by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 30, 2006 | Photography, Usefull Things
Yesterday Flickr announced the previously leaked new feature, an integration of Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
It is very slick, the integration between Organizr and the maps is way kewl and it does not suffer from the problem of making a mess of your Tags like some of the other options as it maintains an internal data structure.
Their map placing method isn’t too accurate but if you open up a photos properties you can type in exact coordinates which is nice. Searching for photos is now even greater, you can search for photos matching a keyword near a location, or simply explore photos at a specific spot which is great.
The problem is of course that they use Yahoo! Maps, it’s crap unless you live in the states. Resolution and street level maps in Europe and elsewhere leaves much to be desired. It is also much slower than Google Maps.
Today Flickr posted an update to their blog firstly pointing out the amazing uptake in use of this feature in the first 24 hours:
When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!
That is impressive! they also acknowledge the Yahoo Maps problem and I hope they can work with the maps team to quickly address this, though I am not holding my breath, more likely is someone will take the new API calls that Flickr provide and write a mashup using Google Maps that uploads data into this new internal data structures.
I dragged a couple 100 photos onto the map, you can take a look at a map of these here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 25, 2006 | Code
I previously blogged about a parser for pcap files that will show all SQL queries, you can now get the code for this tool here. It’s very simple, help is in the comment block right at the beginning of the file.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
I’ve previously blogged about Librarything and said I quite like it.
Feature wise it’s fine, I would have liked to also include my DVD’s etc but mostly I just want the book feature to work.
The authors have been introducing all kinds of new wonderful features like groups etc, but the site is incredibly unstable. Each time I want to go add a new book, I am subjected to 2 hours of downtime, maybe I just have bad luck, but tonight I wanted to add 2 books again and the site was down for a hour again.
No planned notices on the blog (ever) no explanations afterwards, its just down indefinitely. This time it lasted an hour or so. It’s like the image above is their actual home page and the working one is the exception to the rule.
Anyway, other things that annoy me, they have these blog widgets, for putting in your site, but they don’t have a API that has enough features, so I parse the blog widgets to build my current reading list, of course they can’t stop messing with the HTML in these widgets so things keep breaking. I know this isn’t really something that will affect someone who use it on their website, but still it’s irritating.
In that hour I used my backup that I made a while ago of the data (librarything have previously had a disaster where their machines failed, their backups failed and they lost data!) and just imported it all into Delicious Library. It cost me more, but it indexes books, DVDs, games, CD’s etc and it actually works. I guess you get what you pay for and it seems $10 or whatever I paid for Librarything just isn’t enough to actually get a working site.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 17, 2006 | Front Page
People are starting to realize a thing or two about Ubuntu and Linux on the desktop in general it seems. One of the big profile Switchers have gone back to OS X, Tim Bray details why he is going back to a Mac. He has some gripes with Ubuntu, frankly they are not huge gripes but apparently for him enough.
I think the bottom-line is he hates the Apple applications and never thought of trying Thunderbird and friends on a Mac, shocking, anyway so now he realized he can get those same apps on a Mac and not be data-locked into them he feels happier going back to the Mac
Well, I don’t know. Weirdly, now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.
He also touches on some of my general issues with Linux on the desktop, people seem to think they have to retain it as a free thing so they don’t bundle useful stuff and they don’t buy decent sets of fonts etc, I bet if Ubuntu releases a pay version that has fonts, flash, codecs and all that sorted out they’ll see a huge bunch of people switching, I’d pay for it.
Then there are the fonts. Anti-aliasing is an optional extra on Linux, and I wasn’t willing to do the sources.list wrangling to get the bleeding-edge allegedly-anti-aliased Emacs. Also, lots of fonts Windows & Mac people use every day just aren’t there on Linux. There are apparently some gyrations and downloads and things you can do to get some of them.
I couldn’t get Flash working (complaints about the amd64 architecture), which meant lots of irritating little holes in Web pages everywhere. Not being able to watch YouTube is a real time-saver, though.
I think people want to just get on with it and not have to muck about with bullshit options these-days, I’m sick of fiddling with fiddly software to get simple things working, and that’s the achilles heel of Linux Desktops.
UPDATE: Scoble also sounds in on the font issue, he mentions the cost of real fonts and so forth and also calls them the achilles heel for Linux, freaky.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 10, 2006 | Code
I’ve several pairs of Cisco PIX failover clusters, till now I’ve never really monitored their status because I do not have snmp-trap servers but today I discovered one pair did a failover due to a cable problem a while ago so I figured it’s time I do something about it.
I’ve written a quick guide on using Nagios, Net-SNMP and a few MIBs from Cisco to monitor it and to alert you if any change in the status of your failover clusters happen.
You can get the full document on my Wiki at http://www.devco.net/pubwiki/PIX/MonitorFailoverWithNagios
