Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

My transfer from Windows XP to Vista has been good. I like Vista much better than XP. It’s easier to use, I like the organization of the directories, and it has many useful tools that I no longer need 3rd party packages for.

As a genealogist and a guy who carries his digital camera wherever he goes, picture management and editing is very important for me. Previously on XP, I had tried Corel Photo Album, Google Picasa and even Adobe PhotoShop Elements to try to organize photos. Elements had the best organization tools, but it was a monster of a program with a horrible interface that I hated to use.

Vista includes its own picture organization capabilities and I like them. You can create and add tags and rate your photos and search them simply and efficiently within Explorer. Best of all, it stores the tags and your comments right in the EXIF in the pictures, and that is very important - so the data stays with the picture. I will next try downloading the free Windows Live Photo Gallery that apparently adds face recognition, which is something I consider important for genealogists. I’ll try it out. Eventually I expect to add capabilities in Behold to access this information stored in these pictures and display the pictures with this information and probably allow editing of the information as well. With Window Photo Gallery as the “companion” this will probably work very well.

Then there’s the matter of editing photos - to rotate them, resize or crop them, get rid of red-eye, and other simple fixups. On XP I had a host of different programs and never could settle on any one. PaintShop Pro wasn’t bad, but PhotoShop Elements was just too much of a gorilla for me.

For now, I’m hoping that Windows Live Photo Gallery will again do most of what I need. If the free Microsoft tools prove to be sufficient, I can recommend them to Behold users and add Behold capabilities to work with them. This would be possible, whereas getting Behold to work with a dozen different applications would not.

Meanwhile, if you don’t like the Microsoft tools, the other programs I ran across that are not bad and are free that you might want to try are: For photo/image management and organization: (1) XnView (2) Faststone Image Viewer. For photo editing: (1) Paint.NET and (2) GIMP.

So it only took about 5 days to get just about everything configured on my new machine. Three days ago, I set up Delphi, got Behold compiling and found a few Vista-based bugs that I quickly squashed. I even put up a black based 2560 x 1024 background from a poster on the New Horizons mission to Pluto website. Of course, that turned me into a super-nerd in the opinion of both my daughters.

So the one last thing left was to set up my webpage development environment. That involved setting up IIS (Internet Information Server) and downloading and installing the PHP scripting language, the mySQL database, and the phpMyAdmin program to manage the mySQL database. I had this all set up before on my old computer, but I remember back then that it wasn’t as easy as it should have been to set up. So I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Two nights ago, I started the process. I found an excellent article to Set up IIS 7 with MySQL and PHP 5. Having a new 64-bit OS, I decided to take him the writer up on using the 64-bit version of PHP and MySQL. I installed them and they worked right away, just as he said they would.

Then it was phpMyAdmin. I installed that. It worked, but it gave a warning saying “Your PHP MySQL library version 5.0.19 differs from your MySQL server version 5.1.33. This may cause unpredictable behavior.” Needless to say, I didn’t trust leaving it that way.

It only took the next morning after trying to find a simple fix,that the 64 bit PHP package was version 5.2.0, a slightly older version of PHP. I could have pursued that more, but I decided to go back to 32 bit versions that I knew were the latest and would be compatible. Then I had a day and a half of misery as I tried to get it all working again. I must have reinstalled it in various ways a dozen times, searched numerous articles on the web about IIS 7 on Vista 64 with PHP and mySQL.

Finally, an hour ago was the breakthrough and relief. I ran across Installing PHP5 on IIS7 Vista 64. Step 14 mentioned a step I hadn’t seen before, enabling 32 bit apps to run on Win 64. I didn’t have the adsutil.vbs script on my machine, but it led me to realize that 32 BIT APPS ARE NOT ENABLED BY DEFAULT IN 64-BIT IIS 7! (Yes, I’m yelling that!) It then didn’t take long to find that in the Application Pool Defaults, I only had to change the setting “Enable 32-Bit Applications” from false to true, and everything then worked.

Two days of my time spent becoming an expert on IIS 7. Oh well. Going back to the original article, if I had looked further down to Point 3 of Lou’s “Set up PHP in IIS” comment, I could have avoided this whole mess. But picking out the right few lines amongst about 100 blog comments is not the easiest task.

Its popularity is soaring and I don’t understand why.

Blogs make sense to me. You write a complete story that expresses your thoughts or opinions about something that is meaningful to you, that you hope will be meaningful to others as well. They can follow you by RSS or find your your post via a search engine.

Twitter is sort of like blogging, but only a line at a time. And the line is so short that you have to abbreviate almost everything. It’s sort of like text messaging which, other than for informing “I’m here now” or “Also buy butter”, makes no sense to me to just spew out random thoughts.

The only person I follow on Twitter is Tamura Jones. Tamura doesn’t have a blog, but tweets instead. Rather than joining Twitter (which Tamura has tried to get me to do on more than one occasion), I just read Tamura’s tweets via RSS. And I must say I don’t really enjoy reading messages like: http://twitpic.com/2zgwe - #genealogy #art Dutch forensic genealogy: Night Watch with names.

Twitter seems like a great place to spend (waste?) a lot of time. Sending off 20 tweets a day wouldn’t take long, no longer than a blog entry like this one. But following 100 twits (can I call them that?) and their 2000 messages a day would take a lot longer. As it is, it takes me 15 minutes a day to read the fifteen RSS feeds that are updated each day out of the 60 that I am following. I really don’t need to spend another 60 minutes a day twittling my time away.