Yes, the camera on my cellphone is broken. It won't really focus. But still, I had to take this shot. It was on a display at my local Lowe's.

Story. About 6 weeks ago I was in the airport bar in San Jose waiting on my flight. I looked over and saw that someone had left something. I hadn't seen the guy in a while, so I picked it up to see if there was a way to contact him. Then I read the cover. I had to take the picture or no one would ever believe me.

After years and years of having all of my pictures on SuperPowers where I have been mooching space, bandwidth and root access from Chris, because I'm cheap, I went over to SmugMug. I think this is probably a case where one of my sayings has become completely true: "I've lost count of how much being cheap has cost me." So, now they're over here.

The proverbial straw that got the avalanche started (how is that for mixing metaphors?) was Tammy and I getting new phones. Really. Here is how that unfolds:

• Jot & Tammy get new phones and now Tammy wants to be able to send email from her phone.
• Jot spends HOURS trying to get that working on the existing system with sendmail. (Turns out getting SMTP Auth to work on an ancient OS is a non-trivial task.
• Jot whines to Chris.
• Chris does the thing that we should have done a long time ago and upgrades the system.
• Jot spends a few hours getting SMTP Auth to work with Postfix.
• Jot spends more hours getting SuperPowers back up on an upgraded version of GeekLog.
• Jot spends more hours getting Gallery integrated, including requiring the G2Bridge developer to help out.
• It's all working.
• Chris applies a security patch (again a good thing) and nothing works.
• Jot spends more hours before disabling G2Bridge and trying a bunch of other things.

So, at this point, no one has access to the photos.

Now, let's look at the problems with the photo galleries.

1. They're big. Currently bordering on 13GB of jpgs. That's a lot of disk space.
2. They're big. That means that when you want to do slideshows and other things, they take a lot of bandwidth and as a result the user experience suffers.
3. There are a lot of them. I'm way over 4000 pictures right now. Makes management and organization tough.

So, why SmugMug? Fundamentally it came down to finding someone who had a lot of requirements, some technical savvy, and looking at the decisions they made. That's what I did. The person was Gary Ardnt and his rationale is documented in this post.

Ok, so I've moved most of the family pictures. (I think I have a few recent albums left that I'll get next week.) I've finally decided to go to a paid site. As a result, all of the pictures are now going to be hosted on SmugMug. I'll try to detail why later. The problem is I still don't want just anyone to be able to view them, so they are unlisted and password protected. Since they're unlisted you'll need a direct link, and you'll need to email me for a password. Eventually I'll come up with a post of "picture gallery links" so that it will be consolidated in one place. Please let me know if you have any issues with this first one so I can try to iron out the bugs for future posts.

• 2010 Second Quarter

I've spent several hours over the last week trying to figure out what the heck happened when the system got upgraded.

It looks like G2Bridge wasn't happy. Once I disabled it manually through mysql we were back up. I'll now have to figure out how to deal with the Gallery, but I'm afraid I'm done trying to deal with G2Bridge.

Via Brian McCann, Pixels.

I've come up with a new plan to make convenient transportation available to everyone! It's based on a popular model, so I think everyone will love it. Here it goes:

The family pictures from the first quarter are now available. In order to view them you'll need to login. Now, if you're one of the 7 people already with accounts, that won't be an issue (as long as you're in the right group). For anyone else that might want to view them, go ahead and create an account and I'll validate you and let you in. Of course, lubricating me with beer will speed the process up. ;)

Ok, I've installed and enabled the CAPTCHA module to deal with spammers. It will only be in the way if your are anonymous, and then it will require you to pass two of them for comments. Sorry for the inconvenience. I've had to delete 60+ accounts and roughly 200 spam submissions and since I'm lazy, I'm looking to make it so I don't have to do that work in the future. Email me if you have problems.

Why should you create an account and login?

See that photo block on the right hand side. It probably is showing you pictures of ultimate frisbee or other inane photos. If you login it will rotate and include some of the few thousand family pictures that are available.

Of course I'll need to fix the permissions for you to see them, but that is another great reason to send me email to work on that too.