NYI template:

throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not yet implemented");


I’ve been having a play with Adobe Lightroom 2 today. The ability to apply a gradient mask to an adjustment (such as reducing exposure) is probably my favorite new feature so far.

The sky in the original image (below) was pretty flat, and a bit boring. A couple of minutes adjusting the exposure with a gradient mask resulted in a much more dramatic sky. Obviously the same effect could have been achieved in photoshop, but including it in the workflow tool makes it really effortless – no switching between apps.

I found “Beginning iPhone Development” (Dave Mark / Jeff LaMarche) on Amazon and ordered a copy of the back of the good reviews it gets on there. Doesn’t disappoint. I’ve done a fair bit of c/c++ in the past but not much in the way of Objective C and this is a cracking intro to Objective C, iPhone development and developing in Xcode, not to mention one of the most readable books on programming I’ve read. I highly recommend.

I also discovered Jeff LaMarche’s blog today which has some good posts including this one on webservices.

Start of my qualifying heat:

Practicing on the glacier:

… and ripping up some of the finest (and in places most crazy) single track I have ever ridden:

A quick google showed that my Blog had already earned some respect from the ever popular radioactiveman.co.uk.  I’m am still a bit confused as to why Radioactive Man bothered to include the link to my page along with a solitary comment “a pretty generic setup!”, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you should include on a page entitled “my links to cool places”. It is however much easier to see why Radioactive Man found my site a little bland…

Anyway Rob, in response to your lesson on blog etiquette, hope you like the single tag.

I don’t like the idea of using an external hard disk. (1) I don’t want to have to plug a disk in every time I want to backup. I could setup some kind of file server (or buy something like Apple’s Time Capsule), but this is not a particularly cheap and more importantly it doesn’t solve my second problem… (2) I don’t like the idea of the backup living in the same physical location as the original as this only really be protects against disk failure, so for me external hard drives are provide half the solution.

This has left me looking for a service which will give me backup over the net at a reasonable price

Time Machine and S3 Storage

Since the release of time machine it always seemed to make sense that this should be the software installed, so the question was really “where do I store the data?”. I’ve just come across JungleDisk which is a client for Amazon S3 (online storage from Amazon). To me this combination seems like a bit of a winner:

• Reliable
• Integrates well with OS X (and Windows and Linux apparently), so your S3 drives can be mounted as standard network drives
• Time Machine allows the use of these drives out of the box
• Jungle Disk provides connection throttling, so it shouldn’t totally kill your net connection

I set myself up with an S3 account and configured Jungle Disk with my account details (very simple). I started backing up my LightRoom catalogue as a test things out. Everything worked perfectly (if a little slow, but then, hey, it’s not Amazon’s fault my broadband’s not that quick!). So technically everything looks okay at first glance.

One of the attractions of S3 is that on the face of it, it looks cheap. If you look a bit closer and do some sums then things look a but pricier… The data storage is not too bad – to store my 90GB of data would cost around 16 Euro per month (196 Euro per year comparable to MobileMe at £176). BUT then you have to add data transfer costs and request costs. Every 1000 requests which you make costs 0.012 Euro.

My home directory has around 60 000 files in it at the moment. By my calculation (I assume that each file you upload will make at least one request, possibly two) that means my first backup would cost me another 7 Euros or so. You also have to pay for the data transferred in either direction…

In some ways this starts to make Apple’s own MobileMe service look more attractive – it’s probably a bit cheaper, you get their email service (although apparently the “push” email does not work that well) and a host (of presumably Apple-slick) ways to access your data on the web and your iPhone. On the downside only Windows and OS X are officially supported.

The thing is that this is one of the areas where I don’t want to be tied to a specific platform. I’ve been craving a netbook for a while now and I certainly would not want that to run Windows, yet I would definitely want to be able to sync to the remote backup of my files. I also like the “pay for what you use” aspect of S3. So on balance, I’m going to bite the 7 Euro bullet and upload all my data…