Mark Roddis

I am a big user of virtualization both at work and at home. I design it into the solutions I produce for my clients and also use it at home for testing and the like. But it has other uses and sometimes lets you do things you would not normally consider.

So with the announcement from Microsoft that Windows 3.1 is about to be withdrawn forever, I just had to dive onto TechNet and grab a copy before it was gone.

Armed with a copy of Virtual PC, 3 MS DOS floppy disk images and my 8 Windows floppy disk images (and if anybody asked what a floppy disk is I will cry), I got to this stage

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That title should really be followed by an evil laugh but I don’t think it is us that should be doing the laughing.

Now I was reading today about a Polish start up called Belysio which is just another social networking site however it’s key differentiator is that it uses geotagging to map your location. Put simply, not only can you read about what your “friends” are doing, but you can also see exactly where they are. So much for the boss not knowing you are playing golf rather than meeting that client in London.

So there a whole load of privacy issues here although I suppose that you can always switch the service off (if you remember) but read on because this is actually going somewhere a lot darker. (more…)

Like just about everybody else, I own a digital camera. In fact I own Three.

First there is my Sony DSLR A100 which is my pride and joy. It takes great pictures and gives me complete control over what I am shooting.

Next there is my Sony T70 point and shoot camera which is small enough to drop into my pocket but still returns some really great pictures.

Finally I have a camera on my phone which is OK for the occasional snap shot.

So for a few years now I have maintained an online photo album on the same server that I run this blog on. I was always put off the free photo hosting web sites as they were plastered with adverts and had serious limits on storage etc.

For my album I have tried many different software solutions.

Initially I was using the open source software Gallery which worked really well for me but when I moved to Vista, the option to upload in bulk from within Windows folders went away so to upload 20 photos one by one was a painful and time consuming chore.

I then tried Coppermine and again it was the uploading that let things down.

So I moved over to using Jalbum which created the whole website locally on my PC and then let me upload it via FTP onto my web space. It may sound clunky and tied me to a single PC for uploading but the results were actually quite nice.

But because of the way it stored it’s images, if I ever moved my photos around on my hard disk or reinstalled my PC (like I did this weekend when I upgraded to Vista 64bit) I had to mess about and recreate the entire album AGAIN! For over 1000 images, this can take a whole day.

So time to review how I get my photos online moving forward.

I took another long look at some of the free services like Microsoft Live Spaces, Google and so on and still found them to be strewn with banner ads and very much geared to blogging and social sites rather than just delivering a nice elegant album.

So onto the paid for sites.

Flickr is nice but again is heavily biased to social networking and sharing and that is not what I need.

Pbase is awesome but is really geared towards the pro photographer so that the albums are way too complicated for when Granny wants to look at our latest holiday snaps. On top of this, it can get quite expensive if you want to upload full sized images.

And so the search went on and I did find that many large sites were too bothered about rating my photos and getting me to add my friends to my network rather than just let me show off my photos to my family.

But then I found SmugMug which is actually a photo gallery first and a social networking site second. There are no banners and the layout is simple and easy to navigate. it does not require visitors to register first and has no restrictions on space, bandwidth and visitor numbers. The limitations that do exist do not impact me so we are onto a winner. On top of all of that, the upload facility is easy and quick plus allows me to add photos from any PC or even via email and my phone. Sorted.

So you will find a link to my photo album at the top of this blog (or you can just click here) but hopefully I will now be able to post a lot more images online as it is now easy to do again.