Al's in Hawaii

Don't worry Big Guy, there are plenty of big people in Hawaii. You may be right about the tan thing though.

I love Hawaii. I used to think I could never live there because it's an island, and I'd start to feel trapped. But these days, I'm annoyed if I have to drive over the Intracoastal Waterway. In effect, I already live on an island, albeit one with a bridge to "the mainland." Maybe, about a decade from now, I'll move to an island that doesn't have a bridge to the mainland. If there are any islands left that will have me then, that is.

And Al, while you're there amidst all those OS X/Unix geeks, ask about that "reserved range exhausted" message, will you please? Thanks.

OS X Question

Does anyone know what this message means:

Jun 1 06:36:15 Dave WindowServer[205]: Reserved range exhausted. (0xbbff7000 to 0xbc011000 goes out of bounds)

It gets repeated over and over again in the Console. Everything seems to be working okay, but this doesn't sound like it's a good thing.

Spider

I disturbed this guy as I was raking leaves this morning. He's about two inches or so from leg-tip to leg-tip. He was certainly easy to spot as he scurried away from my rake. I ran in and grabbed the camera and when I came back out, he was still sitting there. I tried for a number of candids, but Mandy came by to see what excitement was, and the spider became very shy.

New Toy

I bought myself a little gift. (Yes, I am selfish. I know this.) It's the Canon Powershot A70. I love my DC290, but it's so S...L...O...W! I wanted something a little quicker on the draw, not too expensive, using compact flash for storage, more control over the exposures, and smaller than the 290. I happened to spot the A70 at Target last weekend, and hadn't heard of it before. I did a little homework using the web, and it looks like the perfect camera for me. It's not a perfect camera, but for the price, I think I'll be quite pleased.

I'm sure glad I didn't buy the A40 when it was on sale at the Exchange a couple of months ago! I bought the A70 through Amazon and selected free shipping. It was $10.00 cheaper than Target's sale price, and I avoided sales tax (as I would have, if I had bought the A40 at the Exchange).

iPhoto 2

I was purging my iPhoto library last night and I happened to notice something. I have the organize window set up to view images by name, so everything is pretty much in the order I shot it. The images are sized such that I see two columns of thumbnails (obviously, they're pretty big thumbs). There is a sequence of shots I made last October during a nighttime thunderstorm that was going on northeast of here. I was really just trying to see if I could capture an image of a bolt of lightning. Unfortunately, my DC290 wasn't quite up to the task, but since I had the camera set up on a tripod, I managed to capture about 20 frames of clouds illuminated by lightning at night. As I scrolled the thumbs, it created an animation effect, and I saw I could make a time-lapse video clip.

I put it together last night in Quicktime, and it looks pretty cool as an image sequence. Each time I've exported it as a Quicktime movie though, the quality of the images has gone down too much. I'm going to have to peruse the QT docs and see if I can't manage to get better quality in the images, and then I'll post it somewhere. It's not incredibly cool, but it isn't the kind of thing you see every day either.

Speaking of iPhoto, I did some more investigation into virtual memory. Another very cool utility to use is Memory Monitor, which puts a little moving graph of your memory usage in the Dock. Plus, it's free. He includes a nice discussion of virtual memory in his help file, and introduced me to using vm_stat from the terminal.

I'm still not savvy enough to really understand what's going on in iPhoto, but I'm getting the impression (which may be a false one), that I really only need a little more RAM, and it won't pound virtual memory as hard. I may buy another 512MB and see if I can't avoid the vm issue altogether.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto

One of the cool things about Giants: Citizen Kabuto is that it is optimized for multi-processors. (Yea, Omni!) One of the bad things is that it doesn't allow you to save your game in the middle of a mission. It is a pretty fun game, I'm still working my way through the Meccs scenarios. I'm on the base-building tutorial, and I never seem to have time to finish it before I have to do something else with the machine, so it's start all over again each time. Of course, it does go faster each time, as I learn what things to do and what things not to do.

iPhoto

I had about 150 pictures sitting on my compact flash card in my digital camera, and I decided it was probably past time I downloaded them to iPhoto. I'm running iPhoto 2 on 10.2.6 and my library has about 3000 pictures. That's a pretty big number, and I have begun to delete all the out-of-focus, and what-was-I-thinking shots, but it's likely to remain a relatively big number. It's not helped by the fact that my library it almost totally hosed.

Some time back, something went awry on my iMac that I don't recall at the moment. It was before I got the G4, and it was before the 10.2.4 update that caused all the problems with OS X resetting the clock to like 1969. But it was a time issue, as all my files in my library started showing up with weird dates in them. Normally, the library is ordered by the date you uploaded the pictures. Because my dates were all scrambled, my library was totally hosed, and I've never managed to get it unhosed.

So when I imported my photos from the iMac into iPhoto on the G4, I inherited all the problems in the previous library. I'll eventually get it all sorted out, but it's a pain. One thing I've noticed is duplicate photos. A nice feature of iPhoto is that it allows you to display your photos by filename. This has the benefit of largely unscrewing the ordering problem caused by the date malfunction, as the cameras employed a consistent naming scheme employing the sequence numbers of the pictures. This also revealed I have a lot of pictures that are duplicated. Some differ only by a "_1" appended to the name, while others have exactly the same name, but have a .jpg appended. I've been going through getting rid of those as I discover them.

One thing I noticed using iPhoto was a lot of disk activity, and the computer became very unresponsive, lots of the Spinning CD of Infinite Futility, which does not make for a happy user experience. So I ran Top in Terminal and discovered that virtual memory was clobbering my system with pageouts.

At first, I wasn't sure it was iPhoto that caused it, or if I was just noticing it because I'd launched iPhoto into what may have been a fairly low memory situation to begin with. There's a neat utility called Do I Need More Memory? that helped clarify the situation. I launched that utility this morning, then launched iPhoto. iPhoto immediately consumed over 500MB of available RAM (out of 1.25GB installed). I started scrolling in the Organize view, and it consumed all the available remaining free memory and started clobbering the HD with page swaps. This is not good.

I think the next step is to break the library up using iPhoto Library Manager, and see if I can't get this problem to go away. I suppose I could also go ahead and buy another 512MB of RAM as well, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't be seeing the day when 1.25GB of RAM wasn't enough for the kinds of things I do.