Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Visiting family for my birthday; if I don’t respond to your email it is because I am soaking in sunshine.

I’m thankful, among other things, for the opportunity to have just concluded the trip of a lifetime with my wonderful wife. (She says, of course, to be optimistic and to assume we’ll do something even better sometime.)

A couple of pictures from the last morning of the trip, off the coast of the big island in Hawai’i:

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good workflow for editing a large set of photos using at least two and probably three laptops? It should be able to do f-spot-like tagging and favorit-ing of pictures, as well as cropping, simple color adjustments, etc. Goal is for Krissa and I, working together but often on our own machines, to turn 5,000 unedited honeymoon pictures into a smaller, organized, cropped, etc., set of pictures.

I’d love to just use f-spot, but as best as I can tell there is no way to share an f-spot collection (files+metadata) across multiple machines/user accounts- happy to be wrong on that count if possible.

I think our visit to the tiger sanctuary in Ranthamore has gone alright…

(Special thanks to Hema at Wipro for reminding me of the existence of Ranthambore, and to the great staff at Tiger Safari Resort Hotel in Sawai Madhopur for helping us through some complications along the way, like me misplacing our passports…)

FYI for friends, etc.: I am going to continue journaling privately for post-trip publication, probably, but rather than bore entire planets worth of people in the meantime, I’m just mentioning small things on identica (with republishing to twitter and facebook) and posting pictures on my gallery install. Both of those have RSS feeds so you can subscribe if you want.

Just a brief note here to say thanks to the gallery3 developers- they appear to have taken the lessons of wordpress and other successful open source web services to heart; the new gallery (even though still in beta) is a pleasure to set up and (more importantly) a pleasure to use. Even in the current, occasionally still rough state, it is enough of an improvement over gallery 2 that I’m going to use it for the handful of wedding pictures I’ve posted and honeymoon pictures to come.

I realize that the import from the old stuff is imperfect (lots of over-rotation now that it does it automatically), and that should be a consideration if you’re considering upgrading from g2 to g3, but that’s something I can fix later.

A picture from last weekend, spent in the not-quite-high Sierras:

Krissa and Luis on the very, very, very narrow and twisty road to Edison Lake

Vows are finally written, and even printed. Have not wanted to throw my computer all day, and can even breathe on an almost-normal basis. Things are looking up! :)

A kind blog reader suggested a gross hack which rescued my vows. (Cat, strings, and grep should never be a part of the process of the vows, though admittedly in my case it might seem appropriate.) Krissa may marry me (and continue to deal with my operating system) yet.

Battery life of my HP mini with WinXP: 3-5 hours, depending on use. (I hear Win7 is better.)

Battery life of my HP mini with Fedora 11: struggling to get one hour.

Pathetic.

[Ed. later: should have mentioned that this is having done everything powertop suggests. Top culprit seems to be hrtimer_start_range_ns, which is much discussed but has no solution that I can find.]