Dependency hell
Gods above and below, I did not miss this. For those not familiar with Linux/Unix, it goes as follows:
Dependency hell
Package A requires pacakge B, which in turn requires package C. So working backwards from this I install C and B. Then I attempt package A again, which informs me that it still can’t find package B, as B installed in a different place than from where A is looking for it.
Confused? Last night’s nightmare involved 12 packages, covering all the dependencies. Going back to the original package, GTK. It still variously informs me that it cannot find two of the packages.
OS X seems to hate the shell. The bash shell is case-sensitive, Finder isn’t. Most Linux shell tools have to be built from source, which typically leads to dependency hell. Fink whines and bitches about me using X11.app when I try to install anything. Ports installs everything under /opt, doesn’t bother to update my path and everything I’ve installed via it just flops over and dies for some weird reason. All I want is Imagemagick, ufraw and a few other tools so I can batch manage the 10k+ raw files on my external hard disk.
So I give up, I’m wiping my Windows partition (I only used it to play Oblivion anyways) and I’m installing Gentoo again. I tried very, very hard to keep everything within OS X as Mariah quite rightfully complains that I should just pick an OS and bloody stick with it, but Linux has the performance and tools I need out of the box. Applications like Aperture and Lightroom keel over and die, frothing at the mouth, when I import 13,000 raw files. Picasa is actually the perfect tool for my needs, but it’s not worthwhile for me to use Windows just for that. Yes, I know about Cygwin, but again I have problems with integration of imagemagick and ufraw to the bash shell.
Colour management in the Gimp versus Photoshop
I’m too tired to write a long rant, go see this thread for more. Here are the basics:
I’m creating a print of Procastination, and I may as well use the print-in-progress as an example. The original file is a 16-bit tiff in ProPhoto RGB (its the colourspace Lightroom uses) . It renders thus in Photoshop:
(Apologies for the small file size, these are taken from screen caps)
I then opened the file as-is in the Gimp:
It looks like ass, frankly.
I then went back to Photoshop, converted the photo to standard sRGB and downscaled it to 8 bit. The photo looks much better, but still like ass in comparison to the original:
Procastination
I should be working on installing a store for this site. Instead I uploaded this:
Drawing Caira
One place Mariah brought me to in San Diego last September was Seaport Village, down at the Embarcadero. It really is a lovely place to visit in rain, hail or shine, even if some of the shop prices can be…steep. There’s a beautiful park, wonderful sea air, a frakking aircraft carrier and many other Wonderful Things. Score one for San Diego. A man in the park asked if he could draw a sketch of Caira for us - and at this point I will say that I bitterly rue not paying more attention to the process, as I got hopelessly distracted by the many wonderful pigeons that were present in the park.
At any rate, I still managed a few photos which I’ve been wanting to get online for a while now. The chore of digging through all of my photos on my external hard disk is time-consuming and slow at the best of times, but my camera dying has given me the perfect opportunity to do so:
Piglet
Athena and messy Jade
It’s an old photo (September), but it is a new photo of Athena:
Athena (new)
This was one of about ten photos I took in one go in the porch at the back of Jared’s house, during the party. With all the people coming and going, I’m suprised there are no random limbs peeking into the photo. I went back to this photo a few nights ago, cleaned it up, cropped it down and slapped it up on Flickr - there was honestly very little work on this other than cloning out a doorknob coming out of Athena’s forhead.
What amazes me most about those 10 photos was how perfect the lighting was in them, I’d love to get them all online sometime. Just for the sake of completness, this photo of Jade was taken about three feet away a few minutes later, after they had finished destroying the pinata. I’ve put up this photo before in black and white but I love the full colour one as much:
Messy Jade
Jade ran up, covered in mud, grinned for the camera and ran away about a five seconds later. Two blurry photos and one fantastic one.
Me, elsewhere
