iPhoto Library Huge? Delete your movies!

My iPhoto library has grown to over 30 Gigabytes.  We’ve got nearly 10 years of photos in the Library, but still, that’s a massive library size for a person, who until today when I bought a dSLR, always used the stock settings on  our camera.

A had a sneaking suspicion of the root cause of my iPhoto library growth, however.  A few years back, instead of having a separate camcorder that used DV videotape, we started shooting all our video on our point-and-shoot.  iPhoto by default imports videos from the camera, and so over the past 3 or 4 years we seem to have accumulated 20 Gigabytes of videos (about 200 videos shot) out of a 30GB library.  Extreme!

So, in order to combat this growing file size, I took some steps to export these videos and delete the from the Library.

First Step, Find the Videos

First, we need to find the videos.  Took some time to find this, but you can’t do an advanced find or anything sophisticated in iPhoto.  However, you can create a Smart Album.  Go to File -> New Smart Album, and set it up like this:

Second Step, Export the Videos

iPhoto is great for managing a large number of small files.  However, because it manages files all inside one .pkg file, it means once it gets large (20-50 gigabytes) it becomes a royal pain to move around.  Best to keep a large number of small files inside it, and manage the large files somewhere else on your file system.  To do that, lets export all the videos out of Library.  First hit select the Smart Album we just created, I called mine videos.  Next, hit Cmd-A to select all the videos in your Smart Album, then Go to File -> Export and make your window look like this:

Select a directory to export them to, and you’ll find all your original movies in that folder after the export is complete.

Third, Delete the Videos

Now, it’s time to clear out the videos from the Library.  However, this is not as straight forward as it would seem.  Attempting to delete the videos from the Library does not work as expected.  iPhoto will simply beep at you if you hit Cmd-Delete, or if you try to select Delete from the menu you’ll find it greyed out.  Instead, you need to do a Cmd-Opt-Delete from the Keyboard and this will allow you to delete the videos from the Smart Album.  Again, go the Smart Album we created in the first step, then hit Cmd-A to select all the videos in the Smart Album, then hit Cmd-Opt-Delete, and it’ll prompt you to move all the videos to the trash.  Hit Okay, then right click the Trash icon and choose “Empty Trash.”  Quit iPhoto, and your space from your iPhoto Library will be reclaimed!

New Job & Getting Back Into the Swing of Things

I’ve been quiet for a few months.  I see my last post was about Dave getting fired.  By that time, I was already talking to my new employer, Splunk, about potentially coming over.  It took several more months to get the deal done, but in February I moved over from Cricket to Splunk.

After they fired Dave, Cricket went even further downhill if that was at all possible.  In order to fend with the chaos of a untransitioned parting CIO, we created a 100 day plan that was inspired.  Unfortunately, the plan quickly got bogged down by consultant after consultant wanting an infinite amount of attention from the rather few people in the organization who had a clue what was actually going on, and by the time I left the consultants had just gotten to the phase where they start regurgitating back recommendations they’d gleaned from merely talking to the clueful people inside the organization.  I cannot hide my disdain for consultants.  Companies who hire them are, in my opinion, too weak-willed to listen to their own employees for direction and instead feel it necessary to put someone in the middle to anonymize that feedback.  It’s a silly waste of money in order to save a few people’s pride.

The day I left, Cricket announced a new CTO, who was former from Echostar and T-Mobile (I won’t mention his name, because he seems like the kind of guy who Googles himself a lot).  Word has it that he plans to crony up the place, and the few reports I’ve received so far of his management style have been very humorous.  I think they’d be decidedly less humorous if I was still on the inside having to listen to him.

At the end of my tenure at Cricket, I knew a few things.  One, I was decidedly unhappy at my current job.  Secondly, that unhappiness stemmed largely from being unable to influence change inside the organization.  Its not that I think I have a monopoly on good ideas, but I think I do have more than my fair share of them.  Spending weeks or months attempting to lobby everyone with the ability to say no to get to yes was frustrating.  These people were at no because frankly they were either threatened by new ideas or they simply thought their life would be easier if they didn’t have to do anything different.  After years of attempting to affect change, I reflected deeply and determined two more things.

• I no longer wanted to be in IT Operations
• I wanted to be on the business side of the business

There were a couple of reasons for those two revelations, which largely influenced my new job choice.  First, IT Operations is a completely thankless job.  Cricket had 94.7412% service availability on our primary CRM platform in 2011 (if you choose to believe my numbers and not various executives who attempted to manipulate them).  That’s approximately 460 Hours of downtime.  This terrible by every industry measurement, and I was on an outage bridge for nearly all those hours of downtime.  It took a toll on me personally, especially since all of that downtime had executive attention and generally involved at least talking to the CIO, if not the COO or CEO.  Cricket was unwilling to make the investments it needed to improve that, and only started seriously talking about making those changes after it fired the CIO that had been asking desperately for the money needed to make them.

The second revelation was because I wanted to be able to influence the actual revenue side of the business.  I’ve long said that I think IT should be the best cost center possible.  At this year’s Gartner ITxpo, there was much talk of turning IT into a profit center, but frankly I’ve been hearing that from IT executives for years and it’s really just self delusionment.  IT will always be a cost center, and so I think it’s IT’s job to simply be the best at it as possible.  However, there’s no substitute to being in the product, sales or marketing organizations simply because they are working every day to drive top line revenue growth.  The satisfaction gleaned from doing a good job and seeing the company succeed because of your work is unparalleled, and its best experienced from the front office.

All those thing said, the opportunity to join Splunk was too much to pass up.  I’m also getting to move to the Bay Area, which I’m incredibly excited about.  I’ve long wanted to live in the Bay Area.  The weather is fantastic; the best technology companies in the world are there; and the opportunity is just endless.  I’ll miss Denver and all the friends I’ve made here, but on to new and better things.  The role I’ve accepted is as the Sr. Manager over Technical Product Marketing.  This means I’m going to get to use my unique blend of technology and communications skills to show off the product in the best light possible.  I’m also tasked with keeping a close eye on our competitors, which I’m sure will be rewarding in its own way.

Now that I’m free of corporate overlords and I’m actually in an outward facing position, hopefully I can find time again to write my thoughts.  I’ll especially be writing much more on technology and Splunk specifically.  I’m very much looking forward to the future!

Boss Sacking

I’m very conflicted.  Today, the man I’ve worked for for over 8 years got sacked.  I don’t really intend this to be a deeply reflective post, mainly one to document this point in time, and how I feel.  I think he was a fall-guy, a victim of circumstance, but yet, I think he totally had the power to prevent what happened to him.  Our whole company is completely addicted to change, from the top to the bottom.  Nobody prioritizes today’s activities, at least, I don’t see anyone prioritizing what’s happening today over anything that is coming up in the future.  We’re always focused on tomorrow.  I work in Operations, I have no choice but to worry about today at the expense of tomorrow, but it seems higher up we could have spent more time focusing on how what we were doing was going to affect our operations.  At the very least, as we dipped below 99%, then 98%, then 97% availability, we could have put a focus back on it and had all hands on deck to alleviate the problems.  We did try to do that, but I think it was too late.  Ultimately, most CIOs don’t make it through a Billing Conversion, so a credit to him that he did and last 6 months past it, but all in all, I think he was an excellent boss who was the fall guy for the business to blame when things went exactly as anyone could have seen them going given their total lack of direction.

No Netflix? No problem!

At work, they block Netflix streaming for obvious reasons.  However, they don’t block outbound TCP connections on every port, which is the only way you can stop me from looking at what I want.  I have a Linode VPS that I use for a screen’d copy of irssi which connects to Undernet and bitlbee for IM (I’ll do a post on that sometime).  I have a script that keeps that connection nailed up that looks like:

until ssh -t -o "ServerAliveInterval 1" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 5" -D 1080 -R 8000:localhost:8000 some.host screen -x;  do
    echo "Server 'ssh' crashed with exit code $?. Respawning.." >&2
    sleep 1
done

Basically, that little shell script makes sure SSH stays nailed up and connected to my VPS, port forwards port 8000 to localhost for my web development stuff I play around with, and today I added -D 1080 which creates a SOCKS5 Proxy on port 1080 that will tunnel through SSH turning

Into

I use FoxyProxy in Firefox to automatically tunnel Netflix through the SOCKS proxy.  I could set it up in Chrome which is my primary browser, but this way I don’t have to turn the Proxy on and off between home and work.  I rarely have time to watch anything at work, but at least now I can.

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