Arun Stephens » computers

Windows Live Writer

arun — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:45:00 +0000

Have you heard of this? Well, I just found out about it. It’s quite cool. It’s a client for blogging, and you can even use it for Blogger blogs. It seems there’s some sort of standard that Blogger supports.

So this is written using Windows Live Writer. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse or the same as using Word to write blog entries.

I have also started the blog for Zemobo. Zemobo will be quietly launched at the beginning of July. You can sign up at the Zemobo web site to be notified when it launches.

IIS7 on Vista and languages

arun — Mon, 07 May 2007 09:35:00 +0000

I installed IIS on Vista the other day, but haven’t done anything with it yet. But today I was visiting a poorly configured site that redirected to localhost, and I got an error message (as the file didn’t exist). But it was in French.

That it was in French isn’t too big a surprise (having had my computer set up for French while I was over there) but I was sure everything was back to English. I checked my Internet Explorer language settings and the two preferences were EN-nz and FR-fr.

So I added EN-us to the mix, between the two, and the message appeared in English.

What does that mean? It means that the localisation in IIS isn’t working properly. At least not like the .NET Framework one does. Actually maybe that is how it’s supposed to work, but it’s not how I’d expect it to. It was looking for a specific localised resource for EN-nz. When it couldn’t find that, rather than finding a generic EN resource, it went to the next one in my preferences, FR-fr.

I’m not sure what most users would want – the language to be one of the exact language+culture combinations they’ve chosen, or that the language is what matters most and if the language is available, they should get any culture’s variant of that language. I’d prefer the latter. However it doesn’t really matter because I understood both.

More on Zooomr

arun — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 06:18:00 +0000

Bloody Microsoft Word! I had actually written this whole post out in Word. And then Word crashed. For no reason. I didn’t even get a chance to take a screenshot of the page so that I wouldn’t have lost everything. Oh well. I shall start from scratch.

Last week I was quite keen to see the new version of Zooomr, the photo sharing site. It was down for a few days as they were deploying the new version. Turned out the new version wasn’t quite ready and they ended up rolling back to the existing version. I commented that it looked a bit “busy” (design-wise) and lo and behold (I’m pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to spell that expression) Kristopher Tate, the founder of Zooomr, within about an hour, responded to my comments. I am guessing he found it from Technorati (where my site is included automatically thanks to Blogger – not that Blogger is the only blog service (hosted or otherwise) that allows this). There’s something neat about writing about someone’s product and then having that person respond to you. It’s cool.

Anyway, more than a week later and still Zooomr Mark III (I’ll just click Save now as I have written a bit) isn’t up. But, it’s good that it’s not up because I think everyone would like a site that works. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing new features and not being able to use them. Mark II, apart from its ugliness, is pretty cool. I like the way it does geotagging, particularly as it uses Google Maps. It’s also cool to be able to get a page of photos taken in the vicinity of another photo. You can see the photo in context.

Zooomr, like many sites out there, uses the Google Maps API. Zooomr Mark III in fact promises an API (perhaps there’s one out there for Mark II already, but I’m not sure). Flickr‘s got one, as does Facebook. Amazon‘s had one for a long time. It’s amazing what applications people can come up with by using public APIs of other services.

In response to my “busy” criticism, Kristopher pointed me to this screenshot of a page in the new Zooomr. It’s much more to my liking.

I have to congratulate Kristopher on having his finger on the pulse of what his users (and non-users, as I was at the time of the post) think of his service. It’s good to see the personal touch. In fact, I wouldn’t have written more on Zooomr if it weren’t for his comment. It’s not just good marketing – it shows he believes in what Zooomr offers and wants to share that with others. As we say in France (sometimes – although apparently it’s a bit dated) – “supercool”. Seriously. They say that.

Vista and Daylight Saving Time

arun — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 07:31:00 +0000

This appeared at the bottom of my calendar/clock screen in Vista today. It’s cool that it’s giving advance warning like that. That is all.

dst, originally uploaded by arunstephens.

Check out my photos

arun — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:22:00 +0000

I gave up waiting for Zooomr to come back online and have put some of my photos up on Flickr. I found out that using “sets” lets me organise the photos in the correct order. I spent a while geotagging my photos. That means putting the photos on a map, basically. Still not 100% sure that Flickr’s what I want (especially seeing that you can only create three sets if you don’t pay).

I found a tool that looks like it will be able to synchronise that information back to the original files on my computer, which will be very useful.

One of the problems I encountered though was that when I searched for locations on the map (which uses Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! owning Flickr now) they sometimes didn’t show up. But if I used Google Maps, there was no problem. My understanding is that Zooomr’s geotagging is based on Google Maps, so that is good.

Just have to wait until they get Zooomr back up and running.

Blogger and Google. And my search for a photo sharing site.

arun — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:20:00 +0000

So, I created this blog yesterday. Already if you search for “arun blog le” in Google it comes up with this site. Google must have very tightly integrated Blogger with their indexing. I have added a keywords meta tag to try and get a search for Arun Stephens to yield the blog as a result. At the moment my main web site (with less content than this one) comes up trumps, which is fine (preferable, even) but it would be good if this could come up too. I haven’t actually written my full name on any of the pages (until now) so there’s no reason that it would have come up in the search results anyway.

Yesterday I was reading, mostly in Wikipedia, about photo sharing sites. I had tried Flickr once before and didn’t really like it. I think it was because it was too difficult to get the photos in the right order (the order I took them, rather than the order in which I uploaded them). Maybe it has changed by now, or maybe I was just stupid. In any case, it should have been easier. I learnt about Zooomr yesterday. I checked it out, but it turns out they are currently upgrading to Zooomr Mark III, and the site’s been down for a couple of days. They’ve run into some problems during the upgrade but I am eager to check it out. I think that it’s probably not going to be the best time to create a new account with all the old account people checking out the new features but I will persevere – when it’s ready.

I also did a search for myself in Technorati today. I’m already there. It’s very strange. It’s a lot different to 11 years ago, when I created my first home page on GeoCities. (I just had a check back through old emails to see whether I had the old address to put here for prosperity but I don’t. I probably do have the first site somewhere on DVD, CD or floppy. That will be weird to look at.) Anyway, back in 1996 I had to manually submit my site to all the search engines (Excite and Lycos were the big ones back then) and wait a few weeks for the site to be included in the index. Now it’s almost instantaneous.

So now to test the speed of Technorati. Blogger automatically pings weblogs.com. I’m not entirely sure what weblogs.com does with it but I guess other sites can get a list of recently updated blogs from them, and that “other sites” could conceivably include Technorati.

Thats all for now.

Blogger. Not bad!

arun — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 01:22:00 +0000

Hello again

So, I created this blog this morning at school. I have been playing around with it this afternoon and have come to the conclusion that Blogger‘s not bad at all.

The reason I originally decided against using Blogger or something similar was that I wanted a way to restrict access to certain articles to certain people. The same thing with photos. For photos it was more important actually, because I didn’t (and still don’t) want photos of me available for the world to see. But it’s not worth the trouble.

I’m trying to find a decent place to put my photos. I have just signed up for Photobucket but it doesn’t let you restrict access to photos. Does anyone know of a good one that would let me create groups of people and let particular groups access photos? Or that lets you create albums and only let certain users look at the album? Photobucket doesn’t do that yet, but says it will be eventually.