Last October when I bought a Canon Rebel XTi camera I found that if I shot in RAW mode that Picasa (version 2.6.0) would display the images with a strange blue-purple hue. I filed a bug with Google back then, and got the standard response that the camera wasn’t supported yet but they would pass it along to their development team. I had naively been assuming that if the CR2 format worked for the XT then it would work for the XTi. Clearly not the case. I haven’t found a good explanation about what is different, other than the size of the image.

Now it’s almost March and while they don’t support it yet, there is a posting in their forum collecting information on cameras that they don’t support and certainly the Rebel XTi is a popular one. In the meantime I’ve been playing with a trial of Adobe Lightroom that just went 1.0. I’m still a finding my way around, but it seems pretty nice for what I need, but a little sluggish in parts. Currently there is a limited time price of $199 on Lightroom before going to $299 in April. Having to actually pay for software is almost foreign to me at this point. Like, shouldn’t they just give it away for free?

After reading this piece on Bill Gates limiting the computer usage of his kids and later that day seeing Apple’s latest iPhone “Hello” commercial, I got to thinking about what their teenage rebellion will look like. It’s inevitable that teenagers will push back against their parents, even ones as rich as Bill & Melinda. Will one of them throw out their Zune and come home with an iPod? Start touting how OSX had certain features before Vista? That must be healthier in the long run than if they start trying to spread tuberculosis and malaria just to spite their parents.

Recently I put an end to my waking up in a cold sweat muttering, “my music! my photos! my documents!”, by signing up with the online backup service Mozy. Having better backups seems to always fall to the bottom of my todo list. I’d been thinking of building a local RAID server or maybe using ZFS, but this never seemed to happen (and still wouldn’t protect against a fire.) Instead, for $55 bucks per year Mozy offers unlimited secure backups and a simple front end to configure it (currently Windows only, with an OSX client soon). I looked at several Amazon S3-backed services, but didn’t see one looked both simple, inexpensive and mature enough that I would trust all my precious data to it. The NYTimes David Pogue’s positive review pushed me to finally signup. Here’s my impression after 6 weeks of using it:

• The price seems right. $55 / year / computer for unlimited space seems fair, and a good deal compared to services like JungleDisk that charge for both the amount stored and transferred. They provide a web restore to recover destroyed files, or a FedEx option where they mail you a DVD.
• It looks secure enough to be trusted, using 448-bit Blowfish encryption over SSL. You can provide your own key or let them autogenerate one.
• The Windows UI is pretty easy to use. The preconfigured backup rules didn’t capture quite what I wanted, but it is easy enough to erase those and create new ones. Also it was simple to schedule the backups to take place at night, which I prefer to run continuously. I know that I’m lazy with these things, so I wanted to set it up once and then forget about it. One nit is that when Mozy is “suspended”, the taskbar icon doesn’t change, which confused me when I was trying to figure out why a scheduled backup didn’t run. It would be better to have a different overlay that made it more obvious.
• The initial backup of my 30+ GB of data took several days. The Mozy FAQ states:
  

  For a typical system, on a typical broadband line, Mozy backs up data at about 2-4 GB per day - but if left undisturbed on fast connection, you can backup over 9GB in a single day.

  If the backup is run without any throttling, I typically get ~360Kb/sec. upload speed. This is pretty close to the maximum upload speed I get from RCN, so Mozy isn’t slowing things down much. This caused some problems with my Vonage phone service, since Mozy was filling the outbound pipe. Mozy lets you throttle how much bandwidth to use, which can help the problem but lengthen the backup. During the initial backup I hit a few “connection errors” which required the backup to be restarted (more on this later). After the initial backup, further backups are incremental and have run successfully.

• I’m a little concerned because they are a young company. Will they be around in 5 years? At least the guys running it appear to be a sharp crew from this article.
• Around the time I signed up they were getting good press, like this plug from Walt Mossberg, and struggled to keep up with the demand. Many new users like myself were causing some of the connection problems I’d hit. To their credit, they sent an email explaining the situation, apologizing for the problems, describing what they had done to improve the network glitches and customer support slowness, and offered 1, 2 or 3 months of free service. I took the extra service and was relatively pleased with their response to the issue.

From the blog of Charles Nutter it looks like JRuby is very close to supporting Rails,

I think the truth is that we could really announce support for Rails now. Almost all the visible, outstanding issues with actually *running* Rails apps have been resolved, and most apps and scripts work fine.

While this is very impressive, and full speed ahead gents, it opens the question of what will the response be when it is fully baked? Will the Rubyists starting invoking System.out.println and require 'java' (ouch!)? Will the Railers jump on the JVM? In the Rails community now until now, the word “Java” is usually a punchline (unless prefixed with “recovering”). And those who develop in it are only a half-step above child molesters.

The RoR weblog has plugged the progress of JRuby, and some are excited about Ruby on the JVM. JRuby could provide the catalyst for boatloads of Java developers to sneak Ruby into their shops, nay, “enterprises”. But is the Rails community ready for unclean hordes who develop on Windows, don’t use TextMate and aren’t Twitter addicts?

We’ll see what 2007 brings. There are cases now in Rails where the best alternative is in Java, such as search. Ferret is out there, but has issues running large deployments that are addressable with SOLR. (The pure could tell themselves that they weren’t integrating Java, just calling a web service. Still clean!) Perhaps this will be like ThroughAssociations before 1.1 or Mongrel all over again. (Very quickly it went from “FastCGI is fine” to “Mongrel is teh bomb”.) Embracing change is good. So perhaps when there is a real alternative to the standard ruby interpreter there will be a considered evaluation at the possible future speed improvements and libraries in JRuby. Or maybe the diehards will move to OCaml and Haskell to keep their secret decoder rings. I’d suspect that JRuby’s biggest impact will be to make Ruby/Rails more acceptable to corporate types and lower the barrier for Java heads to make the switch. Hopefully the natives will be welcoming.

As a society we need to be careful about abusing the name Gary. There is only so much that they, the Garys, will take before rising up against the rest of us. Sure, we can all agree it is a funny name. We laughed watching Ace and Gary and all the Garys out there winced. (Although many Lances breathed a sigh of relief as a torch was passed.) We laughed still as all those Garys were further mocked on The Simpsons when God’s own innocent unicorn, named Gary, was killed needlessly. A fictitious Jesse Jackson confused his friend Gary with the Taliban on the phone because apparently Garys sound like “Agga gaga”. Even the Brits are in on the act, with the original The Office naming their idiot character Gareth, a Welsh variant of Gary.

So, over time it became the go-to name for easy laughs. When a character is to be a buffoon or ridiculous, they go with Gary. (And all that crime in Gary, Indiana isn’t helping anyone.) Since the 1950s height of Gary Cooper’s fame, there has been a “Gary Genocide” of new babies with that godforsaken name.

Now it’s time for the rest of us to be worried. It was a hilarious joke that we coulnd’t let die. There a lot of Garys out there, and sure, they seem nice and harmless, but inside they’re pissed. (Not unlike the Gary on South Park’s All About Mormons.) Did you know the name Gary means “spear thrower”? Yeah, it does. Gary Oldham has been quite for a while. Don’t think he could lead the uprising? Well, watch out, that bastard could look like anyone of us.