[OS X] LensForge: Software for professional & amateur lens designers, amateur telescope makers, and others.

John Steinberg wrote:
LensForge, a tool for professional and amateur lens designers, amateur
telescope makers, and others.

Reportedly the first ever lens design program for OS X.

Yo! What a coincidence. The missus and I traveled to your Fair City by
rail on May 31 to ogle the new 5th Ave Apple Store and to visit and
have a spot of lunch at MOMA. (I recommend starting with the paté de
foie gras with toasted country bread and then moving to the sirloin au
poivre on a bed of spaetzle and spinach. Simple peasant fare for
ragfeet like us.) The Apple Store is all it is cracked up to be,
appearance-wise. Who in Hell (besides Jobs) would have thought that
/Apple/ could launch one of the most succesful retail ventures ever!?
And it's not just iPods -- the stores are moving a lot of Macs (average
$2,489 per sq. ft. in 2005, compared to $971 for Best Buy and about
$300 for Target), with 45 percent going to people who are switching
from another OS (except in Colorado, of course, where "switching" means
the opposite of what it does in the rest of the Galaxy.)

Anyway, I /had/ to wear /some/ sort of uniform to mark myself as a
Faithful Pilgrim, so I wore my "MacAstronomer" cap into the Apple
Store. That caught the attention of a fellow who is an optician and who
designs, among other things, telescope lenses and mirrors. He uses Macs
and he recommends software from http://www.opticasoftware.com. This
is high end stuff, Mac & Windows, not recommended for the faint of
purse. He also mentioned some Unix apps that he runs under X11. He
described them as not well known, but very powerful. Since this is only
of passing interest to me -- I'm not the next Al Nagler -- I didn't try
to recall the names.

And there was a fellow who described in a Mac science forum early this
year how lonely it was being a Mac optician in a room full of Others.
He found a piece of Unix software written in Fortran, he said, and was
able in short order to make it run under X11. But X11 is apparently too
fancy for him, so he modified it to run straight from the terminal.

Wish I'd had a video camera on the trip up. Business class. One guy
with a MacBook Pro and another with a /huge/ Dull laptop. The guy with
the MacBook attracted a small crowd that oohed and aahed over the
software he was showing to his travel companion (Aperture, Final Cut,
Keynote, Garage Band, and other neat stuff, even MS Office) while the
guy with the Dull, obviously a networking expert, was shouting
instructions into his cell phone at an entire office full of people who
couldn't connect to the wireless network because the IT guy was away.
It was a real soap opera. He had the speaker on for a very short time
while searching his briefcase for some tech papers, but cut it off
quickly when a woman in the office began loudly using four-letter words
to describe MS Windows He had people crawling under desks looking for
Ethernet cables, while others, who didn't even know what a server is,
were directed to the server room to try some fixes. This went on from
Phila. to Newark, then his own Dull began having problems (crashing
repeatedly, actually) from (he said) having too many apps open at once.

Speaking of Aperture, I've been using it exclusively for pre-processing
of all my raws. It also handles jpeg's out of the camera and I suppose
any other common format. This is a powerful solution, especially for a
young piece of software. It is not, and is not meant to be, a Photoshop
replacement, but it fits nicely into the workflow and lightens the
Photoshop workload considerably. In fact, the great majority of the
processing of my miserable photo of 73P Schwassmann-Wachmann at
http://tinyurl.com/n4roo was done with Aperture. Kind of like iPhoto
on serious steroids, and it requires a Mac of suitable power to do it
justice. Hums along nicely on my older Dual G5 with 4GB RAM, now up to
nearly 2 terabytes of storage, and 30" Cinema Display.

We would like to pop up for lunch more often, but it's hard to justify
spending six hours and over $300 just to travel to and from the
restaurant (Business Class) -- unless one is on an Important Mission
like Apple-Store ogling.

A man who boarded in Newark asked a conductor whether persons traveling
on business were /required/ to have business-class tickets.

And that ends this week's chapter of Weird Travels with Davoud. Tune in
again next week, as Davoud and the missus take a road trip to
Rockwall, Texas.

Davoud

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usenet *at* davidillig *dawt* com