Author Archives: Brian - Page 3

SmugMug

Posted by on September 24, 2009 No comments

In my never-ending quest to find the ultimate in online photo management tools, I am currently trying out SmugMug. Currently all of my images are self-hosted as I like the control that gives me. After a recent event however, the software I’m using (ZenPhoto) started choking on my uploaded images. This isn’t really ZenPhoto’s fault as it wasn’t really designed to deal with 10 megapixel images uploaded at full resolution. I considered uploading resized images, but I really like having the full quality pictures available anywhere. As such, I started investigating other options…

Since I generally prefer self-hosted, I started out looking at my options there. There are a LOT of options in the PHP photo gallery world. Things I tried in no particular order:

  • Piwigo
    • There were a lot of things I didn’t really care for in this one. The administration interface was unintuitive and uploads were a pain.
  • phTagr
    • I was curious about this one as I have used CakePHP in the past and enjoyed it. The gallery wasn’t really designed for what I want to do though. phTagr was more about being social then displaying the information in the way I wanted.
  • Gallery 3
    • This one had a fair amount of potential. Though it is currently still in beta it feels like a very nice product. This one is the successor to the hugely popular Gallery2 software. Gallery2 had a lot of power and suffered for it in terms of performance and complexity. With Gallery3 the team decided to strip out most of the non-core functionality and focus and speed and ease of use. In my opinion, they made a good choice there and have been hugely successful. Ultimately what killed this one for me is the way it stores files. Since Gallery3 copies files into a specific folder structure, you can’t easily modify files in bulk once they are in the system.

There are a lot of other self-hosted options, but these are the ones that looked interesting enough for me to experiment with. After ruling them out, I started looking at hosted options. Hosted services I looked at:

  • Flickr
    • Pretty much ubiquitous for photo sharing. But not at all customizable. I like customizable.
  • Picasa Web Albums
    • This integrates seamlessly with Picasa which is probably one of the best photo organizing apps I have used. But again with the lack of customizability.
  • SmugMug
    • No free accounts, but a 15 day free trial. I can do a lot with a 15 day free trial. This one has a large amount of customizability built in. If you don’t like what they have available they let you create a complete theme (I haven’t played with that yet). They also allow you to use your own domain name (on a Power or Pro level account) which I really like. Also, the service uses Amazon S3 for storage and a CDN to get things served quickly. Overall sounds like a winner.

So far in my experimenting with SmugMug, I have been pretty pleased. I will likely end up signing up for their Power level account ($60/yr) which provides all of the features I can forsee needing. File/Album management is less intuitive than I would like, but I will have more on that later.

On the off chance you feel like signing up for SmugMug and want to help me out, my referral code is pJEmU1ps9hXGE

Irssi, Irssi Proxy and Bitlbee

Posted by on August 7, 2009 No comments

Quick summary: How to make communications as convenient yet convoluted as possible.

In my seemingly endless desire to play with changing the way I do things, I have modified the way I use instant messaging. While at work I am constantly connected to IRC in order to keep up (in realtime!) with things going on in the real world. Yesterday we were comparing the benefits of irc and xmpp trying to determine which technology is cooler. One of the nice things most Jabber servers have going for them is the ability to connect to other networks (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc). As I normally have two clients open for this very reason (xchat-gnome for irc and pidgin for regular IM) I decided it was time to try out BitlBee. BitlBee is basically a lightweight service that creates an IRC interface to various IM networks (including all of the examples above).

Setting up BitlBee (at least in my case) on Ubuntu was absurdly simple.

  1. Install BitlBee
  2. Start the service (sudo /etc/init.d/bitlbee start)
  3. Connect your irc client to localhost port 6667
  4. Type help quickstart and follow along

The way I handle IRC is a bit more complex than many people, so I had a few additional steps. I use irssi and irssiproxy running in screen to stay connected 24/7 (or close enough). The only extra thing you need to do to make that work is add a port to irssiproxy_ports for your bitlbee network.

Vista won’t turn off the monitor

Posted by on June 29, 2009 No comments

I run Vista at home primarily for gaming purposes (and I like uTorrent). One of the problems I had with it lately was it not turning off the monitor when the power saving plan was supposed to. I would watch it try and turn off, but usually wouldn’t quite succeed. Eventually I determined the problem was having the screen saver set to activate at the same time the monitor was supposed to turn off. I set the screen saver to activate 1 minute earlier and everything is now working correctly.

OpenDNS kills Google

Posted by on May 13, 2009 No comments

Yesterday I was having problems getting to Google. The rest of the internet worked fine, but I couldn’t connect to Google. It struck me as unlikely that Google would be down and check with Down for Everyone confirmed that it was just me.

After much digging and a bit of thinking, I discovered google.com was not actually resolving to google.com. It was resolving to an OpenDNS service. Apparently they do some proxying of Google to make sure some of their advanced features keep working. To fix the problem, I just had to turn of the proxy and everything was golden.

To turn of the proxy:

  1. Login to OpenDNS
  2. Go to Settings
  3. Go to Advanced Settings (the link is on the left)
  4. Turn of the proxy
  5. Enjoy

Adobe Air in Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04)

Posted by on April 24, 2009 1 comment

I just finished reinstalling Ubuntu 9.04 and was trying to install my air applications. Not terribly difficult…

  1. Download the installer from: http://get.adobe.com/air/
  2. Install ia32-libs
  3. Install lib32nss-mdns (from http://tr.im/jCFs )
  4. Install your apps

I got stuck on the third step when I was going through things. I could install Adobe Air applications, but they had no network access. Installing that library corrected the problem.