Originally I thought they’d done their photo the same way, but I was wrong. They “borrowed” a few thousand merit badges and constructed it by hand. Here’s the video:

I poked around on the Internet for ideas, and came up empty. Then I contacted the folks at Tekzilla, a web video magazine on tech that streams onto our Tivo. They made some suggestions that helped a little – but not enough – and asked listeners for other ideas.

Last week, the listeners came through. The winning suggestion was to use the incredible capabilities of GoodReader to upload hierarchies of files. I’ve been using GoodReader for several weeks, but hadn’t dug deeply enough into it to appreciate these features. Thanks to GoodReader, I’ve finally filled up at least half of my iPad!

My problem arose because I’d developed a personal library of ebooks and reference materials. To keep things tidy, I sorted everything into an alphabetical hierarchy of folders. At the top level I had 26 folders, one per letter. At the next level I generally had one folder per author’s last name.

My first strategy was to find a way to simply move the entire hierarchy onto the iPad. Then I’d direct the appropriate files to the appropriate apps. This would obviously work when moving the files to any traditional operating system or desktop. It failed miserably with the iPad.

Here’s the problem: the IOS interface doesn’t let end users grope around the actual file system. Each application gets its own chunk of hierarchical file storage. The only way to share a file between applications is to physically copy it to the other application’s file tree. The end user sees this as an “Open in iBooks” operation, or something like that.

iBooks Trouble

When I started with the iPad, I copied sets of individual files to specific apps using the iTunes sync interface. Once I had about a hundred books and articles in iBooks, I found the interface impossible to handle. iBooks would use “Title” and “Author” metadata, if available. If no metadata was available, iBooks leaves the author blank and names the book/article with the file name. This really stinks when you’re uploading a subscription PDF from “qmags” (IEEE uses them for distributing its Spectrum trade mag electronically). Annoyingly, qmags provides no metadata and gives every file an inscrutable, seemingly-random name that bears no relation to the magazine title or date. Once iBook grabs hold of that name it won’t let you use a different one.

My basic reaction has been to try to organize everything into “collections” inside iBooks. A collection is a poor-man’s subdirectory or folder, implemented directly by the application. You can’t (to my knowledge) import a folder structure into iBooks – you can only impose the structure book-by-book after the books are imported into iBooks. This is annoying when you have a thousand items in your electronic reading library.

The iAnnotate Dead End

My first big mistake with respect to iPad apps was my failure to figure out the “notes” function in iBook. Since it wasn’t obvious how to annotate a book or PDF from iBooks, I went looking for an app that would do it. I downloaded (and often paid for) several that looked promising. The best bet seemed to be iAnnotate, and I successfully used it to review a technical article for a journal.

After poking at iAnnotate for a while, I came across its Wi Fi sync function, also called “Aji PDF Service.” This replicates a hierarchy of PDF files from your desktop within the iAnnotate app on the iPad. It requires special software on your desktop to serve the files to the iPad.

I tried it. The process took a couple of hours to replicate several hundred PDFs from my desktop.

DropBox Good and Bad

DropBox is a web service that provides file synchronization between desktops. I used to do the same thing using sync software on various desktops in conjunction with a USB drive. DropBox performs the sync automatically as long as the desktop is active. The service provides file storage on the Dropbox.com web site. The site’s files replicate the hierarchical structure of the “Dropbox” folder established on the user’s desktop.

For example, if I add a folder with some files to the Dropbox folder on my Mac, the desktop agent will scurry around copying those new files onto the Dropbox site. This all happens in the background automatically. When I start up my PC, the Dropbox agent on the PC desktop checks its Dropbox folder against the web site. Since I added a folder with some new files, the PC desktop agent creates a corresponding folder in the PC Dropbox folder, and copies the new files into it.

Dropbox also has an iPad app that will download files from the file hierarchy and make them available on the iPad. Unlike the desktop agents, the iPad app doesn’t try to replicate the entire Dropbox folder hierarchy. You can navigate the hierarchy, but you can’t replicate it directly. At least, you can’t do it with the Dropbox app.

Fortunately, the DropBox protocol is sufficiently well-known and usable that several iPad apps have also implemented it. For example, I’ve been able to upload files to QuickDocs, a program designed to work with Microsoft Office files. Unfortunately, though, QuickDocs doesn’t make it easy to keep the files in place. I’d often lose a document if I lost network connectivity.

GoodReader to the Rescue

GoodReader has two features that make it perfect for my needs:

1. You can mount the iPad on your desktop through a Wi-Fi based local file server mechanism. Once it’s mounted, you can drag and drop a whole file hierarchy into GoodReader. I recommend using 802.11 N, if only because it’s faster. Even using my N channel, it took a couple hours to transfer 8 GB of files.
2. You can actually sync your Dropbox hierarchy with a copy stored in GoodReader. The service reps at Dropbox claim that their software won’t sync iPad files because of limitations in IOS, the iPhone/iPad/iPod operating system. GoodReader’s valuable feature suggests that the Dropbox folks just didn’t try hard enough.

In addition, GoodReader uses the built-in IOS support for many standard document, image, and video files to let users actually look at files within GoodReader. The program implements its very own PDF processing, partly to allow for making notes and partly to ensure proper handling of incredibly huge PDFs.

My main justification for the iPad is that it lets me handle PDF files for my upcoming textbook. Those files are typically 10-20MB in size.

So I’m really happy with GoodReader.

1. Automation is stupid. Until we get Do What I Mean brain interface debugged, cameras will make a best guess.
2. This is what I like about photography: the opportunity to exert control over how the image gets captured.

Although I learned a bit about photography years ago, I still blunder with camera settings. I didn’t mind the shutter speed while snapping pics of dancing. I find I have to literally exercise a special bit of my brain to look at the lighting of a scene. Otherwise I fail to assess backlighting or realize that the shadow will make a huge black slash through the image.

I find that I rely heavily on Photoshop-like software to redeem over- and under-exposed photos. It’s usually good for 1 or 2 stops on a digital camera, though the colors may suffer. Unfortunately there’s no related technology to un-blur a moving subject.

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Now, if only Randall Munroe would respond to my emails and let me use a few comics in my textbook…

[UPDATE!] He said YES, so I’m reprinting his Map of the Internet in Elementary Information Security, assuming things progress as expected.

I assume this was a last-gasp attempt to boost circulation at the end of the big Back-To-School advertising season. I’ve received this sort of offer from them in years past.

This morning my wife fielded a call from the Pioneer Press disavowing the offer. I also received an invoice in the mail TODAY, instead of receiving it in six weeks. Thus, my free offer has been aborted about five weeks early.

This is no huge loss for our household. We get the Hastings Star-Gazette on Thursdays, the New York Times on weekends, and we go on-line for the rest of our news.

In past years, when the Pioneer Press offered us a free 6 weeks, we usually said “No,” especially if we were already receiving the Minneapolis Strib. We accepted maybe one of those, and canceled after weeks of excessive recycling.

I have to wonder what sort of back-room shouting and recriminations led to this reversal at the Pioneer Press. I suspect someone got fired over this.

1. Practice Makes Perfect.

It’s muscle and reflex training, not head training. It takes time to get the feel of the clutch, especially from a dead stop. Take advantage of opportunities to practice stop-and-go with the clutch. Be sure to do it on hills, too.

2. Listen To The Engine

The tachometer and speedometer tell you interesting things, but the sound of the engine really tells you when to shift gears. If it’s high-pitched, you need to shift. For improved gas mileage, you want to shift sooner rather than later.

[This has been revised since first posted 7/31/10]

To learn the engine’s sound, you’ll want to sit in the car, put the shift in neutral, and rev the engine by gently pumping the gas pedal. Listen to the sound change. The lower pitch means the engine turns more slowly. As it speeds up, the pitch increases.

You start in first gear with a sort of “medium” pitch. It takes practice to figure this out, and it varies from one car to the next.

When shifting to higher gears, you want to shift when the pitch goes high, but not too high.

If you shift too soon, the motor might stall and sputter to a stop. If this happens, remember how the engine sounded – it wasn’t at a high enough pitch to shift.

If you rev the engine to a really high pitch, you’re shifting too late. If you rev the engine too high, you may red line it, as described below. This is best avoided.

Also related to Listen To The Engine is to know when to down-shift: if you’re going up a hill and slowing down while pushing the gas pedal, the engine’s working too hard. Downshift so the engine actually has the torque to push the vehicle.

Learning Stick

My dad tried to teach me stick shift when I was 16. It was not successful. The car was a 3-on-the-tree Plymouth in the late ’60s. I was trying to shift and turn the wheel while pulling out onto Old Dominion Drive, the “paved road” off our street. I wandered towards the center line and Dad grabbed the wheel. We didn’t exactly fight for it, but I got back into my lane. It was a short driving lesson.

After that, I limited my driving to automatic transmission cars, with one exception. My summer job was at Wolf Trap Farm and my supervisor wanted me to be able to drive trucks. He patiently taught me how to use the truck, stick shift and all, going up hills. But he forgot to tell me how to drive down hills. When I demo’ed my driving for the Ranger In Charge Of Issuing Government Driving Licenses, I free-wheeled the truck down the hill. Fortunately it was empty, except for the two of us. So I was restricted to automatic transmission vehicles.

When my ’64 Impala (automatic transmission, A/C, power windows – a sweet ride) finally had broken down enough, I replaced it with a brand new Saab 99 with four-on-the-floor. The nice lady at the Saab dealership was perfectly happy to spend a half hour driving around with me to get the hang of the stick shift.

After that, it was pretty much trial-and-error. I did take an all-day course in performance driving, which was enlightening, but that had more to do with controlling speed in turns and handling skids with ABS.

The Downhill Problem

In case you don’t get the story about free-wheeling, here’s what was going on.

To free wheel a stick shift is to go into neutral and just let the vehicle’s mass pull you down a hill. You are trusting that the brakes, all by themselves, will be able to stop you if you need to stop.

This is probably OK for most small cars. I never had trouble free-wheeling the sedans and hatchbacks I’ve driven. The brakes on a typical passenger car are designed to stop the vehicle even if the transmission is disconnected.

On the other hand, if you keep the car in gear, the engine itself can slow the car down. This is engine braking.

Trucks rely a lot on engine braking. Usually the brakes aren’t enough by themselves to stop the beast, especially if you’re carrying a load of something or other. When I went free wheeling down the hill with a government truck, The Ranger no doubt imagined me doing the same thing with a truckload of stage lights or manure or something. That would have been a Bad Thing. The truck’s mass would have been too much for the brakes to stop. The brakes would burn out, leaving no way to stop the truck.

Red Lining

Every engine has a red line – a maximum rotational speed. The tachometer (“tach”) tells you the engine speed in revolutions per minute – RPM. Every tach has a red line that marks the engine’s maximum RPM.

If car engine doesn’t have a tach, but does have a shift (VW bugs, for example) then the instruction manual should list the speed ranges for different gears. The engine should make similar noises (a low-pitched growl or high-pitched whine) at the gears’ minimum and maximum speeds. In other words, the minimum and maximum RPMs will be about the same for most gears.

Trucks and cheaper cars have lower red lines – that is, they top out at lower RPMs. Sporty cars tend to have higher red lines. Here are some red lines, mostly from memory:

• Park Service trucks – 4000
• My old Saab 99 – 6000
• Our two old Tercels – 5500
• My old Volvo – 6500
• My “like new” Acura – 7000

In any case, you can quickly overheat and damage the engine by red-lining it too much. Newer, computer-controlled engines may actually shut off the fuel if you red line. At least, my late Volvo seemed to do that.

The design cost came out about $100 MILLION lower than the MNDOT estimate. I suspect this is because the arch isn’t quite as huge as we might have expected. I think the proposed appearance looks fine.

And, by the way, here’s another he forwarded – edited entirely with an iPhone…

“Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film – UPDATE: Behind the scenes footage included from Michael Koerbel on Vimeo.

Aside from a stability improvement, I saw no immediate, significant changes either good or bad. That was great. Most things worked, including VMWare. I didn’t lose any functionality, either through omission, or through “GUI improvements” that emphasize more common activities at the expense of less common, but still critical, activities.

My biggest gripe is that the Apple “Pro” applications like Aperture were broken by the upgrade. I didn’t find this immediately, since I don’t use Aperture every day. But as soon as I ran Software Update, it fixed the problem. A lame arrangement, IMHO, but at least I didn’t have to go searching for the fix.

Being paranoid, I disabled the Time Machine automatic backups during the upgrade. I turned them back on once I was satisfied with the upgrade results. If the upgrade had been a botch, I would then have pulled out my 10.5 distribution files and reinstalled my old system from Time Machine.

Since things went fine, I re-enabled Time Machine and told it to save the latest changes (8GB to the system).

VMWare Stability Improvement

I use VMWare to run Microsoft operating systems, mostly so that I can run FrameMaker and Quicken, my two vices.

The only real change I’ve seen in my Mac’s behavior is that it handles VMWare glitches without hanging the whole system. VMWare will occasionally go to lala land for 2-3 minutes, displaying nothing but the Mac’s spinning rainbow. In other words, it was so strung up that I didn’t even get the PC hourglass. These occurrences seem to happen when I’m clicking quickly between Mac and PC windows.

On 10.5, the whole system would spin while VMWare got hold of itself again. Now, I can go to other Mac processes and do other work while the rainbow spins over VMWare.

Glitches

When I first posted this (6/27) I had only suffered two minor configuration glitches. Since then other things happened. Here’s the whole list.

1. The most trying problem arose the next time I tried running Aperture – there was a mismatch between Snow Leopard and the older support for Apple’s “Pro” applications. Aperture literally crashed without running when I first tried it after the upgrade. I had to run Software Update and get the libraries upgraded to make things work. I think this was lame on Apple’s part, though I was savvy enough to fix it without excessive fuss or inconvenience.
2. I had to reinstall the login background screen – a pic of our tower. It defaulted back to the original background during installation. Actually, this time I went in and edited the appropriate plist to point to the new and different picture (see below).
3. Sound output was messed up. Both the 10.6 upgrade, and the Apple Software Update immediately following it, reset the sound outputs to go to the internal speaker. Like many, I have a marginally better set of stereo speakers on the desktop, and direct all sound to those via “Line out.”
4. The monitor profile for my Acer monitor disappeared. I have 2 LCD monitors, an old Sony and a newer (much cheaper) Acer. The Sony’s default monitor profile seems to work fine, but the Acer’s is seriously deficient in contrast. I generally display Finder windows with the column hierarchy view, and the lines between columns were invisible in the default profile. I re-calibrated the monitor and now it’s OK. (Actually, after I ran Software Update following Snow Leopard’s install, the monitor profile defaulted to the weak one again, and I had to re-select the right one).
5. The Acer monitor profile was reset to the default on each user account. Thus I’ve had to go in and change it back on each account. Thus the accounts have anemic contrast until the profile is set to the correct value.
6. I also had to reset the background pattern on some (but not all) user accounts. Not sure what was going on with that – some user accounts retained their background pattern without muss or fuss, but others didn’t.

So, it took some time to do the upgrade, including fixes. Incidentally, it’s tricky to change the login background:

Changing the Mac’s login background image

I found this described on-line.

I have a tower picture I like to use as the login background. To change it, you change the “loginwindow” properties, which are in this file:

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

To change the login image, you edit that plist. To do that, you find the plist and open it. By default, the Property List Editor should open it.

Tell the Editor to add a new entry. I guess this used to be the “Add Sibling” command, but the latest version just seems to have an “Add Entry” command.

Be sure to name the entry “DesktopPicture” and give it the string data type.

Set the value of the entry to be the path name for the picture, in Unix format with slashes between folder names:

/Library/Desktop Pictures/tower.jpg

Be sure to include any embedded spaces in file or folder names. Note how the example above has a space in the name “Desktop Pictures”.

Both went “sort of” smoothly, though there was a bit of gear grinding to get the two to work together.

Oddly enough, once everything was properly set, I just had to be patient and various problems disappeared on their own. The linkage between WordPress and Gallery 2 works better than ever, though they seemed on the verge of divorce right after the upgrade.

I did the Gallery 2 upgrade first, and it went perfectly smoothly. Everything seemed to work just fine once I was finished. The last time I updated Gallery 2, I had to go back in and reset several things that upgrading had unset.

Fixing my updated WordPress theme

The only problem with Gallery 2, and the first thing I noticed in WordPress was that I’d lost my customized splash and logo photos. G2 normally puts its own logo in the upper left page corner, and I replaced it with a house photo. The splash on the top of Smatters (the same house repeated) was replaced with a bland green bar. Also, there was some weirdness in the layout such that the blog name and tag line (“Matters of the Smith Atwood family”) were superimposed over part of the margin and over the missing image.

I fiddled with the theme configuration (which claimed to display the house image, even while displaying the green bar) and then presto – the image appeared. The title and tag line were still askew, but I decided I’d just live with it for now.

Hooking up with G2

Then I went to look at G2 – and couldn’t reach it from Smatters. There’s a link in the top menu (the “Photos” link) that’s supposed to take you right to the gallery. It took me to an error page complaining that the WordPress G2 plugin had not been “validated.”

Sure enough, the G2 plugin had lost track of the G2 URL and directory path, a goofup during updating, I suppose. I fixed it, and slogged through all the other WP-G2 plugin settings, but the plugin still refused to locate the gallery.

I decided I’d just live with that for now. I renamed the “Photos” link to say “Broken G2″ and added a separate one that led to a page that manually linked to the gallery. There was also a box on the left that provided a hierarchical search of the photo galleries: the box was empty, pending resolution of the plugin problems. I heaved a sigh, and hoped an upcoming patch would fix things.

Then I noticed that the Smatters heading had cleaned itself up: the title and tag lines appeared neatly at the top, outside of the house image. And – surprise – the G2 hierarchical search box was populated. And it worked – I could click on an album and hop inside.

So, without fixing anything at all, the blog formatting just fixed itself, and also healed its linkage to G2.

I went back and cleaned up the “Photos” link, and sure enough, everything was working.

Even better, G2 now seems to recognize when I’m logged in to WordPress, so I don’t have to log in twice.