I have been using Google’s Picasa to organize and catalog my digital photos on Windows XP but the location of the database it stores is hard-coded (why?) to ‘c:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Google\Picasa2′ which is fine if you have plenty of space on your c: drive. Unfortunately, this has become an issue for me recently so I was looking for a workaround to move it to my larger d: drive.
Since Google provide no configuration option for this path, i was looking for some way to redirect the default location to another folder. On Linux this is straightforward since you can just create a symbolic link between the locations and away you go. Windows does provide hard links using the command line utility ‘fsutil hardlink create <newfilename> <existingfilename> but unfortunately it can only be used for files, not complete folders.
A bit of googling later and I came across NTFS Junction Points (Wikipedia) which provide what I was looking for. More searching uncovered a handy utility called Junction Link Magic which allows the creation, editing and deleting of junction points.
I created a folder on my d: drive call ‘Picasa’ and created a junction point from ‘c:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Google\Picasa2′ to ‘d:\Picasa’ and I now have my Picasa database in a different location.
If Google would only provide the location as an installation option, this hack wouldn’t be necessary. Until then this will have to do!
(PS: Junction points are also called reparse points and the fsutil does mention them but it only has commands to query and delete a point, not to create one.)
I wonder if I am alone in finding the current levels of cold-calling to be obtrusive and annoying. It was bad enough when I was responsible for the IT department of the company but since I’ve taken over responsibility for the accounts functions as well, the level has spiked. Myself and our receptionist are now having to deal with between 15 and 20 telephone calls a day from companies we don’t do business with but who think that wasting my time on the phone is a good way of getting them some of our business and these are just the calls for me let alone every other manager in the group!
I have removed myself from as many mailing lists as possible by cancelling all of my business and IT magazine subscriptions but it’s really starting to aggravate me now. My current favourite is an insurance broker who has now tried to get through to me every day for three weeks. I’m determined to not take the call because they should take the hint and **** off!
Anyone could easily spend their full working day talking to these companies and getting no work done whatsoever. How much time and money is being wasted trying to tell these people that we are not interested and if one more of them asks me why I’m not interested in saving money I’ll reach down the phone and strangle them! (Let’s face it, it’s impossible for every one of these companies, regardless of their market, products or services to save us money. They can’t all be the cheapest!)
Rant over ……….. until the phone rings
According to the BBC today, Cadbury Schweppes have been forced to apologise for a promotional stunt they pulled in Boston, U.S.A. in which they ran a competition for people to find hidden gold coins in a ‘Treasure Hunt’. Some smart ass in the company’s marketing department decided that a great place to bury one of the coins was in the Granary Burying Ground, a historic, 347 year old cemetary which subsequently had to be closed since they feared that graves would be desecrated. A company spokewoman said:
“It was not an appropriate place to bury a coin. It was poor judgment and we have apologised to the authorities. No damage was done to any of the graves.”
Who in their right mind thought that a great place to send people to dig up in search of a treasure hunt clue would be a cemetary? Where next, a nuclear waste dump?
Having started using Visual Sudio 2005 recently, I ran into problems when I tried to move my projects from the local drive (VS2005’s default location) to a network share where they would get backed up automatically. When attempting to run my application, Visual Studio reported a permissions error and would not run the program. Some research later and I discovered that I needed to set my network share to trusted status within the .Net Framework.
More info on how to do this here.
The BBC are reporting that the Hong Kong-based online retailer CD-WOW is again being taken to court by a group including EMI, Sony and Warner for ‘illegally’ selling cd’s in European markets which have been imported from outside Europe, a practice called ‘Parallel Imports’. They were taken to court before because they were selling cheap CDs and DVDs to UK customers from their base in Hong Kong and the music publishers objected because CD-WOW were undercutting them in their own back yard. CD-WOW agreed to stop the practice and increase their prices by selling only media sourced from within Europe.
It seems that CD-WOW may not have kept to this promise since test purchases by the music publishers have shown that they are still illegally parallel importing.
I hope, but doubt, that CD-WOW win this case. My doubts are because parallel importing has already been declared illegal. I want CD-WOW to win because what the music publishers are trying to protect is in itself an illegal pricing cartel whereby they, as a group, set a retail price for CDs and DVDs in Europe which is higher than the rest of the world and then lobby for laws which stop anyone else buying these goods from a cheaper part of the world and selling them to european customers at lower prices. Don’t let the publishers fool you, the extra money they demand in Europe does not go to the artists who produced the music or films, it goes straight into the coffers of the publishers, probably so that they can fund more political lobbying to protect their racket.
It’s about time our politicians and courts stood up for us and declared that we will no longer be ripped-off so that wealthy corporations can take more of our money for doing less.
Linux Today is running an article by someone called Jabari Zakiya entitled “Why Does KDE Use Slaves?” the basis of which is to demand that software, and in this case KDE abandon the use of the word slave to describe a process because it is a clear and abhorrent insult to African Americans. What is this guy on? Since when did the word slave become hijacked by the politically correct to mean only the abuse of black slaves in America? The master-slave relationship between hardware and software processes is exactly that, one process telling another what to do and that process doing it.
I’m sure we can all re-write a few words in the dictionary because they have meaning we dont like. They are just words and are used for many purposes. Get over it Jabira!
According to a report today on The Register, the UN has decided that the current yellow/black radiation sign does not illustrate the danger that radiation poses to stupid humans well enough so they are to ditch it in favour of this new red and black sign which they have concluded achieves this aim much better.
As you can see if you look at the larger image, it shows the old radiation symbol at the top but has those dangerous rays coming from it and then shows you that if you don’t run away from it you’ll be just a skull and some old bones.
You’ll be please to know that it only took 5 years of research to come up with this sign and involved the testing and opinions of 1650 people in 11 countries.
Impressive isn’t it?
For the past 10 years, I’ve coded any database GUIs that I or the companies I work for have needed in VB. “True” programmers scoff at the very thought of VB but in my experience, nothing allows you to put together a neat, reliable database front-end quicker and easier than VB, particularly in version 6.
However, since our two main companies merged 18 months ago, the seperate systems, written at different times have struggled to allow the staff to manage the seperate data as a single organisation. So it’s time to do a full re-write of a combined data management system for them. I could do it in VB6 but that seems old-hat now and while it still gets the job done, I feel it’s time to bring things up to date. I have briefly toyed with the idea of using a python/qt/eclipse environment but I’m not sure I can create a truly user-friendly front end with those tools that will match our existing facilities. So I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered a copy of Visual Studio 2005.
Now I need to make the decision about which language to code the new system in. I see no point learning the new visual basic since it is so different to the VB6 derivative that it’s basically a new language. That really leaves C# or C++. I already know some C++ but I think C# will be quicker to code in. Any opinions from you guys would be received with interest
I love firefox and prefer to use it rather than any other browser. For a while now I’ve been using portable firefox on a USB flash drive. Portable Firefox is a fully-featured version of firefox which stores all of its configuration and data locally, i.e. on the flash drive. I find it invaluable when I’m working on a machine which has only IE installed or when I need access to my bookmarks.
This week I came across a suite of programs packaged specifically to be used in this way. PortableApps comprises of portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice and more. It has a nifty menu system which loads to the system tray on windows and you can download a standard or lite suite and add other applications to it.
I downloaded the standard suite, which includes portable versions of:
- Clamwin (Antivirus)
- Firefox (Web Browser)
- Thunderbird (Email Client)
- Sunbird (Calendar)
- OpenOffice (Office Suite)
- Gaim (Instant Messaging)
- Sudoku (Puzzle Game)
This is a 90MB download which you simply run and uncomress it into the root directory of your flash drive. I then added a couple of extra apps:
7-Zip is a file-archive utility which downloads (1.1MB) as a .paf file. To install it, open up the PortableApps men, click ‘Options’ then ‘Install A New App’, point to the downloaded .padf file and PortableApps will install it to your flash drive and put a link in the menu.
Gimp is a fully featured graphics application which downloads (8.5MB) as a self-extracting .exe file. Extract it into the ‘PortableApps’ directory on you flash drive and then add it to the menu by selecting ‘Options’ then ‘Refresh App Icons’.
There are a number of other apps which can be installed including media players.
So far I’m extremely impressed with the packaging of these open source applications into a functional portable suite. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Recent Comments