SuperJason’s Personal Blog

It took a little searching to figure out how to do an “exclusive or” in a check constraint. Here you go, you’re welcome:

(IsNull([ColA],[ColB]) Is Not Null And ([ColA] Is Null Or [ColB] Is Null))

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I’m not uploading any new photos. The truth is, you’re looking in the wrong place! A couple of weeks ago, I decided to work on getting all of my photos on Flickr.

Why you ask? Let me tell you:

• Flickr is a lot more popular. While it’s not directly one of the reasons that I switched, it means that a LOT more sites interface with them. For example, I just posted a Flickr link to a Facebook comment today, and realized that it let me choose a photo from the link as a thumbnail. Cool!
  (Fotki popularity is in Red, Flickr in blue)
• Amazing API. Just about everything you can do on the site, you can also do through their extensive API. This means that if you don’t like something about their site, you can rewrite it! For example, their uploader sucks, and didn’t really work the way I wanted. So I went ahead and wrote my own. For .NET, there is FlickerNET, for Adobe flex, they have built in support. Yahoo! pipes even has out of the box support.
• Better organizational functionality. This one is tough. I think Flickr is hard to navigate for the end user, but their organizing system does make sense. Fotki is really strict and gives you folders and albums. A photo cannot belong to multiple albums unless you upload it to both locations. With Flickr, I can have an album/set for photos of Ryan, and have some of those photos belong to a set of photos I took at his birthday party.
• More ways to look at your photos. With Flickr, you can browse by date uploaded, date taken, set, tag, etc. Pretty much any way you can think of. And like I mentioned, you can make your own page to browse the images if you don’t like theirs.

While deciding if I wanted to switch, I needed to figure out an easy way to get all my photos on their site. Since their API is so good, I wrote my own program to synchronize all of my photos. Others have written similar programs, but they required setting up symphonizing setting for each folder/set. I wrote my program so that I point it to one folder, and it keeps all photos in all sub-folders synchronized. The set names are based off of the folder names. If I update the tags for a set of photos, it uses their API to just update the tags. The photos don’t need to be uploaded again.

Once my program was complete, I pointed it at my photos, and let it run for a couple of days. When it was done, I had all of my 4000+ photos up there. I’m sold.

Now, I’m just working on tagging my old photos, and taking out some of the out-takes.

Yesterday I did something pretty cool. I actually placed a call with 2-way streaming video! I know it’s not anything new, but it was pretty cool.

My parents are going to be in Atlanta for a couple of years, so we want to be able to keep in touch visually. We want our kids to be able to talk to them and see them.

We tried it using Skype and some old webcams that my mom had laying around. The bandwidth is great, but the camera quality was pretty bad. So, I started Googling.

Apparently, pretty much all webcams are really crappy. One of the only webcams that seems to have good reviews is the Logitech QuickCam 9000. It’s a little pricey, but it seems that if you go any cheaper, the quality gets bad real quick. One of the reviews had this sample, comparing it to the Apple iSight:

I don’t know about you, but the difference is pretty astonishing. The iSight is a pretty decent webcam, and very popular, but there is no contest.

I’m thinking about purchasing the 9000, and then start creating some “bonus” blog posts on YouTube. I can then embed them into blog entries. It might be a good way to get some extra exposure for my blog.