@rmanalan

Frank Leahy's post on How to Make Photos More Searchable got me thinking about the future of digital photography. With digital cameras enabling people to take more photos than ever, it's going to be more important to have some way to organize those photos beyond having fancy software like Adobe's Photoshop Album. The one promising aspect of digital photos produced by most digital cameras today is the EXIF data it produces. EXIF data is typically comprised of the technical data about the photo such as shutter speed, aperture, date/time it was taken, etc. However, it can also contain data like the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken and also comments the photographer might have about the scene. Imagine a digital camera that knew where the picture was taken. All of this stored inside the image file. I might have hinted about the benefits of EXIF in my previous post, but to explain further, making good use of EXIF data gives digital photography enthusiasts a great way to catalog and archive their photos. It will also enable them to search through these archives better without the need for complex software or databases. Making use of EXIF data in my photos is my current pursuit. Now that I've got a gallery that displays my photos EXIF data. I am looking at creating a PHP application that will allow me to edit the user comments attribute of a photo's EXIF data. Currently, I'm looking at using jhead to be able to write to the EXIF headers of an image since PHP currently only supports reading from the headers. If that doesn't work, I plan on just using software to edit the EXIF data. Photo Studio is a free application that will allow me to view and edit my EXIF data before posting the photo on the web. I'm hoping that more software and hardware vendors begin to take EXIF seriously and realize its potential for enhancing the digital photography experience. The promise of digital photography shouldn't be just about the image. The data that supports that image is just as important.

A few months ago, I installed Gallery on this server in hopes to have a decent way to publish my photos to the web. After playing with it for a day, I realized that it wasn't a good fit for me. I have thousands of photos I've kept on my desktop since 1999 (the day I got my first digital camera). I never really spent much time publishing any of them on the web except for a few random shots on Yahoo! Photos -- but that really doesn't satisfy my needs either. Here's what I want in a photo gallery: # Easy photo publishing # Automatically generated thumbnails # Automatically resized photos appropriate for the web # Easy to customize (standards based) UI # EXIF data display Gallery can do 2-3, but falls short on 1 and 4. It can also do 5, but not the way I'm interested in.

Today is "One Unwired Day." Go out and enjoy free wireless access compliments of Intel! If you're looking for a place to "unwire", use this Zagat guide as a reference or got to hotspotlist.com to find a hotspot near you.

By far this one of the worst weblogs of all time. If you haven't done so already, please take me of off your reading list. Ever since I added my Daily Links section (on the right) and started my weblog at work, I haven't entered a single entry here in almost a month. I guess I haven't had much to write about lately outside of work. Most of the time I enjoy reading other peoples blogs more than writing in my own. Maybe that's a clue. Anyway, I think I suffer from writer's block when it comes to writing entries in my weblog. What a waste... I'm wasting precious energy and money keeping this webserver running to serve up stale content. I'm the epitome of my worse pet pieves... out-dated websites. Most of the weblogs I read (the ones in the Daily Reading section on the right) are so well kept up. Some of the entries are even good. Yesterday, I read a very moving entry by Anil Dash. Anyway, I have to get better at this blogging thing. Too bad it's not New Years yet... otherwise, my New Years resolution would be to be a better blogger. In the meantime, I've gotta go... my wife and carpool is waiting...

Dylan Tweney a technology journalist, writes about open-source tools and their slow adoption rate by CIOs (April 15, 2003 edition of CIO Magazine). When IT operating costs are being scrutinized more than ever and downsizing is inevitable, it seems that open-source technologies would be an obvious choice for most CIOs to move to. However, as Mr. Tweney points out in his article, CIOs are still reluctant to jump on board with the open-source movement.

Although developers may be pushing for open-source tools, CIOs are less enthusiastic, citing concern about support, accountability and potential legal issues.

Check it out... a good read for those interested in the topic.

Boy, Anil really socks it to Microsoft with his latest post -- I wonder who pissed in his Fruit Loops this morning. He's mad at Microsoft because of an old font installation dialog box that's still lingering around in Windows 2003 Server. A hilarious read! [image via Anil's website] Hey Anil... don't underestimate Microsoft's font team... they may outnumber you by several thousand.

So, we were out walking our dog (Truman) around our neighborhood tonight. Nothing special... just a typical after dinner walk. Coming toward us was a lady with two dogs. The dogs looked like normal dogs (not sure what breed). As they approached, they slowed down and came to a stop in front of a neighbor's garage. As we walked, Truman looked at the two dogs, but didn't approach them and kept walking forward. Right when we were about to pass by them, one of the dogs, leaped toward Truman then procedded to tear into him. I tried to pull Truman away, but the other dog had his jaws attached to his side. Truman was in fear (he's a very passive dog). A few seconds later, the owner of the offensive dog was able to take hold of her dog then pulled it away. Cindy and I were just in shock. Luckily, Truman wasn't hurt. The offensive dog's bite wasn't strong enough to tear into his skin. So... we walked away shaken. The lady who owned the dog was very apologetic. Apparently, its collar broke off when it leaped at Truman. As we continued on our walk, we were wondering why anyone would want to own an aggressive dog. This isn't the first time Truman's come close to being mauled by an aggressive dog. And this isn't the first time I've heard of horror stories of violent aggressive dogs (remember Diane Whipple?). In light of tonight's events, I've written a letter to owners of violent dogs:

To Owners of Aggressive and Violent Dogs: Tonight, our dog almost got mauled by a dog similar to yours. I kindly ask that if you plan to walk "Killer" that you do so in a neighborhood far away from ours. If for some reason, you happen to be walking in our neighborhood, please observe the following rules: # If you're walking toward us (a couple with a nice happy golden retriever), please cross over to the other side of the street. The people with the passive friendly dog should have the right of way. Because your dog is a lethal weapon, it needs to be handled carefully and taken away from anything it can possibly hurt. # Always keep a leash on your dog! You may want to invest in a thick chain or cable. A strong dog with killer instincts is bound to break off of a nylon leash. If I happen to run into you, and you and your dog are not obeying these rules, you may find yourselves getting whacked by a golf club. Sincerely, Rich Manalang A Friendly Dog Owner

A great article about geocaching was published last Friday by the San Francisco Chronicle: Pleasure Hunt / 'Geocaching' buccaneers pursue hidden bounty throughout Bay Area as GPS-based game catches on. It reminded me that I forgot to log the caches we found up at Tahoe when we were there a few weeks ago. We found this and this but came up short on this. For those of you who don't know much about geocaching, go here.

http://manalang.typepad.com Well... not really. I'm testing out Six Apart's new hosted blogging service called TypePad -- which is in its second beta test round. So far, so good. TypePad is actually very cool. I'm impressed at how nice the user interface is. And underneath, it's looks like it's a highly tricked-out version of MT. Support for photo albums, Amazon lists, and other cool features come right out of the box. The biggest improvement over MT I've seen, however, is the new template designer. Non HTML/CSS knowledgeable users will be able to customize their blogs with ease. So, for now, this is still my blog home. But you never know, Mena, Ben, and Anil are cooking up some good mojo. I have no doubt that this will be better than what Pyra/Google is coming up with... AOL's no match either.

Today on mozillaZine: AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla Hackers Hmmm... I wonder what this means for the remaining organizations out there that are still running on Netscape browsers. Hopefully, it means that software companies who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Netscape 4.x won't have to do that anymore. Thankfully, the Mozilla project will continue under the new Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit that will serve as the new home of mozilla.org. Looks like this new foundation is off to a great start with funding guaranteed from AOL ($2M over the next two years) and other industry leaders, Mitch Kapor, the new Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, is making a personal contribution of $300K, and Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are also planning on ponying up. The desired effect of this is that software companies who have to support Netscape 4.x, will no longer have to. However, an undesireable reprecussion is that developers might begin to target Internet Explorer again. That would be a huge problem. Although, with the next release of Mozilla (currently dubbed Firebird) looming around the corner and Safari becoming the most popular browser for Macs, the chances of developers focusing on Internet Explorer are probably not as good... especially since we're probably stuck with Internet Explorer 6 for the next 3+ years.