Jack Baty Says

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Zenfolio is my favorite image hosting site and Lightroom is my Raw converter/DAM tool of choice. Finally, the toolset is emerging for these two tools. Until recently, getting photos from Lightroom to Zenfolio has been painful.

1. Create export setting in Lightroom for images targeted for Zenfolio.
2. Export select files from Lightroom to disk.
3. Fire up the heavy and rather annoying Zenfolio (Java Applet) uploader.
4. Wait for the uploader.
5. Accept the Java security dialog.
6. Drag exported files to uploader and wait.

How come Flickr, Smugmug, iPhoto, Aperture and friends get all the good tools? I love Flickr, but only use it for one-offs, not galleries.

With Lightroom 1.3, we finally get some basic plugin support. And Jeffrey Friedl was nice enough to write a plugin for Lightroom that sends my photos directly to Zenfolio.

Check out his Lightroom export plugin for Zenfolio

A couple of real-world examples illustrating the advantages of using Raw vs JPG when trying to adjust photos.

My decision to invest time and money into JIRA and Confluence from Atlassian continues to prove fruitful, and the more integration I can find between them the better.

One problem with the existing integration options is that authentication for showing JIRA issues within Confluence pages had to be explicit. This means login information must be stored directly as part of a page. Not great. It looks like an elegant solution is forthcoming. Can't wait.

pandoraboy is a desktop app for listening to Pandora.com. Adds Growl notifications and global keyboard shortcuts.

I just ordered a Kindle.

I'd been holding off until more reviews came in, and in a weird reverse devil's advocate sort of turn, Scoble's ridiculous rant made me buy one just to spite him. Surprisingly, he didn't mention the theoretical DRM issue. It's when he starting whining that the Kindle didn't come equipped with its own Social Network(tm) that I knew this was a device I could live with. A Social Network in my books? No thanks.

Let's see, what else? "Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device." That's right, they never even gave it a thought. C'mon, it's quite possible they didn't nail it first time 'round, but to suggest that the didn't think about it is silly.

I can't wait to give it a shot. Meanwhile I'll be here hoping that the more favorable reviews turn out to be closer to reality.

Gruber says

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion

Here's the thing, if the experience of purchasing and reading books on the Kindle is great, none of the objections matter. Worrying about whether I'll be able to read my purchased books in 50 (or 10) years isn't even on my radar. If I wanted a collectible item I'd buy a real book. And I don't care if there's no way to share, that's a theoretical problem in my life. As for not being able to read them on any other device? Fine with me, since I just *bought* the device I'll be reading them on.

I know, DRM is evil and all that, but at first glance, the Kindle appears to give me what I've wanted, a nice way to purchase, carry and read all the material I'd even want, in a single-purpose, deliberately computer-free device. I love books and suspect the Kindle will help me read more of them.

I'll give the critics one thing, it certainly is fugly, that's for sure.

Jessica was born 19 years ago today. I've been thankful for that every day since. I love you sweets. Happy Birthday!

Yes

Josh asked me to snap a few photos of his proposal to Melissa. (She said yes.) Congrats!

Would someone please buy one of these so I can drive it?

Order one here

I remember the days when Subversion was introduced and solved many of the problems plaguing the aging CVS. Here was something new, familiar and better. I jumped right in.

Subversion does pretty much everything we need doesn't it? It doesn't have merge tracking, and that sucks, but it's scheduled for 1.5 right? So then tell me, why does everyone alluvasudden want to start using Git? I'll tell you why: It's because the geeks are bored with Subversion. The same thing happened with Lighttpd a year or so ago. Someone blogs about how cool "lighty" is and everyone jumps in and declares Apache dead. Hell, I did it too, even though I've never had even the slightest problem with Apache - still don't.

So Git is the shiny new toy all the cool kids just gotta play with. I want to be a cool kid, but I can't figure out what the real benefits are. Only the theory. Here are a few of the reasons that distributed source control, specifically Git, is hot.

1. It's fast with huge repositories. So? I'm not hacking the Linux kernel and neither are most of the folks I know who are switching to Git.

2. Branching is "free" and managed properly. I'll give it that, branch management in Subversion is scary and weird and prone to goofs.

3. I can work offline. Nice, but something I would find useful so rarely that I don't care.

4. Every working copy is a backup of the repo. Also nice, but I back up my Subversion repos already.

What's wrong with Git? Nothing really. The biggest problem is that it has essentially zero available tooling. At Fusionary we're using FishEye and Warehouse and svnX and TortoiseSVN. Everyone in our office, from developers to designers to content people, use Subversion daily. No way I'm dropping Git on them without better tools and a compelling reason other than "oooh, shiny!"

And if I did, how would I keep track of all of those distributed repos scattered willy-nilly across the landscape? Well we'd need a central repository that everyone pushed to wouldn't we, just like Subversion.

Someone explain to me what I'm missing that doesn't, honestly doesn't, have anything to do with Git simply being new.

Update: Geoffrey Grosenbach's excellent Peepcode screencast on Git helped a great deal. Git is kinda shiny, now that you mention it.

I'm searching my iTunes library and listening to songs whose titles contain specific colors. Current Color: "black"

A short time ago, our friends at Joe Cartoon launched Blender Poll 2008. It's funny, topical, irreverent, and there are bones sticking out.

It's always nice when we get to work on projects that make us laugh - and Joe always makes us laugh.

There's almost no point in keeping my own weblog these days. All the hosted tools are getting so damn good. Case in point, Tumblr 3.0. All sorts of great new stuff. Here's mine at jackbaty.tumblr.com. Even better, try the archive view.

Check their post about all this new stuff.

My GRD has had a broken LCD for months. I've been putting off the expensive repair on the off chance that Ricoh would release an updated version of this great little camera. Well, they just did.

Why am I going to immediately spend $700 a GRD II?

* Under 4-second RAW write times with a buffer (vs 11 seconds on the GRD)
* Flash compensation
* 1:1 shooting, and available in RAW
* Noise Reduction ON/OFF switch!
* AE lock

And it's still gorgeous! More at the Ricoh site.

Update: Tony Rose at PopFlash is taking $200 deposits on first order shipments. He's got my money already.