because a Reverend can't be wrong.
(The following image is Not Safe For Work)
*Model*: Liz
*Session*: 2005-11-09 Liz (more…)
This photograph of Liz is my favorite from our work from Wednesday night. The mood of this image really makes me happy and I feel it brings out the soft, peaceful air that surrounds her.
Your comments and criticisms are appreciated, as always. Feel free to comment on the individual images directly within Flickr (an account is free, if you don’t already have one).
For those of you that share “my quest for the perfect online calendaring system”:http://revjim.dreamhosters.com/articles/2005/08/19/online-calendaring-solution, “AirSet”:http://airset.com/ may be the way into the light.
I’ve only spent just under an hour with it but, so far, I’m quite impressed. It’s easy to use, very fast, and has an intuitive interface.
It’s calendar sharing abilities are fantastic allowing an incredible amount of control and flexibility that is much easier understood in practice than by reading about it.
I’m not sure how well the person-to-person calendar sharing works, as I don’t have any contacts to share events with. But, if even a fraction of the Group features are available individually, I’m sure it’ll meet the needs of most people.
It handles lists, and web links as well, and has a blogging feature that I’ll never use but it’s there none the less.
It also allows you to embed a calendar in a webpage making it great for showing an event calendar on your own site without much fuss.
It’s only lacking two things to keep it from being absolutely perfect.
# *Private but VISIBLE events.* I want to be able to publish my calendar in such a way that, while it will don’t disclose the details of the event I will be attending, it will show me as being “busy” and show that time slot as unavailable.
# *Booking.* I’d like to be able to allow others to schedule an event with me. I believe, though I have not been able to test this, that a user can add an event to their calendar and then invite me to it, but that’s not quite the same. I would prefer that a user would be able to request an event with me that I would approve, or, in some cases, it would simply be automatically scheduled. This is a good feature for anyone who regular meets with other people such as a doctor, dentist, photographer, plumber, etc.
If you happen to check it out, feel free to add me as a contact (_daniel AT djamesphoto DOT com_) and we can play with some of the person-to-person features.
The following images are now “FOR SALE”:http://revjim.net/pages/photosforsale/:
I am so proud of these images. Every bit of quality and clarity available has been preserved from the original and they are just dying to be printed very, very large.
My print prices will be more than doubling this evening for the next month or so as a test similar in nature, but exactly opposite, to the “12-hour sale”:http://revjim.dreamhosters.com/articles/2005/10/19/revjim-nets-first-12-hour-sale I had almost a month ago. I guess that means I’m having a sale, sort of, now. :)
I’m also considering offering a 2006 landscape calendar for sale in the month of December. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
With Jeremy Zawodny’s “mention”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005616.html that “Yahoo!’s new AJAXeriffic Maps Interface”:http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/ is in beta, I decided to give it a try. It’s quite nice and shows a lot of improvement over “Google’s Maps”:http://maps.google.com/ with only a few places where Google clearly wins.
I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet but, from first glance, these are the differences I see.
First, the things that Google does better:
* Google was first and has a large base of applications using it’s API.
* Google’s service seems to be more stable, and, having been around longer, it should be.
* Google has satellite maps, street maps, and hybrid maps. Yahoo! only has regular street maps.
Now for the things that Yahoo! does better:
* Multipoint Routing.
* Yahoo!’s Awesome Yellow Pages.
* A small overview map in the corner to give you an idea of where on the map you are, saving you from having to zoom out to figure out where you are, and then zoom back in.
* Live Traffic overlayed on top of the map.
* Send to phone feature allows directions to be sent to your phone.
* Yahoo! knows MY address. I know, this one is personal, but Google has no idea that my house address even exists. Yahoo does. It doesn’t show my street on the map, but, it gives directions as though it was there.
Both Google and Yahoo! have extensive APIs to allow developers to tap into these resources and provide an unlimited number of services that have yet to even be thought of.
It’s nice to see Yahoo! finally stepping up to the plate and getting back into the lime light. Google has dominated the search market for some time now and their lead is beginning to seep into other services like Maps, E-Mail, Shopping, and the like. This is a great step in the right direction for Yahoo. Along with their tried and true services, recent growth like “Flickr”:http://flickr.com/, and new applications on the horizon (like their new mail interface that I’d *STILL* like a beta of), Google is going to start seeing some serious pressure.
People have been talking about “Gallery”:http://gallery.sf.net/ v2 for what seems like decades. Today I found myself in a position to actually give it a test drive.
*UGH!*
It’s got ugly urls, an ugly cluttered interface, it doesn’t seem to do anything more than Gallery v1 did, *and* it’s in PHP.
I’m looking for a combination of “Flickr”:http://flickr.com/ and “SmugMug”:http://smugmug.com/ that runs on my own server and is customizable. Technically speaking, SmugMug would work pretty well for Event Photography and to allow subjects to purchase portraits of themselves. But, SmugMug wouldn’t work too well to handle sales of my Art Photography to the rest of the world since they collect a large profit, require you to use their lab, and ship straight to the customer so you have no opportunity to frame, matte, or sign the prints.
I’m open to suggestions. What do you use?
After talking with “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?revjim a bit more it looks like my only option, with them, is to go for a “Dedicated Server”:http://www.dreamhost.com/dedicated/servers.html. $99/mo (when paid a year in advance) for a decent server (more than I’ve had in any dedicated server before now) is a decent price. I was paying $99 for the Co-Op server and it wasn’t this beefy.
The other really nice thing about “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?revjim’s Dedicated Server offering is that it’s Managed!. It comes with the DreamPanel (the same one you see for shared hosting accounts) and they support the machine fully if any of the software on it should break or if special configuration is needed. My biggest gripe with a dedicated server isn’t the price, it’s the time I have to spend maintaining the thing. I’m fully capable of administrating a server but, I just don’t have the time nor desire to do it any more.
“Ryan King”:http://theryanking.com/ suggested “TextDrive”:http://textdrive.com/ as an alternative to “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?revjim. The problem with TextDrive is their pricing compared to their offering. They offer a limited number of domain names which makes it very expensive for people like me who host 100 tiny little sites that get hardly any traffic or use any resources. If they had an unlimited domain option, offered a bit more bandwidth and space, and clearly stated their internal CPU limits, it might be worthwhile.
Another individual in the #rubyonrails IRC channel suggested “Site5″:http://site5.com/. They were actually the first other company I contacted. I spoke to sales representitive trying to get information regarding CPU second limits. At least “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?revjim is being upfront (now) telling me that I cannot use more then 2400 CPU seconds and giving me an easy way to check that statistic. Site5 simply told me that they do monitor the server and that they do contact customers if the CPU is being overused but that he didn’t feel my usage pattern would be a problem. Basically, what he said was, “We’ve got a 60 day money back guarantee… try it!”. But that’s just it: it isn’t about the money! It’s about the time and effort I have to waste moving from place to place to place until I figure out who is lying and who isn’t.
So, before I jump back on the dedicated server bandwagon with “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?revjim, let me ask you all for a hosting recommendation (shared, virtual, or dedicated) that meets the following criteria.
* > 100GB of traffic each month
* > 10GB of storage space
* > 20,000 CPU seconds of usage
* If you don’t know the CPU seconds this is roughly 30,000 hits a day served from a “Typo”:http://typo.leetsoft.com/ installation plus another 15,000 or so from PHP.
* Unlimited (or, like, 200) Domains (and subdomains too)
* IMAP
* FastCGI
* Ruby
* Apache/Lighttpd
* PHP5
* Shell Access
* Unlimited (or, like, 15) FTP users
* A Control Panel to do all the admin work
* Automatic Upgrades
* Support if the software breaks or needs reconfiguring
Please don’t make a suggestion if you don’t know for certain that the above options are supported. When you make your suggestion, if the place you are recommending has an affiliate program, please be sure to include your information so I can properly credit you. If you’re a current “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?revjim Dedicated customer, I’d like to hear from you, too.
DreamHost is really upsetting me. They have confined me to a “bad boy” server and have asked that I limit my CPU usage to 2400 CPU seconds each day.
When I found out this information, they told me they would begin giving me a CPU usage report so I would be aware of my usage each day. I waited the day out and the next day was given a report stating that I used 2994 CPU seconds. Not too far over.
But, there was something wrong anyway. My site was locking up constantly and, seemingly, without reason. So, I made some changes recommended by other Rails/DreamHost users. The next day the report came in: 9694 CPU seconds.
The other problem is that my site was still locking up, so I tried another little trick. The next day the report came in: 11090 CPU seconds.
I was ready to spit at seeing my usage take a severe turn in the wrong direction. Further more, I got an email from DreamHost that day saying — in a few more words than this — “Dude… it’s been 3 days… why isn’t this problem fixed already?! Fix it or else!”. To make matters even worse, my site was still most unusable because it was so slow. So, I wrote a small script that cleanly and quickly restarted all of my application servers and set it to run every 30 minutes. My site got a LOT faster. The next day I got my usage report: 5899 CPU seconds.
Well, that’s better. But I decided I should let the server run in this new mode for an entire day, so I can really analyze how well the changes are affecting it. So, I make no changes at all and the next day, today, I got my usage report: 7085 seconds.
WTF?
I know there is a leak in regard to @render_text@ in pre 0.14.0 version of “Rails”:http://rubyonrails.com/. So, I went through the trouble of installing rails directly into “Typo”:http://typo.leetsoft.com/ to see if that will make any difference but instead it just made the whole thing explode. Now that I’m slightly back to normal and the site is at least functioning again, I’m not sure what to do.
I don’t really want to get into doing my own backups and administration, and I need full-featured hosting (like DreamHost offers). Does anyone have any other recommendations that meet these requirements?
LetsGoDigital has the review we’ve all been waiting for: Nikon’s D200.
It’s taken Nikon a long time to release this camera, and we’ve all been waiting patiently and secretly considering alternatives. But… the wait is over!
This 10.2 megapixel SLR camera has all of the features we wanted in the D100 and is everything we hoped the D70 would be. With a price point around $1700 USD (without a lens, as best as I can tell), this will make a lot of people very happy.
You should read LetsGoDigital’s full review but, here are some of the more interesting highlights.
The *big* question is… WHEN CAN I HAVE ONE?! December 2005, it seems. Well… hopefully, it’ll be a very Merry Christmas for me this year.
