Woah. Dreamhost is celebrating their 9th birthday, and decided to party by increasing limits on accounts. Account holders now get 200 GB (200 gigabytes - a fifth of a terabyte) of disk space. And 2 TB (2 terabytes) of bandwidth per month.
That’s insane. Three things must have happened, in order for them to be able to offer this at $7.95/month.
bandwidth costs have come waaaay down over the years
the cost of hard drive space has come waaaay down over the years
almost nobody comes even close to using their full allotment of either
It’s awesome that Dreamhost is doing this. It’s pretty cool knowing I’ve got 200GB backing my account, and that I’ll never have to worry about bandwidth. Now, if only the performance of the MySQL server would get a boost…
I’ve been using an rsync-based script to backup my iPhoto library to another computer, just in case my Powerbook blows up or something, so I don’t lose every photo I’ve taken for the last 4 years. It’s worked flawlessly, run every now and then from home, to squirt changes in my Pictures directory to my desktop at work, where I further back it up on an external drive using another rsync script.
I got a copy of Aperture this week, just in time to get to play with the new 1.5 update. I’m really impressed with the application. It blows iPhoto out of the water.
I was trying out some of the new features, and thought I’d see if I could tweak one of my favourite photos of Evan to make it “pop” a bit more. On the left, the original, “in camera” image. On the right, a version with white balance correction, and an application of the new “Spot & Patch” tool to remove some blemishes.
The UCalgary Flickr Group has really taken to the new Flickr Geotagging feature in a big way. The almost-30 group members have tagged 154 photos of campus already, providing a pretty impressive coverage of the major areas of campus.
UCalgary Flickr Group Geotags
I’ve been spending the morning doing mind-numbing copy-and-pastery, so I’m going to grab the camera and try to fill in some gaps. I might hit the Olympic Oval, or even as far west as the new Children’s Hospital. (the brown spot on the left side of the map above is now the most advanced children’s hospital in north america - opened on Wednesday)
I went for a quick walk around campus at lunch, and dragged along the camera to get some shots of the leaves turning colour. Sometimes this campus can be really beautiful. We may not have a rose garden or a nude beach (or any other kind of beach) but it’s pretty nice sometimes.
Apparently, I’m on a quest to become the unofficial UCalgary photographer… :-)
iUofC.com is a community forum site created by students at UCalgary, offering a central off-campus student-managed place for students to share information about classes. It’s currently a rather empty shell, with forums created for every class. As students find out about it, it’s starting to slowly grow.
iUfoC.com Screenshot
The thing that blows me away about this “web *.0” stuff is that students are willing to take on large scale efforts completely on their own. Set up an open wiki, and students create tons of pages about what’s important to them. Open up a forum system, and they fill it with topics important to them. If these tools had been provided by The University, would students be interested? It’s awesome that the students don’t need to wait for The University - they can come up with solutions as effective (or moreso) on their own. Power to the people. Right on.
I had the pleasure of attending a presentation/workshop by Craig E. Nelson this morning. The Teaching & Learning Centre hosted the event, which brought faculty members from the various sides of campus together to discuss critical thinking and implications on pedagogy.
It was a really interesting session, with Craig telling stories and modelling effective use of the strategies and activities he was talking about (and getting us to talk about). My takeaway points from the session:
The U of C’s connection to the commercial internet has been packet shaped for years. Back in the Napster days, they added something that makes any file ending in “.mp3” be transferred at about 2 bytes per second. The shaping filters have slowly been added to, winding up with something that basically says “is this file some form of media? then it’s going to be slow…”
I’ve been trying to find an answer to this, but haven’t found anything definitive either way. Occasionally, I want to bring my Canon XT DSLR along when riding my bike. I might want to photograph something on campus at work, or along the path.
So, the question is - is it safe to pack the XT inside a compact LowePro case, and stuff that in a pannier? It seems pretty secure, but I wonder about vibrations from the ride (about half an hour, ranging from 20-60 km/h, depending on weather, traffic, blood sugar…)
Larry Sanger announced his organization’s intention to create a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia, with a different community/moderation model. Instead of just letting everyone create and edit pages, there will be a new class of citizens called “experts” who get final say. The rest of us are demoted to “unwashed masses”.
According to one source, there are over one billion (a thousand million) people on the Internet. That means there must be tens of millions of intellectuals online–I mean educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly. Tens of millions of intellectuals can work together, if they so choose.
My brother has a house in Phuket, Thailand, so I’ve been trying to follow news on this week’s coup to see what’s going on. I had no idea there was an ongoing corruption scandal of that magnitude. It seems unclear whether this coup was a good or bad thing. Some people say it’s bad because it’s “against democracy” - others say it’s good because it gives a chance to reboot a democracy after cleaning out the garbage first.
I passed the 1000 km mark half way into my ride home today. Since I started riding in July, I’ve now ridden over 1000 km just commuting to and from work, broken into 80 equal 12.54 km trips. That’s roughly equivalent to riding from Calgary to Vancouver, even when accounting for vertical climb (92m per ride). I’m feeling better than I have in years, and am probably in the best physical shape I’ve been in since high school (although you couldn’t tell by looking).
