it was easy to geotag my images.

Unfortunately the location data was not included when I uploaded photos to Flickr using the new Flickr uploader.

The Flickr uploader is a treat. It forces you to place images into a set. It gives you the option of setting the size of the photos as “Web Images”, “Optimized Images” and “Actual Size Images”. It doesn’t explain what this means.

I think that I could understand this behavior in iPhoto, but this is Apple’s Pro-level photo software. Don’t you think the user might have a better idea of how they want to present their images online than Apple?

All Apple had to do was purchase the exceptionally fine FlickrExport plugin and add its capabilities. But no, Aperture 3 comes with its own marginally useful uploader (hopefully the plugin will still work - I haven’t tried that).

The new brushes are helpful. I also like the full screen browser (and the fact that full screen mode doesn’t black out your extra monitor).

But I am left wondering if this upgrade is worth it. Does it really provide enough enhancements to cover the upgrade costs?

I am not sure, I am going to have to play with it a bit more. But my initial reaction isn’t good. I don’t see that the upgrade is that much better than what I have with Aperture 2 and plugins. I would have thought that Apple should have come up with something superior.

UserLand Software appears to have gone off-line without a word. There is no response at most of the UserLand websites including www.userland.com, manila.userland.com, docserver.userland.com. Interestingly radio.userland.com is still running.

I guess this means that most of the servers were taken down, but the dns records are still pointing to them.

I was alerted to this situation by a potential client who had a couple of manila sites hosted by Userland. Their sites went down last week and they are scrambling to find a new manila hosting service. They would also like to get their Manila sites from UserLand.

I would like to help out by providing Manila hosting to these folks. If anyone knows anything about the situation, please drop me a line.

Thanks.

I am not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I am approaching 50 (in a year or so), perhaps it’s because I am reading Farley Mowat’s “final” memoir, I am not sure.

It certainly isn’t because I have something to write. I have never had a desire to write. Prose and poetry do not leap from my keyboard. The only time that my writing has achieved passing marks is in journalism, geology, and one composition class at UCSB, where the teaching assistant did not mind my simple and direct approach.

It isn’t much to hang your hat on.

But I do like telling stories and I have lived long enough to have a few.

So I have started an outline. The two top headings are “Timeline” and “Themes”. I don’t know where this is going to go, but it seems worthy of exploration.

Ok I updated my Mac to OS X 10.6 (snow leopard), my disk free space jumped from 8 to 22 Gigs, I expect to get much better performance with Aperture, and my server admin tool disappeared.

Apparently the 10.5 server admin tool isn’t compatible with the 10.6 os. So the rather than update the server admin tool, the 10.6 updater deletes it.

The updater also doesn’t tell you that it is doing this, unless it does so in the little updater blub that no one reads.

So you have to go to Google and find out that the problem is well documented by everyone except Apple and that the update is readily available from everyone except Apple (It is freely available from Apple, you just have to find it).

So for me, a small company that realized years ago that Apple also made a superior server and invested in it, I get to spend my extra minutes, figuring out the problem, finding the solution, and implementing it.

All because Apple didn’t think that we might want to easily maintain our servers after we upgraded to their latest os.

This probably says a few things, one - their server market is tiny, two - an upgrade for $30 may not upgrade everything you need, three - if you haven’t purchased new hardware recently Apple doesn’t really care (which is kind of funny for a company that makes great hardware that lasts for years).

Yesterday’s system upgrade did not go so well. After the installation, the Frontier server was not available. It was up and running, but requests were not getting through.

The problem was with the port forwarding, so I fixed that and then found that Frontier was now getting all web requests, even those that should be handled by Apache. So Fluid Flow was down for a bit.

I got everything working again by restarting the system and making sure that Frontier started well after Apache. Now all appears to be well.

A really weird thing happened today at Fry’s in Campbell.

I was wandering the isles looking a little lost, when I was asked by a Fry’s Sales Associate if he could help me.

I told him what I was looking for, he led me straight to the products, told me which ones to steer clear of, and with a little more information from me, pointed out what I was looking for.

I have been shopping at Fry’s for over 20 years now and this is the first time that a Sales Associate has been truly helpful.

Thank you!

I wish that I had paid attention to his name so I could thank him personally. But, well done Fry’s.

I completed some behind the scenes stuff that should make my servers more reliable.

Last week, I updated WordPress. The upgrade was well overdue, but when WordPress stopped accepting new posts, I knew that it was time. The upgrade went smoothly, and I doubt anyone noticed.

Yesterday, I finally fixed my Frontier installation. It has been flakey ever since I upgraded the server last December. Frontier is always a little more tricky than it should be, and I made some mistakes that I knew I was making. Hopefully, they are fixed now and the server will run without failing. I would like to stop worrying about it.

This should mean an end to those pesky down times. And I can now post directly from MarsEdit again.

Today was a new day with a new Genius and ended with a more favorable result. While the laptop is still on the fritz, it is getting its GPU (graphic processing unit) replaced, Apple is covering the replacement.

Instead of paying $300+ for a diagnostic, the laptop was diagnosed in front of me at the Apple Store. The results were that the GPU had failed. My Genius then informed me that Apple had extended the warranty period on the GPU in my laptop.

It was kind of a night and day experience. I am not really sure why. Perhaps it was the difference between having an appointment at lunch time last Thursday and having one first thing Monday morning.

I think I will test this by only scheduling future appointments first thing Monday morning.

I am not grumpy today.

Thank you Apple!