November 2006

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I’m an avid digital photographer. I’ve tried many online photo storage accounts in the past and finally settled on a Flickr Pro account, allowing me to store virtually unlimited photos at their highest resolution. I also have a number of other accounts, such as Shutterpoint and PhotoBox where people can purchase my photos.

All of these services, whilst good, don’t really offer me the flexibility I’m after, which is why I took a look at Gallery 2. Gallery 2 is a hosted PHP application, so you’ll need your own server or hosting account. I set mine up using my Dreamhost account. Installation was a breeze, as Dreamhost offer a “One Click” installation as part of their standard package. During setup, you’re advised of any potential issues before installation starts. The Gallery 2 web site has a Certified Hosts section, which details those hosts known to work well with Gallery 2.

After the initial installation, I was somewhat bewildered by the array of options available. I had a few specific requirements for my new Gallery as follows:

• I wanted to change the logo on the header page
• I wanted to disallow anyone to register for the site (i.e. allow visitors to view the albums, but not add or alter them), as I want to host purely my own work (you can, if you wish, allow anyone to register and create their own albums)
• I wanted to allow visitors to purchase my photos via PayPal
• I wanted to change the default “look and feel” of the gallery

A quick search of the forum revealed that I could do all of the above, and just about anything else! This is obviously a labour of love to the authors and everyone who has contributed to it and this is demonstrated by the wealth of detail provided in the forums and the online documentation.

There are a number of methods you can use to upload photos to your server. I tried the ftp upload first, where you simply upload the photos to a directory you create on the server, tell Gallery 2 where they are, and it will upload them to the selected album. You can create multiple albums, each with their own defaults, such as maximum image size, maximum file size etc. You can also apply global defaults, such as applying your own watermark to each image. The second method I tried was using a downloadable Java application called Gallery Remote. This allows you to connect to your Gallery via the application and drag and drop images to it, applying captions etc. This makes it an absolute breeze to get the photos into your album. The only short-coming with this method is that you have to manually apply watermarks once the images have uploaded. I may be missing something here, but a quick forum search revealed others are having to do the same. A relatively minor omission that I’m sure will be addressed at some future stage.

The standard installation (as supplied by Dreamhost) allows a number of options for visitors, such as voting and adding remarks. The gallery can then be extended by using any of the enormous number of plug-in modules available for Gallery 2. To install one, you simply copy it into a new directory on the server. Then go to Modules under Site Admin and configure it as required. You then Activate it and it’s available. I used this method to add the “pay by PayPal” and “Contact” modules to my own gallery.

You can set individual permissions for each album if required, set different permission levels for different groups etc. It really is incredibly configurable. It took me around 1 complete day in total to get my gallery up and running as it is now. Given the cost of the application (free!) and its functionality, I’d say this is a very good investment. You can see my finished gallery here. I’ve still some work to do with it, but I’m now happy with its overall appearance.

I’ll still use Flickr for fun, but I shall most likely be dropping my use of the other services and using Gallery 2 for my “serious” stuff.

If you’re a photographer looking for a home on the web for your images, or you want to create an album for your family, I’d strongly recommend Gallery 2.

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I’ve been on the lookout for the “perfect” note taking application for years, and nothing previously tested really did what I wanted, i.e. basically a free-form note taker with cross-referencing, that was very easy to use. ZuluPad comes very close. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s near perfect for my needs.

ZuluPad is a very young application (version tested here is 0.3.6), but is already showing signs of maturity. I’m testing the Windows version here, but it’s also available for OSX.

Think of ZuluPad as cross between a notepad-type application and a Wiki. It’s described by the author as “ZuluPad is a notepad on crack”

When you start the application, you’re presented with a single “Index” page, with some navigation icons across the top, a menu bar and a large text area. You can just start typing in the text area to enter your notes.

The fun part starts when you want to start cross-referencing data. With the text you’ve just entered, highlight a word or phrase, click the Link button (or press Control-L) and you’ll be presented with a new page, with a title of the word or phrase previously selected. You can now see a list of these pages in a drop-down list at the top of the page allowing you to easily navigate through them. Each time you enter a word you have previously created a link for, it is automatically linked to the created page for you.

It really is very easy, very intuitive and, most importantly, very useful. I love the fact that you can just enter whatever you want, and it automatically references your other notes for you.

Installation is a breeze. Just extract the downloaded files wherever you want. I have it installed on my USB pen drive so I can take it anywhere with me.

Another great feature is ZuluSync. The idea is that you sign up for a free account on their web site, then enter those log-in details into ZuluPad. Once done, you select ZuluSync Send from the menu, and your entire document is stored on the ZuluPad server. When you get home, you can select ZuluSync receive and it’ll download the document to your local copy of ZuluPad. You can also view your “sent” documents via the ZuluPad web site. Terrific idea.

This application shows an awful lot of promise. I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on developments.

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I’ve tried many (too numerous to count) online backup solutions. I found most of them were either too confusing to set up, or didn’t give me the options I specifically needed. Mozy is neither confusing, nor lacking in options.

As I’ve mentioned above, it comes in both free and paid-for flavours. The free account gives you 2Gb of storage (very generous for a free account). If you need more storage, you can opt to pay according to how much you require.

The interface is simplicity itself. You specify which directories/files you want backed up, and Mozy backs that data up securely offline at regular intervals. It only backs up the changes since the last backup (with versioning), keeping network traffic to a minimum.

I’m an avid photographer. I’m also paranoid about losing my images, so, once I’ve copied the images off the camera, I immediately back them up to my server. Mozy sits on my server and watches the directory I’ve backed my images up in and, when it gets some new images, it sends them off to be backed up online. Simplicity itself and it provides a nice warm fuzzy feeling knowing my treasured images are safely backed up in multiple locations.

If the worst happens and, say, your dog eats your hard drive, simply log on to your Mozy account via their home page and select the files you need to restore. The free account lets you do 4 restores per month, which should be sufficient unless your dog has an insatiable appetite for hard drives. It really is as simple as that. I’ve had to do a restore only once for real so far, and did so once before that to test it would actually work, and it’s all flawless.

You can add multiple computers to one account. I have both my server and my laptop on a single account. On your account page on their web site, you can simply select the computer you wish to restore data from.

This really is a very simple “fire and forget” setup. Nobody likes backing up. Quite frankly, it’s boring, so the job needs to be very simple and require as little effort as possible, for both backing up and restoring the data. Mozy excels in both areas.

 
Mozy configuration screen - simply put a tick in all directories you want backed up

 
Mozy backup in operation

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Process Explorer is another very useful free tool from SysInternals.

It’s pretty much Windows Task Manager on sterroids. It provides a vast amount of information, but in a very concise and readable form. By default, it will show you every running process, but this can usefully be restricted to, say, non-system processes, so you can limit it down to your user applications.

You can specify the individual columns to be displayed, even down to .Net Jitted Methods and other development related tasks. You can add a CPU usage graph for each process, a memory usage per process graph and many other useful items.

In the main total cpu usage graph at the top of the form, hovering the mouse-pointer over a peak will show which process was causing it, useful when you’re trying to ascertain over a period of time what may be slowing your machine down.

Double-clicking on a particular process provides you with a wealth of information (see screenshot below), down to the stack trace and thread start addresses.

I’d strongly recommend this application to anyone who may be having problems with their PC performance (i.e. for identifying potential viruses or spyware), or who wants to monitor their own applications for memory leaks and performance issues.

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I often find myself copying large chunks of text and/or images to the clipboard, then switching to another application to paste the data back in. This can be a real chore with the standard Windows clipboard, switching backwards and forwards between applications.

This is where ClipX comes in. ClipX is a free clipboard monitoring tool which allows you to copy a number of items into the clipboard at once. Once stored, with just a few key presses (by default Ctrl-Shift-Insert) you’ll see a list of all stored items (both text and graphics) on screen and can paste any one of them into the current document.

This is a terrific time saver for things such as web page development. I’m using it now to copy sections of text and graphics to include in this page.

There are numerous options available, such as the ability to save the clipboard history across sessions, saving the clipboard history, so you could load it back up at some later stage - handy for repetitive entries, history cleaning etc.

This is one of those great little applications that makes you wonder how you ever coped without it once you’ve used it for a while.

 
ClipX showing recent clips

 
One of the ClipX properties dialog boxes

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There are an incredible number of compression utilties available. 7Zip stands out amongst them for 2 main reasons - 1. It’s free and 2. It has an incredibly efficient compression algorithm - 7z. It can also compress to/from the ubiqutous Zip format, at varying compression levels, in addition to GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR. You can also create self-extracting archives using its 7z algorithm.

7Zip also meets a criteria I always look for in any software - ease of use. It is designed purely to handle compression/decompression and is not bloated with a ton of features you’ll never use.

Another terrific feature is the Command Line version, which allows you to build automated batch files to compress your files, perhaps prior to a backup. I use this feature a great deal.

7Zip comes as standard with support for multiple languages and is supplied with an extensive Help file covering both the standard and command line versions.

The software is completely free, but the author accepts paid-for registrations to help with development. The free version has no crippling whatsoever.

 
7Zip main interface

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Please note this is a review of the latest (as of the 15th June, 2006) beta release of Opera.

I’ve been a long time user/admirer of Opera. I even paid for it back in the days when they offered either a free, advert subsidised version or a paid-for, ad-free version.

I think it has something to do with my desire to see the underdog to succeed. But, it also has a lot to do with the fact that Opera is one very slick browser. It has it’s faults, for sure. For instance, it has difficulty rendering some big-name sites. Having said that, it’s more an issue with the sites in question using non-standard coding techniques than it is a fault of Opera.

Browsing the web with Opera is a little like driving a Ferrari. I’ve done no specific speed comparison tests, but you just know when using it that you’re browsing faster than you ever have before. It makes the whole experience much more enjoyable.

Now, onto specifics. I know you can get Firefox extensions to force it do most, if not all of the following (and also with some other browsers), but this is all straight out of the box with Opera:

• Mouse gestures - right-click/drag has always been my preferred mode for web page navigation
• Tabbed browsing - very nicely implemented, with each tab having it’s own “close” button - should be standard on every browser You can force new windows to open as a new tab if required
• Search from the address bar - simply type “g bestfreeapps” to do a Google search, “e telescopes” for an eBay search etc. You can also define your own search shortcuts
• Feed Reader - subscribe to any RSS feeds and read them using a very intuitive email-like page
  IRC chat - terrifically easy to setup and use IRC client. Supports smiles
• Per-page settings - you can set specific parameters, such as browser identification, on a per-page basis
• Private data deletion - allows you to delete cookies, page history, file transfer history etc on demand
• Voice operated browsing - a fantastic touch of functionality for those who are not able to take full advantage of the keyboard/mouse, Opera can be controlled by voice and can also be configured to generate speech from the content of web pages
• Tab previews - if you’re looking at a page in one tab, you can get a preview of what’s in any of the other tabs by simply hovering the mouse cursor over the tab
• Widgets - Opera 9 now supports Widgets, i.e. small applications that can be placed anywhere on-screen and shown/hidden at will. Not one of my favourite features, but to each their own
• Almost my most favourite feature - Paste and Go! Once you have a URL in your clipboard, right-click the address field, select “Paste and go” and Opera will paste the url and emulate pressing Return for you, hence loading the page - this is so simple, yet so good!
• If you are, say, looking in the 2nd tab, then click a link to open another tab, then close that newly opened tab, Opera focuses back on the tab you started with, rather than the last tab in the list. Another of my favourite features

In addition to all the above, Opera has possibly the worlds best and most misunderstood email client. I will be covering this in a later review, but check it out if you get the chance. It’s the closest I’ve seen to a desktop equivalent of GMail (also to be reviewed later).

Oh, and did I mention it was fast?

 
Main Opera screen, with 2 tabs open

 
Close up of the tabs are, showing the close boxes

 
Opera’s useful feed reader

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I love applications that allow me to get the job done quickly and easily. Paint.Net is one of those applications. There are some great commercial graphics applications available, but I don’t use a great deal of their features and it’s often hard to work out how to use the ones I need.

Paint.Net makes it really easy to get all of the stuff done that probably the vast majority of us need to do, i.e. image resizing, photo finishing (red eye removal, etc).

I’ve used Paint.Net to resize the images shown on this (and other) page. One of the things I really like is the “Quality” option when saving an image as a JPG. You can adjust the Quality slider and visually check the resulting image before committing to the save. It also shows the resulting file size, which is very useful. There are lots of nice ideas like this that make it a joy to use.

It’s got some nice effects you can apply to your image, such as Frosted Glass, Oil Painting etc. I’ve seem some commercial applications going for big bucks that are purely made to apply such effects to images and some of them don’t even do it as well as Paint.Net.

As quoted on their web site, “It started development at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for setup and shell-integration related functionality.”.

You can set an option to auto-check for updates each time the application starts, or do a manual check whenever you please. Updates appear to come along every 1-2 weeks.

In short, everything I need to do on a day-to-day basis with images can be accomplished with this application. I paid for my version of Paint Shop Pro. When I bought my new laptop, I didn’t bother re-installing it, but installed Paint.Net. I can’t offer a better recommendation than that.

 
The main screen, with a blank canvas

 
A “Frosted Glass” version of “Bliss”

 
And an “Oil Painting” version

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Mind Maps - I know they’re not for everyone, but I love them. I have better success brainstorming using this method than any other. I find the whole concept fits superbly with the way my mind works (not sure what that says about my brain!).

I’ve tried virtually all the mind mapping software I can get hold of. Most of it is prohibitively expensive for individuals (IMHO) and most of them are of the Microsoft Word variety, i.e. you’ll never use 90% of the functionality.

FreeMind works superbly in that it offers all of the basic requirements for constructing a mind map, but you’re not bogged down with functions you don’t need. It’s fast and stable and allows me to get what’s in my head onto the screen in the quickest time possible.

You can link to external files and other mind maps from any nodes, expand/collapse any/all nodes at will, drag the map around the screen, zoom in/out at will, add notes to nodes and generally do all the things you really need in order to create useful maps in a very short time.

The user manual is supplied in mind map format, giving you the chance to have a good play with it without first having to create your own map.

You can export your maps in various formats, including html, JPEG etc, for inclusion your web site or other documents.

If you like mind maps and haven’t tried this, give it a go. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. If you’ve never heard of mind maps, also give it a try. It certainly changed the way I carry out any kind of project development for the better.

 
FreeMind main screen

 
MindMap with all elements collapsed