I had a huge problem. Since I am an avid photographer, I started building up a huge library of photos. I do not like archiving photos and delete them from my main library, since I like to have them all available for display.

The problem is that my library started pushing 200GB. It grows by about 100GB each year. I already have two 400GB HDD's in my G5 (RAID1), but with the OS and other applications I was running out of disk space. Since bigger hard drives are not readily available, I had to look for some form of external storage. I'll explain in this blog what my options were and why I dediced to build my own RAID array.

The easy way out would be to purchase a LaCie RAID system, but that would have put me back about R32,000. It can only provide 1.5TB of disk space (if using 500GB drives in RAID5). Furthermore, the speed is limited by the Firewire 800 interface (although fast, with large RAID5 arrays on SATA it is possible to go well over 100MB/s). Another option would have been the Apple XServe RAID. But that costs R60,000 for 750MB RAID5. Yeah it is massively scalable up to insane capacities, but it is just too expensive (and noisy). So I decided to look into building my own RAID array. Why? Because I already had a nice desktop Pentium 4 3.2GHz machine with 2GiB RAM. Since the case can only handle 4 hard drives, and ventilation sucked I decided to replace it too. Fortunately my power supply is rated at 500W - keeping many hard drives spinning requires lots of power.

As any serious amateur photographer or professional for that matter should know by now, Apple released their professional Photography Workflow and RAW Processing software late November last year. It is called Aperture and I do not recall any other photographical software product causing so much uproar in the community. Here is my take on it all...

First some background. Apple always had very strong marketing techniques and when they marketed Aperture whilst it was still on back-order it was no exception. They had the most beautiful video clips of the application in action - enough to have anyone drool for this application. It looked slick, and seemed to fill the missing gap between the camera and the output media.

Apple marketed it as a RAW Workflow system with Professional Project Management, Nondestructive Image Processing and Versatile Printing and Publishing.

I was recently involved in a project where I was reminded of a typical scenario in today's IT environments that still baffles me...

There are many different schools of thought when it comes to how and when to apply code optimisations. Some people would have you believe code should be optimised from the start. Others believe in getting it functional first, then optimising.

This blog is not about how to apply optimisations and the bigger paradigm of when and how to most effectively incorporate it in to a project. It is rather about that scenario where code is functional, now you are looking at ways to improve the performance.

Today I felt first hand how short life actually is. Treasure every moment. If you get angry at someone you love, stop for a couple of seconds - think, and try to show love - not anger. If you are too busy to spend time with them - make time. If someone is really important to you, do not take them for granted, or have the misconception that life is static.

The sad news is - even if you follow all these suggestions, it won't make any difference to how you feel. Life is unfair.

I am sure many purists and photographers used to film, new to digital would argue that a photo processed on a computer is not the original photo. Some may even go as far as exclude it from any kind of competition, or mark it off as art and not photography.

I know this is a discussion causing huge amounts of debate in the photography community. I have very strong feelings about this.

In my mind, there are two basic kind of changes you can make to a photo. The first is to try and enhance it until it resembles the image you saw most closely. The second is to artistically change it to represent the image you felt most closely.