Thoughts

Technorati’s new photo message

Logged into my Technorati account late last week to check my profile settings, and guess what I saw on my photo page? Granted, the message wasn’t for me, it was for every Technorati user, but I thought it was hilarious nonetheless:

For the benefit of those of you that can’t see the image above, let me quote the text:

“Tip: Please favor us with a photo that doesn’t depict your very special but also very private parts. We have to hunt down and quarantine those, and that’s bad for everyone.”

I guess they’re having problems with nasty people posting nasty pics of themselves, or else they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of warning users. That’s pretty sad — to know there are people out there with absolutely no sense of decency and self-control. Zooomr had a huge problem with this last year, in Mark II. You could browse its full photo stream — all public photos posted by users, as they posted them, and I did that a lot to discover great photographs. While I found plenty of great photographs that I faved, I also found plenty of pornographic images.

At any rate, that stuff was pretty nasty, and I spent plenty of time emailing Kris and Tom with specific links, and they would dutifully either make those photos private or remove them altogether. Flickr has the same problem, and that’s why they’re rating accounts as Safe, Moderate or Unsafe, which I think is a better approach than Zooomr’s — Kris and Tom are still stuck doing manual removals, even though they promised they’d introduce a feature to allow users to flag questionable photos.

My rantings aside, I thought Technorati’s approach was pretty funny, and I’m glad to see more companies do their part to make sure the nasties don’t get to poison everyone’s good time on the web with their filth.

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How To

The best tomatoes are homegrown

You can go to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, MOM’s, Safeway, Giant, Publix — you name it — and buy the most expensive tomatoes, but they’ll still taste just as flat as the cheapest ones you’ll find. I don’t care if they’re organic, hydroponic, vine-ripened or whatever — they still have no taste.

It’s a fact of life in America. I don’t know what our farmers do to their fruits and vegetables, but nothing tastes good when you buy it from the store. Most stuff tastes like cardboard, and if you’re lucky, it might have a semblance, a sad little ghost of the taste of the real thing. I call it the great American taste theft. It doesn’t matter if the stuff is cheap or expensive, it still tastes like crap. While I expect the cheap stuff to taste like that, I find it offensive and downright thieving to charge $3-7 dollars for a pound of tomatoes that tastes just like the ones that cost $1-2 dollars. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you haven’t gotten around much.

Our families have always grown their own vegetables, even when they lived in cities. Now that Ligia and I are on our own, and we’ve only got a terrace, we still grow a few vegetables, mostly tomatoes, every year. Let me tell you that there’s a world of difference between the tomatoes you grow at home and the ones you buy at the store. The ones over there might look better, cosmetically-speaking, but the ones you grow with your own love and care, without pesticides or fertilizers, are the ones that will blow you away every time you taste them. They may have a few blemishes, they may not be as big or pretty as the ones in the store (you know, the ones full of hormones and all sorts of crap that’s not good for you) but when you bite into one, that fragrance and taste explosion you’ll feel is proof of their pedigree.

Homegrown cherry tomatoes

Trust me, there’s no substitute. You don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t try it out. You may lose a few tomatoes to disease, but if you let them fend for themselves, and only feed them water, till the ground once in a while and prune them carefully, you’ll come to find out what I mean.

Homegrown tomatoes
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How To

How to rename a WSS 3.0 server

Say you’ve got a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 server, and you’ve got to rename it — as in change the actual computer name. I found myself twice in that situation recently. How do you go about renaming it? It’s a three-step process, as outlined below. Plan for a half-hour outage, just to be on the safe side.

Step one:

Change the machine name. I hope no directions are needed for this. If you need them, you should abort the operation, and get someone more qualified to help.

Step two:

This only applies if your server is self-contained (it has IIS, SQL Server and SharePoint installed on the same machine). Change the name of the SQL Server install by following the excellent directions written by Tibor Karaszi. Like him, I prefer to go directly into the sysjobs table and edit the server names. When you’re done, don’t forget to either restart the machine or the SQL Server services.

Step three:

Per MS Tech Support, open the command prompt and type the following:

  • cd c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin
  • stsadm -o renameserver -oldservername [type in the name] -newservername [type in the name] (remove the brackets, just type the names by themselves)

Now open the SP Admin interface, go to Operations >> Alternate access mappings and modify the server names to reflect the new name. Modify all appropriate entries there. When you’re done, don’t forget to either restart the machine, or the SharePoint services.

Test the SP sites and make sure things are working as they should be. Remember, if you posted any images on your sites, and you used the machine name instead of the site URL for the image paths, the paths will now be broken, and you’ll need to go through each link and re-map it. MS Support didn’t know of any automated way of doing this. Of course, if you feel adventurous, you can back up the SP DB, then go through the SQL file with a text editor looking for instances of the name and replacing it with the new one. Then you can restore the DB from the modified backup file and see how things turn out. I don’t advise this though. You may mess up the text encoding, and may end up with weird characters in your content, not to mention you could also corrupt the DB.

That’s it, you’re done now. If you’d like to read up on the stsadm command-line tool, you can check out this article at the TechNet site.

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Events

Photos from the Legg Mason Tennis Classic

I wrote about the fun day I spent at the William H. Fitzgerald Tennis Center here in DC yesterday, watching the Legg Mason Tennis Classic courtesy of Olympus, and promised I’d publish photos taken at the matches with the new E-510.

After I deleted the blatantly bad ones, I was left with 607 photos. I spent a couple of hours sorting through them, and picked 44, which I then processed. There are a few nice blooper-type photos from the tournament as well, where the players are making funny faces or their bodies are in contorted positions, so those will be kind of fun to see.

Under the cold glow of the big lights

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

P. Goldstein

Overcast

Bryan Twins

Bryan Twins

Bryan Twins

Bryan Twins

Bryan Twins

Unforgiving August sky

Take it in stride

One tall dude

T. Phillips

T. Phillips and P. Goldstein

T. Phillips and P. Goldstein

A. Clement

A. Clement

A. Clement

A. Clement

Saw the light

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

R. Stepanek

T. Johansson

T. Johansson

T. Johansson

T. Johansson

T. Johansson

T. Johansson

T. Johansson

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Places

A night at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic

I received an exciting invitation from Olympus PR last week. Would I be able to attend the Legg Mason Tennis Classic on August 1st, here in DC? I’d get a box seat and the chance to try out the new E-510 DSLR. Absolutely, I said!

What do you think I did this afternoon? I was center court, sure enough, sitting together with five other folks from reputable news organizations, geeking out on Olympus DLSR stuff and comparing cameras and features. The E-410 was also available to try out. It’s the smallest and lightest DSLR on the market. You’ll remember the E-330 held that title before, but it didn’t have a prism. The E-410 has the prism. It, along with the E-510, now also has Live View, which lets you compose photos on screen.

If you know your cameras, then you know Live View is a pretty innovative feature, which is really hard to accomplish on a DSLR. In the E-330, Olympus used two sensors and a complicated mirror system to accomplish it. With the E-410 and E-510, they’ve simplified things. Now they have only one CMOS that does it all. I’m planning to write a detailed review of the E-510 after I’ve used it thoroughly for a month, and I’ll explain how the Live View works in the review.

Back to the Legg Mason Classic. The weather was filthy hot today, but thankfully the humidity was fairly low for our area, and the sun’s oven-hot rays tapered off around 7 pm. I slathered on plenty of sunscreen, but still got sunburn. Such is life when you’re a pale-face.

The first match, at 4 pm, was P. Goldstein (USA) vs. R. Stepanek (CZE). By the way, you can check the schedule over here. I didn’t know who to root for. Goldstein put up a serious fight and I thought he’d win. Stepanek looked like he was losing, but somehow he kept on top and won the match. Goldstein was the crowd favorite — apparently he grew up in the DC area. Stepanek got booed a few times, but I have a feeling he didn’t really care. He kept at it and brought home the bacon, so to speak — home for him being Monte Carlo, which is not a bad place to call home if I might say so.

The second match was A. Clement (FRA) vs. T. Johansson (SWE). Johansson had some amazingly fast serves. He clocked in at 132 mph once, if I remember correctly. He also had great returns. Clement kept pouting and giving the crowd angry looks if they’d as much as get up from their seats. In the end Clement went home to sulk over a baguette and Brie and Johansson advanced to the next round.

The third (and final match for me) featured the annoying Bryan twins (USA) vs. P. Goldstein and T. Phillips (USA). Yes, you read correctly. That’s the same Goldstein from the first match at center court. How he managed to recover from that exhausting match with Stepanek in the course of a couple of hours, I don’t know, but there he was, ready to put up another good fight. I instantly had to root for him. You have to respect a guy that plays two tournament matches in one night. That’s real dedication and perseverance. Unfortunately, all he and Phillips could do against the (yes, I’ll say it again) annoying Bryan twins was to put up a good fight.

The dynamically annoying duo towered over the shorter Goldstein and Phillips and smiled gleefully as they mercilessly tore away at their opponents. I’m sorry, I don’t care if they’re top seeded and girls find them cute, I found myself calling them names and hoping Goldstein and Phillips would beat the pants off them. I didn’t end up staying for the whole match, and after I got home, I found out that the annoying Bryan twins lived up to their ill-begotten reputation and won it. I so wanted them brought down a notch… They desperately need it.

All in all, I had a LOT of fun, and I’m really glad I got to meet people from the National Geographic Traveler, Internet News and The Washington Post. But all of this would not have been possible without Michael Bourne (yes, that’s his real name) from Mullen, who organized the entire get-together and provided us with some great new DLSRs to test and review. Michael, Mullen, Olympus, thank you! I look forward to processing the photos I got last night, and reviewing the E-510! 🙂

Updated 8/6/07: The photos are available right here.

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