Tag Archives: Tech

How I Use Lightroom: Getting Photos In

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is an excellent piece of software I’ve recommended to many of my friends who have been bitten by the photography bug.  It catalogs and organizes all of my photos, allows me to quickly and efficiently edit them, and assists in pushing the end results for others to see. While on the surface it is targeted to professionals, I’m no professional and wouldn’t enjoy photography nearly as much without it.

Because it is so configurable, it is often very helpful to get a look at how others use its many features.  So that’s what I’m going to do with this series of posts titled How I Use Lightroom.  I won’t go to mind-numbing depth into every feature it has to offer, but instead will show you what I think is a very approachable and practical method for getting your money’s worth out of it.

So let’s get started with the first thing you need to do with it – get photos INTO lightroom.

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Lightroom 3, the iPhone, and Crashing on Import

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A few weeks ago I imported photos from my iPhone into Lightroom 3.  Ever since, I’ve had Lightroom crash on several occasions when I’ve gone to import photos off of a Compact Flash card.  I’m running Windows 7, 64-bit. I was resorting to a reboot to clear it up, but tonight I had too much other stuff running that I didn’t want to stop for a reboot.  So I started looking around.

I noticed that in Windows Explorer, there was a “phantom” iPhone appearing when my phone was definitely not plugged in.  Here’s how it looked:

 

My theory is that Lightroom was trying to enumerate devices and was getting to this one and failing.  Unfortunately there isn’t an option to Eject the device from here, so I turned to Devices and Printers in the Control Panel.  In the list of devices, sitting down in the Unspecified section was one called Apple Mobile Device USB Driver.  If you right-click and select Troubleshoot, Windows does a decent job at figuring out that there is no longer a device attached and removes it from the system.  No more phantom iPhone.

I opened Lightroom back up, clicked Import… and Voila!  Fixed!

FogBugz on IIS 7.5

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If you are running FogBugz on IIS 7.5 (Windows 2008 R2), and trying to submit crash reports via scoutSubmit.asp, you may find that you are greeted with HTTP 404 errors.  I spent a few mintes tracking this down, and it’s due to the length of the querystring used in the request, and IIS 7.5′s request filtering.

You’ll need to edit FogBugz’s web.config and add to the System.WebServer node the following:

<security>
     <requestFiltering>
           <requestLimits maxQueryString="15360"/>
     </requestFiltering>
</security>

That will set the querystring length to 15KB, which should suffice.

My New USB 3.0 Drobo S

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A special “Thank You” goes out to Data Robotics for sponsoring the Daddy On Board Podcast (put on by Clayton Morris and Mike Quackenbush), which I watch and listen to regularly.  It’s a fun podcast put on by a couple of new fathers that discuss a wide range of baby and toddler-related topics.  Good stuff and worth a listen, check it out.

Anyway, several weeks ago I tossed my name into a drawing they were putting on for a new Drobo, and won!

For those unfamiliar, a Drobo is a small box that holds several hard drives and makes them function as one, larger drive.   More importantly, there is data protection built-in so that your data is safe even if a drive (or two, depending on configuration) dies.

It arrived today, the brand-new edition of the Drobo S.  This new one has USB 3.0, Firewire, and eSATA and can hold up to 5 drives.   I don’t have any USB 3 ports here yet, so it’s currently connected to my desktop via the slower USB 2.  A USB 3 card should be arriving early next week :)

Here’s the Drobo with 3 new 1TB drives (yes, I label my drives so I know how old they are):

Setup was a piece of cake, and it fits perfectly in a small table next to my desk.  Here it is ready to start storing lots of data:

I have it configured to be able to survive 2 drives failing, so that 3TB of raw storage really only gets me 1 TB of usable space.  But that’s fine, I’m paranoid about hard drives eating my data.

Now that it’s here, I am moving 223 GB of home videos to it that were too large to fit in with my standard backup procedures.   Then I need to figure out where exactly this will fit in with all of my other data storage -  I’m pretty sure it will just hold backups, but which backups (I already have 2 RAID arrays here with further copying to external drives for off-site rotation) is the question.

Capitalizing First Letter of Every Word with Powershell 2

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I came across the need to captalize the first letter of every word (I needed this for names, including hyphenated names) with PowerShell, and learned that PowerShell 2 has a great feature that comes in handy here.

I first tried using the PowerShell -replace operator but you can’t do function calls or anything complex in the replacement parameter.  So $name = $name -replace '\b(\w)', '$1.ToUpper()' doesn’t work.

If I were using C#, I would just use Regex.Replace, making use of a MatchEvaluator delegate (using lambda expression syntax): name = Regex.Replace(name, '\b(\w)', m => m.Value.ToUpper());

Thankfully, in PowerShell 2 you can now use an script block as a delegate. So my problem is solved with $name = [Regex]::Replace($name, '\b(\w)', { param($m) $m.Value.ToUpper() });.

If you’re unfamiliar with the MatchEvaluator, for each regular expression match encountered, the delegate function gets called and that function’s return value is the string used as the replacement. So in my example here, '\b(\w)' matches the first letter of every word. That letter gets passed to my script block as a .NET Match object, whose Value is the matched letter. The returned uppercase version of the letter is put back into the original string. Done!

Favorite Software, 2010 Edition

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Almost 2 years ago I posted a little about my favorite software titles.  Tonight I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my current favorites and see how the list has changed.

  1. Microsoft OneNote is still on the list, albeit the new 2010 version.   This is still where I organize everything and take notes daily.
  2. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom also stayed on the list, new on version 3.  My favorite V3 features are the much improved noise reduction and lens correction profiles.
  3. Trillian gets used just about every hour of every day.  I’m currently using Trillian 5 Beta on the desktop and now enjoy their iPhone too.  Version 5 is promised to bring chat history syncronized across devices, I can’t wait for that.  This version also handles Twitter and Facebook much better than the prior, so it is slowly becoming my preferered desktop twitter/facebook viewer and publisher.
  4. Calibre is new to this list.  In 2008 I didn’t have a Kindle so I had no need for an eBook librarian.  While this tool could really use some commercial UI polish, nothing else like it exists.  I purchase alot of tech eBooks and download a few docs, and they all get stored in Calibre.  From there I can easily push them to the Kindle which is better than either paying Amazon for wireless document delivery or using Windows Explorer for the task.  I need to do a whole post on Calibre at some point, it’s a very versatile tool that any eBook Reader owner should know about.
  5. LastPass has supplanted the TrueCrypt/KeePass combination for storing passwords.  LastPass is FAR more convenient, with its functionality is anchored in its online service.  Using LastPass I have access to passwords from any one of my computers.  One by one I’m letting it generate strong passwords for me, ones I couldn’t remember if I tried.  And I dont’ need to – their browser plugins handle auto-logging me in, among other great conveniences like form filling.
  6. TrueCrypt gets used indirectly every day.  My automated backup sets get copied to a TrueCrypt encrypted drive every morning.

So there you have it.  Most have stayed on the list with even better versions than before, and there are a couple newcomers that have become indispensible to me.

Have you any favorites, internet?

iOS 4 Wi-fi and Exchange Syncing Problems

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Ever since upgrading to iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G and then on the new iPhone 4 I have been seeing problems connecting to my local Exchange server when I was on wifi.   Even with previous versions of the OS, the iPhone never seemed to do Push reliably on when on the same wifi network as the Exchange server.   The problems with iOS 4, however, seem more severe.  Even force-checking the email on wifi would result in the phone just sitting there “connecting..” but never actually working.

Tonight I decided to take some time to look into it – and I think I have it fixed.  Maybe this will help some others with the same problems (and judging by various forums, there are plenty of you out there).

The issue boiled down to a combination of iOS 4 being unable to resolve DNS names ending in .local and my local DNS configuration.   The mail server hostname I the phone was accessing wasn’t .local since it’s publicly accessible, but it did have a CNAME DNS record on my internal DNS server that aliased to the .local name of the server.   On a hunch I removed the CNAME and just made an A record point to the local ip address of the server, rebooted the phone, and voila!  My local Exchange mail works as it should!

To to summarize – don’t have any .local names involved in the lookup of your mail server.    Change your DNS config if you can, and reboot the phone.

Microsoft Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2008

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If you use Visual Studio 2008 and install Microsoft Office 2010, it looks like there’s a very good chance your Visual Studio Web Designer will be clobbered. The symptom is when you go to visually edit a web page (html, aspx, etc) in Visual Studio, it will appear to completely lock up. Actually, I think what is happening is a message box is popping up, UNDER Visual Studio so you cannot click it or do anything but End Task to close Visual Studio.

Some searching around quickly came up with a few things to try.

You need to run “C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12\Office Setup Controller\Setup.exe” and select Repair (drop the “(x86)” portion if you’re running 32-bit).

On one of my machines, this was sufficient to repair the problem and Visual Studio went back to normal. However, on another computer I had to completely uninstall that software by selecting Uninstall instead of Repair. When that is done I then ran the Web Designer Core setup from the Visual Studio CD located at \WCU\WebDesignerCore\WebDesignerCore.exe. Be aware that if you were running VS Service Pack 1, you’ll want to reapply it after that setup completes.

One the topic of the Office 2010 install, I must say that my experience has been dismal. In addition to this problem of breaking Visual Studio 2008, on one of my machines I had to manually uninstall Office 2007 because the new 64-bit setup detected that the old version wasn’t copletely gone after uninstall. As you can guess, this was a pretty lengthy process, following a document from Microsoft led to about 10 minutes of hunting down and deleting various directories, files, and registry keys. Ouch.

Office 2010 is a nice upgrade, but Microsoft sure seemed to have botched the install.