darryl ramm’s blog

So one of the neatest things Yahoo owns is Flickr. But I’m at a loss to understand the snails pace of innovation at Flickr. There is tons of stuff the could be doing with new features, tools and integration. But anyhow instead of wasting space on that I’ll just whine about Flickr Uploadr 3.0 — the down-loadable utility that is supposed to make uploading photos easier, well previous versions did, the current one is just broken.

Build 3.0.2 at least is broken on Windows XP SP2. Starting with the big one - the actual button to upload images never appears, oops bit of an oversight there. And lots of sloppy UI things — like not having any rollovers/hints in the UI. And when you view Upload>Preferences but don’t change anything you still get a dialog box saying you changed preferences and asking you whether you want to apply those changes to the current photos. Dragging the main window frame out larger and smaller shows strange behavior of an horizontal scrollbar on the right panel if you resize the window enough to have a vertical scroll bar on the right panel. Don’t they know how to do basic UI QA? There appears to be other strange things going on as well. The vertical partition between the panel should be re-positionable. And on and on…

How do you mess up something so simple and then actually want to release it?

Santa wears a black turtleneck and he is giving his usual keynote at the MacWorld conference on January 15th. I decided to hold off on a Macbook Pro purchase hoping to see an upgraded model coming. I need a high end machine for multimedia work, overall desktop PC replacement, including running VMware Fusion.

My MacWorld wish list would be for a 17″ high resolution screen model, with

• Intel Penryn procesor (6MB L2 cache) at 2.6 GHz
• An internal dual layer Blu-ray superdrive (ultradrive?), I guess that would make it something like a BD-RE/BD-R/DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/CD optical disk, phew. The ability to play blue ray movies would be a bonus (but not required). Fastmac already has an aftermarket Blu-ray drive available for the MacBook Pro.
• Increased express card connectivity. Ideally two seperate ExpressCard universal slots instead of the single /34 slot in the current MacBook Pro models.  Universal slots accomodate /54 as well as /34 cards. I suspect there would actually be space to put two universal slots on a 17″ MacBook Pro. Failing that one universal and one /34 slot would do. These would give me the ability to carry around an expresscard/54 CF Card reader (for my Digital SLR camera) internally in the universal slot and an expresscard/34 SATA-II controller for hooking up lots of disk for video editing. I’d like Apple, to at least make the single /34 slot a universal slot.

C’mon Santa I’ve been a good boy can I please have these wishes :-)

I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I’ve been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is buying a MacBook Pro and making the switch back to the Macintosh as a primary computer. Part of wanting to upgrade is driven by lack of disk space on the ThinkPad T42 and part of it is driven by wanting more horsepower and memory to run Photoshop on larger images and to do video editing. For video I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 and I’ve been leery of upgrading this on my ThinkPad since most people I know who is doing video are working with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio on a Mac.

I’ve been looking at different options and thinking about the switch. Just some of the software I use is shown in the photo above. I thought it might be interesting look at switching from a Windows laptop to a Mac with a reasonable number of applications and so I thought I’d write about some of the experiences. Bottom line is it is going to cost me about $1,200 in software upgrades/cross grades and software relicensing to move to the Mac, and that is without a big splash on something like Final Cut Studio. I wish Apple had a program where I could get an upgrade credit for Premiere to Final Cut Studio, that would make the whole decision pretty automatic. Which will make the purchase of a high-end MacBook Pro something like a $4,700 purchase - Yikes. Sure I get a platform that can do a lot more, especially with video editing, but it’s interesting just how much it costs to move. Time costs of lost productivity and relearning things is going be significantly higher than a few thousand dollars but I look at this as having to bite the bullet some day.

Obviously any switch made easier with the availability of VMware Fusion and SWSoft Parallels Desktop. Don’t expect me to be impartial here, I’ll be using Fusion and I think it is a lot more stable than Parallels Desktop. But both Fusion and Parallels will perform much better than the old Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC did on PowerPC based Macintosh systems.

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The Palm Foleo has to be one of the most lame-brained product ideas in decades. Foleo is supposed to be a simple “companion” for a smart phone, essentially providing a keyboard and larger screen and ability to browse the Web, check email etc. Palm is claiming the Foleo will be the start of a whole new product family. Good luck trying to convince anybody of that. And I know that “the market” often does not recognize the need for new products until they have established themselves—but the Palm Foleo does not pass even the simplest sniff test for a reasonable product.

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I was cleaning out stuff and found an old cookie from the VMware third birthday party. I certainly was not going to eat it and so as a social experiment I have put it up for auction on EBay. Is there a market for edible promotional and marketing items?

Interestingly this was from the VMware “brown period” where the logo featured the words VMware in brown and brown and blue were used thoughout collateral and other marketing material. This was planned independent of UPS starting to promote their brown color but that did lead to questions of wether VMware was trying to copy UPS with their promotion of their brown color including the “What can BROWN do for you?” advertisments. We were definitely not trying to copy UPS.

Brown is a difficult color to reproduce well so it looks good and not just a muddy mess, and so that it has consistent color across different media. I think the color brown fairly quickly proved a bad idea but the thought and design effort that went into all the marketing collateral look and feel was a step in the right direction.

Naviter has released improved resolution Landsat imaging for for their SeeYou soaring planning and analysis software. A nice improvement in resolution as you can see from the screen shots on the left. These screen shots show part of a flight I made last year from Minden Douglas Airport (KMEV) in Nevada. The 38th north parallel runs through KEMV. In these screen shots you see the new higher resolution imaging south of the 38th parallel and the previous resolution imaging to the north.

The release of improved resolution terrain imagery for SeeYou is likely a slow (there is no reason to hurry) response to Sierra SkyWare releasing WinPilot 3D to compete with SeeYou. One of the leading benefit claims Sierra SkyWare was making for Winpilot 3D was its 3D visualization and imaging resolution. 3D visualization is one of the sexier features of SeeYou so this was pretty much a frontal assault on SeeYou.

A frontal assault on the dominant market leader, including where when there are already other vendors (StrePla) in a market segment just does not sound like good strategy for me. You can run up to the castle and pound on the gates and not many people will care. But if you manage to annoy the owner of the castle enough they pour a little boiling oil over you, and you either die or you leave, a lot worse for wear…

In swapping around PCs and laptops recently I needed a backup solution. I ended up with a LaCie 500GB Brick drive and like it so much I’ll write about it (and pimp it for Amazon). LaCie has a whole series of these brick drives designed by French designer Ora-Ïto. They are not only cute but also practical.

As well as backups I needed a way to move hundreds of gigabytes around, for things like syncing a large iTunes library between PCs at different locations. Far too much data and updated too much to want to use DVD+RW/-RW drives. An external USB drive was clearly the way to go.

So I went looking at drives at local retailers. While there was quite a selection available I managed to find fault with many of the drives, including -

• Suspect looking construction quality
• Vertical standing drives that I was worried would fall over
• Light weight drives and/or poor feet that could easily slide off the desk

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A while ago I cleaned off stuff from our old Dell Windows XP PC and gave it to my ex-wife. She’s complained of all sorts of problems, and no longer has a live-in IT department to fix it for her. I got to look at the PC this weekend, better than listening to the complaints about email not working, applications hanging on start and slow performance. So what did it take to fix it? (more…)