Tag Archives: the intertubes

In Search of: Network-shareable Photo Organization Solution

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Ok, so we have this problem at my job.

We have this fileserver for the marketing team. It’s got photos in it. Lots and lots of photos. It also has Photoshop files, Indesign files, Illustrator files, some videos, and other bits — but it’s mostly Photos. We have so many photos that our network admin had us move off of the main fileserver and onto our own special one that is not backed up with the nightly backups.

Having lots of photos presents its own problems, of course. One must organize large collections. We spend an inordinate amount of time searching for Photos — even those that are used relatively often. When we’re looking for photos that match a theme, it’s even worse because we have to iteratively look through each one.

Does anyone have any suggestions for software packages that would help with this?

Most of the ones I’ve seen that organize the photos (Picasa, Adobe Bridge, FSpot) do not share the tags / categories with others. It is not enough to simply organize them by date — we really need the ability to tag them based on who’s in them, what event they are from, the location, and any abstract descriptors we can think of.

We’ve considered using FlickR, but I’d prefer to keep these files off the cloud, mostly for maintenance reasons.

Basically, what we need is a Digital Asset Management solution that does the following things: Continue reading →

Why MySpace Fails

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If you are an Internet denizen, you are probably familiar with both MySpace and Facebook, both popular social networking platforms on the web. MySpace, which skyrocketed to popularity about 4 years ago, has since waned significantly, dwarfed by the sleeper mammoth that is Facebook.

In April 2008, Facebook finally surpassed MySpace in popularity. As a Web Developer, long-time Internet user, I’ve got some opinions on why this happened. Both platforms are largely similar and serve to fit similar needs. They are, of course, not mutually exclusive (I happen to have an account on both, for example), but otherwise require independent investments of time, so there is an issue of time economy at play.

But the purpose of Social Networking websites is communication. If people are not able to easily communicate with one another, then the site is not doing its job.

The ironic thing is that most of the reasons I cite below as failures have generally been considered features of MySpace. But these features serve to inhibit communication rather than facilitiate it. In brief (will elaborate below):

  1. It allows users to heavily customize their profiles, visually
  2. Users are able to easily change their displayed name
  3. Users can embed music onto their profiles so that it automatically plays when the profile is viewed
  4. The primary focus of MySpace has always been self-centered (see what I’m doing) rather than community-centric (what are my friends doing)
  5. Facebook does a much better job of connecting people, and provides better off-site integration.

Continue reading →

Perspective

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Just caught this tweet from a colleague:

“Mom, I have a call at 1:30 so don’t use the internet.” HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

He was, of course, lampooning one of his friends who has the misfortune of visiting his parents who are still apparently using dial-up Internet. It took me back for a moment:

Back Then (1991)

When I was 11, our incoming Freshmen at IU East were just being born. The Internet, as we know it, did not exist.

We had a 486 SX desktop computer with a processor that was 25MHz, a 121 MB hard drive, 1MB graphics card capable of 256 color graphics, and 4 MB of RAM. (a later upgrade to 8MB cost $160) The modem we had, which connected over landline, would tie up our phone while I used it;  it could also only transfer 2400 bps (aka “baud”). (note that the lowercase “b” there indicates BITS and not BYTES. 2400 bps is roughly equal to 300 bytes per second, or Bps)

My friends and I would connect to local bulletin-board systems (BBS’s), which were kind of like websites: there was mail features, multi-user games, files to download, and you could communicate with people far away via mail relay services like FIDONet. To give you an idea about speed: when you would load a “page” on the BBS (login screen, a game, a filelist, etc.) you could literally see the text appear on the screen as it was received. It was that slow.

Downloading a single image (hot girls, funny pictures, desktop wallpaper, etc.) took anywhere from a solid minute for a small (15 kilobyte) image. A larger image, say 50kB, would take about 3 minutes. For a frame of reference, the banner at the top of this blog, featuring my picture and “Two-year-olds think I’m awesome”, is 22kB (about a minute and a half) and the entire web page is roughly 500kB.

That would have taken a half-hour. Just to load http://blog.amhill.net.

I am not even kidding. Continue reading →

OpenDNS.com [Tech Review]

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As a followup to yesterday, where I discussed overcoming the Comcast DNS Hijacking service, I wanted to write a short post about the OpenDNS service that Matt McKimmy had mentioned in his comment (and tweet).

It’s really awesome!

Initially, I had thought that it was simply a freely available DNS service, to be used in place of any other DNS service. If that’s all it was, it would still be useful and worth checking out. But it turns out there are a bunch of other features that are available with this free service online. The two features I found most useful were:

  • “Shortcuts”
  • Parental Filtering / phishing prevention

Continue reading →

Opting Out of Comcast’s Domain Hijacker Service

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A couple weeks ago, I mistyped a web address in my browser and I was taken to a page run by Comcast that displayed many ads related to the words in the URL I entered. This phenomenon was covered by Slashdot and other sources. If you’ve followed me for a while, you may have seen my previous rants regarding Domaineers such as Kevin Hamm; He made deals with the countries of Colombia (.co) and Cameroon (.cm) to force any mistyped URLs to those domains (ie. google.co, google.cm) to be routed through one of his ad-laden content-light websites.

This Comcast Domain Helper service is the same sort of racket — you type in an incorrect URL, and Comcast shows you a page rich with referral links, advertisemets, and other click-thru advertising.

Anyways — what follows are instructions on “opting out” of the domain helper service, with thanks to Bonnie from Comcast, who directed me to the solution initially, as well as Matt McKimmy who suggested an alternate solution. Continue reading →

How the TV / Film Industry can take advantage of P2P

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If you are a frequent Internet user, you have undoubtedly watched a video online somewhere.

No?

Ok here, watch this:

That video happens to be from Youtube, but as you may or may not know, there are many other places to watch videos online. Some of them are questionably legal. The legitimate sites, however, show advertisements before, during and/or after the videos they display. A 30 minute show typically has 2-3 minutes of commercials — a far cry from televisions 8-12 minutes!

You can also walk the wild side and attempt to find your shows using BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a terrific distributed model for dispersing media across the Internet. But the television and film industry just don’t get it. Well I’ve got a solution. Continue reading →