Firstly, the iPad. I don’t think I need to talk about what it is, what it can do, it’s good points, it’s bad points, etc… as you must have been living in a cave to not know about it. Mine was dispatched on Saturday, so I’m waiting for it to turn up at some point this week. Quite excited really!

Secondly, Annie, myself and my parents went up to North London on Saturday to look for a new place for me to live when I start work next month (as mentioned in my last post). We looked round five places, and settled on the one shown in the four pictures below. It comes unfurnished, so Annie and I are going to have great fun shopping around to turn the flat into a home!

On the one hand, it’s going to be good to no longer attend University. I won’t have to worry about exams, or coursework, or working on the weekend; instead I’ll have to worry about real work during the day. I can relax at the weekend and in the evenings! It’s going to be good. But, moving on means moving away. I’ve landed myself a job at Ocado (yes, the grocery delivery company; no, I’m not driving a van) as a Network Engineer, working in Hertfordshire. I’m going to have to move up there, and that will mean moving away from my friends and my life here in Portsmouth – which is not going to be fun. I’ll miss everything and everyone down here.

However, these past couple of months have been spent working hard at University to complete my final year project. The project has involved designing and developing a Network Testbed Monitoring and Management tool for the ECATS team at Cisco, the department I worked for last year. It’s been fun, and at the moment I’m just finalising my (30,000+ words) final report. We have to present the project on Project Day, the 4th June, to all and sundry who come to look round. Below is a screenshot of one of the modules in the application that I’ve developed.

This was really just a quick post to update you all on my current status in life…. I realise that I haven’t blogged in a very long time (in fact, this is my first blog post of 2010, happy new year everyone!).

My day to day work is done on a Mac, and therefore that automatically rules out Internet Explorer. I can’t say I’m too upset about that – on any installation of Windows, the first thing I do is download a more capable browser if there isn’t one already installed. However, on my Mac, I have a multitude of browsers to choose from. As the image above shows, I currently have installed 5 – Chrome, Safari (obviously, as it comes preinstalled on OS X), Firefox, Camino and Opera. I use them primarily in that order.

Google Chrome

Chrome is now my primary browser. It’s set as default, and I’m using it now to write this post. This is a very recent addition to my browser arsenal, as it has only just been released for the Mac. However, since its release last year, I have used it almost exclusively on my Windows laptop, and I was pleased to see it finally come to Mac. I never did get around to installing Chromium – so a native app direct from Google seemed much easier.

There main reason I use Chrome primarily is speed. I don’t care what Apple say about Safari being the fastest browser – my installation of it certainly wouldn’t. It would lag when loading large Javascript-heavy pages, or lock up altogether when opening a new tab (and triggering Top Sites). Chrome, however, opens in a flash, new tabs appear in an instance, and it can handle an impressive amount of Javascript without blinking. Google Wave, especially, always threw Safari off balance, but Chrome breezes through.

Another not insignificant reason I use it the Webkit rendering engine. To my mind, it is by far the most superior engine around – and I love the advanced CSS it is able to support. I know Safari also uses Webkit, but for reasons mentioned above, I prefer Chrome. The built in web-inspector comes in very handy – and to me, is a brilliant alternative to Firebug.

Safari

Safari is my second choice browser. It’s native on the Mac, and therefore integrates perfectly. It’s use of the Webkit rendering engine makes it one of the most advanced browsers out there – but for me, Chrome just tops it with speed.

Firefox

Firefox is also a brilliant browser. After Chrome, it is my choice of Windows-based browsers, but on the Mac I mainly have it installed purely for testing purposes. It’s Gecko-based engine provides some advanced CSS features, but not as many as Webkit. One of it’s major plus points is the extensions available – amazing functionality can be added to the core browser, and I wish Safari/Chrome would follow Mozilla’s example.

Camino

As Camino used to state on their website, this browser provides the power of Firefox with the OS X integration of Safari. This browser is fast, there’s no doubt about it – it’s very lightweight, and loads in seconds. I’ve found that it’s also the most capable browser for heavy-duty Flash, shining where the other browsers seem to flag. It uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine, but is designed to integrate better with OS X. This is the only browser in this list that’s Mac-only. As I mentioned just now, I purely use it for heavy Flash sites.

Opera

Opera is also a very advanced browser. It’s one of the oldest, and can handle some CSS features that no other browser can. However, I use it mainly just for testing – I couldn’t get along with it when I tried to use it daily. There’s just something about the interface that bugs me.

Well, they’re the browsers that I have installed and use regularly. If you know of any other obscure browsers I’d be interested in having a look at them.

In the end, for me, nothing can beat the Webkit rendering engine – so it’s got to be Chrome or Safari. Hands down.

The final year has been quite interesting so far. There’s only two lectures a week that I really don’t look forward to, which I think is pretty good going really. Work load is fairly heavy, and there’s a fair amount of reading to do for a couple of units, but I’m managing so far. Hopefully I won’t end up neglecting other parts of my life in favour of work!

I have more exciting news regarding holidays! I know that Annie and I have already been to New York and Salcombe (though I didn’t blog about it) this year, but we’re now going to Paris in December! It’s going to be soooo exciting. Paris at Christmas… well cool! The Eiffel Tower in Christmas lights… woo!

My alphabet series on Flickr is going quite well… I’ve reached N! My latest photo is below:

Check out the full set on Flickr.

The rest of this post is probably just going to be a few short sentences… so skip over them if they don’t interest you!

I now have Google Wave, so if you want to chat add me on my usual address!

I’ve also been using Windows 7 on my laptop… it’s quite neat so far – a big improvement on Vista! And again, on the OS front, I’ve updated my Mac to Snow Leopard – there have been a few speed improvements, and Expose works better now; but other than that, there are no major changes. I do like the new completely chromeless player window for QuickTime though!

I found this really cool infographic showing 50 years of space exploration (via @Hicksdesign):

The new Apple Magic Mouse looks really cool – the world’s first multi-touch mouse! But for £55 at the Apple store it’s a bit too steep…

Final Year Project definitions have to be in soon – crazy. That will define 10 whole weeks of my life!

Anyway, sorry for the complete randomness of this blog post. Just felt like it!

Saying that speech was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life! I’d have been fine if it wasn’t something I had written, and there wasn’t any pressure to make it funny. In the end, though, it appeared to go down well, so that was good! People certainly laughed, and clapped… so I guess I did my job well.

The photographer that they had hired was Owen Roseblade, and the way he worked was brilliant. I can’t wait to see the photos he took! There are a few on his website, available here, use the arrows on the photo to scroll through. They’re simply amazing.

I had a great time with Annie too. She looked beautiful, easily the best looking girl there (with the exception of the bride, of course!), and I’m so lucky that she’s mine :)

Going back to university soon – I can’t believe the summer’s almost over already! But at least I have a holiday to look forward to before university actually starts :)

I’ve had this Mac since January 2008, and I can’t actually remember what software I used to manage my photos before then. Since then, however, I used the excellent iPhoto by Apple, which came free with the installation of Leopard when I bought the Mac. iPhoto was great – it organised photos by events, it kept track of keywords easily, and when I upgraded to iPhoto ’09 earlier this year, it could even track people’s faces for me. A couple of plugins and Google Earth meant that I could also geo-tag my photos, and I even used the built-in photobook creator to build a beautifully made book for my housemate’s 21^st birthday.

However, when I reached around 10,000 images, iPhoto started to lag. It would be slower than usual opening it, browsing through the photos slowed down considerably, and the final straw came when it twice corrupted my library, forcing me to restore my photos from backups I had on my external harddrive (largely thanks to Time Machine). So I thought it was time for a upgrade, time to change to a more professional (though my photography is hardly professional) application. That’s when I moved to Aperture.

Aperture is also an Apple product. I toyed with the idea of Adobe Lightroom, but as I already had an Aperture trial and license installed, it seemed to make more sense. But has Aperture actually helped?

On the speed side of things, it is much faster at managing my growing library. In fact, Apple states on the Aperture product page Now it’s even easier to … manage massive libraries, although I am sure that many people out there have far larger libraries than I.

Workflow wise, I much prefer it’s method of handling RAW files than iPhoto – although this took some getting used to. Since I fairly recently acquired my first dSLR, shooting in RAW is common for me now. iPhoto would simply show me a preview of the RAW file, and any editing I wished to perform would have to be done in an external application – for me, this meant launching Photoshop, which is no meagre task on a machine which has a large number of applications running. Aperture, however, handles the RAW editing itself, creating a master image and a second version with your tweaks. Should I wish to edit the photo further, it also provides options to open it with Photoshop, where it opens as a .tiff, and any changes I make (and save) are updated in another version of the photo within the Aperture library, preserving the original RAW, yet linking it obviously to any edited version.

The Aperture workflow for importing images also seems much improved over iPhoto’s, although I am yet to work out how to get it to remove the photos from the camera once it has imported them. (If anyone has any knowledge of this, let me know!) Aperture manages the photos using Projects, Albums, or Smart Albums (albums based upon rating, keywords, date, EXIF data, any number of filters), and has support for creating books, organising into Light Tables, and uploading to Web Albums and Journals or Mobile Me. I don’t use Mobile Me, so have never used that feature of Aperture, but I do use an excellent free plugin for exporting my photos to Flickr.

Unlike iPhoto, Apertures projects, albums and books can be organised into folders (within folders) within the sidebar, allowing a second level of organisation. iPhoto had simply one hierarchy, a single level of events or albums, so the more intuitive Finder-like approach taken by Aperture is useful.

A decent plugin called Maperture has provided an incredibly simple and easy-to-use geo-tagging interface, which means that the only feature previously available in iPhoto that I no longer have access to is the face-recognition – although, let’s face it (get the pun?), isn’t that just a bit of a gimmick? I have yet to try the photobook functionality, but as it’s produced by Apple I presume it will offer the same features as the iPhoto version.

So they’re the main reasons I moved from iPhoto, and some of the features of Aperture that I’ve discovered and like. Don’t forget, you can see my latest photos on Flickr by using the link on the left, or the photostream at the bottom of each page of this blog.

On Monday night, Annie and I went to see Wicked the Musical, at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London. She bought the tickets as a surprise present for me a couple of weeks ago, including Monday night in a 4 star hotel in Kensington. It was so much fun!

I would say that Wicked is the best musical I’ve been to see in London. It’s the only one where I haven’t known the story in advance, and it was brilliant. The set was amazing, the songs were good and the story was really good. It ties in really well with The Wizard of Oz, so if you haven’t seen that I would recommend seeing it first, although you’d still enjoy it regardless.

Annie and I spent the Monday and Tuesday wandering round London, or in Annie’s case, hobbling; she sprained her ankle on Saturday and could barely walk! Had a really good weekend though, and I can’t wait to see her again next week.