Category: Reviews

Del.icio.us Followup

I’m liking the centralized repository of bookmarks aspect of del.icio.us; I can bookmark something from school or work and not have to e-mail it to myself at home. That’s useful. I’ve also tried finding interesting stuff from other people’s tags, which has been reasonably useful.

I haven’t tried uploading my “master” bookmark list, because that would mean having to tag a few hundred links, and that’s a lot of work.

At any rate, if you want to take a look:

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Choosing and Learning a Photo Editing Application

Apropos of my comments on the last photo I posted, I need to find a good graphics editing application. I already have at least three of them on my hard drive (not including whatever graphics apps came as part of Windows XP or MS Office): Photoshop 7, ImageReady and Picasa. And of those three, none quite meets my needs.

Photoshop, is, of course, the gold standard when it comes to graphics manipulation applications. It can be made to do just about anything, if you know how to do it (and can stand waiting for the program to load — it takes forever, and I have a pretty good system here). And really, that’s the problem. Even after a number of years, I have no clue how to use 80% of what Photoshop has to offer. There are a lot of books and classes out there for Photoshop, so it’s not like I can’t fill in the gap. And I may end up doing that if I can’t find a better alternative. But still, using Photoshop for my personal photo editing feels like I’m using a Formula 1 race car to go buy the groceries. It’s nice to have all that power, but I’d really prefer to have a daily driver for just puttering around town.

I also have Adobe’s ImageReady program. It’s more or less a junior version of Photoshop, with some of the high-powered editing taken out and some new features added to make resizing photos for the Web easier. And you’d think that would be exactly what I was looking for, given my complaints about Photoshop? Well, it is, but it’s not. I hate the selection of filters that come in ImageReady. Adobe left all the cutesy filters — like the ones that will make your image look like a charcoal drawing or a mosaic — and took out the few Photoshop filters I actually knew how to use and liked using. I can crop and resize photos with ease, but editing them is still a hassle.

Finally, I have Picasa. And I don’t like it either. It’s reasonably intuitive to use, and does about 90% of what I need it to as far as photo editing goes, but unfortunately it also doubes as a photo management system. I’ve been keeping photos on my hard drive for a long time. I have a system in place for organizing them, and I really do not need Picasa trying to impose its own methodology onto my system. Even more annoying is the fact that you have to go through a series of steps and export photos into a new folder if you want to actually view the changes you have made to your photos in any application other than Picasa. More than anything else, this is a dealbreaker. It’s a huge pain in the butt. If I open a photo for editing, I want to keep the edits! I don’t want to have to export the editied photo to a new directory to have an edited version of my original photo. Finally, since Google owns Picasa, the interface is geared towards Gmail and Blogger, with no interface at all for Flickr.

On the OSS side of the house, I tried The Gimp on my Mac at work. Meh. It’s powerful but the UI was kind of a pain.

There are probably hundreds of alternative applications out there. Scott has already suggested a couple for me to try, and try them I shall. But I’d like to hear from you, too. What’s your favorite photo editor? If it’s Photoshop, how did you learn to get the most out of it?

Powweb Hosting Woes

So, this spring, Powweb, the company I use for my webhosting was sold. This caused me some concern, because it was announced to customers that as a part of the deal, all the sites hosted on the old web servers would be migrated to some new servers. And oh yea, that would involve an OS switch from FreeBSD to Linux.

I have my preferences for OSes, but I’m hardly a zealot on the subject. FreeBSD and Linux are both perfectly acceptable platforms for web hosting, and I’m not going to get too upset about which one my hosting company uses. However, I also know that switching from one OS to another is bound to cause problems. Things are installed in different places, some modules may not be installed at all, paths change … in short, it tends to break stuff. I was concerned.

My site is not all that complex. I have a copy of Movable Type and a copy of Gallery up and running, and I have only one plug-in that touches my otherwise vanilla installation — MT-Blacklist. It’s a critical part of my website because it makes managing the trackback and comment spam that are the plague of a blogger really simple.

So of course, Powweb’s migration of my site from the old servers to the new ones managed to utterly break MT-Blacklist.

If you’re interested, here’s the error I get when I try to use MT-Blacklist now:

An error occurred: Out of memory during “large” request for 2147487744 bytes, total sbrk() is 5480448 bytes at ../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) line 366, at /home/users/web/b1970/[username]/htdocs/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 28

I have done some web-based scripting, but that was a long time ago, and only using Cold Fusion. I can customize the settings on someone else’s code, and if I really focused in hard I could probably make some very basic tweaks to an existing script, but troubleshooting something like this, especially on a server where I don’t know what’s installed on it nor what the paths are, is simply beyond me.

At any rate, I opened a ticket with Powweb Support about this problem, and waited. And waited. Every other day, I would send Support an e-mail asking what was up, and each time I was told, “Please be patient, someone is working on your problem.” So I waited. And manually deleted the pings and trackback spam that I kept on getting. After Day 6, I sent a slightly more annoyed e-mail to Support saying that 6 days to fix one script was more than enough, and that moving to a new company was starting to look like a good option. I got a slightly more effusive response, explaining that the issue was being “forwarded to our senior specialist”. I started looking at new web hosts, but decided to give Support a chance to do its thing.

Today though, I finally got the much awaited response from their senior specialist. And what was it? “We Googled your problem, and here’s a blogger in December 2004 who also had this problem. Try their fix and see if that helps.”

Some “Senior Specialist”.

Now, I am pissed off. I waited 8 days thinking I was going to get some expert help, and all I got was a Google search? I can do that myself. I was expecting that someone would look at the script, notice what it calls, and then compare it to what is on the new server to see whether the switch from BSD to Linux caused modules to move, be missing, or act differently. That’s the kind of thing that I as an end-user can’t do.

Yes I know, a real geek would self-host and avoid the problem entirely. I’d rather pay for shared hosting than self-host from the DSL line in my home. Our DSL provider is good, but we do have outages from time to time, and I want the bandwidth, monitoring, uptime & redundancy that you get from a professional host.

In some ways, I’m SOL, and it’s my own fault. MT-Blacklist has been integrated into MovableType since version 3.x, and I’m still using the plug-in version with MT 2.6x, so I can’t go to the author for support: the response will be, “Upgrade”. Which I have not wanted to do, because that would entail re-customizing all of the Movable Type templates in order to get the look and feel of my site back, and I didn’t see the point of doing that when everything was working quite nicely the way it was.

With the long weekend coming up, and us not having much in the way of plans, switching web hosts and/or upgrading my Movable Type installation might be a good project to take up. But then the issue becomes — will I just be trading one set of problems for another?

*mumble grumble grr*

A Trip To The Movies

For a lot of reasons, Scott and I haven’t been to the movies in a long time. Last night, though, we finally got over to the theater in downtown San Mateo to catch X-Men: The Last Stand (don’t worry, no spoilers to follow).

It was OK. Not as bad as I’d been lead to expect from the reviews, but not OMG awesome either. Some of the ‘continuity’ issues bothered me more than others. I’m fine with the fact that some changes need to be made to turn a comic book into a movie. But others just didn’t make sense. Argh. I really don’t want to give spoilers, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

On the bright side, Kelsey Grammer turned out to be a hoot as the Beast. And what’s not to like about Hugh Jackman and Halle Berre?

As a bit of a bonus, there was also a tiny “DaVinci Code” protest going on outside the theater. Four people and two signs, plus a couple of bored-looking cops to make sure nothing got out of hand.

Seen Oustide The Theater Tonight

Nice juxtaposition of the US flag in there. *Sigh* I guess some people just don’t understand the concept of movies being fictional entertainment.

Lestat The Musical

Thanks to the kindness of some friends, Scott and I were able to see the new musical “Lestat” in San Francisco last night.

Overall, I’d give it three out of five stars. The show has a lot going for it, it was entertaining, and the majority of the flaws are fixable ones. Whether it will ever make it to 5 stars, though, I’m not sure.

First, some technical observations. The show is done with relatively minimal set; heavy use is made of projections onto various screens. It worked better for the Paris scenes than the other locations, but overall I was OK with it. Using projections on the screen as special effects when the vampires attacked was a nice touch; and I also liked that there were no fangs and minimal blood effects. Costumes were overall good, although Gabrielle’s last costume was just weird, and I’m not sure why they chose to do the ensemble in black and white for “Welcome to the New World”. It didn’t fit. Lestat’s costumes also could use a bit of help — he seemed underdressed much of the time compared to the rest of the cast.

With one exception, the cast was very solid. I particularly liked Lestat and Gabrielle – both had powerful voices and did a good job with their roles. The actress who played Claudia was also very good – her number, “I Want More” was a highlight of Act 2 – but she was also obviously not 10 years old, and that bugged me a bit. Armand, Louis and Marius were also effective. However, the actor who played Nicolas was clearly not as good as the rest of the cast. His acting was weak and so was his voice. To be fair, Nicolas is a tough role – playing a depressed person isn’t easy – but that doesn’t excuse the vocal weakness. Perhaps he was having an off-night, but if that’s as good as he gets, I hope they recast the role for Broadway.

Before I go into the book, lyrics, and music, I want to talk about the big problem with the show, because it impacts all the rest and I’m not sure they’re going to be able to sucessfully resolve it. That’s the fact that they’re trying to cram a tremendous amount of plot — two 300+ page books — into one three-hour event. The problem is, the plot has been cut down to the barest bones of Lestat’s life story, and I’m not sure what else they could possibly cut without either ending the story sooner or deviating away from Anne Rice’s story. And yet, there’s just too much plot.

This impacts everything else. The evening felt rushed, like we were on a whirlwind tour and never had time to sit back and really enjoy the moment. The need to drive the plot forward hurt both the book and the lyrics (the latter moreso than the former; although Taupin’s inexperience with the genre probably didn’t help). The music was fine but could have been stronger in Act 1. All of the really memorable music comes from Act 2 — I particularly liked “Welcome to the New World” and “Sail Me Away” (sure to be the single off the cast album when the time comes) — but other numbers might have been better if they weren’t so focused on driving plot, plot, and more plot.

The other problem caused by the deathmarch through all this plot is that there’s a minimal focus on the emotional attachments between many of the key characters. There may be more purpose here than just driving plot, though. Readers of Rice’s vampire novels are well aware of the significnat amount of homoerotic subtext in these books. I don’t know if a conscious choice was made to de-emphasize that aspect of the story, or not, but this aspect of Lestat’s life is virtually invisible. This missing part of the story becomes even more obvious when you see that the relationship between Gabrielle and Lestat is well laid out and their bond discussed in several different scenes, but virtually no time at all is given to Lestat’s bond with Louis. One minute they meet, the next, they’re living together and Louis is unhappy. Later, when Lestat talks about how happy he was in New Orleans, it’s hard to see why unless you have your memory of reading the books to fall back on.

“Lestat” is only in the first week of previews, and is still being worked on. Much may change before its San Francisco run ends. At this point, I’m reasonably sure the show will make it to Broadway, but I also don’t see any Tony Awards in its future.

UPDATE 12/30: I’m noticing an uptick in traffic to this page. Please be aware that the show has gone through some changes since I saw it and that my comments may not be a valid criticism of the show as it currently stands. Also, I’d love to hear some feedback from other folks who’ve seen “Lestat”.