Last month I took nearly 1300 pictures with a borrowed camera. I’m expecting my very own camera later this week which I think will lead to another spree of pictures being taken. I know, over time, that I’ll be collecting a ton of pictures. Which has got me thinking about how to deal with them.
Currently, I’m using Adobe Lightroom to import and post process the pictures. The import process takes the pictures off of the memory card and places them into folders on my PC based on the date they were taken. As I look at and process these pictures, the really good ones – the ones I intended to upload to Flickr and talk about here - I place into a “touch up” folder and then use the Flickr Uploadr to post them to my Flickr photostream.
This weekend I did my first real backup of them – just because I felt guilty about not having a plan already in place. Which is why I’m writing this post. I’m having a hard time completely working through that plan. I’m getting stuck at the part of “Do I keep ALL of the pictures?” Part of me says “Yes.”, and the other parts keeps asking “Why?”.
The other part of the workflow problem, which can be linked into backups in a way, is where to I house my images when I put them on the web. I mean I do have my own webserver! It seems like I should be able to come up with some open source software that will let me add a “Flickr-like” section to my wbesite. But nothing that I have tried has made me happy yet. (I’ve only been looking at WordPress plugins so far.)
I know I hear people screaming already: “Gallery!!!”
But Gallery has never really impressed me. Yeah, I can upload pictures and have people look at them, but there’s a crudeness to Gallery that I simply can’t get over. Not being a very apt web dude, I can’t seem to blend it into my blog seamlessly enough for people not to notice. I really wish there were more apps like Gallery so I had more of a choice.
I guess for now, I’ll simply use the external hard drive for backups and Flickr for presentation. But I know there has to be more elegant solutions for both issues.
So I’ve been thinking that I want to learn programming. I have for a long time, but I’ve only really dabbled. I know just enough PHP to be dangerous. I have no proper training, and I’m not sure where I should really begin.
I would like for it to be useful at work – so I’m thinking either Visual Basic or C++, so I can create in house apps and extend our Sharepoint server. I’m also thinking that I would like to program for the web – and I do have a bit of PHP experience. But I know that any PHP that I learn will only be use for non-NEI projects.
So to all my developer type friends – where should I start? Are there any places in town where I can take just C++ or VB classes?
For a couple of days, I’ve been trying to find a way to implement a shared storage unit for use with vmWare ESXi servers. I’ve been mostly looking at a free but pay for support product called “Openfiler“. From the list of features on Openfiler’s web site, it appears to be just exactly what I need. To be honest it does work as advertised and provides several ways for me to implement what I need.
But, there’s a problem. The problem may simply be caused by the way that I’ve done things to this point, but it’s something that may prevent me from deploying this setup in production. It’s performance.
Let me explain a bit. To date, I’ve always purchased servers with enough internal storage to fulfill their roles. This internal storage has been SCSI, SAS or SATA, but it’s always be directly attached to the server and has been very fast.
All of my tests, which have been non-scientific, have shown that moving data to and from the Openfiler box will take at least twice a long as the internal storage. What’s worse is that my tests don’t include the heavy load of multiple virtual machines running on the shared storage. My tests were done with a single virtual machine attached to the Openfiler box. Nor do my tests show the impact of taking volume snapshots that I would depend on for backup purposes.
Anyway, I’ve created a video of one of the simple tests that I performed this morning:
If anyone sees a problem (especially one that can eliminate the speed issue) with this setup, please provide feedback in your comments.
As an experiment, after the frustrations with the Ubuntu install (see Video Log 1), I goofed around and was able to OS X running on the little thing. Here is a screen shot:
I’ll try to capture some video later showing it in operation.
By the way, I’m posting this from the little Acer. Here’s a screen shot of that:
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