Photo Sharing Site Spam

Chuck,

I will be totally honest with you -- I am pretty happy with the photosites that I use right now.  Both support communities and drive print sales.

I use Pro.Pictage and Pro.SmugMug.  All total my clients spend in excess of $2,000 / month on these two sites combined.

Why do I love them so much?

• FTP Upload.  My average wedding take is 10GB and I need a robust, scalable highly-batched upload system and the automated FTP system I have created supports my needs very well.
• Album Design Service.  Pictage's free album design services provide me and my clients an invaluable feature above and beyond standard print ordering.
• LightRoom Integration.  I will not / cannot take the time to apply tags outside of LightRoom.  My workflow is not flexible and I will not change it for any reason other than my own.  Therefore, I need a solution that fully integrates with my toolset for tagging images -- Pictage and SmugMug both support Adobe LightRoom integration.
  

Why do I hate them so much?

• Expensive.  Pictage is $100 a month flat rate fee before you even buy anything.  That means I have to sell a lot to break even.
• Slow Turn Around.  While free album designs are great, waiting 5 weeks to see the printed product arrive at the studio is a PITA.
• Stupid User Interfaces.  Pictage's user interface is horrible.  I mean, unforgivably terrible.

Hope that helps :)

- Cory

Do NOT Install "Microsoft Recipe Framework" In Visual Studio 2005

Why not?

• It does not work correctly, and provides almost not real value.
• It will increase your Visual Studio 2005 memory usage by approximately 50%
• It can never be uninstalled even if you decide you do not like it
  

ati2mtag -- Edid Checksum Error (DAL -- 43033)

One of my ATI-nVidia-AMD-WindowsXP workstations has recently developed some seriously stability issues.

I am using an ATI Radeon X1800 on with the AMD Athelon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+. Not a brand new system, but not too old either.

The machine, under load, will spontaneously reboot and the only evidence of a system problem is an Event Log entry from "ati2mtag" stating Edid checksum error. This reboot (for me at least) would do one of these things:

• put both monitors into PowerSave mode, freeze all input & disable NumLock -- but not reboot. In this case the soundcard would issue a loop of recent input make terrible screeching sounds
  
• Freeze the output to the monitor (leaving the screen frozen, in either a screensaver or the UI of whatever was running), freeze mouse input & disable Keyboard/Numlock -- but not reboot. Sometimes, in this case the soundcard would issue a loop of recent input make terrible screeching sounds
• Issue an immediate hard reset to the machine and reboot immediately without warning
  

I have upgraded my drivers, disabled Edid checking in Catalyst and it is still happening.

I am not certain but I believe it may be temperature related.

http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=882129
http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/video-card-support/207822-pc-restarting-occures-only-wc3-2.html
http://www.driverheaven.net/hardware-discussion-support/144512-x1650-issues.html

I performed about every settings change and drive update I could think of to resolve this issue. Once I disabled all EDID Checksum Error generating functionality, I was still having the sudden unplanned system reboots, but I had eliminated the Event Log entry.

So, following the temperature hunch I took the case part, cleaned everything, removed a few panels that were blocking air flow. Following these changes I monitored the VPU's core temperature via Catalyst's OverDrive control-panel, which allows you to view the temperature even if you are not enabling overclocking (which I am not.)

Removing all the dust and making some minor tweaks to the case reduced the temperature from 71C to 62C on average.

Bugzilla 3, Server-Push, FireFox2 and Symantec Endpoint Protection (or Other Anti-Virus / Firewalls)

Another random problem I had to fix today.

My organization recently upgraded to Symantec Endpoint Protection and I use Firefox2 and Bugzilla 3.0.2 (a lot!)

One solution is to add serverpush=0 to your URL, to Turn Off Server Push in Bugzilla Queries.

I ended up adding it to my "Query Defaults" query templates and hacking it in the MySQL database for some of my saved queries that I couldn't fix with the query templates.

I am going to have to fix this Bugzilla defect:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298995

Debugging AJAX Applications -- Use FireBug, End Your Troubles

• Are you struggling with debugging AJAX applications? 
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• Trying to figure out why IE works and Firefox does not?
  

Firebug, available here, is the answer:

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