Lightroom 4

I have upgraded to Lightroom 4 and wished Adobe had made this available in 2 versions:

• Normal - Single Catalog
• Enterprise - Shared Catalog

I am very happy with LR4 and it does perform better than the BETA. The catalog upgrade was seamless and I am finding that re-visiting post-processed photos and switching the updated develop module does seem to bring more detail out of these photos.

Looking forward to testing my plugins and see if they work under LR4 or there is going to be a flurry of software updates from me over the coming weeks.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Day 7

So, I took the plunge and decided to see how the web update method of a laptop went.

This laptop has been running Windows 7 x64 for a while now and is cluttered with junk (its not my everyday machine).

The specs are:

• Toshiba P300
•  Dual Core Centrino 
• 4gb RAM
• Dual 720Gb HDD

The upgrade was smoothless with only requiring me to install Avast AntiVirus and Raxco Perfect Disk. After uninstalling these two products and rebooting, the OS continued to install.

There was one glitch where after going 100% through the update it just hung on a black screen on 100% HDD activity. I did the power-cycle and it rebooted and setup the user profile without any issues.

I have used this laptop exclusivly over the last 2 days doing things like watching movies, playing music and will confess it feels like it runs faster and with less disk activity than what Windows 7 was doing. This hardware was designed for Windows Vista (and only just in my opinion!).

I find myself missing the start menu less and less as the metro start enables me to get to the required application in less time. I can see Microsoft's vision for what it is, and look forward to the first bug fixes (if not a Win8 SP1) to get this into version 2.0.

To quote U2 for those complaining about the lack of a start orb/button - Your stuck in a moment, you can't get out off.....

Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Day 1

Well, I have installed my basic software:

• Office 2010
• SP1 won't install at this stage for some reason.....
• Palemoon browser (think Firefox - Windows optimised)
• Nero 11 burning
• VLC for media
• Desktop Fusion
• Lightroom 3
• Avast Internet Security
• AnyDVD HD
• Virtual CloneDrive
• TortoiseSVN
• Visual Studio 11 Beta
• Resharper 7 Early Preview (for VS11)

Overall, this release is much more coherant than the developer preview. I am slowly getting over the missing orb as the new start screen supports typing for the program you wish to run.

Next up will be Photoshop CS 5 and all my plugins and I should have everything that I use daily to continue my daily run of this release.

 There are some UI issues with some programs having artifacts in the chrome and some of my internal SATA drives being detected as removable and just disappearing!

These are minor issues at this stage and I am happy to progress forward with this release

Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Day 0

I have now installed the consumer preview using a VHD as my drive and booting on the bare metal.

My first problem is I never realised how much I used the start button until now!

I am just setting up .NET 3.5/2.0 and installing Visual Studio 2011 Beta as well.

This is going to be my primary OS over the next couple of weeks to give this OS a fair chance rather than just ranting about how I hate the new metro interface.

OnOne Perfect Suite 6

Finally! After waiting nearly the whole month, getting teased by showcase videos, OnOne Perfect Suite 6 is now available for download/purchase.

I look forward to seeing the enhancements of this software over the coming weeks.

Windows 8 Client & Server - First Thoughts

Well, I am not a fan of metro on the PC. Looks great for tablets but I will reserve UI judgment until the BETA/RC versions ship.

I really don't like the server version at all but after doing some registry hacks to turn the metro feature off, I find the new versions to actually perform faster than their parents.

Of course I am running these in VMWare Workstation v8.0.

ISO and VHD/VHDX mounting does exactly what you expect as long as:

1. VHD's are partitioned & formatted AND
2. Drive letter allocated when formatting

I really liked the fact the double-clicking a VHD/VHDX automatically mounted the filesystem for you.


What has not been thought about, is right clicking the same media DOES NOT give you an unmount option. For that you need to right click the drive. Not an issue but all other software allows this functionality so you would think Microsoft will copy at some stage.

Well this is my first take on this OS and although I don't like Metro, the speed and refinements over Win 7 do look like a great service pack!

Agile Data Warehousing

I have had the chance to play with Wherescape RED, I have to say it makes building Data Warehouses a lot faster and a lot simpler!

If you are looking for a product to make your data warehouse creation time shorter as well as fully documented, then do not look past Wherescape RED.

One project took over 8 months to build a data warehouse, with Wherescape RED I built a Data Mart in 3 days!

• Ability to create staging tables with transformations by simple drag-n-drop and double-click capabilities. 
• Creation of slowly changing dimensions is a simple drag-n-drop followed by a wizard answering questions.
• Building fact tables is again, a drag-n-drop operation including adding the dimensions to build your star schemas
• It even has the ability to publish the SSAS cubes
• All this with documentation including data flow diagrams!

It should be noted that I am a Kimball fan, and Wherescape RED adopts the Inmon  approach.

I look forward to understanding this software deeper to empower me in my deliverable.