Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through MySQL colleague Zack Urlocker’s biking trips. He shared albums of his trips, which I browsed through, and found “quite OK”. Meaning: Easy to consume pics posted by others, but no trigger for me to start producing web albums myself. When running with Zack, the Picasa topic occasionally popped up, with me expressing skepticism towards the time expenditure for uploading a gallery, and Zack saying it wasn’t that hard, as there is a good picture uploader. It turns out Zack was right, as I learned much later.

What triggered me to join Picasa Web was my blogging. A blog entry without a single picture isn’t very appealing, and some blog entries require many pictures. I had for long used a complex setup, uploading my pictures using Unix utility scp from my Mac to my account on @arno.fi. The domain arno.fi was a parallel domain to a now-extinct server grankulla.mysql.com, which I had to stop using after the Sun acquisition, as the use was bordering on the private. So I started to host arno.fi privately (a different story entirely) and became worried about bandwidth cost for the pics referred to from blogs.mysql.com/kaj. So the MySQL Web Team enabled uploading of pictures as part of the MySQL Wordpress blog site itself. This worked fine, but by this time I had already thought a bit about hosting the pics on Picasa or Flickr. So when I saw Picasa pictures automatically connected to Google profiles and Google maps, I decided to try out Picasa.

Like for all social networking sites, I obviously had to register. This wasn’t hard, and it was part of my general Google profile (Google Reader, Google Mail etc.). The real obstacle which had kept me from doing it earlier was installing the picture uploader, called “Picasa Web Albums Uploader“. I’m not a person who likes to tweak with the technical setup of my computers, hence the reluctance. But it was OK. I didn’t have to know anything in advance; the Picasa web site gave the relevant pointers and I wasn’t lead astray during the installation.

Next came the learning part, which in fact turned out to be fun. Uploading the pictures was trivial. I am a character based (”command line”) type of guy, hence the perceived ease-of-use of the scp utility. But merely dragging the pictures from the Mac Finder to the Picasa Uploader was easier still. And uploading pics with the Picasa Uploader came with two real benefits:

1. Automatic picture resizing into multiple sizes: 144px, 288px, 400px, 800px. For that I had used the resize command of Imagemagick, which took me quite a while to install, and which despite its command line nature wasn’t as fast and automagick as the ease of use of the Picasa Uploader for this specific task. Plus, Picasa relieves me of renaming pics in various resolutions to distinguish them from each other.
2. Easy housekeeping of album names / directories. I like order (not that I always succeed in keeping it). So I dislike putting all pics into a one single directory. The Picasa uploader provides me with a drop-down list of my previously used albums ( “directories”), which I can refill, or the opportunity to create a new album (”directory”). And at the point of upload, I can very quickly label the pics.

The next step is completely optional, but very “cool” and inspiring: I can tag the pictures, and I can place them on Google Maps.

Tagging is merely about finding out multiple, good descriptions for pictures, for later searches. So that doesn’t take long.

Placing the picture on the map can be everything from dead easy to very frustrating. For my pictures from Munich, I very simply typed in the address: just “Balanstr. 22″ for the pictures of my son trying to be an actor, and “Kleinfeldstr. 28b, Germering” for the pictures of my daughter by Riccardo Desiderio. For South Africa, it was much harder. It didn’t know Kievits Kroon, Reier road, or even Kameeldrift. I just had to point manually to somewhere north-east of Pretoria, where I assumed the pics were taken. That was a time drain.

Still, as a result, I got a nice map of where I took the pics of the trip, and if I’d like more detail, I’ll even see the individual pictures placed on a map.

The last step is about using the Picasa pictures in the blog itself. And this is also a bit simplified from my character-based scp blogging, where I had to semi-manually concatenate the first part of the picture urls (”http://kaj.arno.fi/”) with the name of the picture (”IMG_1234_Blabla.JPG”). In Picasa, I do the opposite, i.e. I cut-and-paste the huge text provided by Picasa, e.g.

<table style=”width:auto;”><tr><td><a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/YpJLrGsLVDIbs_jSHkAQ-Q”><img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg” /></a></td></tr><tr><td style=”font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right”>Från <a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/KajArnPortraits”>Kaj Arnö Portraits</a></td></tr></table>

and clean it up from surplus stuff to get only what I want, i.e.

<img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg”/>

which I then paste into my Wordpress blog entry, perhaps adding an align=”right” or align=”left” in the process. And I take care to select the desired resolution: 144px, 288px, 400px or 800px; more than once, I’ve been happy with reducing the picture size further than what I would have done during my Imagemagick resize days.

In all of this, I see little if any problem, except the huge size of the licensing agreement I clicked through. That’s another barrier of entry. I don’t know what I really agreed to. Who knows, perhaps I even violated the agreement by taking screen shots of what Picasa looks like, for this blog entry?

Which brings me to my summary:

	Positive experiences: Many, and significant   + Very easy and fast to upload pictures + No need to shrink the pictures before upload — Picasa does it for you + Great to get many resolutions (144px, 288px, 400px, 800px) automatically + Fast integration of pictures in blog entries + Easy to keep pictures in order + Cool to tag the pictures for searches + Cool to place pictures on maps
	Negative experiences: Few, and all related to legalese   - Very irritating to have such a lengthy license agreement - The license agreement was so long and difficult that I don’t know what I agreed to - Meaning, I also don’t know if I’m missing something important - And why didn’t I get http://picasaweb.google.com/kajarno as my public page?
	My own confusion — no fault of the social network itself  Privacy! It isn’t even 20 % clear to me when it’s in my interest to allow the albums to be visible for everyone, and when it should be private (sure, I won’t put up pictures of drunken friends, or of myself in a similar state — but what about the innocent family pictures I linked above?) I first thought Picasa was a standalone photo organiser like iPhoto, and then learned it was a picture sharing thingie like Flickr, but only now reading Wikipedia do I understand I was right to begin with, and Picasa Web is separate from Picasa (good thing I read that before posting this blog entry, as I now sprinkled in the word “Web” here and there after “Picasa”)
	Remaining questions from my side   How much time should I spend uploading my existing pictures? Should I do that at least for my past blog pictures? Privacy! When should I make my pictures public? Why? Should I link the pictures from other social networking sites? How can I do that easily? Privacy again! Who will use the tags I provide Picasa Web with? Will that be of benefit or harm to me?

Starting to use Picasa Web Albums has so far been a very positive experience, and I do expect to manage all my online pictures in it, and get lots of good vibes from it going forward.

Links:

• Picasa Web Albums: http://picasaweb.google.com
• My Picasa Web page: http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Picasa_Web_Albums

One of the most interesting people I met during my trip to South Africa earlier this week was Aslam Raffee. He keynoted the Sun event, sharing his view of the South African government’s stance on Open Source.

Aslam has two roles: He is the Chief Information Officer at the South African Department of Science and Technology. He is also the chairperson of the OSS Workgroup in the South African Government IT Officers Council.

From Aslam’s presentation, it is clear that South Africa is ahead of the game when it comes to finding out ways to mandate the use of Open Source in Government. I had the privilege to talk to Aslam over lunch, and he described the process whereby the OSS Workgroup is moving the usage of Open Source products like MySQL from optional to default status.

I have a new top example to talk about, right alongside India and Brazil!

Not everything is going the wrong way on our planet. There are things that are changing for the better! And one of them is South Africa. Just back from a three-day MySQL related trip to Johannesburg and Pretoria, I saw a lot of well-founded hope around me. The hope is related to less crime, less racial tension, and more economic growth. I share the positive vibes and think they’re founded in reality.

I was in South Africa for the yearly Sun partner event in “Sub-Saharan Africa” or SSA for short. SSA is one of the fastest-growing regions within what is known as “Emerging Markets”, which in itself grows faster than Europe, North America or Asia Pacific. And partners are extremely important, as Sun uses solely indirect sales in the region.

I was so impressed by what I saw that I wrote nine blog entries. As I didn’t want to spam PlanetMySQL nor blogs.mysql.com/kaj with nine separate blog entries, some of which were hardly related to MySQL, I wrote them on my newly-started private blog blogs.arno.fi/isit/. The name “/isit/” comes from an observation on how English is spoken in South Africa, but I made it up as an acronym for “It’s some interesting topic!“. On that site, I’ll be blogging on anything that interests me, in the humble hope that it also interests someone else.

My first nine blogs are all about South Africa:

1. Why I think South Africa is on track
2. South Africa: There’s hope!
3. The Government Wants You To Use A Condom
4. Jacaranda, the South African national weed
5. South Africa: Select your preferred language
6. Comune di Monte Casino
7. Four practical ways to learn a language: On the road, from a girlfriend, for the police, getting lost
8. South African breakfast: Worthy of an experiment!
9. “South Africa has many robots.” — “Is it?” — “Ja!”

Here are a few excerpts from some of them (but if you’re interested, do go to blogs.arno.fi/isit/):

Why I think South Africa is on track

1. Races happily mix! And respect each other!
2. Sub-Saharan Africa experiences explosive growth!
3. People have learned to live with crime
4. Foreigners get a needlessly negative picture of South Africa
5. White émigré South Africans are being encouraged to move back, by all South Africans
6. Even white South Africans are well seen in the rest of Africa
7. Afrikaans is alive and well
8. Re-naming of places and streets is limited

South Africa: There’s hope!

Encouraged by the openness of everyone I talked to (”oh yes, please go ahead, I’d love to read your non-MySQL related blog on South Africa!“), I wrote a short summary of what I see as the top reasons

The Top Ten Reasons Why South Africa isn’t the next Zimbabwe

1. There was a long tradition of democracy prior to the end of apartheid. [..]
2. The racial situation is not black and white. [..]
3. An allegedly “phenomenal” constitution. [..]
4. Nobody even attempting at changing the constitution. [..]
5. Politics becoming less aligned with race and tribes. [..]
6. Silly politicians being fired. AIDS is now, even according to the new South African minister of health, caused by HIV and not cured by garlic but prevented by proactively using condoms.
7. Security improving. On a customer visit today, we walked through central Johannesburg. That was in an area where my local host wouldn’t have walked 3-4 years ago.
8. The 2010 FIFA World Cup. The eyes of the world will be on South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010, and not just those of football enthusiasts. There was a huge positive impact in Germany 2006, both on the national identity and on the external perception of it. I think we’ll see something similar in 2010.
9. The large economic footprint of South Africa. It’s huge. MySQL downloads in South Africa outnumber those of downloads elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa by a factor of three.
10. Innovative public policy, at least in Open Source. Read Aslam Raffee’s blog. Open Source is being mandated by the government. That means South Africa is at the forefront in innovating public policy.

Personally, I could sense a mere fraction of the racial tension of my previous visit in 1993. On the dance floor at the Sun partner venue of Kievits Kroon, everyone mixed with everyone. I could see mutual respect.

Hey, why not invest in Africa? It’ll be the next boom market (and likely, one of the only ones in the current climate).

Four practical ways to learn a language: On the road, from a girlfriend, for the police, getting lost

George Swahi Moleko’s Tips for How To Learn Eight Languages

1. On the road. Meaning: On the street, in the township. For example in Soweto, people speak so many different languages that you pick it up from friends, when you grow up. That’s how George learned most of the languages.

2. From a girlfriend. Some of the South African languages are difficult to learn for a Sotho speaker. Then, George asserts, you need more motivation, and more intense exposure to the language: You need a girlfriend. George mentioned having used the girlfriend method for learning at least Venda, Tsonga and Nguni.

3. For the police. While having to do with the police might not directly teach you so much, it indirectly motivates you. George means that Venda speakers are hugely overrepresented in the South African police, and they’re likely to just reply “It’s the law! The fine is 500 Rand. Everyone has to follow the law.” if you complain in Sotho. But if you swap to Venda and say “My brother! It’s not my own car. I’m so sorry. I was in a hurry. Anyone can do a mistake, my brother!“, the policeman will be more understanding.

4. Getting lost. Not finding your way out, and having to rely on your environment, is a high motivator just like the previous item.

I hope you’ll enjoy these blog entries, as well as upcoming ones on blogs.arno.fi/isit/! And, if you’re a South African of any race, I hope you don’t see my commentary as offensive. It isn’t meant to be. I very much enjoyed your country, and respect what you’ve accomplished!

I was booked for keynoting the second MySQL Users Conference in Japan on 30-31 October 2008. Going to Japan is always something I’m looking forward to.

However, I won’t have that pleasure this time. I got requested to keynote a Sun partner event instead, on Tue 28.10.2008 at Kievits Kroon, just outside Pretoria in South Africa.

For Japan, I will be replaced by nobody other than David Axmark. I’m happy he gets the opportunity to do this keynote, transitioning from his current role to a consultant next month. I hope this also gives the press an opportunity to understand David’s motivations a bit better!