I have been trying out the .Mac Web Galleries and am disappointed. While it does offer 10GB of storage, the features of the gallery itself are strictly for consumers showing snapshots.
1. The data transfer and website is very heavy. Its slow. Much slower than it needs to be. Someone clocked the initial download hit for scripts, etc. at 2MB.
2. All images are resized on the fly. There is very little thumbnailing and no possible way to see the image in its native resolution. When trying to view images full-size, the resizing messes up the image quality, at times quite severely. There is no fixed resolution view mode to show the image at high quality.
3. Reflections. I am showing photos, not eye-candy reflections at the bottom of the photos.
4. Upload options. There are none.
5. When clicking through full-size images and there are multiple pages of thumbnails, a user is told they are at the end of the gallery when they reach the end of the thumbnail “page”. In a test this caused every single user to miss the second half of the two-page gallery.
While this Gallery is as easy as possible to use for your average iPhoto user, I think that it could do a much better job with less of the bloat.
PicasaWeb, with all of its features and Google maps integration and an iPhoto plugin, is still lightweight and plagued by none of these problems. It just works. Of course, with the release of the new iLife 08, the Picasa iPhoto export plugin is broken, but the separate uploader app works and an update to the plugin will be released soon.
Here is an example for you to compare:
.Mac Web Gallery
Picasaweb
I have begun working my way through Yasujiro Ozu’s films with the goal of extrapolating some common themes and styles from his work. Thus is the peril of Netflix - browse at your own risk, you will find yourself going off on tangents and ending up with a full movie queue.
Late Autumn, filmed in 1963, is a quiet drama set in the then modern-day Japan. If this film were a food, it would be a cup of tea. It is quiet and understated with depths that need to be found through relaxation and reflection. There is humor, but it is dry and not found unless looked for.The movie provides an interesting view into the Western incursion into traditional Japanese style, attitudes and culture. The older generation is markedly different from the younger, both in dress and attitude. The Western American stereotypes of traditional Japanese culture are so strong that the “modern” dress and language of the younger generation in the film seems to be more affectation than reality.
Ozu seems to concentrate more on composition and rhythm rather than acting. Actors address the camera overmuch, walk on and off of the scene and things come off like you are watching the film adaptation of a play. While somewhat disconcerting, the formalized structure of the film allows you to pay attention to the smallest details.
One of the most interesting photographic composition elements from a Western viewpoint is that the camera is often at the viewpoint of someone sitting on the tatami rather than in a chair.
Here is a much better writeup than mine.
Here is a new photo gallery from San Diego. All pictures were taken with my Nikon D40x and an 18-200mm VR lens.
I spent quite a bit of time looking around for a good OS X password manager and form manager. I found that 1Passwd blows everything else away. Click there to see a demo movie which is pretty cool.
Consisting of a stand-alone application to manage your password database and plugins for every browser under the sun. I was able to import all of my Firefox saved passwords instantly and the toolbar automatically captures new logins and stores them in the database.
Passwords can synch via .Mac and can be backed up automatically via .Mac. It also is compatible with the pop-up HTTPAuth dialogs some websites show.
The multiple personality idea is embedded in both the logins as well as the form auto-fill feature.
If I am creating a new account, I can easily generate a stupendously difficult one-account password which will be stored in the database and used for future logins at that website.
The GUI is well-behaved and it just works. It’s well worth the registration fee!
While at the VeriSign Technical Symposium last week, I got to hang out with the guys building the VeriSign Personal Identity Provider, an OpenID implementation. I am already a fan of ClaimID, which is another OpenID provider and have been using VeriSign authentication tokens for work. It’s interesting to see the convergence of the Paypal and EBay markets, the VeriSign security tokens and OpenID.
Paypal and Ebay have achieved a critical mass of users and seem to be able to define an entire market segment by simply rolling out new technology. Security tokens have been in use for awhile in the enterprise but Java rings, smart cards, tokens and other things were just a bit early for the consumer. There was no market demand.
Given the fraud issues on Paypal and eBay, consumers are acutely aware of the need for something better than just a password for authentication. Paypal is now offering a VeriSign security token for $5 each on their website. You have to dig around to find it, but its there. Once you order one, a whole new world opens up.
The classic concern raised about security tokens are that they are bulky and they only work with one vendor. Enter the idea of a “networked” token. One token, issued by a large certificate authority, can now work for any vendor that chooses to implement their solution. The Paypal token, being issued by VeriSign, already automatically works for eBay. The secret here is that this is not a “Paypal” token, this is a VeriSign Identity Protection device. You will use it with a lot more stuff than just Paypal and eBay.
As more vendors adopt the VeriSign token, the network will grow and each user getting a token will be able to use it with more and more vendors. eBay and Paypal have simply jump-started the consumer adoption.
One such compatible implementation is the OpenID based VeriSign Labs Personal Identity Provider. Create a profile and activate your VeriSign token in it, now you have just upgraded your OpenID authentication to use the token for OpenID logins!
I’m in San Diego for the week attending the VeriSign Technical Symposium in Coronado. 14 years ago I lived here for about 7 years. Perfect weather and no work. Go figure.
This trip is giving me a lot of chances to learn how to use my new D40x. Pictures coming soon.
Do your portrait photo subjects look like a deer in headlights? I hate taking indoor pictures of family with my point-and-shoot pocket camera because the flash washes everything out. The most unflattering picture you can take of someone is with a flash pointed right in their face! This does NOT sit well with the wife!
The single biggest thing you can do to take amazing portraits is use an external flash which can be pointed at the ceiling or a wall. The light of the flash bounces off of the wall or ceiling and diffuses onto the subject.
I got a new Nikon D40x today along with a SB-400 external flash and a Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. A picture is worth a million words.
D40x with built-in flash pointed directly at subject.
D40x with SB400 flash pointed at wall.
D40x with SB400 pointed at wall and in Portrait Image Optimization mode.
You can see full-size photos here.
The world exists despite itself. So do large corporations. And crowds.
I stumbled across the digital remake of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on the Internet tonight. The originally re-assembled movie is one of my all-time favorites and I had no idea it had been digitally remade with the original score.
Metropolis is not for mass media entertainment. It’s silent, overacted and not a relaxing film. However, anyone who likes science fiction must see this movie to learn where the entire SF film industry came from. A movie from 1926 with 25,000 extras is something to see! Read Roger Ebert’s review for lots of detail.
If you do watch this, remember, Fritz was inventing the visualization of science fiction in film with no previous work to build on. Looking at the city scenes, you can see where Blade Runner and Dark City came from. Guess this is something to move to the top of the Netflix queue!
I have been impressed by the work of Hayao Miyazaki over and over. Tonight I watched The Cat Returns, which is nowhere near as good as his later movies such as Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. In this movie, Miyazaki contributes the story concept, but not the actual direction. Some of his style comes through in the story, but the direction is quite different.
