Monthly Archives: February 2011

EyeOne and OS X Lion

Problems, problems, problems

October 4, 2011 update: Xrite has now released a Lion-compatible version of its software. Click here to read about it.

As I mentioned yesterday, OS X Lion will no longer support PPC Rosetta applications. That really matters little as 99.9% of software has been updated to tun on current Intel Macs. But the fact that the PPC (G3/G4/G5) Mac has not been made for some 6 years now has not motivated the people at xrite to update its colorimeter software to work on Intel Macs. So once you convert to Lion or buy a new Lion-equipped Mac, your old EyeOne or Monaco Optix colorimeter is junk. It will not work as the software cannot be loaded.

Here is the reply I received from xrite to my question as to when they would release EyeOne Intel Mac software:

Forcing the noun ‘task’ into service as a verb is enough to make anyone ill.

Well, that’s encouraging. A guy who has no idea points me to a product that does not exist with an unknown release date.

Here’s an extract of the brochure he points to:

The bottom line is EyeOne and Monaco Optix (and maybe ColorMunki and Huey – all come from xrite) colorimeter owners will need the i1BasicPro software which the fine print states is a Universal Mac app (meaning PPC or Intel machines are fine). The software is not available yet, there is no stated availability date that I can find and there is mention of costly upgrade coupons ($400!), though it’s unclear whether you will need one for this app. This all makes me feel about as confident in xrite as I feel about U.S. energy policy.

It’s taken xrite 6 years to not release an Intel version of their app so I wouldn’t be holding my breath. But I would be holding my wallet.

Read on.

A simple and cheap workaround to Xrite’s sloth:

It generally pays to upgrade to the latest version of any Mac OS, with the sole caveat that it also makes sense to wait a while for the first version (meaning Panther->Tiger->Leopard->Snow Leopard, etc.) of a major upgrade to gel, allowing any undiscovered bugs to surface and be quashed in the first amended release. So you will likely want to upgrade to Lion when it hits version 10.7.1, skipping 10.7.0. Thus you have a couple of months at least. I doubt xrite will have their product out by then.

There are a couple of simple solutions, as subtle as a sledgehammer, but you can be absolutely sure they will work and that your excellent EyeOne colorimeter will continue to do its job.

They cost $0-$60, depending on which you choose.

  • Buy a $20 8gB USB flash memory drive.
  • Buy a $40 250gB 3.5″ SATA HDD for your Mac. If you have slots in it, you can install it internally. If not, use a disk cradle or separate enclosure, another $20-30.
  • Buy a 2.5″ $25 100gB SATA notebook HDD (MacSales has them for that right now!) and an external enclosure if needed
  • The free option – repartition an existing HDD and set aside some space for your Snow Leopard + EyeOne install

In each case the process is simple as can be.

Format the USB stick or HDD and install Snow Leopard and the PPC EyeOne Match software on the device. Don’t forget to include the optional Rosetta installation! When it comes time to profile your monitor(s) restart the Mac while holding the Option key on the keyboard. Your display will give you a choice of start-up drives. Select the one with Snow Leopard on it (or Tiger or Leopard). Start EyeOne Match and do the profiling.

The Free option: This one is my favorite! If you have an existing back-up HDD with lots of free space, then you can repartition it, if you use Leopard or Snow Leopard, without losing any existing data. Go into Disk Utility, select the drive then drag the lower right corner of the drive map (after clicking on ‘Partition’) to reduce the size of the existing partition and create a new partition for your Snow Leopard + EyeOne Match installation. You can then rename the partitions to something sensible using Finder. The picture of Disk Utility below shows the result after creating a new partition of 50gB on a 500gB notebook drive, reducing the original single partition from 500gB to 450gB. The 50gB partition will be for SL + EyeOne Match. Data in the original partition was not lost or erased by doing this.

A new partition has been created on a back-up disk.

If you rename your original partition be sure to rename it also in any stored back-up scripts used with the likes of Carbon Copy Cloner or other back-up applications.

Finder will now report your back-up disk as two disks and you can install SL and EyeOne Match to the new partition. When you are done you can go back into Disk Utility and reduce the SL + EyeOne partition to the minimum necessary so as to make as much free space available in the main partition on the HDD. I have tested booting from this partition back-up, attached the EyeOne colorimeter, ran the EyeOne Match software and everything worked perfectly.

Your profiles will reside here on your new device:

The screen snap shows the latest profiles for my three Dell 2209WA displays used with my HackPro.

Now reboot starting from the regular OS Lion boot disk, leaving the profile device attached so that you can copy over the latest profiles to the like directory on your Lion HDD. Do the copy now. Erase the old profiles.

To check the correct profile is being used go to System Preferences->Displays. If you have multiple monitors, move the white bar in Arrangement to the monitor you are checking. In this case quit and restart System Preferences->Displays to make sure you are addressing the selected monitor (OS X does not do this without restarting System Preferences).

Check the ‘Show profiles for this display only’ as shown below:

If the correct profile is not selected (your naming convention used when you save the profile from EyeOne match should be clear and obvious – I use ‘Left’, Center’ and ‘Right’ for my three displays) select it now and repeat for all other displays.

You are done and you can disconnect your Snow Leopard drive and stop worrying about Hans, Fritz, Helmut, Adolf and their fellow duffers at xrite coming out with a new version of their application for your EyeOne or Monaco Optix colorimeter. And your wallet will be safe, too.

And whatever you do, keep that Snow Leopard install disk or buy one now ($29) before Lion comes out, if you have lost your original!

O’Neill’s

The pub that time forgot.

When the AT&T ballpark was finished in 2000 it attracted like ugliness. But one building that time forgot is O’Neill’s Irish Pub, not a stone throw’s away, and beautiful weather and tired feet found me enjoying the lunch special, which came with a glass of Smithwick’s finest, for an all in price of $13. Can’t beat that. And as the place is old and tired and has been around for ages, it actually is somewhere you want to linger.

Panasonic G1, kit zoom @ 18mm, 1/30, f/5, ISO320.

My fellow diners included a bunch of manual laborers from the nearby new ferry terminal construction, people who know a good deal when they see it.

You can find O’Neill’s here:

Update 2012: Sadly, O’Neill’s is no more, replaced by yet another mindless chain restaurant ‘brew pub’.

Mac OS Lion

Two new features of note. And one great loss.

Like many, I use Macs not for the hardware – which my many years of use have shown to be generally poorly designed and unreliable – but for the operating system which is robust and largely trouble free. Indeed, my home brew Hackpro has shown that not only are PC hardware components dead reliable, they are also far cheaper and more easily replaced than anything in a Mac. The last major upgrade to OS X was Snow Leopard (June, 2009) and while it introduced no exciting new features the reliability improved on its already excellent predecessors Leopard and Tiger. Snow Leopard is so solid that the only time I reboot any Mac running it is when a software upgrade dictates that process.

Now that the next release of the Mac OS X operating system is out in beta test, details are beginning to leak. Snow Leopard will soon be replaced by Lion and here are a couple of substantive features that have caught my eye:

Recovery partition support: Lion will place a separate partition on your start-up drive with a complete installable copy of the Mac OS in it. This means that if the regular boot partition gets corrupted in some way, you will simply be able to restart your Mac while holding down the Option key and will be presented with a choice of boot drive. You elect the Recovery partition and are up and running in no time. Of course, if your whole drive is hosed, that will not help, but the increasing incidence of Solid State Drives (SSDs), as used in the MacBook Air and some MacBook Pros, makes this much more useful as the chances of ‘mechanical’ failure in an SSD are low. I suppose a massive blow would do it but the SSD would be the least of your worries in that case.

I hope that the version of the OS in the Recovery Partition is updated at the time the user updates the OS in the boot partition down the road. I can’t determine if that is the case

TRIM support for SSDs: Because an SSD can sustain fewer read/write cycles to any one internal location the OS has to move data around to maximize life. It’s not that big a deal as it’s likely your Mac will be obsolete before you exceed the number of permitted cycles, but it’s still a fact of life which may affect a very small percentage of users. Further, one dirty little secret of SSDs is that they do a poor job of managing garbage like deleted files (hitting ‘Delete’ does not delete the file, just the file name which appears in Finder, removing the total file size from the ‘space remaining’ statistic only), so they tend to lose storage capacity over time in the absence of TRIM technology.

Here’s a System Profiler snap from my 11″, 2010 MBA running Snow Leopard:

As you can see, it does not support TRIM, which is a technology which cleverly manages garbage to keep storage capacity at a maximum.

OS Lion, SSD + Recovery Partition + TRIM: Put those together and you get three benefits:

  • Fast SSD read and write speeds
  • Ability to restart even with a blown boot drive OS
  • Efficient management of dead space on a costly SSD

This leads to a couple of thoughts. If I can get Lion to run on the local workhorse here, my HackPro, then the next logical step is to add a small SSD to become the start-up drive with OS Lion on it and to store the Applications and Library directories on that SSD. Data files will continue to reside on traditional spinning disk drives until SSDs become larger and much cheaper. MacPro users could do this also given the machine’s ability to contain multiple disk drives. MacBook Pro users whose disk drive is of the spinning traditional type can get a kit to replace the increasingly useless optical disk drive with an SSD – Mac Sales has them – thus running two drives inside their laptop. I’m not sure about iMacs; there’s an option to buy these with an HDD plus an SSD but whether it’s possible to retrofit machines with an additional SSD which came without one is not something I have researched. Nor will I, given the poor heat design of the iMac which saw two die prematurely here, and the ghastly glossy screen.

I added up the size of those directories and here is what I got:

So that little lot totals less than half the capacity of a 120gB SSD. Here’s the current pricing of SSDs at MacSales – these come in a 2.5″ drive size so add $20 for the cradle to adapt the SSD to a full size machine which takes 3.5″ drives:

So the 120gB is in the gB/$ sweet spot and just the right size for my purposes.

MacSales’s web site makes the point that applications like Photoshop still do a lot of disk swapping when processing, so doing this using an SSD is going to result in far faster performance when doing complex processing. And my experience with the SSD in my MacBook Air tells me that PS and LR3 work super fast, especially when it comes to start-up times. Typically these applications start in half the time on the MBA compared with the HackPro with its 8gB of RAM and 1tB Samsung 7200rpm traditional HDD boot drive.

Today even the MacBook Pro laptop computer reports faster benchmark results than the HackPro despite the latter’s four core CPU, fast Nvidia 9800+ GPU and 8gB of RAM. But, then again, I can get faster to the grocery store on my push bike than you can in your Ferrari. Raw speed tests are not everything. Constraining factors like a slow internet connection can make all that speed of little use in many real world uses. The SSD addresses one of those bottlenecks, the slow read/write times of conventional hard disk drives, so for a modest investment of $270 + OS Lion I expect that the HackPro will once again jump to the forefront of effective speed in practical use which, for me, means less time spent processing photographs. That’s always a good thing as I much prefer pressing the button to messing about with a mouse.

Thunderbolt: Never missing an opportunity for hype, Apple has just added Intel’s Light Peak technology to the newest MacBook Pros fancifully naming it Thunderbolt. Please. This has nothing to do with OS Lion but is a wire or optical connector which permits far higher data transfer rates than USB2 or the nascent USB3, as well as supporting many peripherals like external drives, displays, etc. on one connector. The MBP version does not use optical fibers but you can bet those will be coming soon. There has been some confusing press stating that Thunderbolt will be exclusive to Macs for a year but I think that cannot be correct. It makes no sense for Intel to destroy its market for this exciting technology by limiting sales to a vendor who commands 5-10% of the non-tablet computer market. Accordingly, I expect that we will see aftermarket PCIe plug-in Light Peak cards for PCs and MacPros soon. It will be interesting to see how this works out but hopefully all those sockets on computers will disappear in favor on one, two or three Light Peak connectors. Light Peak supports serial connections (simply string your peripherals together end-to-end) and offers mainframe communication speeds to the PC market and I wouldn’t be making any investment in USB3 peripherals if I were you. USB3 is DOA.

No more Rosetta: Now here’s the bad news. Lion will not include Rosetta so PowerPC apps, like my Photoshop CS2, will no longer run. That’s a shame and I fail to see why Apple would delete this feature. Still, for the first time in ages, Apple has made Adobe happy given how many people will have to upgrade to the outrageously overpriced CS5.

The more troubling implication is for EyeOne Match which is the application used with the Eye One colorimeter to profile displays. Even though PPC hardware has been discontinued for years, x-rite has yet to update EyeOne Match to work on Intel machines; it needs Rosetta to work.

I have written to xrite and will publish their reply if I get one. Here’s what I wrote:

Gentlemen – I use your EyeOne colorimeter with your EyeOne Match software on my Macs for photo processing. I use v. 3.6.3 which is the current version of EyeOne Match, I believe. This application requires Rosetta to run in OS Snow Leopard as it is a PowerPC app and appears not to have been updated to run natively on Intel Macs. As you know PPC Macs have not been made for many years. EyeOne Match runs fine on my Macs using Rosetta.

However, the next version of Mac OS X, Lion, which will be introduced shortly, will no longer support Rosetta/PPC apps. So my question is:

“When can we expect an Intel version of Eye One Match which will work on the latest Macs running Lion?”

Not upgrading the Mac OS is not an option as all new Macs will come with Lion only; unless you upgrade your EyeOne Match software your device will cease to function on new Macs and your sales to Mac users will cease.

Thank you.

Until I get a positive response with a committed date from xrite I no longer recommend the Eye One for photographers and have updated my review to that effect. Indeed, the Mac user contemplating purchase of any xrite colorimeter should first address this issue and, if the software runs in Rosetta/PPC emulation mode only, buy something else.

xrite follow up: Correspondence with fellow photographer Roy Hammans has disclosed that others are onto this issue. It seems that Monaco Optix has the same problem and I wouldn’t be surprised if ColorMunki has it also – all three colorimeters are sold by xrite.

Meanwhile, assuming xrite is lazy/slow/dumb (which history suggests) it occurs to me that there is a workaround. The Mac user would keep a working installation of Snow Leopard in a separate partition on his boot drive and start from that, perform a profile update then simply copy the profiles created over to the Lion partition. Then reboot from Lion. Even easier, create a bootable version of Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) on an SDHC card or an inexpensive USB thumb drive, and install the EyeOne Rosetta software there. An 8gB drive should be ample as OS X uses under 5gB.

Your display profiles reside here on your Mac:

If it comes to this, as I suspect it will, then I will post a piece here explaining how to accomplish the workaround, allowing users to update to Lion and still retain the ability to use the EyeOne to profile their displays.

TurboTax: While not germane to photography, US users of TurboTax should also think before moving to Lion. Through and including tax year 2005, TurboTax for Macs was a PPC application and needs Rosetta to run. So if you need to access tax returns prepared using TurboTax for tax years 2005 or earlier on your Mac, make sure to keep a Mac running nothing later than Snow Leopard handy for that purpose.

21st Amendment

In memoriam of quite exceptional stupidity.

For a nation created in the joint beliefs of self determination and freedom of religion and expression, the United States still boasts more loony puritanical cranks per acre than most. Never was this better illustrated than in the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, passed by the drunken louts in Congress in 1919. This stunning piece of idiocy prevailed until repeal by the 21st Amendment passed in 1933.

There were only two groups who approved. The peddlers of illegal hooch who became wealthy overnight. And Hollywood, which made movies about …. the peddlers of illegal hooch. Congress had proved, yet again, that a basic, unarguable principle of economics could not be changed.

All control drives up price.

The poppy farmers in the Golden Triangle and the hemp growers of South America and the California hills bow daily in the direction of a Congress still in denial of this Great Truth. Or maybe those legislators are simply on the payroll? Either way, we continue to support the drug trade and its extraordinary profits by doing for drugs what we did between 1919 and 1933 for booze. Go figure.

Please. No lectures about your kids getting higher than a kite. It’s called ‘parental responsibility’.

There’s a fine brew pub with a nice selection of craft beers not far from the ballpark in San Francisco named, appropriately, The 21st Amendment, and you can get a beer there for a whole lot less than you paid Al Capone back in the day. My waiter knew his stuff too when I asked him which Amendment made the Volstead Act law, right down to the date! Click ‘No’ on their home page and nothing happens! Gotta like that.

Panasonic G1, kit lens @ 14mm, 1/80, f/3.5, ISO 1600.

As the snap shows, they are proud of their brewers here and I confirm that I was enjoying a light New Belgian Mothership wheat beer with my fish and chips when snapping this, purely to steady my hand, you understand,

Google Translate

For other languages.


Read this journal in English.
Lire ce journal en français.
Leggi questo giornale in lingua italiana.
Lea esta revista en español.
Lesen Sie diese Zeitschrift in deutscher Sprache.
קרא את היומן הזה עברית.
日本でこの雑誌を読んでください。
閱讀這份期刊在中國。

English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese – that should about cover it.

My mail box suggests that some readers of this journal do not read English so, to accommodate them, I have added on-the-fly foreign language translation using Google Translate.

Click a language choice in the right hand drop-down menu and you will see something like the following almost instantly (this illustration is in a language I really care about):

In one of the most beautiful languages known to man.

Granted, the translation may not be the greatest but it suffices at a pinch. I count 57 language choices in addition to English and for the imminent arrival of the day when our new Chinese masters march into free nations’ capitals, I have made bloody well sure you can get Chinese. Of course, I will doubtless be among the first lined up against the brick wall for the poor quality of the translation. Or for actually having an opinion. Or something.

A nation that makes billions of Macs has no words for ‘Lightroom’ or ‘QTVR’ ….

Sorry, no American option. This journal is written, for the most part, in the Queen’s English and residents of certain former colonies will have to make do with that. And if you switch to Chinese, I can confirm that it’s sheer hell trying to get the right choice to revert to English .


* * * * *

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him.
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.
One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get,
Oh, why can’t the English learn to

set a good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears.
There even are places where English completely disappears.

In America, they haven’t used it for years!

Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian,
the Greeks are taught their Greek.
In France every Frenchman knows his language from “A” to “Zed”

The French never care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning,
The Hebrews learn it backwards,
which is absolutely frightening.
But use proper English and you’re regarded as a freak.

Why can’t the English,
Why can’t the English,
Learn To Speak?

‘My Fair Lady’, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner (who was an American
though he did go to a proper English school!)