Image Hosting

I've been hosting my images online for several years now and it's nice to be able to share pictures with family anywhere at any time. I am currently hosting the images on my home computer over my ADSL connection at http://gallery.epenguin.org/, using Gallery on Apache.

This solution has worked out alright, but I am looking for a change. The disadvantages of the solution are:

• Speed: Everyone should know how narrow ADSL upload bandwidth is, and how easily it is saturated.
• Reliability: While my ISP is quite reliable, my computer is not. At almost seven years of age, I can safely say that my PC is over the hill and gaining speed. When it goes down, the photo site goes down.
  
• Energy: I am trying to be more conscious of my energy usage these days, and a PC running 24/7 just to keep a photo site running for occasional access is a waste of energy.

Of course, there are also advantages:

• Control: I have ultimate control of how everything looks and feels.
• Fun: I have fun tinkering with stuff and seeing how it works.
• Personalization: I have my own vanity domain, and it is nice to be able to give people a short URL to type into their address bars.
• Cost: Although I have increased energy usage, I don't have any hosting fees. I'm not sure which one costs more.

Candidates I am looking at are Flickr, Picasa Web, .Mac, and hosting through someone like GoDaddy.

The reason I am interested in .Mac is that I am planning to buy a Mac in the near future, and the iPhoto integration that I have seen is really tempting. Of the image hosts, I think that this is the only one that gives true domain redirection capability. That is to say, people could type my vanity URL into their address bar and get redirected to the site without using frames or anything. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in paying over $100 per year to host my images somewhere.

Picasa and Flickr are similar, but Flickr seems to be more popular. Flickr Pro gives you unlimited everything for under $25 a year. That's a much nicer price. To use either of these options with my domain, I would need to use the WebHop service that I have available from DynDNS. It basically wraps the site in a frame. It's a bit cheesy but it does work; I already redirected a temporary domain to my Flickr site. If you want iPhoto integration, there are tools for Flickr and Picasa, but you need to pay for the Flickr one. Flickr also seems to be integrated better with the whole social networking phenomenom which I am trying to become a part of.

Finally, there are web hosts. GoDaddy is my registrar, so I would probably be interested in going to them as a web host (not to mention the fact that they are pretty cheap). But, in my mind, this means more work. I don't want to maintain a site at all at this point. I just plain don't have the time, and it's not worth it to me. I may be swayed, but I think it's a bit of overkill for what I need.

In short, I have no idea where to go with image hosting. I'm leaning toward Flickr just because it seems to be the best connected. Yeah, WebHop is cheesy, but who is really going to notice or care? The FlickrExport tool for iPhoto is only $25 after all, and even that is just an unnecessary frill.

Moved to Blogger

I started posting stuff last month on WordPress, because it seemed like a nice place to put my blog. As I mentioned in one of my other posts, I have recently started using Google Apps, and I remembered about this Blogger account that I created three years ago. Since I can easily point my domain (www.timcoleman.com) to a Blogger blog, it only made sense to start posting here instead of on Blogger. That domain name is much nicer than trwcoleman.wordpress.com.

I copied and pasted my posts from WordPress here. It was really easy. I will try to blog here from now on.

Why I don’t like the upcoming referendum

I received some information about the upcoming Ontario election scheduled for this Autumn, and it reminded me why I'm not happy about the referendum that will be included. The referendum is mostly about whether Ontario should continue with a first-past-the-post system, or change to a mixed member proportional system. Now, I'm all in favour of proportional representation. I think it gives a fairer representation of the people's desire than a first-past-the-post system, and it allows a broader mix of parties in the Legislative Assembly.

Here's how it's supposed to work (from Elections Ontario):

In each electoral district, one vote would be used to elect a 'Local Member' using a First-Past-the-Post system. The candidate with the most votes in an electoral district wins.

The other vote would be for a political party. Votes for parties will be used to determine the number of 'List Members' each party gets. This is the proportional representation part.

Sounds pretty good, right? You get to vote for a local member, and there are some extra seats that are selected by popular vote. Well, here's the thing. There are 90 seats to be selected as local members, and 39 seats to be selected as list members. That's a total of 129 seats, which is almost as many as the 130 seats that existed before the PC Party was elected in 1995. The Legislative Assembly current has 103 members. So, if this measure were to be implemented, an additional 26 seats would be added to the house. After the latest pay raise voted in by the Legislature, a member of provincial parliament (MPP) earns a salary of $110,575 per year, before benefits. Over a four year term, this change would cost over $11,000,000 in salary alone! There are also additional costs in benefits, expenses and pensions for the additional members.

So, we are left with a choice between the existing system, which doesn't give a fair representation, or a proportional system at the cost of millions of dollars. If we vote against a proportional system, how likely is it that we will be asked again? If we vote for it, how likely is it that the number of members will return to the level that we see today?

Wow, Google Apps is really really cool!

I have been thinking lately about how much of a pain it is to run my own mail server. Well, it really runs itself, but it's annoying that I have to rely on my computer being on all the time, and my Internet connection being up all the time. The latter isn't a problem (my ISP is pretty reliable), but the former is becoming more and more of an issue the older my computer gets. I'm also interested in energy conservation, and the next major hurdle there is figuring out a way to not run my computer 24/7.

Enter gmail. I was just browsing around last night, and I found something about Google apps for your domain. I have had a gmail account for some time now, but I don't use it because it has a long and awkward name, and I already have my own vanity domain. I didn't know that I could transfer my domain e-mail to gmail, and it would work just the same as it does now. Just the same, except for the fact that Google handles it, and I can access my e-mail over the Web from work. Up until this point, I would read my e-mail through ssh, using mh as my e-mail client. From home, I can use POP3 if I want to even bother downloading the e-mail from Google.

Wow. It was incredibly easy to set up, and I can get my e-mail from anywhere without having to connect to home, or even having my home computer on. I'm going to try it for a while before transferring e-mail for the other domain over to gmail. If all goes well, I could reconfigure her e-mail client to get the mail from Google and she wouldn't even notice! I probably won't do that though, because that would involve messing around with her e-mail settings, and she would probably be annoyed about me doing that without letting her know.