…just another hippy blog

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Originally uploaded by kozan.

Another note to myself:

Always, always ensure that your tripod’s quick release plate is on the camera you are carrying with you and not on another camera.

Believe me, it is pretty annoying when you get to some location at night, spend 15 minutes framing and spot-metering everything and everywhere and then realize you can’t use your tripod because that damn plate is at home.

I have been playing around with Google’s "new" toolbar buttons.

Quite interesting stuff, even though the current version has quite limited features. Google’s so-called toolbar buttons are basically XML files that contain a search engine URL (both GET and POSTS http or https requests are supported), an embedded base54 encoded icon and some other optional stuff, like an RSS feed URL.

Buttons must be hosted on some website and can be added via a special URL:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://myhost.com/mybutton.xml

Of course, you can submit your button to a public gallery hosted by google so that other users can find them.

I have written a few buttons to do various searches on flickr (photos, tags, groups, discussions and members). Please check them out at my single-paged google page

I have found that the current version mainly lacks of three interesting features:

1. You cannot add locally stored buttons
2. You cannot have more than one option for the search engines (and its value must be used directly in the URL)
3. You cannot access the option via a context menu - you will have to change it from the google toolbar settings

I have stumbled upon a new interesting website today: beta.zooomr.com

zooomr is basically another photo sharing service like flickr, picasa, or kodakgallery (there’s plenty of them!).

To be honest, it is suspiciously similar to flickr! It offers almost the same features and it has a quite similar interface. I think they might be using the same frameworks, at least on the javascript side, as some parts of the interface are identical (text editing, notes, tag editing…).

I looked for any connection to flickr or Yahoo, but it seems that this is an independent project, with three developers (leaded by Kristopher Tate) and Wendell Davis III as interim CEO (google his name and you will find out that he is not a newcomer).

zooomr introduces some nice features that are missing (or less useful) in flickr (but the latter has a far better web design IMHO

Jason Famularo has made a nice Google module to display one or a set of Flickr pictures. The problem is that I want to display one of my own images in a random fashion. The Flickr API has a flickr.photos.search method that allows you to retrieve the photos of a specific user. The problem is that you cannot retrieve them in a random order. There are the only parameters that allow you to change the photo order:

Photos with an upload date greater than or equal to this value will be returned. The date should be in the form of a unix timestamp.

Photos with an upload date less than or equal to this value will be returned. The date should be in the form of a unix timestamp.

Photos with an taken date greater than or equal to this value will be returned. The date should be in the form of a mysql datetime.

Photos with an taken date less than or equal to this value will be returned. The date should be in the form of a mysql datetime.

Deafults to date-posted-desc. The possible values are: date-posted-asc, date-posted-desc, date-taken-asc, date-taken-desc, interestingness-desc, interestingness-asc, and relevance.

This means that I had to find a "hack"