lucis

I’ve used gnome as my default desktop for the better part of the last three years. Why? Because it “looked” better than KDE back when I tried them both. KDE was a tad faster, but everyone wants some eye candy! But it looks like KDE has come a long way. This post has convinced me to give KDE another spin. Of all the things mentioned, I think amarocK looks the most impressive. A serious iTunes replacement? We’ll see…

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to decide on a photo sharing website. flickr is extremely popular and the pro account has unlimited bandwidth and storage. It also has an amazing community with millions of cluncky but functional groups. However, I could never get myself to like the flickr user interface. Sure, there are quite a few intelligent features, but for the most part the UI is simply unusable. The amount of whitespace wasted on each page is absolutely ridiculous. The slideshow feature is really a joke (who would want a slideshow in a tiny part of the window!?). I even setup a flickr account for myself, but never really uploaded much.

pbase was one of the very first photo sharing sites on the net. It has some really cool features like searching the camera/lens database. Unfortunately the interface is somewhat antiquated (though very flexible), and they offer very little storage space.

And then there is smugmug. It has the best UI by far (though not very configurable for the standard account). They offer unlimited storage and a generous bandwidth cap per month. They have a fairly decent API for third party apps (though not as popular as flickr). Nice full screen slideshows, print ordering, and the option to upgrade to a power user for a highly customizable look are added benifits. The only thing that really goes against smugmug is the lack of a real photo-sharing community like flickr.

So, I was really jumping between smugmug and flickr and finding it hard to decide until I came across this thread on their smugmug’s support forum. This guy basically wants to upload 2+ terabytes worth of images, and is wondering if smugmug can handle this. Here is the response that he got from those incharge:

Wow, that must be close to 500,000 JPEGs! Quite a collection - I can’t wait to see them.

So we’ve always said “unlimited storage” and we mean what we say. We’re happy to take your photos and host them, but we need a little time to prepare.

Just so you know, this is something like a $20,000 first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling, and physical space. You’ll basically have two complete RAID arrays to yourself in our datacenter. Of course, you’ll only pay your $30, $50, or $100 per year, depending on your account level. Again, we’re happy to do it - but I want to be up front here and let you know that we need to order some equipment and get it installed to accept your photos. We’re not geared for accepting 2.5TB overnight.

We’ll also be buying extra image processing machines just for your batch of photos. Luckily, once yours are done, everyone else at smugmug will get to benefit from them, so I don’t consider that a cost to host you.

Does that sound fair? Can we ask you to hold off while we order and install the equipment and power required?

Thanks!

Don

Wow! This is called customer service. I immediatelly signed up for a standard account at smugmug

Here is my smugmug webpage. I’ll be adding pictures and organizing it in the coming weeks. Will also post links here, and hopefully have something like a photoblog that is linked to smugmug soon.

Finally, if you do decide to go with smugmug, use this referrer code while signing up MwBAowRs6Oiis - it will save you $5, and give this poor graduate student a $10 credit towards next year’s service.

… or am I? Its been a long time since I wrote anything here. Have lots of stuff to add and lots of pictures to share. I hope I’ll try to update this more often. Meanwhile, upgraded WP to the latest version - was really straightforward.

To get started, here is a nice little twenty minute special on the best TV serial on air - Battlestar Galactica. Its not much, but atleast something to chew on while we wait for the rest of the second season.