Word is out on Picnik, the web-based photo editor I’ve been working on for over a year now. With Picnik we plan to achieve three goals:

1. Provide the best photo editing experience. Easy, powerful, and fun.
2. Take advantage of everything the web can bring to photo editing and everything that photo editing can bring to the web.
3. Define a new kind of web application that combines the best qualities of traditional desktop and web applications without compromises.

We’re not there yet, but we’re in Beta! You’re only a click away from trying it out for yourself. Please do.

Hey look what Jonathan found! Back in 1986 we worked together with Hayes Haugen on a fun shoot-em-up game for the Amiga called Sidewinder. It was a moderate hit. Hayes and I coded and Jonathan did the in-game artwork. This is a scan of the retail box Sidewinder was packaged in.

Good times. Now Jonathan and I are reunited on another venture but I’ll save that for later post.

When I discovered the low cost ($99/mo) dedicating hosting plan offered by ServerBeach I had to try it out. For the price I get an Athlon 2100 server with 60 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM and a monthly bandwidth quota of 2 TERABYTES tapped into ServerBeach’s high-speed backbone. The machine is all mine, I can put anything I want on it, and if things go wrong I can even remotely reboot it (while praying that things haven’t gone too wrong). I’ve been gaining experience and confidence in the ServerBeach setup since the beginning of the year and I love it. The server is fast and its internet connection smokes. Today I’m switching the massena.com domain over to it.

CrystalTech hosts Windows Server 2003 and my ServerBeach machine hosts Debian Linux (they’ll also host Windows if that’s what you want) so I’m migrating from the .NET blog (dasBlog) and photo gallery (nGallery) applications I was using to Linux equivalents. I’ve chosen WordPress for my blog and so far am very happy with it. WordPress is professionally developed and has a dynamic community of supporters enhancing it with tons of plugins and themes. For my photos I’m switching to Gallery2. It also has quite a bit more functionality than my prior solution. It’s not very attractive at the moment but it is highly styleable so when I have some free time I’ll be able to take care of that.

It’s nice to be back in control.

After hearing about geocaching off and on for awhile we encountered a pair of ‘geocachers’ on a train in Norway, Oslo to Bergen. They were very enthusiastic about the, uh, sport and some of their enthusiasm rubbed off on us. Today we decided to give it a try.

Geocaching in a nutshell: Go to the geocaching web site and locate a nearby cache at an interesting location or with contents you want. Use some mapping software to pin the latitude/longitude coordinates on a map and work out how to get close. Get there, then whip out the ‘ole GPS and start walking to the target coordinates. This is where it gets tricky since it is unlikely that you can walk straight through buildings, rivers, fences, thick underbrush, etc towards the target and your average GPS unit isn’t going to know much about these features or how to get around them.

After resolving this you’ll have to deal with the reality that GPS precision, both yours and the person who placed the cache, is somewhat limited. GPS limitations may not be an issue if you’re trying to hit a target with a 5,000lb bomb but if you’re trying to place your hands on a deliberately concealed tupperware container in the middle of a thick forest it can be a challenge to search a ~100 square meter area.

The reward for our efforts today is a pair of comic book action figures, Batman and Wolverine! We’re going to take them on our next trips and drop them off in caches along the way. These guys are extra cool because they carry “travel bugs“ (Batman’s, Wolverine’s) which means they’re tagged so we can see on the Web where they’ve been and keep track of where they go after we drop them off.

Additional gadgets with potential for our geocaching ‘kit’:

night vision goggles: for geocaching in the dark
Internet-capable phone: for immediately posting your finds online
metal detector: for those buried caches
RFID tags and reader: for easy tracking of cached items
walkie-talkies: to communicate with the rest of your geosearching team
web cam: keep an eye on your cache and who’s messing with it
robot: why get leave the house when you can remotely guide a robot to the cache?

If you’re going to be here for less than 12 months you don’t want to be locked in to a phone contract so that leaves you with the “pay as you go” choices. Every phone operator has their twist on the concept but since many shops lay out all the plans from all the operators in a simple grid they’re easy to compare.

To start off, we want the cheapest phone and an operator with good UK coverage. £39.95/~$72.00 (VAT included) for a Nokia 3410 (pictured at left) and service from T-Mobile. 30p/minute up to £10/mo, 20p/min up to £20, and 10p/min for calls over £20/mo. Cool things: no bonus taxes or surcharges, no charge for incoming calls, text messages, voice mail, or for checking voice mail. So if you’re only using a phone for incoming calls and messages the service is essentially free!

They have this concept of ‘top up’ cards which you use to add money to your phone account. Ideally we would just have the phone company bill our credit card as needed but that is turning out to be tricky. They want the address the credit card is associated with to be the same as the address you register your phone with which must be a UK address and it’ll be a little while until we have one of those.

Shaula has tried every trick in the book to avoid the effects of jet-lag. As the control subject in this experiment I haven’t done much except stay up late most days the past week finishing multiplayer Warfare Incorporated and preparing for the Big Trip.

Here we see Shaula on the plane synchronizing her sleep schedule with GMT. I can’t sleep. Fortunately I have my cell-phone camera and an unwitting model to keep me occupied.

If this works I’ll eat a bug, or something.

(hey, it worked!)

I need a good way to integrate travel photos into my blog. Rumor has it that nGallery is being integrated into dasBlog but when?

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