Scan-090704-0009, originally uploaded by Jeff Self.

Here I am on Christmas morning 1968! Last Christmas as an only child. Scanned this in at 3000dpi from a 35mm negative on my Canon 8800F.

Grandma, Mom and Uncle Jim, originally uploaded by Jeff Self.

Here’s one of the scans I’ve done from a collection of old negatives. This set of negatives dates back to the mid 1940’s. I’m scanning these in at 2400dpi 16bit grayscale using VueScan. Then I’m doing some tweaking on them and storing them in Aperture.

I’ve decided to go with the 4-core Mac Pro.  I still don’t know why Apple gives it only four memory slots when the DDR3 memory is triple channel.  Would it have been too much for Apple to give it six slots?  Anyway, I have found out that the 4-core Mac Pro can support 4GB modules according to this article on Bare Feats.  So theoretically, this Mac Pro can have up to 16GB of memory.  So I’m going to order a 4-core Mac Pro with only one upgrade.  I’m bumping my graphics card to the ATI Radeon HD 4870.

So I’ll order the Mac Pro with the ATI graphics card, order the 12GB memory kit from OWC and order a second hard drive from NewEgg.  The cost will still come in a little higher than I want to pay, but I’ll have something much better than the iMac and won’t have to deal with changing software to work on Windows.  I’ll still have to build a PC running Ubuntu Linux to use for my telecine machine, but now I can build something really cheap or even pick up a used PC for next to nothing.

I’ve got about 10,000 feet of 8mm film that I will need to get converted.  I’ve been looking at ways to build my own telecine device with a scanner.  I don’t think I’ll be able to use a Mac for this, so I’m really looking at building my own PC and running Ubuntu on it.  Then use some Python code to talk to the SANE interface of the scanner.  But thats for another post.

Once I get this film transferred, I’ll need to edit it.  I currently run Final Cut Pro.  But the problem I see is a lack of hardware from Apple that suits my needs.  Lets take a look at the three machines I’m looking at.

8-core Mac Pro

I love the 8-core Mac Pro.  Its a beautiful machine.  Dual Xeon 5500 Nehalem processors.  Its got everything I want in a desktop machine.  There’s only one problem.  I’m not a professional video editor.  I can’t afford the $4000 price tag.  So its a no go.

4-core Mac Pro

This is the red-headed step child from Apple.  They really don’t want you to buy this machine.  They cripple it just enough to convince pro shops to just bite the bullet and go for the 8-core Mac Pro.  If this Mac Pro came with six memory slots, I’d be all over it.  But its only got four.  It just feels dirty to me that Apple would go out of their way to cripple a machine like this.

iMac

So what about the consumer Mac?  Could I settle for the iMac?  It has decent performance, definitely much better than my dual 2.0Ghz G5, and is in my price range.  Except its got one major problem.  It has 2 memory slots.  It comes with 4GB of memory.  If I want to upgrade to the maximum of 8GB, it will cost over $900.  Why?  Because the iMac is using DDR3 memory.  And the 4GB modules are expensive.  So if I want to get an iMac with 8GB of memory, the price tag will be in the range of the Quad-core Mac Pro.

And the winner is?

So right now, I can say that none of these Macs work for me.  Which really sucks.  I love Apple hardware, and Apple software even more, but it seems like Apple isn’t catering to the prosumer like me.

So what am I to do?  As I mentioned earlier, I plan to build a PC that will run Ubuntu.  The problem is video editing sucks on Linux.  So what is my other option?  I could install Windows 7 on the PC as well and then install Adobe Premiere Pro to do my video editing.  Even after building an Intel i7 machine and buying Premiere Pro, it would still come out cheaper than a Mac Pro.  This would also lead to another problem.  I use Aperture.  If I make the transition to a Windows machine, I could replace Aperture with Adobe Lightroom.

Apple could make this real easy by just releasing a computer that fits in between the iMac and the Mac Pro.  Something that runs on an i7 processor and is expandable.  Sell it for between $1500 and $2000.  I’d order one tonight.

But without that much wanted Apple computer, economics may play a role in my future hardware.  I can’t stand Windows.  I love OS X.  But if I can keep a $1000 in my pocket, I may have to go to the dark side.

• Introduction to the Google App Engine
• Geographic Information Systems in Python
• Python 401: Some Advanced Topics
• Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming

On Friday morning, I’m chairing one of the sessions which includes the following talks:

• How to Give a Python Talk (Andrew M. Kuchling)
• Python in the Enterprise – How to Get Permission (Stuart Williams)
• Giving Back and Helping Expand the Python Community (Kamon Ayeva and Roberto Allende)

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone I follow on Twitter and hope to absorb as much as possible regarding Python and Django.

With the losses in my family the last few years, I am now on a mission to preserve as much history as possible.  I am scanning negatives and photos and storing them in Aperture.  I have a box full of 8mm film that I need to have converted.  I’ve got a ton of geneology stuff that my mom had.  I also have Digital 8 tapes of my own kids that I am converting to MPEG4 movies.  I’m worried that my Sony Digital 8 camera is going to fail before I can get all these tapes migrated.

So this is my mission for 2009.  How am I going to accomplish all this?  I’ll blog about this in the future.

You can find the DjangoCon 2008 playlist here.

A couple of years after I left, the I.T. department finally decided it was time to have a presence on the web.  So they wrote a couple of “eServices”, bulk trash pickup, real estate assessment, etc.  But they never thought about taking back control of the website itself.  They concentrated on what I call “business apps” but totally ignored other types of web apps.

In the three years that I’ve been back, there have been on and off discussions about getting a Content Management System.  The city originally looked at products like Vignette (don’t know why they thought they could afford that one).  Well, the discussions are back on and this team it is getting serious.  But there is a problem.  Remember how I mentioned the website is not under I.T.’s control?  You guessed it.  PIO would like to make the decision on the product.  And I’m not fond of what they’ve chosen.  They are sold on Ektron.  While Ektron is full-featured and could do everything we want (actually its probably overkill), I have a few issues with it.  It’s expensive, maybe not to a city budget, but it is to me.  And more importantly, it runs on Microsoft-only technology.  It’s .Net, requires SQL Server, and uses Windows Servers with IIS.  Yuck.  I prefere to run my apps on a Linux server using PostgreSQL for the database.  As a developer who would like to be writing cool web apps for citizens, rather than boring business apps, this is personal.  I don’t write .Net now and I have no intention of writing .Net.

As an alternative, we looked at Alfresco.  Alfresco is commercial open source.  Alfresco is very powerful and web content management is only a piece of the Alfresco puzzle.  Alfresco also does document management, image management, and record keeping.  Unfortunately, our design team in PIO weren’t thrilled by it.  I liked it but I now believe that it would probably be too technical and demanding for the few we have on our web team.

The next CMS we looked at is CommonSpot by Paper Thin.  CommonSpot is a ColdFusion-based CMS.  It has many of the same features that Ektron has and runs on our current J2EE platform on WebSphere.  On a side note, we’re looking to migrate away from WebSphere to JBoss, but I’ll save that for another story.  The biggest drawback I have to CommonSpot is that it needs ColdFusion.  We have ColdFusion and I’ve written several apps in it, but my long-term goal is to move away from ColdFusion and utilize other languages and frameworks like Groovy and Grails.

So what’s left?  I’ve looked at Drupal and Joomla but I don’t really care for PHP.  I really want a CMS that I can build apps to work within its framework.  We looked at Plone in the past, but I’ve never been a big fan of Plone.  I always thought it was too complicated.  Do you write your app in Plone?  Or do you go down a layer and use Zope and the ZMI?

I’m a big fan of Django, so I contacted the Ellington team and spoke to them about Ellington today.  Since Ellington is designed primarily for newspaper and publishing sites, I’m going to try and persuade our team that a city website should probably be more like a newspaper site and that Ellington might be a good fit.  It doesn’t have the features of Ektron or CommonSpot, but I believe it may have just what we need.  Plus, if there is a piece that is missing, I could add it myself or find it in the Django community.

What have I been doing this year?  Well, I went to PyCon in March.  It was awesome.  I went to CFUnited in June.  I thought it was second rate.  And I got some training in Flex in July with FigLeaf.  Waiting on my copy of Flex Builder to come in so I can start coding with it.  Its some pretty cool software.

I’ve been looking at using Groovy and Grails for some future development at work.  I’d like to integrate it with Flex for some applications I have in mind.  I’m really getting interested in doing some serious mapping stuff especially since ESRI has opened ArcGIS up with the release of 9.3.  They have API’s available for Javascript and Flex.

I bought a new MacBook Pro in June.  I downsized from a 17″ to a 15.4″.  I really could have used a new Mac Pro, but I can’t afford one of those right now.  So I’ll get another year out of my PowerMac Dual 2.0ghz G5.