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Favorite Re-Invention No. 1: Hard Drive “Toaster”

If you are good about keeping backups or, simply have a large amount of digital data, you probably also have an extensive collection of external hard drive enclosures, and a power supply for each of them. And of course all of those power supplies are different, so getting your digital photo originals, or restoring a file from backup usually ends with all power supplies lined up on the floor to find the right one for a specific enclosure, and then yet another search for a USB or FireWire cable. Even worse, if you’re sick of this mess, and decide to simply swap out drives in a single enclosure, you’ll probably realize very soon that those enclosures simply are not made for constant drive swapping – pins bend and logic boards loosen.

The solution? A hard drive “toaster” (well, that’s what they look like, though I do hope none ever actually toasts a hard drive). These docking stations usually take 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA hard drives and connect externally with USB 2.0, and, in some models, eSATA and/or FireWire. And drives can even be hot-swapped. They’re available from a variety of manufacturers such as Thermaltake and Vantec (Vantec also has a two-drive version).

Favorite Re-Invention No. 2: X-Shape Drying Rack

If you use a drying rack outdoors and indoors, you probably know the difficulties of carrying an unfolded rack full of laundry inside through narrow doors when it is starting to rain. I recently fell in love with TVÄTTA (from IKEA – where else would you find something with this name!). The TVÄTTA drying rack (IKEA catalogue) can be folded almost entirely with clothes still on it, so it fits through the narrowest of doors. It may not look like it, but it fits as many clothes as a regular metal/plastic drying rack. And it’s wooden, so it’s looks much nicer indoors:

“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”

So, who am I going to write about? Well, I guess I’ll rehash a post from a while ago, about a beautiful little poem:

I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span.
So packets can reach every LAN.
First the Root must be selected
By ID it is elected.
Least cost paths from Root are traced
In the tree these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree.

That “algorhyme” is from Radia Perlman’s paper “An Algorithm for Distributed Computation of a Spanning Tree in an Extended LAN” (PDF). Yep, that’s the algorithm that prevents havoc when you have a loop in your network – either through intentional redundancy, or if someone decides that plugging both ends of an Ethernet cable into the wall is a good idea

Dr. Radia Perlman (by the way, that “Dr.” is a Ph.D. from MIT) also wrote some amazing books, holds an impressive number of patents, and received some of the most prestigious awards, including a USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (and she’s even sometimes referred to as the “mother of the Internet”).

You can find out more about Radia Perlman in her bio at Sun Microsystems and her Wikipedia page.

More about Ada Lovelace Day:

• Ada Lovelace Day
• Ada Lovelace Day Collection
• Finding Ada on twitter
• Ada Lovelace on Wikipedia

I’ve uploaded full-size versions of some of my photos that make good desktop backgrounds. Click the download link in the sidebar next to each picture to download a full resolution version.

Enjoy

I am currently playing around with the trial version of Aperture 2.0. As the Canon G9′s RAW format was not supported in Mac OS X until very recently, I kept the JPEGs in iPhoto, and the RAW images in folders somewhere else.

Aperture can show the JPEG + RAW of the same picture as a single image, so they do not take up unnecessary screen real estate. The RAW or JPEG master can be selected through the context menu:

But I couldn’t find a way to re-combine the JPEGs I had imported from iPhoto, and the RAW files from a separate location, though it worked fine when importing directly from the camera. A workaround would of course be to use stacks (easy, thanks to auto-stack), but that would mean that stacks are pretty much unusable for other purposes.

I tried throwing JPEGs + RAWs together in a folder, and re-import them, hoping that Aperture would then recognize them as belonging together. Didn’t work. In the end it turns out that Aperture only creates a combined master if the modification date of both files is exactly the same.

This can of course easily be done in Terminal (my RAW files were still unmodified and thus had the original date, so I used those as the reference date, it would of course also work the other way round):

for f in `ls *.CR2`; do touch -r $f `basename $f .CR2`.JPG; done


I’m still glad that I don’t have years of such files to re-combine, but at least it is a lot less annoying than using stacks for them. If anyone knows of a better way, please let me know

My updated key can be found here or on your favorite key server … same procedure as every year, I guess