Punderings

I want to put a gallery of family photos up on my 1and1 hosted website.  Gallery program suggestions? There are a million out there, and a thousand of them seem to have good reviews, so I need advice from people I trust (IBM’ers).

I have MySQL, PHP4, PHP5, Perl, and cgi access available on a shared linux hosting box.  It’s important to have good security (i.e. I only want family and friends to see these), and it would be nice to have commenting and such, but not really important.  I like XML and RDF stuff, as long as it doesn’t take too much extra maintenance.  I definitely want the presentation to include a filmstrip-like feature, or at least a last/next thumbnail, so it’s not just the “one picture and forward/back buttons” that some galleries use.

I already have some cat photos on flickr, but want to host these myself for security and ease-of-use reasons.  I.e. my grandmother can barely use the web, and certainly doesn’t know how to login to flickr so I can give her access that way…

What do you use to self-host photos?  An online gallery that does the work, or a local site generator where you just push a chunk of static files up to the server?

One of those strange moments happened on SameTime today, when a I asked a co-worker for the slides from a team planning meeting from last year.  She mentioned that she had just shipped a box of them out to the other manager (this is two reorgs later), so I should ask that other person once they got it.  I had to ask what was in the box.

Paper?  What’s that?

Paper is those thin white sheets you have to find when the printer outside of your office starts beeping incessantly.  Once you find enough sheets of the stuff to stick into it’s maw, the printer will be quiet again and you can go back to your email.

The other funny observation today is that when the postman comes to deliver the mail at home – which I don’t think of as ‘paper’ but rather ‘bills’ and ‘junkmail’ – my daughter yells excitedly “The e-mail is here!”.  Very cute.

Two diametric links about proper (or improper) human behavior I stumbled upon today I thought I would share.

Xiphias writes about fundamental rights, human behavior, and what our Constitution and Governments have to do with them – very little, in his eloquent and positively thought-provoking words. I just wish I could make trackbacks out of Livejournal.

“…things I think everyone should know”
- Xiphias

Which reminds me of an interesting phrase I copied when writing some acceptable use guidelines for a work-hosted discussion database. Not something I enjoyed having to include, but important when your forum is actually owned by someone else (i.e. not a public street, etc.):

Correctly interpreted, the First Amendment does not prohibit all restrictions on speech. It doesn’t prohibit private restrictions at all. Our constitution is a series of constraints on government, not on individuals or even powerful corporations.
Wired, 4.03

On the other hand, we have The Prince re-imagined as The Little Prince, so to speak. A novel graphical view of Machiavelli, as wryly translated for children.

“A Child’s Machiavelli”
- Claudia Hart

Definitely something you don’t want your youngsters reading until they’ve found their own moral center (hopefully, one you approve of).

I’m sure not.  State Of The Union, forsooth.  State of his… well, I’m not going to finish that thought since I don’t plan to do politics on this blog.  Ug.

Although I must admit it’s pretty odd forming an opinion about the details of a speech that hasn’t been given yet.  But if you were surfing news sites the hours before the speech was to begin, apparently the text has already been officially given out by the press people.  Wierd.

How does it feel to be slashdotted in the real world?  Ask Colleen Meahger, who appears in today’s Boston Globe with a warm idea: mittens with a pocket for your Charlie Card.  That’s one of those RFID cards that the T (our subway, y’know) uses as it’s new fare card.  There have been a number of local blogspots with various stories of how to best pass or wave your card as you go through the turnstyle, er, gates these days. 

I say Colleen’s got it all sewn up!

(with apologies to The Tick for trying to rip off the Mad Bomber’s speak)

Remember when ice cream came in 2 quart containers?  When exactly was it (a while ago, I know) did they downsize to 1.75 quarts without telling anyone?

Inflation is a bit… well, you fill it in.

Or rather, did you realize what rights you’re giving up when you print your digital pictures?

It’s been a while since I got hardcopies (always useful for frames on the wall, wallets, and grandparents) of some Roxanne pictures, so I looked at local places I can get 1 hour prints (I’m impatient once I start).  I thought I wanted to find the cheapest major printer that I can get to easily – the two obvious choices here are CVS and Ritz.  CVS was a little cheaper (19cents with no restrictions), so I started signing up.  Fill in your email and password and get yet another darn account…  CVS outsources the photo site to a place called pnimedia.com to do all the work, just leaving the CVS banner there.  Then I read the TOS (Terms Of Service).

Of course by default, the TOS pops up in a separate window that’s much too small to read, without a scrollbar.  And it’s an onClick link, not an href, so you have to look in the page source to see where the terms really live (hint: http://cvs.pnimedia.com/disclaimers/terms.aspx).  Plenty of the usual legalese about their lack of responsibility for anything, which is fine.  Then I read on to this section:

You grant to the Web Site and its service providers and licensees a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, unrestricted, world-wide right and license to access, use, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, perform, communicate to the public, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, and otherwise use such Materials (in whole or in part) in connection with the Service, using any form, media or technology now known or later developed, without providing compensation to you…
…
You also grant to the Web Site and its service providers the right to use your name in connection with the Materials.

So my non-lawyerly reading of that means that any photos you upload to their site, they can then use as they wish, for any purpose ever, and even use your name.  Don’t hold your breath, but you might someday be featured in one of their ad campaigns for photo printing in the future.  Including your name, Mr/s. Blog Reader.  Sound fun?

Not liking the sound of that, I surfed over to ritzpix.com.  The TOS there at least comes up in a normal window, and has a normal URL of http://www.ritzpix.com/common/RitzTerms.cfm which states:

As a condition to your Membership, you hereby grant RitzPix.com and the RitzPix.com Site Host (LifePics, Inc. Based out of Boulder Colorado d/b/a/ LifePics) a perpetual, universal, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to copy, display, modify, transmit, make derivative works of and distribute your Content, solely for the purpose of providing the Service.

Here, you give up the same basic rights, but “solely for the purpose of providing the Service”, which sounds almost reasonable to me.  Obviously if they outsource bits, or display your stored pictures, they want to CYA with the basic rights there.

Contrast this all with other sites, like what flickr uses, which is qoop.com for photo printing nowadays, TOS at http://www.qoop.com/about/terms_of_service.php

You hereby grant to QOOP a worldwide, transferable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, right and license to use such Content, in all media existing now or created in the future, as QOOP feels appropriate in its sole discretion, to allow you to deploy the QOOP Services to create, manufacture and purchase Products for so long as you maintain a Content QOOP LINQ to QOOP Services, house your Content in the QOOP Content database, or remain a member of QOOP. QOOP may sublicense the rights granted to it in this Section to a third party subcontractor where QOOP deems it necessary or advisable to facilitate QOOP Services. We reserve the right to excerpt your Content and make minor modifications to the Content for technical reasons and for marketing and sales materials.

Ooops, they explicitly say they can use your stuff for marketing materials.  Oh, well, I guess there aren’t many safe places anymore.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think about this stuff for licensing in their daily life?

The popular networking site LinkedIn has created a new Answers feature, where members can post questions, and members can provide answers.  They have a simple expertise system where the ‘best’ answer to each question garners an expertise point for the answerer.

I happened to be reading a question about webhosts, and decided to answer (I use 1and1 for my personal site).  Then I looked at who asked, and who (46+ people) was answering the question.  It’s a huge expertise mining operation!  I couldn’t figure out who was getting more traction in this simple example: the VC person asking who used which web host, or the various people – real life, or shills, we don’t know – who were including plenty of weblinks in each of their answers.

In any case, when do you think this will move to a micropayment system, like some of the other web expertise systems out there?  I’ll give the VC my opinion on web hosts for a few cents, especially since it’s getting him good data to get his job done.  Some of the questions there are clearly people looking for an easy way to do research.

Or am I being too harsh today?  LinkedIn is all about connections, so maybe we should look at it as the broader version of asking your question around the watercooler.  If it’s someone in your 1st/2nd degree contact list, then it’s not much different from a friend of a co-worker asking you for advice – there’s an inherent level of trust, both in the answer, and the fact that the trust won’t be abused.

If you’re on LinkedIn, then see their Answers tool.  If not, contact me for an invitation.  You don’t need an invitation to join – it’s free – but I’m currently at 99 connections, and you could be the lucky 100th person on my contact list!