Late Night Fiction

I’ve spent a few years accumulating digital pictures on my computer and over the past two finally started to organize them. With the introduction of Windows Vista it made this process a little easier through the use of tags and ratings.

Folder Structure
I keep all my pictures under my personal Pictures folder in Vista. Below that, my file structure consists of the following format: /year/month-date - description/event/ where year is in a four-digit format (e.g. 2008), month and date are in a two-digit format (including leading-zeros), and description is simply a description about the event, subjects, or location of the pictures in general. Being more general allows for there to be multiple events or other sub-divisions within that date’s folder, if needed: the event subfolder.

So an example of the folder structure might look like this:
/2008/
/2008/02-20 - Visiting at mom's house/
/2008/02-20 - Visiting at mom's house/Dinner/

Keeping a leading zero before both the month and date will allow for the folders to be sorted in chronological order.

Tags (Vista)

I’ve started using the tags feature of Vista to tag my pictures with the name of anyone in it, or the subject matter. I may also tag photos with additional information, such as black and white photos with “Black and White,” allowing me to do a search only on pictures I’ve taken in black and white.

The image to the left is tagged with People, Black and White, Lake, and Gabby, my friend who was in this picture. This way, through Vista’s search feature, I can easily search for pictures of a particular person or just of people in general. Saving one of these searches (for people, etc.) also allows me to easily access these pictures in the future and automatically updates the Search Folder to include newly-tagged photos.

Ratings are also a good way to keep track of favorite photos. I generally assign four-stars as really good pictures, and save the fifth star for only the best pictures I take. But I also have a search folder named “Good Pictures” with the query “rating: >= 3 stars.”

So there you have it. Hopefully this helps anyone who has ever had problems organizing their photo collection. Remember this system can always be changed to adapt to your own needs–between tags and your file structure, organizing your photos can be very flexible. Play around and see what works best for you!

Organization Vista

My HOSTS file has been repeatedly losing my local websites that I’ve added there manually and I finally figured out what the problem was.. After getting the BSOD for the first time on this computer today, Vista told me the problem seemed to be with my anti-virus software. I checked online to see if there was any kind of problem with Norton 360 and the windows HOSTS file and it turns out it deletes all “malicious” entries in case they are just that– malicious.

It turned out to be a simple fix: In Norton 360 go under Virus and Spyware Settings > File Exclusions:
And in the section “Which disks, folders, or files to exclude from risk scanning“, enter the location of the HOSTS file, which is generally \windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS

On another note, you’d think that they’d figure that more computer-savvy people use their software as well as ones who aren’t so savvy. You’d figure they could at least add a more custom set up, or tell you what files it monitors so you could know ahead of time, instead of going crazy trying to guess what the heck is going on later on. Maybe make our lives a bit easier? Maybe I’m crazy. Who knows.

Internet server, Software, Vista

While I was starting to set up my server, I had come across a few sites saying that MySQL wouldn’t work with Vista’s User Access Controls turned on. So I decided to skip all the trouble I went through with setting up Apache last time and just turned off the UAC. As they promised, or at least made no claims against, MySQL worked just fine. Well recently I turned UAC back on, and I started running into “permissions” problems when I was altering tables or where the data files had to be renamed.

It turns out that some permissions were removed from the folder that MySQL stores data in. Even having that folder right under the root of my drive (as opposed to the Program Files folder), these permissions were applied to this folder apparently only because of Vista’s UACs. I’ve fixed the problem now by giving USERS full permissions for the whole MySQL folder, while I keeping UAC on.

Technology server, Vista

Although I went on about how great I think Vista is, it’s been one hell of a pain in the ass for setting up a development server. I took the WAMP (I guess?) approach and started on my Apache-MySQL-PHP set up yesterday, and still haven’t worked out all the kinks. Now I’m no server-genius, but this is the third server on the third computer I’ve tried to set up, and the only one that’s caused me a problem. My journey began like this.

Day 1: Apache and PHP - I started with the standard installations to get the very basics down. I installed Apache on my computer with the oh-so familiar installer. Everything worked great (I got the “It Works!” screen when I went to http://localhost/. Alright, time for the PHP. After finally finding the right download for PHP 4.4.8 (to mimic my online setup), I had PHP 4 with the dll for Apache 2.2 I had to download (done this before). So it was time to hook it all up.

I went to the Apache configuration, as normal. Added a line to include the php module, load index.php, and add the application/x-httpd-php (.php extension) file type. I saved it all up, and then went to my htdocs directory to test it. I created a simple index.php file on my brand-new local server with the line <?php phpinfo(); ?> and let it rip.

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Internet server, Vista

So I just received my brand-new laptop yesterday. As a long-time Windows XP user, I’ve never really warmed up to the idea of an, although prettier, different “fancy” new operating system. There weren’t many improvements, in my opinion, that XP needed. Plus with claims of it being so much slower (especially with those claims), I was really hesitant about this new operating system.

Well the laptop I chose is the new Dell Inspiron 1420, and I loaded it with 4 GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.00GHz processor (most allowable RAM and almost best processor I could get with it). Although I haven’t been able to edit any video or pictures or run 20 programs at once, the thing is fast. I didn’t even have to remove any appearance options or anything and I can run Apache, MySQL, iTunes, Firefox with 8 tabs open, and view my photos all without a hitch. It could just be me and what I’ve heard, but Vista is not nearly as slow as I was lead to believe it was. I’ve officially been converted.

Technology Vista