Keys Corner

Apple is using the Olympics to market it’s Macs and professional image processing software, Aperture, to the press photographers attending. They’ve set up 50 workstations with 30” Cinema Displays and all the necessary software (Photoshop, Aperture, and more) for the pros to use in the Kodak Photographer’s Center. The set-up is being managed by Joe Schorr, Senior Product Manager of Photo Applications, who is also learning a lot about how the Apple applications can be improved by watching the pros working under very tight deadlines.

Sounds like a great idea – gets the best possible quality feedback on their photographic applications and the photographers get excellent support using the Apple set-up from the Apple experts.

Incidently, Kodak are publishing the Olympic Picture of the Day on thier web site – their take on the best photograph processed in thier center on each day of the Olympics.

We have just installed Aperture and switched to shooting our serious pictures in RAW format with the goal of using Aperture to organize the 1000’s of images we have on the Macs and to optimize the pictures when we upload them to the Macs. I’m currently working my way through Apple’s “Aperture 2 – Professionally Manage Digital Photographs“, which is a learning by doing course which involves you managing and manipulating several hundred digital images on the accompanying DVD ROM. I’m finding it an excellent way to get familiar with Aperture, depite the book containing a number of typos (mostly wrong command short-cuts).

The answer is far too few.

For a population of 60 million, it’s sad to see that only 602 people chose to study German at university in 2008 – down from 2288 ten years ago.

It’s not only at the higher levels that an interest in foreign languages has declined in the UK - the number taking French at GCSE has halved in the last 8 years.

Andrew Wheeler posted the following list on his blog Very Good Taste a couple of days ago, with these instructions (I don’t usually do these questionnaires, but this one took my fancy. If you think the list of what I’ve eaten and what I wouldn’t eat looks strange, I stopped eating meat about 15 years ago, in particular beef and other factory-farmed meat. Despite that slight handicap, I have eaten 36 of the foods below):

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

How long is a piece of string? ... or are Macs more expensive than Windows PCs?`

The answer is: it depends.

• About the same price for a similar specification
• About double for a basic machine

So it depends what your priorities are. But if you are considering buying a new Mac, remember that the rumour mill says that new models (scroll to near the end of the article) are probably going to be announced within the next two months.

OK - the Burj Dubai is not completed yet. That’s scheduled for September 2009, at a cost building of three Millau Viaducts. But it has already set a number of records:

• Tallest structure: over 636 m
• Building with most floors: 164
• Highest vertical concrete pumping: 601 m

It actually looks most impressive photographed from above. More photos here. There’s a short animation showing the speed of construction (which started on 2005-02-01) here.

Inditex, based in A Coruña (N. Spain), has overtaken Gap to become the world’s number one fashion retailer. You probably know at least one of their brand names, although I admit I hadn’t realised that all the following stores are part of the Inditex Group:

• Zara
• Bershka
• Pull and Bear
• Massimo Dutti
• Stradivarius

Not that that is all the brands- there’s also Zara Home, and a couple of brands I have never heard of before: Oysho and Uterqüe. Inditex’ success factor is the incredibly fast manufacturing and logistics chain, which allows them to get new fashions into their stores faster than the competition, and which has been the subject of intense analysis of management consultants and even the Harvard Business Review.

Actually, The Times puts a different slant on this article (Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop), but it is a very interesting account of the problems that Nicholas Negroponte faced and overcame to produce a laptop which at the moment actually costs $188, but which will be cheaper – and better – when the second revision hits the streets in 2010. The current product is a laptop, which in some respects is better than the much more expensive and better looking consumer equipment on the market. The article picks out three points:

The first is its screen. This was created by OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen. It is, first of all, cheap. Jepsen points out to me that the screen is the most expensive item in any laptop and yet, for some reason, it is not normally included in the hardware costs, so it gets overlooked. Secondly, it is superbly readable in any light. It isn’t glossy or reflective. It is probably the best laptop screen in the world.

The second thing is mesh networking. This means if you have 10 XOs in a room, they can all talk to each other directly without going through the internet. So even in an African village without wi-fi, the people could have their own intranet. Mesh also means that when they do have a wi-fi connection, its range can be massively extended as the mesh picks up the signal and rebroadcasts it. The XO has probably the best connectivity of any laptop in the world.

And third, it probably has the lowest power consumption of any laptop, essential in environments where power is at a premium.

The hardware, in short, is superb.

GMO, a successful American investment fund management group with a good track-record for long-term forecasts has been looking at the property markets in the USA and UK. Their conclusions are not going to cheer up house-owners in those countries, the Economist reports:

...By using the ratio of the median house price to the median family income, GMO reckons that prices in America need to fall by 17% instantly or stay flat for four years to return value. In Britain, prices need to fall by 38% or stay flat for seven years. And of course, there is no guarantee they will stay at fair value; in the mid-1990s, they dropped well below it…

A couple of days ago del.icio.us reinvented itself and became delicious.com. At the same time, the user interface was reworked and a bug was introduced which prevents the tag suggestions appearing when you add a new site to your delicious bookmarks.

The problem is very annoying (not only for me, many users have complained) but there is a solution. You need to use a different link to save your bookmarks.

You can use the link Save to delicious (full save) at the very bottom of this page. Save the link as a bookmark in your browser. When you use it, you’ll see a little triangle marked All my tags near the bottom of the window, which opens when you click on it, displaying your list of previously used tags.

While Germany’s government is still firmly under the control of the automobile lobby, and refuses to implement a general speed limit at all on the Autobahn, the Spanish government is introducing a speed limit of 80 km/hr on its dual carriageways and open roads (and 40 km/hr in towns). I understand that motorways, which have a speed limit of 120 would not affected.

The reductions were announced as part of a package of measures to cut Spain’s energy bill. Also included in the package is the removal of restrictions on commercial flight in military airspace, which will reduce flight times and save fuel.

I think 80 is a bit low, but we noticed that we got much better fuel consumption on our recent holiday run from Frankfurt down to Valencia and back when we kept to a maximum speed of 130 km/hr at all times, and I wouldn’t have any problem with a general limit in Germany of 120 or 130 km/hr. Fines for speeding in Spain are fairly heavy, by the way, starting at 100 Euro if you are 11 km/hr over the speed limit, so the speed limits are likely to be effective.