Tag

[Enlarge] Naked Ladies blooming in one of our naturalized parks in Sacramento

Well, I still haven’t verified that the site displays properly in Internet Explorer (I view it in FireFox and Safari) but I have gotten a lot of what I wanted done. I have changed the site from the traditional category and calendar-based to being tag-based. If you’re not familiar with tagging—don’t feel left out. It is fairly new but quite useful—so it probably time you caught up. You are going to be seeing a lot more of it around in the future (prediction on my part).

A Tag Cloud is a weighted list of keywords used to identify a number of items, in this case the subjects in entries in this fotoblog. In my right sidebar, you will see list of words. The larger words are more frequently used in connection with entries. And as you might expect, foto is the largest.

The interesting thing is the tags in the list are larger based on how often they are used, which also means it will change over time. When you select a tag, you will open all postings that have that tag in common. That means selecting a large tag might bring in a lot of entries so you do need to think about what might happen if you select fotos. There are several people working on an automated way to bring in tag intersections, but for now, you can join tags by typing something like http://www.memoriafoto.net/index.php?tag=pets+fotos like I did here. I used the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress to implement this.

If you are interested in other tag cloud and tagging applications—take a look at Delicious as I have and some of the other popular sites on the Internet like Flickr. Interesting stuff….

wp:thumb src=”2005-08-28-7.jpg” cap=”A low crawling vine also in the park—another reminder of the early family home that once graced this spot.”—> ->

El

[Enlarge] A cascade of color from our geraniums.

Over the last day or so I have completed upgrading to Tiger (OS X 10.4 for the Mac). All in all, I can say it is a great upgrade and from the perspective of the operating system – the process went fine. A few notes are in order however:

• All my regular applications were up to date (at the latest available patch version for that application and the version of OS X I was using). Doing this gives you a better chance of having things work properly when you use the upgrade method of installing Tiger.
• Backup before you start. I used CarbonCopy and cloned my whole disk to a backup partition on my attached drive before I started and then booted off the clone to insure I had a good backup. I used it for a little while to make sure the backup had taken hold.
• Have enough time to go through the process. It took about two hours for the upgrade to run its course on a 60GB hard disk that reported it had 20GB free. Upgrading my applications and debugging issues has taken several more hours – so I would say you should have a day where you can try applications one by one and see if they come up and operate as you expect.
• Most of my smaller, productivity applications (Omnigraffle Pro, Novamind, Cyberduck, etc) needed updates to work on Tiger. Many of the larger applications (Photoshop, Excel, etc) had special issues. Some important apps (Carbon Copy and Diskwarrior as examples) don’t work at all on Tiger yet. There are workarounds for most everything but you have to have time to find them and deal with them before you need to use your applications for actual work. I found that to make Photoshop work I had to remove it and all the Creative Suite applications from my install, reboot, reinstall, and reboot before Photoshop would open images. I found that Excel would hang until I removed my printer driver. Tiger has some issues with printer drivers and you may have to reinstall them to make things work properly.
• I deleted my backup before I realized that Carbon Copy doesn’t yet work with Tiger. It turned out OK because I had already cleared all the other issues and I am now creating an image of my hard disk using Disk Utility on my backup partition. But it scared me at first because I am leaving on a trip and I didn’t want to go with my hard disk no backed up properly. It isn’t what I want for a backup, but it will do in a pinch.

  All things aside, the upgrade is well worth the effort. If I had a choice, I would have waited a little longer to do it because I know there will be further upgrades to applications as reports come in on issues. I have tried the Spotlight search, the new Mail, Dashboard Widgets, and as many other little things as I could and found everything pretty much to my liking. I think the Widgets will become a wonderful resource as people find and share ways to use them. Right now, a lot of them are little more than demonstrations of the possibilities. I used the Spotlight to find the GPG mail bundle and delete it so Mail would run (you have to delete it and upgrade GPG). I did find that for some reason the available space on my hard disk went from 20GB to 36GB following the upgrade. The only reason I can think of is there could have been some inconsistencies in the structure that the upgrade found and corrected as it did it’s job. I know the file index structure has changed significantly for Spotlight. I didn’t lose any data in the process. —>

  May 7th, 2005 by Mike
  Tagged as Apple | No Comments »

Coming

I’ve been waiting for several months now for the opportunity to return to Mexico – the time has finally arrived. Next week I will return to Morelia.

Of course it isn’t quite as simple as that. In my life things never seem to be simple. I will be in Morelia for only a few days before I head to home in Cueramaro. Then it will be back to Morelia so I can get to a meeting in Philadelphia, returning to direct to Leon and Cueramaro the next week. I expect my luggage will be well traveled this trip.

As it turns out this trip comes as the new version of OS X - Tiger comes out so I will have to squeeze in buying it before I leave. I just finished all the preparation for installing it, including a full, bootable backup of my current install to my external drive, so maybe I will be able to get it set up before I leave. I hope so. As a long time admirer of Apple computers, it has been wonderful these past few months to have the time to explore my 15’ PowerBook, now it is time to put it to the real test on the road.

Thanks to a large community of Mac developers and enthusiasts, this trip and a great deal of what I have to do will be aided by special applications and scripts that I have found useful. As a person who has used both Windows and Linux applications over the past few years, the number of small, specialized applications available on OS X is surprising. Despite what you might have heard, once you have an understanding of how the current versions of Apple computers work, you will almost always find a script or application to make some repetitive or complicated task easier. Compatibility with other computers, including Windows application formats, has not been a problem. I have ways to run Windows applications if necessary, but as yet, they languish in my applications folder.

I will write up something about how the install of the new Tiger goes soon and of course, there will be many pictures and stories from my trips. We will be getting back to “normal” (whatever that means) soon… —>

A

In my work, I do a lot of brainstoming. That might sound like something that would be a lot of fun to do for a living, and it is. But, like anything you do a lot, over time it becomes a process in which you use a lot of tools to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I have used Wikis a few times over the years to get people involved in documenting their creative processes, but because they are usually installed on a server with a webserver, I never considered using one as my private notepad. I realized my oversight today when I read my son’s post on his tests of tools to help him in writing.

Although I plan to buy a new notebook computer soon, I don’t think I would select a Mac just for the editing programs. So I decided to look for some reference to desktop wiki to substitute for the VooDooPad wiki he mentioned in his journal. I looked around and found myself using the MoinMoin DesktopEdition within a few minutes. (If you are using Windows, do use the Windows download version to get it running quickly)

Using it, I managed to get the rebranding process done I have procrastinated on for a couple of weeks. Is it the tool or the idea of trying out a new toy that got me going? I don’t really know and only time will tell. In the meantime – Wiki Wiki! (Quick Quick) —>