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Category Archives: Tech
Trying to photoBlog from my iPhone
I like my iPhone, and I like Flickr, I also like to blog and photoBlog.
The iPhone has a really good camera and a constant internet connection and real web browser. It sounds like the ultimate photo Blogging tool, right?
Problems
- There is not file access to iPhones pictures through the web browser, so forget uploading pictures directly to Flickr
- It’s possible to email pictures to Flickr, but AT&T has a hidden back door charge of $0.50 for ever picture emailed via the iPhone, so uploading 20 pictures would cost me $10 extra! forget that!
I modified my iPhone a while back, and there are two applications currently that get around both of these problems, iFlickr and Pushr
iFlickr sucks because you have to take the picture using their application, and you cant upload any existing pictures on your IPhone.
Pushr is closer to what I want. You take pictures with the default camera application, then fire up Pushr. Pushr will push ALL the pictures you have on your phone to Flickr. This sounds good in theory, but what if you don’t want to push all your pictures to Flickr? You have the option to de-select the pictures you don’t want to send. So if you have 100 pictures, and you only want to upload one, you will have to de-select the 99 you don’t want to send. The whole de-select process seems counter intuitive. I think you should be able to select the pictures you want to send and just push those.
Because of the current limitations of both iPhone Flickr related apps, I am with out a good way to send my pics to Flickr.
I decided to send an email to Chris Lee the creator of Pushr and ask for a change in the software…
Josh Highland to Chris Lee:
Is there a way to make Pushr work in such a way that a user selects what pictures they want to send to flickr, rather then picking the photos they dont want to send?example : I have 100 photos on my iphone, and i only want to send one of them to flickr. I would liek to select that one photo to send, instead of removing the 99 photos to not send
Chris Lee to Josh Highland
Hi Josh,
Currently, there is no way to do that. However, it’s a feature request
I’ve gotten, so I may add a preference for it in a future version.
Thanks for using Pushr!
So at least a change like that is on the radar of the developer of Pushr. I hope it gets implemented soon. Until then I’m stuck having to wait until I get to a computer to upload all my cool pics to my photo blog.
If you know of a good solution to my iPhone + Flickr problem, please let me know!
Transfer ORM with Mark Mandel
I have been working long and hard on a project at work (yes i have a realy job outside of working on notpop and related sites)
I’m lucky enough to work with Luis Majano, the creator of the ColdBox Coldfusion Application Framework. Working with ColdBox has really increased the performance of the site, and brought the company fully into object oriented ColdFusion programming.
Along with Coldbox, we have really relied on Transfer-ORM to handle 99% of our database operations. Again, a huge improvement over what we were doing in the past, and a great time saver also. Transfer-ORM was created by Mark Mandel.
I’m a member of the Inland Empire Coldfusion users group, and last Friday we had our month meeting, held by Luis Majano, with Mark Mandel as the guest speaker, talking about Transfer. It was a really great presentation, with a lot of great information.
We recorded the presentation through adobe connect, so its available online. If you are interested in taking your coldfusion database operations to the next level, I suggest you check out Mark Mandels presentation, I learned a lot, I’m sure you will also.
check it out: https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p10885427
InfraRecorder: my new burning software of choice
A while back I had access to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), and along with that came access to every piece of software that Microsoft has put out. Most of the downloads came in the form of ISO files. I downloaded everything I could.
Recently I decided to rebuilt one of my favorite computers in the house, my Windows MCE 2005 box that powers my TV (the hard drive had crashed). I couldn’t find my MCE 2005 dics anywhere, so I decided to burn a new one using the MSDN ISO file for it using Nero.
The ISO burn using Nero completed and I tried to install the OS. It would make it about 30% into the install and fail time after time. I thought the disc was bad, so I burned another using Nero. Same thing, this time about 50% of the install before it flaked out. I burned another disc, and it failed again. I started to Google the errors I was getting and there were no real answers for what I was seeing.
I decided to burn the ISO files using a different application then Nero, but realized that I didn’t have any other burning software installed. I’m a fan of open source software, and a fan of free things, so I did so searching, and came across some burning software called InfraRecorder.
InfraRecorder is an open source disc burning tool. It’s lightweight and was quick to install. I sent the ISO file through it and crossed my fingers. The disc burned fine (then again thats what Nero told me). I went through the install process one more time…. 100% install! My problem wasn’t the ISO file, it was the way the disc had been burned by Nero apparently!
I have burned many discs using Nero over the years, that’s why it was the only burning utility I had installed, and I have never produced coasters like I was with the ISO files from MSDN and Nero. What ever InfraRecorded did, it did it right. I am switching from Nero to InfraRecorder for sure.
Chalk this up to another win for open source software over corporate solutions.
You can check out InfraRecorder here http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net
Amazon S3 + PHP = Awesome image hosting solution
Recently I have been looking for a solution to allow users of notpopular.com to have photo albums of unlimited size. Its a popular trend in social networks, and its way cooler then the 5 tiny images that are allowed on notPopular.com (1.0)
There are many technical problems that associated with having this kind of open system. One of the biggest problems is storage (disk space), and load on the web server. Each image takes up space on the hard drives, and requires attention from the web server when an image is requested, taking attention and CPU from other more important processes.
After looking at several options, I came across Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. It provides unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Data can be easily stored and retrieved at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon charges in proportion to the amount of data stored and applies charges for sending and receiving data. A perfect solution for what I’m looking to do!
S3 would store the data, and would handle the load of the requests coming from users, allowing my web server to focus on more important tasks like PHP processing and MySQL queries.
Here is the price break down for amazon S3 usage:
- Storage
- $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
- Data Transfer
- $0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
- $0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB
- $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
- $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests
Using the calculator tool they have, and looking at the notpop data and projected traffic, my monthly costs would be around $20 a month, and even if things doubled in time, it would still only be $40 a month. Very reasonable for the speed and reliability that a company like Amazon offers.
I found some great php classes to work with S3, particilarly one from Geoffrey P. Gaudreault over at neurofuzzy.net
I am also planing on using some CNAME records on the notPop server to mask the amazon URL. Should be easy to do.
Last night I started to sew Amazon S3 into the pending notPop 2.0 code base. I will make some follow up posts about how it goes once I really start using it.