Projects
It’s been a while, so I thought I’d share some of the projects on which I’m working.
- Digital SRL camera maintenance.
- I’ve owned a Pentax *st DS for about 6 months now and it’s time I learn the standard maintenance procedures for it. Also, while I’m generally familiar with SLR concepts from my photography classes in high school and college, I’m interested in improving my shots. Thus, I’ve purchased Mastering Digital SLR Photography Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera and I’m working my way through them.
- Family Tree.
- I’m trying to trace my family tree as far back as I can go. I haven’t done any work on this in a long time. I’m using Ancestry.com to perform the searches and Mac Family Tree to store the information. However, I’m looking to switch my software to Heredis Mac X.2 because of the cleaner interface and the ability to export to the common interchange formats.
- FileMaker Pro 8.
- I’ve found the need for a desktop database. I will be using FileMaker to create and maintain a membership and contact database for one of the organizations to which I belong. I trick to this is not the database, it’s leveraging the tool to create good forms and reports. I want to use the output for creating mailing list labels and the like.
- Rules Engines
- I’m just starting to look at Drools to create an agent for monitoring a resilient server infrastructure and diagnosing common problems. The goal is to provide a tool for support teams that gives them detailed insights regarding the health and availability of the infrastructure and is able to recognize failure patterns and recommend actions for resolution.
- Machine Learning.
- I’m still very interested in neural networks and online learning. Wicked Cool Java has some good links to projects in the area of creating intelligent agents. And I’ve been doing some reading on my own.
- Newsletters.
- I used Apple’s Pages application to create a newsletter for an organization to which I belong. I’ve created a Pages template that I’ll eventually share for others to build from. I’m still tweaking the layout and content distribution based on feedback from the membership.
- Private Pilot License
- And, of course, I’m learning to fly.
In other news, here is a dump of the topics on which I want to blog when I get the time:
- Backup 3 vs. SuperDuper! (responding to the debate here and here)
- DoubleTake photo stitching (I like it a lot)
- Graphic Converter does not handle Automator nicely for RAW formats
- Dell 3100cn networked, PostScript, color laser printer (I like it a lot)
potracerastor-to-vector program (fantastic for B&W)- disclabel is painfully slow to use – unusage, actually
- Yojimbo (I have it, I don’t understand it’s value, but I didn’t understand QuickSilver for a long time, either and now I can’t work without it)
- ImageMagick (doesn’t handle Pentax PEF raw files
Finally, a list of what I want to see in Pages:
- automatic em-dash, en-dash ; or easy access to them
- When a paragraph is started right of an image around which it flows, it should still be indented
If Swift Publisher does these two things and has nice templates, I’ll switch in a heartbeat.
