http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/ 360 en-us © http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=25
I looked at many options for this. The easiest solution seems like it would be to use an existing online photo sharing site, like Flickr or Windows Live Spaces. I looked at four or five of these, and none of them really offered what I was looking for. And what was that, exactly?

Access control. I want to be able to upload a bunch of photos for the general public to see, but have more that friends and family can log in to view. I want to be able to assign users into groups and set some photos visible only to certain groups.

Tagging. Some existing services have limited support for tagging. I really like Windows Photo Gallery's hierarchical tagging. I wanted some way to bring this into my online photo gallery.

(Hold on, why don't I just use Facebook? It seems to fit the bill so far. Well, how about these...)

Download the full-size, original photos. Users who have accounts should be able to download the full photo for archival or printing, not just a scaled-down web version. And I'd like the photos on the web site itself to also be reasonably high resolution... no 640x480 junk.

Easily managed appearance and organization of photos. Specifically, I want photos to be presented chronologically, and I don't want to have to do some tedeous rearranging or even be sure to upload photos in the correct order to get them to appear in the order I want.

After dismissing the idea of using an existing online service, I thought about writing my own. I started working on my own online photo application. It was to support everything I mentioned above, and even support importing XMP metadata information saved by Windows Photo Gallery and expose the hierarchical tag tree for users to browse. I made some good progress on this application during the previous summer, but I ended up dropping it because I simply do not have the time to devote to it.

However, all of that effort was not lost. I finally settled on Gallery (what a name), an open-source PHP based photo gallery web app. I extended the metadata module provided with it to support reading XMP metadata from Windows Photo Gallery (tags, corrected dates, and captions), using code I had written for this that was originally intended to be used in my own photo application. This makes uploading photos that I have already organized in Windows Photo Gallery very easy for me. I made some other minor tweaks to the app, but now it is up and running at gallery.aaron-kelley.net.


Here's what you need to know if you want to check out my photo gallery!

I decided not to expose tag information directly for privacy reasons. However, you can search on the tags. My tags are pretty detailed, so if you put in a location, person, or whatever in the search box, you may be able to find photos.

Personal photos (that is, photos of me, friends, family, and so on) are only visible to people who have an account and sign in. If you register for an account, it has to be verified by me before it becomes active. I will only allow friends and family to register accounts. People without accounts can still view my more "general" photos.

Account holders may also download the original version of any photo they have access to. Other web users may view the rather generously sized 1024x768 versions. (I thought about going even higher than that, but decided that it'd make the page bigger than some users' web browser windows. I'll check out the Google Analytics data on this after a while, and raise it if it looks like it won't bug very many people.)

At this moment, I've only uploaded photos from the last two months. I will be adding more in the coming days and weeks, starting from now and going backwards. Photos marked "NEW" on the site are photos that I added within the last 7 days. (After I run out of digital photos, I hope to digitize some "traditional photos" and make them available. But I have lots of digital photos that I have yet to even sort through and tag for myself.)]]> Photographs http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=25 Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:49:39 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=24 Stargate: Continuum on Blu-ray and received it a few days after it came out, back during the summer. I have yet to be able to play it.

I don't have an HDTV or a set-top Blu-ray player. I do have a laptop with a full-HD display and a Blu-ray drive. That should be enough? However, software to play Blu-ray titles on Windows seems to be a bit lacking.

To be clear, this is the only Blu-ray disc that I have tried to play (the only one I have at the moment). It came with a leaflet that said that my player may need a firmware update for "optimal playback."

First, I tried to play it in Nero Showtime (that came with Nero 8). I had purchased the HD-DVD/Blu-ray plug-in for Nero 8 that is supposed to, among other things, allow HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback in Nero Showtime. HD-DVD worked reasonably well, but when I tried to play this Blu-ray disc, it gave me a "you need to update your firmware" message and then would not play the movie (Nero Showtime just seemed to reset).

I checked on this with Nero support and they mentioned that lots of people are having problems playing newer Blu-ray releases that require this firmware update, but they offered no solution. Nero has since released Nero 9, which seems to have any option for HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback removed from Nero Showtime.

Alright, so I tried to play it in PowerDVD 8 after they released an update that is supposed to address this "firmware update" issue. It acts like it's going to start playing the movie, and then it crashes with the standard Windows "this program stopped working" dialog box.

Today, I tried Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray. This program crashes when I launch it, even if I don't have any DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray disc in the drive at all.

Is there any other Blu-ray playback software for Windows that I can try? I just want to watch my stupid movie. If you happen to read this and know of any, please drop me a line. :-P


I love the idea of Blu-ray (or HD-DVD), which is pretty much, high quality high definition movies on a disc like a DVD. It is unreasonably more complicated than a DVD, both in terms of its implementation and in actually getting it to work. Maybe I could play older movies that came out before this firmware update business. What about consumers that have a set-top Blu-ray player for their HDTV? Do movie studios really expect all of them to be able to figure out how to hook their players up to the Internet and download the firmware update, or go through whatever other process is necessary to get a firmware update on the player, just to get new movies to play? I hope this all gets sorted out before Blu-ray takes off, and we don't see a regular stream of required updates causing problems forever.]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=24 Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:56:26 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=23
My Tungsten E2 had a little whine problem. That is, if it was on and I held it up to my ear, I could hear a little high-pitched whiny noise. Turns out that the screen is causing this. It wasn't a big deal, because I have to hold it right up to my ear to hear it and I noticed it only by chance. In 10 years, I probably won't be able to hear that high-pitched a noise anymore.

Anyway, while being mostly very pleased with the T|X, I was dismayed to find that it came with a huge whine problem. The whiny noise is probably 10 times louder, or more, than the noise coming from the E2. It was enough that I could clearly hear it when the PDA was on and over an arms length away from me.

After using the thing to take notes during a 50 minute class today, it was enough to drive me crazy (though it would probably be very good at keeping me awake and alert). I don't know if anyone sitting around me could hear it... No one said anything to me about it. I think my ears are a little more sensitive to high frequency noise than many other people my age, though I am certainly not sure about that, I certainly won't mind when I'm not able to hear these whiny noises anymore. Anyway, something had to be done about this problem.

Googling, I was pleased to see that I am not the first to come across this problem. However, the T|X is not exactly a new device, and some of the advice I found on fixing it yielded dead links to software that is no longer supported (I suppose). However, I did find a software-only solution. WarpSpeed, an overclocking utility available over here for $11, has the option to silence the screen noise (I believe this is done by lowering the screen update rate). I downloaded the trial version and sure enough it was able to reduce the noise coming from my device from a terribly annoying whine audible from 3 feet away to a very, very quiet buzz audible from only about 2 inches away. They got my $11.]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=23 Mon, 6 Oct 2008 19:33:41 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=22 Carl for bringing this to my attention.

First of all, I've never liked to install the Microsoft Office plug-in or Outlook e-mail scanner plug-in that comes with AVG. In my experience, this has led to it wanting me to quit Outlook whenever it wants to install an update (or reboot the machine after the update is complete), which is a bother, and I don't think it's a very big risk to leave those components out. So, on my system with only the "basic" e-mail scanner installed, it is only able to scan mail sent through SMTP.

I recently switched to Thunderbird and I have one of my accounts set up to send through SMTP, which means AVG is able to intercept the connection and scan the mail. Even though I do not have AVG set to "certify mail," it still makes some modifications to the message. Perhaps the most obvious is a message that it adds to the headers of the message...

Received: from 127.0.0.1 (AVG SMTP 8.0.169 [270.6.15/1649]); Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:30:57 -0500

Of course, it makes sense for it to put this there, because it is actually intercepting the TCP connection used to send the mail and then relaying the mail to the server you specified in your e-mail client. Adding these relay messages to an e-mail will not make it fail validation as they are not covered by the digital signature.

However, oddly, AVG makes some other modifications to the message, as we see in this diff between the mail sitting in my Thunderbird "sent" folder and the mail that showed up in the recipient's inbox:



I know that AVG caused this because I duplicated the behavior several times, and it stopped right after I disabled AVG's mail scanner.

There are a number of other small changes like this. These modifications are to the body of the e-mail message, which is covered by the digital signature. The result is, the recipient cannot verify the authenticity of the message, as it appears to have been modified since it was sent (duly so).

Why were these modifications made to the message? Are they just strange errors, or is AVG actually trying to make the style information in the message more consistent for some reason? Whatever the case, your anti-virus software should not be modifying mail that you send, especially without informing you that it is doing so, whatever the modifications may be.

So, here we have a plus for digital signatures and a minus for AVG. I don't seem to be able to communicate this to AVG support because I am using the free version. If any of you have a paid AVG anti-virus product, maybe you could pass the word along? :-P

Anyway, I now am running AVG without any mail scanning at all. (I hope that common sense in dealing with attachments can keep me safe. :-P)]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=22 Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:48:59 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=21
Google Apps for your domain is great. For less than $10/year, you can get yourself a domain name. With this service from Google, you can set up things like Google Docs, Google Talk, and Google Calendar to run on your domain name. Perhaps the coolest one is Gmail. Google will host the e-mail on your domain for free and give you the nifty Gmail web interface on top of that.

But I've never been one for web mail. I'd rather use a desktop e-mail client, like Outlook or Thunderbird, mostly so that I can check all of my different e-mail accounts through one interface, utilize S/MIME digital signatures and encryption, and file all of my incoming e-mail without having to worry about running out of online storage space. (Granted, Gmail's online storage space is very generous and makes this a non-issue... And it also pushed Yahoo! and [Microsoft] Hotmail into offering large online storage for mail as well.)

Fortunately, Google offers POP3 and IMAP access to your Gmail mailbox, so that you can use virtually any mail client with their service. This is also free. Great, I can have them host my e-mail, that means I don't have to worry about setting up a server and making sure that it is up all the time, or pay someone else to run a mail server for me. And, I can create whatever account names I want, they will all be at my domain, and I don't have to worry about name collisions with existing Gmail users.

Should I use POP3 or IMAP to access my mail?

IMAP may seem to be the obvious choice. You get access to the full Gmail "folder structure," including the spam folder, trash, sent items, and all of your archived messages.

I'd rather use POP3, myself. My connection is a little slow, and in either Outlook or Thunderbird, when I try to view one of my Gmail folders via IMAP (the Inbox or whatever), the application becomes non-responsive while it connects to the IMAP server and refreshes. If I use POP3, mail is downloaded to a local store on my machine, automatically deleted on the Gmail server (preferred behavior for me), and the local mail client runs smoothly.

Enter Gmail's spam filter. Google looks at all incoming mail and delivers suspicious e-mail to your "spam" folder instead of your inbox. There's nothing wrong with this... In fact, I'd expect any respectable mail provider to do some spam filtering like this, as spam is a huge problem nowadays. Anyway, I have a problem with how this is implemented against your client mail application, whether you are using POP3 or IMAP.

When using POP3, only messages in your inbox are downloaded to your mail client. Messages in the spam folder are not downloaded. This means I have to remember to go to Google's web interface and check to see if any messages have been misclassified as spam from time to time. (Don't give me any "Google's spam filter is great, you don't need to worry about it!" talk. I had a misclassification that started me on this whole investigation, so that I don't have to worry about it anymore.)

When using IMAP, at least you have access to the spam folder, so you can easily see if any mail has been misclassified. However, I use my mail client to check four different e-mail accounts, and only one of them is provided by Gmail/Google. If I want to take advantage of the mail client's spam filter, this throwing the spam out of my inbox is annoying — I may have to check multiple folders for junk and I'd like all of the suspected junk from all of my accounts to go to one place.

Ideally, I'd just set it to POP3, disable the server-side spam filter, and do all of the filtering on the client. Google doesn't give us this choice, though, there is no option to turn off the spam filter or even to change its behavior in any way. So, I'm stuck using the laggy IMAP account, because I want to keep an eye on the spam folder.

I've been searching the Internet for solutions to this problem. Lots of people have posed the question "How do I download the contents of my spam folder via POP3?" Maybe someone has answered that question, but I didn't find an answer after checking 20 or so pages. Most of the responses were, "You can't," or, "Use IMAP instead."

But today, I believe I figured it out! Here we go.

• Log into Gmail, go to Settings, and then filters.
• Create a new filter.
• In the from field, type: *
  (That's right, a single asterisk.)
  Leave the other fields blank.
• If you do a "Test search", it should match all of the mail in your account (except mail that is already in the spam folder).
• Click on "Next step," and then check the box "Never send it to Spam."
• Save the filter. Now no incoming mail should end up in the spam folder, which means your POP3 client is free to download it.

Thanks Google for making this straight-forward. Hope my little rant helps someone.]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=21 Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:21:56 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=20
If you're running Java applications on Windows, you may have noticed that Sun likes you to see a Java icon in the system notification area when a Java application is running. You can get rid of it by right-clicking on it and selecting "Hide icon," but it'll just come back next time. There's an option in the Java control panel to hide the icon... But sometimes, in Vista, it shows up even though you've told it to hide.


Here's the solution.

Open an elevated command prompt. Navigate to the Java JRE's bin folder... at present, on my machine, it is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.6.0_07\bin". Run javacpl.exe. The Java control panel will open. If you go check, you'll notice that the option to show the icon in the system tray is still checked, even if you unchecked it before... It seems that the setting is kept independently for elevated applications and non-elevated applicaitons.]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=20 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:42:08 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=19
In this day and age, you'd be silly to use anything less than WPA encryption (WEP is fundamentally flawed), but there are a few caveats with setting up WPA and WDS together on Apple's devices that I ran into while setting this up for someone recently.

• WPA only works with Airport Express or Extreme access points. (It does not work with the original Airports, or the "snow" models.)
• Upgrade your access points to the latest firmware, some earlier versions have a bug that prevents WPA and WDS from working together.
• Your wireless network name (SSID) must be the same on all access points participating in WDS. (This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and without WPA, you can use different SSIDs.)

]]> Computer Repair http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=19 Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:27:05 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=18 Windows Photo Gallery application that comes with Windows Vista. It's nice for organizing photos and videos, and the killer feature for me is the hierarchical tagging, a feature that I cannot find in any other free photo management app for Windows.

Windows Photo Gallery stores tag information directly in the files you are tagging, when possible. For instance, when tagging JPEG files, the tags are stored in the JPEGs using XMP. Also, if you modify other information about the files (such as the date/time a photo was taken), that information is stored in the file if possible.

In some cases, the information cannot be stored in the file itself; for instance, if the file is marked "read only," or if the file format does not support metadata (PNG, AVI, etc.). In this case, Windows Photo Gallery still allows you to do anything you could to a file that it could store the information in, only, it stores the information in its own little private database. This is transparent to the user.

If you want to move your "gallery" to a different machine, and your gallery consists only of JPEG images, you can probably just copy them all to the new machine, and Windows Photo Gallery will automatically index them and rebuild its list of tags. However, if you have other types of files in your gallery, the information will not be carried along with these files and you'll have to re-tag them. Ugh.

I've been looking into migrating the Windows Photo Gallery database. There doesn't seem to be any supported way to do this (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

The database itself is easy to find — it is the Pictures.pd4 file, found in AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery in your Windows profile folder. So, to migrate the database, it should be as simple as moving this file to the new machine, and making sure that the paths to all of the files in your gallery remain the same, right?

Well, after trying this and running Windows Photo Gallery, we come up with a curious dialog box.

Note that the folder it is complaining about is actually present on the machine.

Here, you have some options. If you click on "Find the folder," and browse for it, you might end up with a duplicate of every file appearing in your gallery (and the folder is listed under "Folders" on the left twice, with no way to remove either of them). If you click on "Remove the folder," all of the files in your gallery disappear, and your tag information is lost (even if you manually add the folder back). And if you click on "Cancel," everything works great, all of the files appear and all of the tag information appears to have been migrated succesfully... Except, this dialog reappears every time you run Windows Photo Gallery.

In trying to figure out a way to either migrate the information without causing this dialog to appear, or to figure out why Windows Photo Gallery doesn't seem to like the Pictures folder even though it has the same path as before, I set up two identical galleries on two separate machines and compared their Pictures.pd4 files. Skipping a lot of the details, I did eventually stumble on the key difference.

Windows Photo Gallery is checking your volume information (volume label and serial number) and storing it in its database; it is then using this to verify that the files are on the same drive that they were before. If you move the database to a different machine, the volume serial number is not the same, so it throws up the error we saw above. You can't just edit the volume serial number in the Pictures.pd4 file to match the new one, though, Windows Photo Gallery is able to detect that the file has been tampered with (you'd have to go fix some other checksum stuff to get that to work). The easiest thing to do is just to change the volume serial number on your "destination" machine to match the one of the "source" machine. You can do that with this SysInternals utility, VolumeID.

So, migrating your Windows Photo Gallery database, step-by-step:

• Copy all of the files in your gallery to the new machine. Make sure the path to them remains the same as it was on the old machine.
• Copy the Pictures.pd4 file to the new machine.
• Change the volume ID of the C: drive (and any other drives with folders indexed by Windows Photo Gallery) on the new machine to be the same as on the old machine, using VolumeID. (Reboot for the changes to be visible, before running Windows Photo Gallery.)

Note that Windows Live Photo Gallery can be migrated similarly.]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=18 Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:05:25 -0500 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=17

• You have 4 GB of RAM (or rather, more than 3 GB).
• You are trying to install the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.
• After the first reboot, when your computer boots off of the hard disk for the first time, Windows crashes with a BSOD with error code 0x0000007F.
• Whatever hardware swapping you do doesn't seem to help; it still gives you the blue screen at every boot.

A friend ran into this issue earlier today. After some searching and digging through a lot of not very useful information, we found out that the solution is pretty simple.

• Remove 2 GB of RAM, or whatever it takes to only have 2 GB in the machine.
• Run the Vista install.
• Install the x64 version of the KB929777 hotfix from Microsoft.
• Put your RAM back in.

Note that this particular issue should not occur if you are using a Windows Vista SP1 (or newer) install disc, it is only an issue with the RTM version.

Hope this helps someone. :-)

]]> Computer Repair http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=17 Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:41:10 -0600 http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=16
Searching around online, I was unable to quickly find any place to download the software, or any kind of support page for this device. In light of this, I made a .iso image of the CD that came with it and I am posting it here in case anyone needs it. Here is a picture of the device for comparison with your device (to know if this is the software you need).

Download version 2.3 of the software (1.92 MB, Windows and Mac OS X software included in the image).

]]> Software http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=16 Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:45:46 -0600