Avinash Meetoo: Blog

Patience is a virtue.

I’ve been told that the iPhone 3G will shortly be available in Mauritius for purchase. To be more precise, the devices are coming to Mauritius this month and are expected to be sold as from November.

Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about the price but I’ll hazard a guess of around Rs. 20,000 for the 8Gb model and Rs. 23,000 for the 16Gb model in line with the quoted price in the Hong-Kong Apple Store. I know this is steep but you need to bear in mind two important things:

Firstly, the iPhone is not only a cellphone despite its name. It is a Wifi-enabled computer (with a powerful browser and enterprise-grade email client) and a video iPod and a GPS receiver and a game console and a digital camera which can also be used to make 3G phone calls. Additionally, hundred of free and commercial applications can be downloaded from the Apple iPhone AppStore (direct link to the AppStore for iTunes users) greatly increasing the capabilities of the iPhone.

Secondly, the price (if confirmed of course) compares favorably with what Americans pay. The 8Gb and 16Gb models of the iPhone 3G cost $199 (about Rs. 6000) and $299 (about Rs. 8500) there. But, and this is a massive but, you are forced to subscribe to a voice plan (to make calls), unlimited data plan (to access the web) and (optionally) a SMS plan (to send SMS) at around $75 (about Rs. 2000) per month for two years. For the 16Gb model, this amounts to Rs. 8500 + 24 x Rs. 2000 = Rs. 56,500 (mind you, for unlimited data i.e. browsing, emailing, chatting and Facebooking which does not really exist here.)

Of course, here we’ll have to pay for pre-paid voice and SMS credits as well as 3G data. For the sake of argument, let’s say we accept to pay Rs. 56,500 - Rs. 23,000 = Rs. 33,500 for 2 years. This equates to, say, downloading 2Mb of data (Rs. 0.01 per Kb i.e Rs. 20), sending 10 SMS (Rs. 6) and making 15 minutes of voice call everyday for two years which I find excessive.

Personally, I don’t intend to use my future iPhone in this fashion. Remember, it has a Wifi antenna and, as I am nearly always near an access point, I will use Wifi when browsing and checking my emails. What I am implying is that I don’t think I’ll have to buy more credits to be able to use my future iPhone compared to what I’m paying now with my trusty Nokia 6288.

So, in a sense, we’re getting a better deal than Americans as we have the choice of not using (and not paying for) the data plan if we don’t want to. Heck, we can even choose not to use 3G!

The image above

I already have an iPhone 3G… except that it is just a software simulator. In fact, today I installed the Apple iPhone Software Development Kit on my MacBook (you need a Mac…) which, in addition to all the tools needed to build iPhone applications, features this iPhone simulator. It works, it’s nice-looking and it gives me the opportunity of making nice screenshots.

What can I ask more?

I know!

I need to convince my Minister of Finance (aka my dear Christina) to allow me to ask Father Xmas a black 16Gb Apple iPhone 3G in December

Alleluia.

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by avinash

iPhoto is an excellent Mac OS X application created by Apple which is used by countless amateurs (like yours truly) to manage their digital photo collection. Since the release of iPhoto ‘08, a lot of people have wondered how to do an incremental backup of their library as this latest version of iPhoto keeps the library in a package (a special type of folder) instead of a plain folder and some backup applications have trouble with that. (An update: I tried doing the same thing with the latest HFS+-aware version of rsync 3.0 but I couldn’t do it as it seems to me that rsync does not copy all the metadata created by Mac OS X. Maybe I missed an option…)

I’ve managed to do incremental backups (i.e. quick and painless) using my registered version of SuperDuper! It’s important to use a registered version of SuperDuper! in order to do smart updates which is what SuperDuper! calls incremental backups. The non-registered version of SuperDuper! cannot do incremental backups which means that the whole iPhoto library will be copied over when doing a backup (which means 15Gb in my case…)

This great backup software is normally used to backup a whole partition (i.e. my MacBook’s hard disk) to another partition (i.e. a partition on an external drive which can then be used to boot the MacBook.) I’ve just realized that it’s relatively straightforward to restrict the files to be backed up to a selection (i.e. your iPhoto library only…) and, instead of the destination being a partition, to choose a sparse image (i.e. a special file containing other files and which takes up only as much actual disk space as the data contained within.)

Step 1

First of all, select the partition where the iPhoto ‘08 library resides in ‘Copy’ (mine is Multimedia.) Then select where the sparse image will reside (I chose a folder on another disk.) Then you’ll have to create what SuperDuper! calls a copy script which will be used to indicate what to copy and what to ignore. To do that click on the drop down next to ‘using’ and choose ‘New Copy Script.’

Step 2

Write a nice description and make sure that the ‘Allow the user to select this script’ is ticked.

Step 3

In the ‘Included Scripts’ tab, click on the ‘+’ and choose the predefined ‘Exclude all files’ script. This is to make sure that SuperDuper! only backups those files and folders that you’ll explicitly specify and ignore all the rest. This is essential.

Step 4

Then, in the ‘Script Commands’ tab, navigate to the folder where the iPhoto library is found and select it. Click on ‘Add Item’ and it will be added in the top part of the window. The default command is ‘ignore.’ Change that to ‘copy.’ As you can easily guess, this, combined with the ‘Exclude all files’ seen previously, will tell SuperDuper! to only consider the iPhoto library and nothing else which is what we want.

Click on ‘Close.’ and give a sensible name to the script (’Backup iPhoto library’ is nice…)

Then you can click on ‘Copy Now’ and, voilà, an incremental backup is done! Remember to use a registered version of SuperDuper!

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by avinash

Once more, I’ve been thinking about that one thing that regularly prevents geeks like us from sleeping peacefully: What is the text editor that I prefer?

I’ve always been a vim guy. I think I started using it on my Amiga or something about 15 years ago. I used it daily when I was studying in France and ever since. Of course, I’ve read a lot about how Emacs can help one reach nirvana and I’ve tried it a number of times but I’ve never managed to like it. I’ve even aliased vi to emacs for some time but this didn’t help a lot…

As a Mac user, I’ve bought TextMate which lots of people consider as being one of the best text editors around. In fact, it is regularly described as a 21st century Emacs. It looks great and has lots of very cool features. It supports loads of different programming languages and is extensible through plugins.

Even though I use it from time to time (especially when editing Ruby programs), I tend to quickly open a terminal and launch vim far more regularly. I wonder if I should alias vim to TextMate to help me recover my financial investment

When programming in Java, I always use Eclipse. I know, it’s massive and complex but I love the syntax completion and refactoring facilities. I tried NetBeans but I am more of an Eclipse guy.

What about you?

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by avinash

According to Apple, one million of iPhones 3G have been sold during its first week-end! I don’t remember any other expensive technology product being as successful as the iPhone 3G in its first week-end.

I can only conclude (like countless have done before me) that Steve Jobs has flair.

I need one.

Popularity: 1% [?]

written by avinash

Like most (technology-oriented) parents, Christina and I have recorded hours and hours of Digital Video (DV) of Anya and Kyan growing and we’re still doing it now.

Digital Video (DV) requires a lot of space (of the order of 15Gb per hour!) Consequently, we edited the raw footage like mad and discarded all the crap to come up with beautiful movies (for us at least — I guess that most of you will fall asleep if you were ever subjected to them…)

Initially we only had one way to archive the movies: on VCD (No! Not DVD!) The reason is that we didn’t have DVD burners then. Of course, the quality is not great (MPEG-1 / 352×288 / 1150 kbit/s) but we personally do not care. Watching Anya discovering the world for the first time is what is important!

Then we acquired a DVD burner and shortly after we were producing our own DVDs. The quality level rose abruptly (MPEG-2 / 720×576 / around 2500 kbit/s) and we did that for years until H264 came.

H264 is the new MPEG-4 Part 10 video compression standard which has become pervasive since its adoption by Apple, Sony, Nokia and the Blu-ray Disc Association. Consequently, this year, Christina and I stopped creating DVDs and started rendering our movies to H264 at 720×576 and 1500 kbit/s.

The big decision

Two weeks ago, Christina and I decided that having VCDs, DVDs and H264 Quicktime movies on my MacBook was going to hurt us in the long run. I did a little bit of investigation and realized that we had to convert all our VCDs and DVDs to H264. We settled on using HandBrake to do the conversion because, well, it’s excellent and open source.

As we are planning to buy an AppleTV some day, I used the AppleTV preset in HandBrake with the following changes:

• H264 Video / 720×576 / 1500 kbit/s
• AAC Audio / Stereo / 48kHz / 128 kbit/s
• 2-pass encoding
• Turbo first pass
• Anamorphic: no
• Keep aspect ratio: yes
• Crop: manual
• Deinterlace: yes, slow.

The result

Christina and I are now the proud owners of 48 home made H264 movies taking 17Gb of space (more than 24 hours.)

We have bought an external hard disk (a Lacie) to store those 48 files and I’ve copied them on the hard disk of one of the desktop computers I have access to. I have also copied them on a second external hard disk I normally use to backup my MacBook. All in all, I’m happy… for the time being.

Amazon S3

I have been looking at Amazon S3 for some time now as a means to keep my most important files in a data-center somewhere. And those 48 movies certainly qualify as my most important files ever! Unfortunately, sending 17Gb of data to Amazon from Mauritius is not practical (and this is one of the most massive understatements I’ve ever made) due to the pathetic bandwidth we have here.

Let’s see, at 128 kbit/s, 13 days would be required to upload all the 17Gb of video. Maybe it’s more sensible paying an air ticket to Réunion Island and doing it from there… Anyway, the cost to keep the data on Amazon S3 would then be:

• $4.25 (Rs. 113) for the first month (to account for the initial data transfer)
• $2.55 (Rs. 68) per month thereafter.

This is extremely cheap! One added benefit is that the videos will all be accessible online. Surely, Kyan and Anya will be able to stream the movies from S3 to their mobile phones when they’ll be big enough to have phones

A question

Have you had the same problems? What strategy have you settled on for archiving your precious digital memories?

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by avinash