Category Archives: Geek stuff

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Moore’s Law Rocks!

August 19, 2008 – 12:35 pm

Update (August 19, 2008): Intel have announced that they’re jumping into the Solid State Disk business: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10018837-64.html

I am amazed at Moore’s Law. For those who may not be familiar with this great piece of computer history, it goes something like this…

Way back in 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore wrote in a research paper that he believed that the number of transistors able to be placed on a circuit board would roughly double every two years. He could not envision this continuing beyond even ten years, when that would place over 65,000 transistors on a single board. Imagine his delight all these years later when he sees things like this.

Digital cameras record their images on “compact flash” or “SD” memory cards. The SD cards are considerably smaller, and are becoming more favorable because of their size advantage. Their capacity has now caught up with their larger siblings, as evidenced by Kingston’s announcement of a 16 GB SD card.

I won’t bore you with yet another accounting of how much of the Library of Congress would fit on that one card. :) But consider this:

Currently the largest available conventional hard drives are one terabyte (that’s roughly one thousand gigabytes, or 1 million megabytes) in size. They’re available from all the major hard drive manufacturers. So I did some math and imagined if you were to build a storage device made up of not a high-speed magnetic platter, but a whole bunch of these little SD cards.

The SD card spec says that the cards must be 24mm X 32mm X 2.1mm in size.

A standard 3.5” one terabyte hard drive is roughly 26mm X 101.4mm X 147mm in size.

So, based on my redimentary calculations, that means if you were to attach a whole lot of SD cards together (I figure 200 would work) so that they could fit in the same space, you’d end up with a solid state storage device which requires very little power, weighs 40% less than a hard drive, and stores over three terabytes. And it would work a lot faster than a hard drive, too.

Unfortunately, at a retail price of around $230 each, this whiffy storage device would cost you $46,000. But remember Moore’s Law, and just wait a few years!

[Update as of Feb 1, 2008] As if to prove how quickly things change, today I saw that Sandisk has announced a 32GB SD card. So take the calculations above and double them. Except for the price, which is $350, so the cost of your 6.5 terabyte solid state disk would be a nice round $70,000.

(Images courtesy of Kingston, Inc. and Sandisk, Inc.)

By steve | Also posted in Personal, Video | Comments (3)

Warning: übergeek stuff (DNS on Mac OS X Server)

July 30, 2008 – 10:33 pm

As some of you readers may know, I used to be a software engineer, and I continue to dabble in the black arts on an as-needed basis. So while photographers may be interested in this post (although I sincerely doubt it), I am writing it for a different audience. You see, I spent (wasted, really) the better part of a day trying to solve a problem, and was amazed that my constant and diligent Google searches yield surprisingly little (no) help. So, if you’re looking for help configuring DNS on your OS X Server (Leopard 10.5.4 at the moment, but I suspect it’ll be relevant to other builds as well), you’ve come to the right place. Well, at least you’ve made it somewhere. ;-)

I have been migrating my old Linux router/server running on a 2-way Dell server to a quiet, nearly green Mac mini running OS X Leopard Server. I have been generally happy, although I finally cut over the last piece this past week and shut off the Linux server, and all hell broke loose. The last piece was DNS, and try as I might, I could not get my properly-delegated subnet to answer reverse DNS lookups. This ended up causing our email to Comcast, Yahoo, and others to start bouncing (they rightfully demand mail servers to answer with a proper reverse DNS lookup).

So, after screwing around with this problem all day, and getting nowhere (it’s DNS, for goodness’ sake…it’s been basically the same since the dawn of time!!!), I simply gave up.

I downloaded the BIND 9.5.0-P1 distro (source code), typed “configure”, “make” and “make install”. I then adjusted the OS X bind directories to go somewhere else, copied my Linux BIND config files onto the Mini, typed “named”, and lo and behold, it works.

I have no idea why Apple made the Leopard Server DNS stuff so painfully automatic…and wrong. If they’re selling a $1,000 server OS, they should not assume they’re dealing with newbies. Sigh.

Oh, and here’s a picture of my dog taken with a new 35/1.4 lens I just bought. =)

By steve | Comments (0)

Storing my negatives

June 16, 2008 – 4:10 pm

I am well-known among my friends, clients and colleagues as an über geek. I live, breathe and think in gigabytes, terabytes and redundant storage. Of course, that is all secondary to my creative pursuits these days. But a working image maker in the modern, digital world can not afford to ignore the realities of the technological rats’ nest that is known as “media storage”. Years ago, a photographer or film maker’s biggest storage challenge was keeping his negatives, slides, film and videotape dry and fungus-free. In today’s unforgiving world of digital media, one slip-up can lead to a disaster on par with having your studio burn down years ago. So what’s a creative guy who’d like to believe he’s moved well beyond the geek world do? Fortunately, my training an experience has held me well. The horrific list of hard drives you see in the picture is actually what I use. I have almost a dozen hard drives, each responsible for holding my work, a backup of my work, or an off-site backup of my work. Everything I do is in multiple places. And at the moment, if I do the math (ouch!), I have about nine terabytes of hard drives. And a fairly complex manner of mapping exactly what is where.

So be kind to your friendly neighborhood digital image maker. He or she probably has a headache. All the time.

By steve | Also posted in Personal | Comments (0)

My neighbor

May 5, 2008 – 9:19 pm

My new studio is working out brilliantly. I love the space. Despite the fact that I’ve been orphaned by my regular assistant (who’s moving to Dallas!) and I’ve still got lots of boxes to unpack, it really feels like home. I finally have room to stretch out, both physically and artistically.

But one of the most unexpected pleasures of my new digs is my neighbor Albert. He’s also my landlord. And he’s is one of the most amusing and interesting characters I’ve met in a long time. Aside from being a very accomplished sculptor, he is also an avid and successful antique car collector. It’s a never-ending source of amusement to me that every few days, I’ll pop out of my cave for some fresh air and there will be the most magnificent hunk of steel, chrome and glass that I have ever seen.

One random evening a few weeks back was no exception. Albert was working a deal with a guy from Dubai to sell him a couple of Albert’s cars. One of them was this breathtakingly beautiful 1950’s Cadillac Fleetwood limo. Suffice it to say they don’t make ’em like this anymore.

By the way, that’s my studio’s roll-up door to the right of this photo. I literally almost crashed into this Caddy when I walked out of my door!

By steve | Also posted in Family & Friends, Personal | Comments (0)

Ahh…detail!

April 28, 2008 – 12:42 pm

One of the many advantages of owning the highest-resolution 35mm-format digital camera in the world today (the 21.1 megapixel Canon 1Ds Mark III) is that I have a lot of detail to work with. This is a 100% magnification of a corporate headshot I took yesterday with no sharpening or any other edits. Just straight from the raw camera file. And another interesting tidbit about this photo is that I did not use a tripod. The image stabilization built into the Canon 70-200 f2.8 L lens I used provided sufficient stability. Here is the actual (also unretouched) photograph.

By steve | Also posted in Commercial | Comments (0)

Leopard and Time Machine

January 15, 2008 – 2:04 pm

OK, I’m not just a photographer. Those of you who know me know that I was a software engineer for almost 20 years before I re-invented myself as a photographer. And my geek heritage still lurks just beneath the surface.With that as a background, I’ll share an experience I had yesterday. I have a Macbook Pro. I love this computer. It’s wicked fast, totally portable, and very sleek and attractive. All things that I am not. Ha ha. Anyway, I bought it a year ago, and now that the warranty’s expired, I decided to upgrade its original 5400rpm 120gb hard drive to a larger, faster 7200rpm 200gb hard drive. Here is my story…

I recently performed a hard drive upgrade on my son’s Macbook (which was still on Tiger) and I had to use Carbon Copy Cloner. But I read that OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) Time Machine was a better, smarter way to do this, so I decided to try it.

I have not used Time Machine yet. I use a set of rsync scripts I wrote for backup of my Macs and didn’t think Time Machine was necessary. But I decided to take the plunge.I connected a 250gb Firewire drive to my Macbook Pro and started Time Machine. I set it to look at the Firewire drive, and within a moment or two it started the backup. I let the machine sit for several hours, and it finally finished about 3 1/2 hours later (the Macbook Pro’s 120gb disk was about 98% full).

I then followed the best of several disassembly guides I found on the web and successfully completed the installation of the new drive into the Macbook Pro.I connected the Firewire drive back to the Macbook Pro, put in my Leopard upgrade disk, and booted the Mac. And here are a few comments about how it went from there:

1) It was unclear as to whether the Leopard Time Machine restore program would recognize the new HD before I formatted it. It didn’t seem to, so I switched to Disk Utility and formatted it, naming it the same as the old drive. It still didn’t recognize the disk. So I rebooted and the second time I started up it recognized the HD.

2) The restore process was uneventful. It took about two hours.

3) When I restarted with the new HD, the Macbook Pro took a very long time to boot. Not surprising. I figure it cleaned all the OS caches and had to rebuild them all.

4) When I finally got to the desktop, I was pleased that it seemed everything was there where I left it.

5) I started Mail.app, and was greeted with a window that said I should import my mailboxes. I was confused, so I quit and thought maybe the Mac was not finished rebuilding things. When I started Mail later, it started up and got my new messages. But I noticed that none of my old mail was there. So I realized that while Mail.app remembered my mailboxes, my filters and the rest of my account info, it failed to recognize any of my old mail. So I had to painstakingly re-import all my old messages (nearly 100,000) into the mailboxes (30+). That was a pain. :( At least it worked, though.

6) Then Apple’s Aperture failed to start, saying in the resulting crash log that certain OS frameworks were not present. Weird. The /Library/Frameworks folder seemed like it was only 1/2 restored. So I found the Frameworks folder from my Mac Pro (running the same OS), zipped them up and transfered them over. I unzipped them, carefully set the permissions to be the same as the other ones, and was able to re-open Aperture.

7) The Spotlight database seems to be out of whack, so I rebuilt it. I couldn’t seem to find much of anything. Now it works.

All in all, I would deem this process a success, but it’s not for the faint of heart. And if I was not conversant in Unix and the Mac’s internals, I’m afraid it might not have ended well.

By steve | Also posted in Personal | Comments (4)