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I learned my lesson. Never touch a running system. That's why I was still running Tiger on my good old MacBook... Then I was intrigued by the new features of iPhoto, since so far I've been lacking a user-friendly picture browser on the Mac. Well the damn thing would only run on Leopard, so I had to install it last weekend, which could be a whole post of its own, but I want to spare you some frustrated hacking. Well the next problem was to get my pictures into the iPhoto database. For the average photographer, this would probably not be so much of a challenge, however try getting some 95'000 pictures (450GB, and NO this is a collection of undecent pictures I "found" on the internet but my personal work) from my PC to my MacBook. Well I planned on placing the IPhoto library on an external hard drive anyways, however this would not solve my problem as iPhoto encodes and integrates them into its very own database, occupying more space than the individual files, and as my external drive had only 750GB, I could not fit both the original pictures and the pictures in the database. First I planned importing them over the network, which after a wasted Sunday afternoon failed because of a Leopard bug that is making a stable smb connection to Windows XP impossible (at least in my hands). I tried making a firewire network which failed due to the same reasons. I could connect from Windows to Mac just fine, but not vice-versa... Anyways, my semi-broken 1TB Iomega drive (dubbed Terabetz by some unforgiving lab collegues) had to come to a rescue. Well kind off, since he tends to crash every couple of minutes due to a power cable issue, robbing me of my last nerve.
After a couple of 24h shifts (for my laptop that is) I have most of the pictures imported, however a greater number seems to be missing and many seem to have gotten copied multiple times, and the lack of a remove duplicates feature makes this another big pain. There seem to be a couple of third-party apps that do this, I might have to consider those. Then I finally tried out the much discussed face detection feature. First of all I have to say that that it has some serious flaws. It works in several steps. First, during importing, the app scans every picture for faces. Then later you have to name the people in these pictures, and he offers you similar pictures, refining the process more and more. The big issue for now is that the software scans every picture only once for face detection, and for one reason or another it fails to scan quite a significant number of albums and their respective contents, without giving you the option to run it again. Obviously this will be fixed in a patch, hopefully soon.
Now to the face detection itself. It is truly awesome. There's room for improvement, of course, but it really can do a lot! After the first couple of annoying manual confirmations it gets better and better. An interesting sidenote is that it will also show you very often interesting results. For example, it picked up on several occasions my girl-friends siblings when I was tagging her pictures. This screams for an automated family tree feature... Or it can detect blurry pictures far in the background with shocking accuracy. Of course it can also fail on many occasions, depending on the faces you are tagging. People are reporting that it's quite good in keeping cats apart, but I had problems with my dog so far. Well I guess more fun to come, hope they can address some of these issues.

Pix are here.

Continuing my series of Luxembourgish national dishes and gastronomic specialties, I present you today the Liewerkniddelen, which you could probably translate by liver dumplings. It's one of my favorite dishes, and for a very long time I could not prepare it because I was lacking a proper meat grinder. Well Xmas was my lucky day, and I must agree that while not many people would be happy to find a mincer under the Christmas tree, I was. It was a Alexanderwerk Fleischwolf inherited from my great-great grandparents. The quantities will be enough for 2 person. First I bought a cabbage head because I could not find any Sauerkraut, chopped it up in thin slices and incubated (yeah I do too much science) it overnight in the fridge with tons of salt. You need 300g fresh calf liver, 2 eggs, white bread and milk, parsley, onions, bacon ("Fette Speck" instead of "Moëre Speck", meaning the fattier the better) and potatoes (small ones). I began by carefully washing the cabbage in order not to get a salt shock, and then I cooked it for an hour in bouillon. I made "Gebootsche Gromperen" with the potatoes, so you peel them, take your bacon (around 70g) and fry it in an adequate pot (teflon coated is excellent for this), then remove the bacon but leave the liquid fat, add the raw potatoes and put on medium heat with a closed lid (no not your eyes!). Every couple of minutes, you shake the pot without opening the lid. So for the dumplings I chopped up the liver in thin slices, put them in the mincer, added the milk-soaked bread (100-150g) as last to get it all out. You have to pass it through twice, the second time adding the bacon and parsley.You then mix it with the eggs and some breadcrumbs (depending on how liquid it is), 2-3 chopped onions, season it (salt and pepper etc, use enough salt) and bring some bouillon to cook. You form fist-sized balls and place them in the boiling water and let it cook for some 10 minutes. Taste the cabbage, if it is still too salty wash it again and heat it shortly before eating in a pan with some oil. You can add some fried bacon (Gréiwen) on the potatoes and liver balls. They go great along some mustard!