Author Archives: TC

Break on Fail

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I haven’t blogged much about software development and usually don’t blog about work related issues at all. Which is kind of strange, as this is a huge part of my life, and something I’m really interesting in.

With this post I try to change that. Slowly. Just to see how it goes.

I’ll start by telling you a story about failure, and how to learn from it. Not because I’m a negative person, but because failure, should be see as an excuse to stop and ponder. There’s often something important to learn.

We, and by we I mean me and the development team of Metaconomy, of which I’m the product manager and daily contact person, failed last week. The goal for the week, was to refactor the partnership functionality and UX, in our Channel Performance Manager solution.

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Second thoughts on Flattr

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I’ve had a chance to think a bit more about Flattr, and what kind of impact it can have on the ‘net.

(My first post about Flattr, for those that missed it: https://b.tc.dk/2010/05/flattr/)

First of all, and this may seem kind of strange, I’m a bit scared of the negative impact that this can have on the kind of content we’ll see on the net.

The Negative

Consider this: If you read an article on the net, what will make you click the Flattr button?

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Android User Experience: Listviews

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I’ve had my Nexus One for over a month now. Normally I would have blogged something about it by now, but for some reason I haven’t really had a need. Maybe it’s because it just works. I haven’t really had anything to complain about – yes, it took some getting used to not having to constantly tweak the Wi-Fi/3G connection (like I had to on my WinMo phone), but I’ve learned to leave it alone now.

I do want to talk a bit about some of the user experiences, different applications have given to me. I’ve a few hopes and suggestions that I would like to share with you.

Most of it is aimed at developers, but maybe some users might want to add their own comments to this.

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I want to be a Real Photographer

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Around the time I started to take my photography seriously, a couple of years ago, I started to “follow” professional photographers on the internet. Reading strobist, going on a strobist seminar, following people like McNally, Zack Arias, JoeyL, Zemotion, duChemin, Wizwow and a lot of other professionals – reading their books, blog and tweets. All of them – good people, all of them inspiring – all of them  – professional.

I was getting really serious about this. I experimented with different kind of business card. Wrote a plan. Designed a web-page, based on all the good advice from Arias. Focused on my strong points and worked towards a portfolio and web-presence that would show me to the world as the photographer I wanted to sell.

But then…

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Photo book printing

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Note: This article has been, sporadically, updated since it was written. Most of it is still relevant.

I recently photographed a couple of weddings and decided to make photo books, to the happy couples. They where a huge success. Initially I just chose the service that allowed me to pick up the books locally and seemed fair price wise. But then I decided to make a small test to see if I had chosen wisely.

A couple of notes:

  • The is a comparison of consumer services. I’m aware that there are professional services, that will give you a lot more then the consumer service, but also that at a totally different (higher) price.
  • I’m in Denmark, but as far as I can see what I’m writing here will be relevant for most people in Europa, as the service and machines used are probably all the same. It’s probably possible to find what exact machine is being used, but setting may vary, so I’m not sure how useful this information will be.
  • I’m only looking at book printing here.
  • Pricing is current as of December 12th 2008.
  • Both foto.com and digitalshoppen.dk (fujicolor.de) now offeres “photopaper” quality books. I’ve only tested the Digitalshop “Brilliant” print, but haven’t added it yet. The short of it: Better then the good PhotoCare.

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New homepage: DejligtVejr.dk

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Well, yeah, the domain name is danish, and it translates to “nice weather”. We had a bit of rain yesterday and I got tired of hearing people complain about it, so I decided to do a mini-site with a nice photo slideshow showing some nice weather:

http://dejligtvejr.dk

The site is flash based, which normally goes against my idea on how to make homepages, but this is not really supposed to be browsed. It’s not an information source. It’s just a bunch of pictures. If you can’t see them they are all available on http://gallery.tc.dk

I made the site using the web function in LightRoom, using the AutoViewer from Airtight Interactive. Very easy!

Samsung i780 GPS

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I’ve never had a GPS device before,  but one of the place the i780 got points, was on the GPS as I would like to play with one, and especially do geotagging of my photos.

In this blog I run through the software I’ve tested. Please note that my i780 is unlocked and unbranded. Yours may be locked to a specific set of services making impossible to use other GPS software.

My wants and needs are not for navigation – there’s 14 days trail version of Garmin XT included, which I’m still thinking about buying, but there’s also Google Maps which works flawlessly, but needs to download data. So unless you make it cache data before you go or has a “unlimited” dataplan with your provider you are going to pay as you go. And open street map software is getting better…

What I’m looking for is a simple piece of software that will capture my route and allow me to read it into a program that will syncronize it with the photos that I took while walking that route. This blog will mainly concentrate on the logging software. I’ll look at the PC (windows) side later. I’ve limited the search to software that didn’t require payment.

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First impressions: Samsung i780

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I got my new mobile phone yesterday. A (unlocked) Samsung i780. Not the LG KS20 which was my previous favourite, but thanks to the nice people at clicksalg.dk (I mailed them and asked if they really had it and when it would ship. The reply was “yes. Is today fast enough?”. Cool.), this one became available to me first. It was down to that for me. Which one will become available to me first… 🙂

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Online back up: Mozy

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I’ve about 120GB of photo’s that I backup on DVDs and an external harddrive.

What I’m really bad at, is taking these backups off-site (a.k.a. somewhere else that will not be affected if the house burns down).

I used to copy it all to my own server (it was in a hosting facility), but as I’ve moved everything to a hosting service, that doesn’t make sense any more as they have limited storage.

I looked around a bit and mozy.com, seems to have a good reputation. 5us$ a month for unlimited space, is very cheap for that kind of peace of mind.

I can’t help but thinking that it’s to cheap. But doing the math, it’s rather easy to see that, even with 120GB they will be making money of me within the year:

Back of envelope math: a one TeraByte hard drive is about 300us$, (120/1000)*300=36$. In a raid5 array, every fifth drive (depending on implementation) is for error checking so you need to multiply with 1.25 = 45us$, plus admin and network traffics costs. Probablty still less than 60us$.

The software seems quite okay, and is available for windows and OS X. No linux versions seems to be available, but as I do most of my photo work in LightRoom (and windows), this really is a non-issue for now.

The software has been running for a couple of hours now and is a 0.6% of the total 120GB, it’s not maxing out my upload speed, but it’s doing a good enough job, and it will be done in a week or so…

I’ll let you know what I think of it when I’ve used it a bit more…

p.s. one week later: It’s still uploading. It’s uploaded about a fifth of the 120Gb. I’m not sure how I could mis-calculate that badly, as it’s has been running 15 hours a day all week. As I have 2048Kbit upload the max is closer to 1.5-1.7Mb/s, but I’m unsure if the limit is at Mozy or somewhere between me and Mozy. Actually my theoretical daily upload is 22GB, so my first estimate isn’t that bad and my actual throughput is just really, really bad. My guess is that it’s a lot worse during the work hours, where the nets are a lot more busy.

p.s. One month later: nearly done uploading :-).

p.s.: May 2010: I’ve uploaded a total of 337Gb (uploading is a lot faster now)