Alax Villmann

It’s been a busy few weeks since my last post, and really not a whole lot of stuff happened that’s worth writing down. However, in my absence I’ve been changing things up a lot. First off, new software.

Photoshop CS5 Extended

All I have to say is pure awesome. Seriously. It loads up insanely fast, it’s 64-bit from the ground up, and it even has a new splash screen. What’s not to love? (besides the fact that I really hate the new icon).

Also, I need to make sure that people are aware: Content-Aware Fill is pure magic. Seriously. There is no way half the stuff I’ve used it for recently is even possible, and yet it makes it happen right before my eyes. My friend Todd really had the best explanation of how this wizardry works (I was editing a photo of a tree):

You see, as soon as you click the button, Adobe goes out to that exact same spot, digs up the tree, fills the hole, replants the grass, and fixes the rest of the landscape. Then, they set up the camera at the exact same position, time-warp to the time of day you took the photo, take the photo, and send it back. It’s actually quite simple, really.

That’s definitely how it works.

Snow Leopard

I’ve been running Snow Leopard since the beta stages on my MacBook Pro, and I have to say, I’m less than pleased. It’s a fantastic OS, but the RAM consumption has been out of control. Every time I fire up MainStage (an amazing program, by the way) it shows all 4Gb of RAM completely used. MainStage uses about a gig by itself with all my patches loaded; where is the other memory being used? It’s the only program running, aside from Dropbox and GlimmerBlocker in the background.

I re-installed in a vain attempt to regain some of this lost memory; honestly, that was just a huge waste of time and the RAM consumption is back to ridiculous levels.

Ahh, well. This is why I love Linux.

Network Management Systems

I’ve been looking into all sorts of network management systems lately for an upcoming project, and again, I have to say I’m displeased. I’ve looked into Hyperic, Zenoss, Nagios, OpenNMS, and many, many others; all fall short in one of these areas:

1. Too much RAM consumption. All you do is monitor my other systems, and yet you won’t even start up with less than a gig of ram. Not acceptable.
2. Not extensible enough. Most of these solutions are great, but they don’t offer the extensibility I need. I want to be able to pull stats from their interfaces into my own 10-foot user interface which is on a wall-mounted monitor. That way, I can glance over and know if something is wrong, and then use the more complicated system interface to find/troubleshoot/fix the problem.
3. Just plain ugly. This may sound superficial, and it kind of is, but I don’t do ugly UIs.

If there is one solution that can do/doesn’t have all of those, somebody, anybody, please let me know.