A Simple Change = Huge Savings?

Date                Vistors    Pages  Hits    Bandwidth

26 Nov 2006    1140    3741    15585     213.50 MB
27 Nov 2006    1382    4466    20946    239.65 MB
28 Nov 2006    418     1606      3503       72.01 MB
29 Nov 2006    428     2708      4459     84.14 MB

Well, I’ve been having major bandwidth issues this month. I passed my 8GB limit about a week ago and ended having to buy additional bandwidth to keep the site active for the rest of the month. This got me thinking and looking through my server logs to try and figure out what the heck was going on. I know for a fact that my site is not nearly that popular, but somehow my bandwidth was still disappearing at a frightening pace.

The big break through came when I looked at the plain ugly un-prettied up logs. I was getting a ridiculous percentage of my traffic from Google. That’s good right? That’s what I thought until I looked a little deeper. It turns out virtually all of my traffic from Google was coming from Google Images in particular. Basically what was happening was that all of my images in my gallery were being indexed and searched by Google users. The vast majority of my bandwidth on a daily basis was going to people downloading my images through Google.

So I came up with a plan. If I move my entire gallery over to Flickr then a good chunk of bandwidth will be saved. Based on a brief 2 day experiment of this theory is seems to be paying off. My bandwidth usage has been nearly quartered simply by moving my images off site. I figured it out that what I pay to use Flickr’s pro service works out to be roughly what I end up paying in extra bandwidth charges whenever that occurs. In the long wrong I just about break even, so for now that is good enough for me.

This is not a perfect marriage though, not nearly. I miss my fully customizable gallery (formerly powered by Gallery2), and Flickr certainly does not offer even a vague semblance of customizability (which apparently is not a real word). Also, Flickr does not have true folders in the sense that we have come to understand. Flickr uses a system very similar to Gmail’s “label” system. These are essentially virtual folders that don’t hold the images, the merely group them how you decide. All of the images are still in this mess of “all images” limbo which just makes me squirm in it’s disorganized nature. Also, apparently Flickr does not see the need for sub albums. I really can’t imagine how they wouldn’t think this might be useful to customers, but they simply do not support the idea of sub albums.

So in summary, strictly from the perspective of saving bandwidth this has been a great idea, but it has not come without trade offs.

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[tag]Tech News[/tag]
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Seed: Dead Bacteria Walking

Scientists had previously hypothesized that an organism couldn’t have a genome with fewer than 400,000 nucleotides, the units that compose a strand of DNA. But Carsonella’s genome has evolved right past that theoretical limit, weighing in at a mere 160,000 bases. In fact, it is the smallest genome ever sequenced. Scientists are still not entirely sure how these bacteria and the insects that house them continue to survive.

Wow, that is pretty cool. Granted, I can only act like I really have a clue what this means, but it’s quite cool anyways.

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Open Source Internet Explorer

I am quite curious what people think of the idea of making Internet Explorer open source. I know it would never happen (ok, very very unlikely), but the recent release of IE7 final got me thinking about this again.

Here’s my thoughts. If Internet Explorer was to be open sources:

1. Millions of more eyes looking at the code, therefore a plethora of new exploits/bugs would be found and in turn also be fixed quicker. Open Source: +1

2. Perhaps if they were to open source IE we could finally make the sweeping (and much needed) rendering/CSS updates that badly need to be done. Microsoft has made it abundantly clear with the final release of IE7 that they are going to just go about taking their sweet time to update the handling of CSS standards for example (just to name one huge lacking area). My thought is that a community could handle this fairly daunting task in a much more time efficient manner. Open Source: +1

3. It’s likely that if they were to open source IE then it would no longer be bundled so deeply into the core of any future versions of Windows. This is not necessarily a bad thing. With the recent upgrade of IE7 we all became painfully aware of how deeply Internet Explorer is baked into Windows. What other web browser needs to restart the computer to be installed? That is a ridiculous requirement at this point in software. Very few software applications should require a system reboot, especially something as non-system critical as a web browser. Also along this separation from the Windows core would be a greater level of security. We all know perfectly well about all of the vulnerabilities in IE (and even Firefox for that matter). It would help the overall security of Windows to have one less application that is very prone to exploitation being so closely tied into the core security of the entire OS. Less built in applications = less sources of problems. Open Source: +1 (sort of)

etc…

My main reason for thinking about this was due to the fact that I did not see any (ok, very little) innovation on the part of Microsoft with Internet Explorer 7. This release contains virtually no new features that have not been taken, copied, or based off of existing products. I think the community could come up with better ideas and a quicker period of time.

Please state any ideas/thoughts agreeing with my ideas, contracting my ideas, or just in general about this. I am curious to see what people think.

[tag]Chaos[/tag]
[tag]Tech News[/tag]
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[tag]Security[/tag]
[tag]Software[/tag]
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[tag]Personal[/tag]

ShotgunGuide.com – Official Rules for Calling Shotgun

Ever have the problem of catching a ride with someone whose car doesn’t have much of a back seat? At times like these, it is important to know the rules of calling shotgun. Never again will you let someone take advantage of you because you don’t know the rules.

I know everyone was wondering about the very specific and ever so important rules that govern the usage of calling shotgun.

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[tag]Life[/tag]
[tag]Personal[/tag]

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

Photo Tourism

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change the way you think about digital photos forever.

Gotta love sweeping overly dramatic product descriptions…(generally it’s good practice to avoid words like “forever”).

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

With Photosynth you can:

* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.

* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph whether itâ€™s megapixels or gigapixels in size.

* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.

* Find similar photos to the one youâ€™re currently viewing.

* Explore a custom tour.

* Send a collection to a friend.

Well I have been putting off this post a few days in hopes that they would finally release this public technology demonstration that they said is coming soon, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet. Sooo, I thought I’d go ahead and write a little bit about this. Let me just start by point this out:

The above link to “Photo Tourism” is only loosely based on what you’ll see once this software is ready. The Photo Tourism example is also up on a server somewhere running inside Java. Needless to say (but it needs to be pointed out), it runs a lot slower than it will when it’s on your computer.

Software or ideas come along like Photosynth maybe once a year or so. This is definitely one of those things that make the nerdy parts of my brain tingle with excitement. The possibilities for this Photosynth software are virtually impossible to fathom. The technology could be applied to medical imagining, tourism (as the rough example shows), real estate, and a plethora of other fields. I don’t want to say “this is what it does and what it can do” simply because the example I am linking to is not exactly the newest version of the code. Once we get the first public technology preview a in depth write up will soon follow.

So, play with the demo…learn what type of things this technology enables, and generally try to hold yourself back from saying “oh wow” and “ok, that is cool” more than 10 times. (I said both of those at least 18 times).

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