Archive for February, 2008
Both my wife and I have Windows Mobile phones, and we use Google Calendar for our calendars. GooSync allows us to wirelessly sync our calendars with our phones. My wife and I both have GooSync accounts, which sync to our own Google Calendar accounts. The permissions on some of the calendars has been setup so either one of us can add events.
There appears to be a bug where events are getting duplicated, seemingly on every sync. From looking at the duplicated events, they are being created from my wife’s phone. Maybe it is caused because these events were created by my account, and maybe GooSync can’t handle this.
It looks like I am not the only person having this problem. Here are several forum posts: (1, 2, 3). There doesn’t appear to be any official response to these reports.
I spent 30 minutes removing the duplicates. Ideally, Google would offer SyncML access to calendar accounts. Then, I could get rid of this third party from the process.
Continue Reading February 28th, 2008
Continue Reading February 27th, 2008
To upload my photos to flickr. I have been trying to use flickr’s tool, Flickr Uploadr. This tool lets you drag photos to a window, to upload them. You can use the tool to set keywords and permission settings when uploading.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that well. Sometimes the transfer just stops, and the only indication is a little message in the lower left corner of the window that says "Bonk!". Other times, there is a message that says something like "Houston we have a problem! There is a network problem….", but in this case the network connection is fine.
I stared to think that this could be caused because Comcast could be filtering some of this traffic, as I am uploading several GB of photos. But then I decided to try a different application to do the uploading. So I tried jUploadr.
jUploadr is a java application that has the same functionality as Flickr Uploadr. But this applicaiton handles the transfers so much better. In addition, it also uploads meta data for photo, so any title that you set on a photo in iPhoto, will be transferred to flickr when you drag the phots from flickr.
I have only found one problem. If you start a transfer before all of the previews have been generated, it is possible that jUploadr will crash. The problem happens when there is a file with an unsupported file type. It looks like jUploadr creates an array for each of the files dragged in its window. Then the thread that generates the previews will set the entry to NULL if it is an unsupported file type. But it appears that the thread that actually performs the upload doesn’t handle a NULL entry.
Continue Reading February 26th, 2008
My friend Steve commented on this post, where I mentioned that I am trying flickr as a photo management site, mentioning SmugMug. SmugMug is a pretty nice site to to photo management. They offer a 14 day free trial, and then several different subscription options. Similar to flickr, SmugMug has several desktop uploading clients available. In addition to that, there are some site that will let you automatically migrate from flickr, or other sites.
I really like the look of the site, as the albums look more polished than the albums do on flickr. Also, since the main focus of SmugMug is not sharing, it leave the UI to be uncluttered.
I uploaded about 300 photos and added tags for each of them. The upload process was pretty painless, and adding tags to each photo was a lot easier than it is on flickr. But unfortutately, the site was getting pretty unresponsive, when I was attempting to look at my uploaded photos. In fact, many of the web browser connections were timing out, so I had to manually try the connection again.
The other problem is that it doesn’t appear that you can have a single photo in two albums. You can duplicate the photo, but that is not exactlywhat I want to do.
Continue Reading February 25th, 2008
This week’s roundup contains 3 references to security issues including a post about how Microsoft Vista SP1 may impact your existing security programs. To round out the news, we found a nice article on repurposing old notebooks and finding lost consumer electronics manuals.
Continue Reading February 23rd, 2008
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