Migration
Aperture: Migrating From 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.1
2008-04-02
Adam Tow has been migrating his collection of more than 100,000 photos to new drives and to Aperture 2.1. He writes about his experience on his blog. It was a little complicated because he had duplicates and a mixture of managed and referenced photos and had several different schemes of library organization in use.
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Aperture 2.0: Updating And Migrating
2008-02-14
After playing with the free trial of Aperture 2.0 yesterday, I purchased the upgrade package and receive my key today. The Aperture menu has an Authorize entry and I could put my key in immediately and get full use of the product.
The next thing I did was update my library. I did a couple of smaller libraries first as a sanity check, and all was well. My 90GB library with 32,000 images took about ten minutes to convert. Inside I can see that the original Aperture database has now been split into two. The original database pretty much doubled in size, while the new one is obviously dedicated to Blobs (binary large objects) and is quite small.
The surprise can when I quit Aperture: quitting took more than 20 minutes! The sheet said Writing Files... and I believe it was updating the database. It also used up an ungodly amount of RAM. I only have 3GB and it sucked up everything it could find. I sampled the Aperture process while it was doing this and saw 16 Exabytes in use -- about 5 billion times what I actually have:
It did finish, and all was well. My guess is that this delay was because I am still on Tiger and this is a Core Data efficiency problem.
Next I looked at the possibility of migrating my images to the new RAW converter:
Entire projects can be converted, or just individual selections. I selected Migrate and got this rather confusing dialog:
Upgrade existing RAW images
This means that of the images selected all the non-RAWs will be left alone. The RAW images will have their RAW converter changed to 2.0 and the versions and previews updated. While I can't go back on this, I can individually set the RAW conversion back to 1.1 from the RAW Fine Tuning adjustment panel if I want:
I can also create new versions manually and compare the RAW 1.1 and RAW 2.0 converters side by side for individual images. Note that none of this affects the masters. The reference to "images" should be to "versions".
Create upgraded versions of existing RAW images
This works exactly the same as Upgrade existing RAW images except that a new version is created (in a stack) with the original and the converter changed to 2.0 for that new version only.
All images
Means all selected RAW images. The other two selections are similar.
I don't recommend updating converters en masse. I am finding that the new converter is quite different, particularly for heavily adjusted images. Here is a quick example: RAW 2.0 is on the left here:
The new RAW converter does do a much better job with highlights.
The next thing I did was update my library. I did a couple of smaller libraries first as a sanity check, and all was well. My 90GB library with 32,000 images took about ten minutes to convert. Inside I can see that the original Aperture database has now been split into two. The original database pretty much doubled in size, while the new one is obviously dedicated to Blobs (binary large objects) and is quite small.
The surprise can when I quit Aperture: quitting took more than 20 minutes! The sheet said Writing Files... and I believe it was updating the database. It also used up an ungodly amount of RAM. I only have 3GB and it sucked up everything it could find. I sampled the Aperture process while it was doing this and saw 16 Exabytes in use -- about 5 billion times what I actually have:
It did finish, and all was well. My guess is that this delay was because I am still on Tiger and this is a Core Data efficiency problem.
Next I looked at the possibility of migrating my images to the new RAW converter:
Entire projects can be converted, or just individual selections. I selected Migrate and got this rather confusing dialog:
Upgrade existing RAW images
This means that of the images selected all the non-RAWs will be left alone. The RAW images will have their RAW converter changed to 2.0 and the versions and previews updated. While I can't go back on this, I can individually set the RAW conversion back to 1.1 from the RAW Fine Tuning adjustment panel if I want:
I can also create new versions manually and compare the RAW 1.1 and RAW 2.0 converters side by side for individual images. Note that none of this affects the masters. The reference to "images" should be to "versions".
Create upgraded versions of existing RAW images
This works exactly the same as Upgrade existing RAW images except that a new version is created (in a stack) with the original and the converter changed to 2.0 for that new version only.
All images
Means all selected RAW images. The other two selections are similar.
I don't recommend updating converters en masse. I am finding that the new converter is quite different, particularly for heavily adjusted images. Here is a quick example: RAW 2.0 is on the left here:
The new RAW converter does do a much better job with highlights.
Migrating Away From .Mac
2007-05-21
Apple's homepage.mac.com is nice to get started with, but don't do what I did and build a 130 page site on it. Migrating away from homepage.mac.com is painful: .htaccess files are not recognized, so there is no way to put a 301 permanent redirect on it. There is no custom 404, so any deleted pages just go to a generic Apple 404: no place to put a friendly message telling the user that all the content has moved. Google will now get all confused as it finds the content has gone.
So I'm replacing old pages with individual redirect pages, pretty much by hand. The one remaining problem is replacing more than 500 web pages that represent the permalinks for my home page. These are all in one place and I need to do exactly the same thing to each of them. I would welcome a script (shell, perl, python, Applescript, or anything else I can run) that does the following:
For each html file in the current directory:
Rename the file to "old"+currentfilename
Copy template file to currentfilename
Replace all occurrences of "zzz" in currentfilename with "currentfilename"
The template file is my redirect page. The string zzz in that template file completes a link to the new site.
Any takers?
So I'm replacing old pages with individual redirect pages, pretty much by hand. The one remaining problem is replacing more than 500 web pages that represent the permalinks for my home page. These are all in one place and I need to do exactly the same thing to each of them. I would welcome a script (shell, perl, python, Applescript, or anything else I can run) that does the following:
For each html file in the current directory:
Rename the file to "old"+currentfilename
Copy template file to currentfilename
Replace all occurrences of "zzz" in currentfilename with "currentfilename"
The template file is my redirect page. The string zzz in that template file completes a link to the new site.
Any takers?
http://www.bagelturf.com
2007-05-19
Since you are reading this, you have made it to the new site: http://www.bagelturf.com. All new content will be posted here, so please update your links, feeds, and bookmarks.
At the old http://homepage.mac.com/bagelturf/ site all the existing material is still available, but nothing will be updated.
The layout and content links are all exactly the same, so if you want to globally update your links, just replace "homepage.mac.com/bagelturf" with "www.bagelturf.com" and you should be good to go.
One difference between the sites is that I am now publishing with a beta copy of RapidWeaver 3.6. This results in the permalinks being the title of the post, not listed separately. You will also find that the archive and category links have meaningful names now.
At the old http://homepage.mac.com/bagelturf/ site all the existing material is still available, but nothing will be updated.
The layout and content links are all exactly the same, so if you want to globally update your links, just replace "homepage.mac.com/bagelturf" with "www.bagelturf.com" and you should be good to go.
One difference between the sites is that I am now publishing with a beta copy of RapidWeaver 3.6. This results in the permalinks being the title of the post, not listed separately. You will also find that the archive and category links have meaningful names now.
Getting The 24 Inch iMac Into Shape
2006-11-20
What else have I been doing with this new monster on my desk over the past few days? It has not been all plain sailing, but the issues I have encountered have been minor, easily diagnosed, and fixed quickly.
First I backed it up to a 750G Firewire drive using SuperDuper. I use two of these drives in rotation (keeping one off-site at all times) and make a copy of the hard drive onto sparse disk image. I could not use an incremental back up as I usually do because everything had been updated in the move from the old G5 iMac, so this took a long time: about four hours for 160G of data (600,000 files, encrypted disk image). A second back up to a different drive without using a disk image or encryption took 2 hours 15 minutes.
Next I went through all my applications and utilities checking to see what was PowerPC and what was Intel or Universal. I did this quickly by bringing up the file inspector with option command I. It looks just like the file information window (command I), but updates as I click on different files. So this cuts out all the opening and closing of windows I would have had to do. Each time I found a PowerPC only application that I still wanted I made an alias of it on my desktop with option command drag, and when complete, I put all of those into a folder. This gives me a list of applications to go seek out Intel versions later. Pretty much everything I care about is now Intel. A few lingering Classic applications will no longer run (Intel Macs have no Classic support), so those were deleted. I found out later that another way to find all of my PowerPC applications is to use System Profiler. The Applications section finds them all and they can be sorted by CPU.
On opening GarageBand I found that all my audio units were missing. These are plug-ins that provide audio processing and synthesizers. Again this was a CPU difference problem, so I had to go find updates for those. My USB audio box (MobilePre) was showing up, but not working. I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver to fix that. It seems I already had an Intel driver, but the installer only installs the one needed at the time. While applications can be universal, some of the more fundamental parts of the OS cannot and need separate code for each CPU.
Migration Assistant had copied across all my network settings including the static IP address and warned me that I was going to have a problem if I didn't change one. I fixed that by changing the old Mac to DHCP.
RapidWeaver, the application I use to write this blog, developed a problem whereby it would hang loading my site file. I trashed the prefs and that was fixed. There were some interface changes following that, so I think that this was not an Intel problem at all, but a preferences corruption that had occurred a long time ago that just happened to not be fatal on PowerPC.
Not much maxes out the CPUs. They are usually very evenly loaded (I use Menu Meters to view their activity), so this implies that most applications are efficiently multithreaded. Even when I do max them out, the machine is still perfectly responsive, handles network traffic, launches applications, etc. Exporting from Aperture, converting video files, that kind of thing are the only activities that are limited by the CPU. I can hear the fans if I stress the machine, but I have to think about it. The hard drive is the noisiest part when it is doing a lot of seeking. Audio applications like GarageBand and iTunes hardly make a dent in the CPU.
Window resizing is silky smooth. I'm doing it right now while converting a 250MB AVI file from my digital camera to H.264. Playing two 1080p HD movies at the same time certainly makes the machine busy, but doesn't slow it down. So where are the limitations? Probably mainly in the hard drive -- seek time and transfer speed. Sometimes in the memory access. I can't do anything about the RAM except for an upgrade to 3G when the 2G sticks come down in price. But I could speed the disk access with an external RAID system on the FW800 bus.
Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 did not work as an administrator on this Intel Mac. But there is a fix. It involves deleting some files that cause the incompatibility. A side effect is that it becomes impossible to manage this Mac remotely. But that is not a problem for me.
First I backed it up to a 750G Firewire drive using SuperDuper. I use two of these drives in rotation (keeping one off-site at all times) and make a copy of the hard drive onto sparse disk image. I could not use an incremental back up as I usually do because everything had been updated in the move from the old G5 iMac, so this took a long time: about four hours for 160G of data (600,000 files, encrypted disk image). A second back up to a different drive without using a disk image or encryption took 2 hours 15 minutes.
Next I went through all my applications and utilities checking to see what was PowerPC and what was Intel or Universal. I did this quickly by bringing up the file inspector with option command I. It looks just like the file information window (command I), but updates as I click on different files. So this cuts out all the opening and closing of windows I would have had to do. Each time I found a PowerPC only application that I still wanted I made an alias of it on my desktop with option command drag, and when complete, I put all of those into a folder. This gives me a list of applications to go seek out Intel versions later. Pretty much everything I care about is now Intel. A few lingering Classic applications will no longer run (Intel Macs have no Classic support), so those were deleted. I found out later that another way to find all of my PowerPC applications is to use System Profiler. The Applications section finds them all and they can be sorted by CPU.
On opening GarageBand I found that all my audio units were missing. These are plug-ins that provide audio processing and synthesizers. Again this was a CPU difference problem, so I had to go find updates for those. My USB audio box (MobilePre) was showing up, but not working. I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver to fix that. It seems I already had an Intel driver, but the installer only installs the one needed at the time. While applications can be universal, some of the more fundamental parts of the OS cannot and need separate code for each CPU.
Migration Assistant had copied across all my network settings including the static IP address and warned me that I was going to have a problem if I didn't change one. I fixed that by changing the old Mac to DHCP.
RapidWeaver, the application I use to write this blog, developed a problem whereby it would hang loading my site file. I trashed the prefs and that was fixed. There were some interface changes following that, so I think that this was not an Intel problem at all, but a preferences corruption that had occurred a long time ago that just happened to not be fatal on PowerPC.
Not much maxes out the CPUs. They are usually very evenly loaded (I use Menu Meters to view their activity), so this implies that most applications are efficiently multithreaded. Even when I do max them out, the machine is still perfectly responsive, handles network traffic, launches applications, etc. Exporting from Aperture, converting video files, that kind of thing are the only activities that are limited by the CPU. I can hear the fans if I stress the machine, but I have to think about it. The hard drive is the noisiest part when it is doing a lot of seeking. Audio applications like GarageBand and iTunes hardly make a dent in the CPU.
Window resizing is silky smooth. I'm doing it right now while converting a 250MB AVI file from my digital camera to H.264. Playing two 1080p HD movies at the same time certainly makes the machine busy, but doesn't slow it down. So where are the limitations? Probably mainly in the hard drive -- seek time and transfer speed. Sometimes in the memory access. I can't do anything about the RAM except for an upgrade to 3G when the 2G sticks come down in price. But I could speed the disk access with an external RAID system on the FW800 bus.
Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 did not work as an administrator on this Intel Mac. But there is a fix. It involves deleting some files that cause the incompatibility. A side effect is that it becomes impossible to manage this Mac remotely. But that is not a problem for me.
The 24 Inch iMac Experience
2006-11-18
On Monday I ordered a Core 2 Duo 24" iMac from the online Apple Store with some extras: better graphics, big hard drive, 2G RAM. I'll be busy over Thanksgiving I thought, moving over all my stuff from my 20" PowerPC G5 iMac and fixing problems.
It arrived Thursday morning. It is big. The screen is perfect. And it is fast. I repartitioned the HD, loaded the OS, downloaded 400MB of updates (1.8G if you include the XCode tools), and generally checked it out. On Friday morning I left Migration Assistant doing its thing for about 4 hours. It's Friday evening and there is basically nothing to do except reenter in a few application serial numbers. Total time actually spent at the computer to achieve this: about half an hour.
Seriously, Migration Assistant is the closest thing to magic I have experienced in a long time. It really epitomizes the It Just Works aspect of Apple. Everything works: preference panels, applications, background processes, drivers. You name it, it's there working. All the junk on the desktop is there too, the layout stretched so that it covers the screen in the same way it used to on the smaller machine instead of being huddled in one corner. A nice touch.
Aperture is about four times faster. Much more usable. Tons of screen real estate. A bright, bright screen that makes the G5 look dull and gray in comparison. The only thing that has maxed out the CPUs so far is Aperture. Rosetta is in there somewhere, but I don't notice it running my old PowerPC code at all.
No wonder Apple's stock is doing so well. They have perfected the experience of driving a new computer off the lot. I've been a Mac user since 1992 (this will be my 5th Mac), so I shouldn't be surprised or excited, but I am. They are that good.
It arrived Thursday morning. It is big. The screen is perfect. And it is fast. I repartitioned the HD, loaded the OS, downloaded 400MB of updates (1.8G if you include the XCode tools), and generally checked it out. On Friday morning I left Migration Assistant doing its thing for about 4 hours. It's Friday evening and there is basically nothing to do except reenter in a few application serial numbers. Total time actually spent at the computer to achieve this: about half an hour.
Seriously, Migration Assistant is the closest thing to magic I have experienced in a long time. It really epitomizes the It Just Works aspect of Apple. Everything works: preference panels, applications, background processes, drivers. You name it, it's there working. All the junk on the desktop is there too, the layout stretched so that it covers the screen in the same way it used to on the smaller machine instead of being huddled in one corner. A nice touch.
Aperture is about four times faster. Much more usable. Tons of screen real estate. A bright, bright screen that makes the G5 look dull and gray in comparison. The only thing that has maxed out the CPUs so far is Aperture. Rosetta is in there somewhere, but I don't notice it running my old PowerPC code at all.
No wonder Apple's stock is doing so well. They have perfected the experience of driving a new computer off the lot. I've been a Mac user since 1992 (this will be my 5th Mac), so I shouldn't be surprised or excited, but I am. They are that good.
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