Ordering photo prints online on GNU/Linux

I wanted to order photo prints from an online shop. The problem is that those shops upload tools are not very effective under Linux. Although they propose native tools under Windows and sometimes Mac, the solution for Linux users is a simple HTML form. When you have to upload 100+ photos, it's not very convenient..... Sometimes you get a useless, buggy, Java applet.

The best solution I've found is to use Picasa for Linux. After you import your pics in Picasa, you click order prints, choose your prefered shop, and your photos are automatically transfered. You then just have to confirm your order and you're done!

Although running on Wine, and as such not a native application, Picasa for Linux is quite good. It won't replace Digikam for me, but it's a good complement. A negative thing is that when you import pictures, it copies it under its own directory ~/.picasa, which can become a waste of storage space.

Although my prefered option would be to use a Firefox extension to upload photos to the print shop, like Yahoo Photos had, this Picasa will do well enough.

Two-pass algorithm illustrated

Here's joke illustrating what a two-pass algorithm is, as found in "The Art of Computer Programming":

Old lady on the bus: "Young boy, can you tell me how to get off at Pasadena Street?"
Young boy: "Just watch me, and get off two stops before I do"

Virtualisation is hot

As VMWare's IPO showed, virutalisation is a very hot subject. And Free and Open Source based solutions are showing good progress too. This should ensure an event you won't want to miss will take place in Brussels in january :-)

Continued learning online

Google Code for Educators has some course material as well as videos, with for example Ajax tutorials and Distributed Systems tutorials. This last contains an Introduction to MapReduce, which I already mentioned on this blog.

With YUI's Theater and Google's Googleplex videos, there's really interesting online material to keep you up to date, and learn new stuff.

Back to MapReduce: I again (second time only though ;-) read the paper "Why functional programming matters", and it motivates me, again, to learn a functional language, and Lisp to begin with. I've read Practical Common Lisp during last year's holydays, and the watch Googleplex' Lisp video, but never got to practice. And it won't be for this year though, as I first want to progress in my reading of "The Art of Computer Programming".

It's so frustrating: there's so much I want to learn! It's hard to make a choice. The good thing though is that I'm not bored :-)

Toolinux à propos du Profoss

Toolinux a publié un article sur le Profoss, qualifié d'"événement de taille dédié à la voix sur IP". Il mentionne également le site d'actualité news.profoss.eu lancé il y a peu.

Exim on EC2

When you configure your Exim on an EC2 server, remember to set the hostname or it'll use Amazon's internal, private unresolvable name. Here's what I did for the Profoss newsletter server configuration in exim.conf:

primary_hostname = newsletter.profoss.eu

This resolves this kind of error messages in you mainlog file:

Recipient address rejected: No IP address found for HELO/EHLO domU-12-31-35-00-39-A1.z-2.compute-1.internal - try again later

Discovering the Symbian platform

As I'm considering the purchase of a Symbian powered phone, I took a look at the platform, and there are some good stuff: Ruby and Ogg are available.

Other things are not that good though, especially C++ development tools that are only available for windows, although they're based on Eclipse......