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Perhaps my relationship with Picasa Web Albums will be short lived. I’ve gotten it into a state where PWA no longer will accept name tags either from the desktop client upload or from the user interface. Nothing I’ve tried has been able to prod it back into accepting name tags on new uploads though existing name tags are still there.

If I try to add a name tag in manually from the UI, it doesn’t accept the entry. The entered name blanks out and the tag is labelled “unnamed.” If I navigate to another photo and then back, even that unnamed tag is gone.

If I delete the album and re-upload it from scratch using Picasa for Mac then none of the name tags are transferred. But, up until yesterday, this was working properly. The evidence indicates a problem on the server side and web searches indicate others have run into this problem but nobody’s come up with a solution and Google doesn’t seem to be saying anything.

Perhaps its time to look at plan B.

Last night I stopped in the Apple Store at Reston Town Center to see if I could play with a Magic Mouse. This mouse doesn’t have any buttons or wheels or nipples but sports a smooth, multitouch surface. It sounds great on paper, but how would it feel in the hand?

Pretty good, actually! Left and right clicking worked as I intuitively expected and scrolling (both vertical and horizontal) were equally simple and intuitive. The only downside was that, at least currently, there is no way to do a “middle click.” That’s a fairly big drawback for web surfing where I frequently use middle clicks to open a link in a new browser tab. That one lack could be a show stopper. I hope not though because I’m still looking for a mouse I can really like instead of just tolerating.

Fortunately, it was a decision I didn’t have to make last night as they don’t have any mice in stock yet (though they are shipping in new macs).

I’ve been using flickr for over three years now. In general I’ve been content with the service. It’s not perfect but it has been serviceable and reliable. They’ve added new features. I’ve got over 11,000 photos there. Moving that many photos is a fair amount of work and I’ve certainly been a victim of entropy. I didn’t much want to think about doing it.

But, there have been nagging gripes.

My earliest is that flickr is oriented to the photo, but I tend to work and think in terms of photo sets or albums. Flickr does provide sets but doesn’t provide any way to get an RSS feed of sets. Getting that feed would allow me to automatically create a post here whenever I uploaded a new set of photos. To get around that I wrote a module that used flickr’s API to work around that. However, that code was somewhat brittle and probably would have needed major updates whenever I did a major version update on the website software.

Flickr recently added name tagging but without any automatic face recognition. The UI to work with it was tedious at best, particularly if I wanted to go back and tag all the old photos.

While flickr was among the first to offer geotagging there was no way to get an overview map for the entire set if the set was large.

Flickr’s organizer, while generally pretty slick, had problems when dealing with the nearly 200 sets that I had. Those problems made dealing with collections (groups of sets) awkward.

So, when I decided to move the website from an old version of drupal to a new version of wordpress, this meant that my flickrsync module would no longer be available unless I wanted to port it to wordpress. While that might be an interesting exercise, it was never a perfect solution and had its own scalability issues. Instead, I decided that this was the time to consider other photo hosting solutions.

I decided on Picasa Web Albums for a few reasons:

Foremost, PWA provided an RSS feed of albums and better yet would sort that feed by the “date taken time” rather than the upload time. This kept things in the proper order for what I wanted.

The name tagging interface was better than flickr’s (particularly when the Picasa desktop app was used to do the tagging).

There were some downsides:

Picasa Web Albums isn’t as full featured as flickr. I did give up some functionality but mostly functionality I rarely if ever used. I’m also giving up all the comments and history the photos had on flickr. Also, while flickr provided unlimited storage space, PWA doesn’t.

It’s going to take a while to move things over, especially since I am adding name tags and cleaning up the textual tags, but I’ve got until April until my flickr account needs renewing so hopefully I can get it all done by then. And who knows, perhaps by then flickr will address my major issue (rss for sets) though it seems unlikely because they haven’t yet despite three years of many people asking for it.

I’ve been wanting a bluray player since the format launched. However, a few things held me back. First, there was this competing format, HD-DVD. It seemed that whichever format I selected would be guaranteed to lose so I sat on the fence and waited. Bluray seemed to be have technical superiority but HD-DVD seemed to be more available.

Well, to my surprise, HD-DVD threw in the towel much more quickly than I expected and bluray was the clear choice for high definition media, but which player to choose?

This, as it turned out, was a difficult decision, mostly because the bluray consortium has made life far more complicated for consumers than it should be. First, we have three different bluray profiles, 1.0, 1,1 and 2.0. When I started looking there only a few 1.1 players and no 2.0 players. It didn’t seem to make sense to buy a player that wouldn’t be able to take advantage of features on newer discs, so I waited. Again.

The first 2.0-capable player was the Sony Playstation 3. Sony has done a good job of keeping the PS3 up to date on Bluray. And reports from the field were that the PS3 was a very good player and faster at disc loading than any standalone player. There were limitations: only 2-channel analog audio, lack or infrared remote control and potentially loud fan noise. The former was not an issue for me since I’d be using HDMI connections. The lack of IR could be overcome with third party products though all are from tiny, little mom-and-pop shops currently. The reports of fan noise were all over the map and with no real objective data and the likelihood of a fair degree of unit-to-unit variation, I’d be taking my chances here.

There were some other potential advantages to the PS3. You get a game system. It has some media streaming capabilities (but sadly, not capable enough for what I’d want). None of these were enough to swing me over tot he PS3 camp. I kept looking.

The profile 2.0 players finally started to appear. Well, one did, the Panasonic BD50. It cost significantly more than a PS3, was somewhat slower at disc loading. It could bitstream advanced audio codecs which the PS3 can’t, but honestly, for bluray, the player ought to be doing the decoding since that’s the only way to handle secondary audio properly so the lack of bitstreaming on the ps3 wasn’t a disadvantage for me. However, if I was reading the manual correctly, the Panasonic player couldn’t decode 7.1 mixes and send them out as 7.1 LPCM, only as 5.1. Granted that there aren’t many 7.1 mixes, but this seemed like yet another player that didn’t manage to be fully capable.

So, rather than wait for Sony’s attempt at a 2.0 standalone player in the fall, I decided to take the plunge and try a PS3.

The fan is a bit louder than I’d like but it isn’t horrible. The unit sits on a component stand and has plenty of ventilation. It’s open on four sides and has 3-5 inches of space above the unit. For ventilation, it’s probably better than what many can manage. With the air conditioning not running and quiet movie dialog, I can hear the fan. It’s not awful, but it is definitely noticeable. With normal dialog levels or the a/c running, it’s not audible. I wish it were quieter but I can live with that.

I don’t really have much time for games, but who knows, perhaps I will give it a try. Been a long time since I’ve done any real gaming. Not that I was ever more than a casual gamer. Might be nice for parties.

So, this is the tale of how I went shopping for a bluray player and came back with a ps3. Of course, that process took more than a year and I finally gave up waiting for a standalone player that met my requirements. It was either buy a ps3 now or wait another three or more months to see if the next player managed to get it right.

Ultimately, if bluray wants to get out of the enthusiast market and into the mainstream, they need to get players down in price. They also need to reduce the complexity. Do we really need three lossless formats (pcm, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA)? All players should decode all formats. That’s the only way to properly implement profile 1.1 and higher requirements. Right now all the players fail to get it right and force you to bistream if you want all the channels. Of course, this disables any secondary audio. And flipping back and forth usually requires a trip out the setup menu.

Bluray had the chance to simplify the complexity of DVD but instead has made it worse. The PS3 does a remarkably good job of hiding that complexity and doing the right thing out of the box. With built in infrared remote control and quieter fans it would be perfect. As it is now, it’s not perfect but for me, it’s as close as any product gets. I was surprised that a game system has managed to be the most capable bluray player around but, at least for now, that seems to be the case.

Apple made a bunch of announcements yesterday mostly about new iPods. But, they also announced the demise of the 4GB iPhone. That’s not really a surprise since the price difference between the 4GB and the 8GB models was small compared the price of the 4GB so it wasn’t much of a stretch to just get the 8GB. Apparently the rest of the world agreed with me and almost nobody bought the 4GB.

What annoys me is the $200 price drop of the 8GB phone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see the price come down, but I’m not happy about what it says about Apple. Anyone who is an early adopter of new technology knows that it’s going to cost more than if we wait. That’s a given. However, such a big drop so soon after the initial release stings.

Apple had to know this was coming and they set the initial price to gouge their most loyal customers. That’s not really a smart thing to do. It will certainly make me less likely to jump on a new Apple product bandwagon. Historically, Apples prices have tended to remain fairly stable for a long period of time so this came as a fairly rude surprise.

When you factor in their ringtone pricing and policy it’s just plain apparent that it’s greed at work. Making people buy the song from the itunes store and then pay again to convert it to a ringtone strikes me as being greedy. And what about the music I already paid for on CD? Why can’t I convert that to a ringtone? Of course, I can with third party tools but the latest itunes appears to get rid of ringtones from other sources.

Not that I even want to do much with ringtones. But, Apple’s announcement did give me an opportunity for some righteous indignation and that’s always a fun pastime.