The Quiet Picture

I uploaded a bunch of new pictures on minnak.net. Some of them are familiar for the blog readers, but many of them are unpublished so please feel free to click through the galleries!

I added some new pictures to the minnak.net galleries. For anyone who’s visited the site before, the new pictures are collected in the New! gallery, logically enough… Some of the pictures actually date back to last year, but there’s also three very new ones (one more deer, tiger and polar bear).

I’ve updated and slightly re-organised the photo galleries at minnak.net. As always, the new pictures are in the “New” gallery and I’ve also tried to re-process some old pictures but it seems like I still have a lot of work to do with them. I’ve recently learned a new way of processing pictures in Lightroom, so the old pictures now look unnecessarily pale… I’ll get to them one day.

Edit 2009-08-30: I updated the Orchids gallery with some new pics and new post-processing.

Today I was notified that someone had stolen my pictures, this is the first time I’ve known of it to happen. The person who emailed me had several of her pictures displayed on this same site, but she asked if I could help in stopping the thief permanently. The site is full of images ripped from all over the place, the copyright information is clearly visible in most of them! I was told that even the horoscopes that this person is posting on the blog are ripped from another site. Apparently, no original thoughts in his head… Anyway, I found that my image was hotlinked directly from my site, so the fastest way to stop this unauthorised use was to use .htaccess.

This is what it looked like before:

And this is with hotlinking blocked:

If you’re a photographer, maybe you want to check the site yourself…  at the moment of posting this, my image (or the warning) is on linked page but it’s a blog so the page number may change in time.

Although I’m taking measures to stop this, it doesn’t mean that I’m really terribly worried. I don’t make money with photography so somebody using my pictures without permission is not ripping me off financially – it’s just ripping off, period. It’s the principle of it that bugs me, if someone asked me if they could use my images non-commercially, I’d most likely permit them to do it. But using without permission, I’m offended.

I read an article today where they speculated that filesharing is so common these days that people don’t understand anymore what intellectual property really is. So even though they hear everywhere in the media that downloading music and movies and software is illegal, their moral compass is so skewed by the ubiquity of filesharing that they don’t consider they’re doing anything wrong. But you know what? Just because everybody is doing it, it doesn’t make it right. Now I’ve experienced first hand what it feels like to be at the losing end of copyright infringement, and I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Revenge however, that was sweet…

Internetworld har gjort en webbhotelltest, och det visade sig att mitt webbhotell Cliche fick sämsta betyg. Jag har kanske haft tur då för jag har inte upplevt några som helst problem. Hur många år har jag haft minnak.net nu… fyra? Under den tiden har jag behövt kontakta supporten två gånger och fick snabb svar både gånger, först när jag behövde MySQL aktivering får att installera WordPress och sen när jag reggade en ny domän och ville peka om den. Fast ompekningen gick inte som jag ville, men det var mitt fel – det stod ju i klartext hur de kan peka om, och det jag ville göra var bestämt nånting annat. Så nu äger jag en domän som gör ingenting… tror inte jag förnyar den… Hursomhelst alltså, trots dåligt betyg från Internetworld så skulle jag ändå kunna rekommendera cliche.se. Kanske hjälper det att jag jobbar med IT så det här att man inte får något hjälp med att installera WordPress osv gör mig inget, och kontrollpanel har jag faktiskt inte saknat heller – jag tänkte inte ens på saken tills jag läste om det i testet. Uptime tycker jag får godkänt också.

Jaja, kanhända att har jag alldeles för låga krav då.

OBS! Jag har ingen annan knytning till cliche.se än att vara kund… tyckte bara att det var lite småroligt att se hur cliche misslyckades med nästan vartenda delmoment i testen. Your mileage may vary!

P.S. Titta jag lyckades med att skriva (nästan) hela inlägget på svenska, borde kanske prova på finska också nån gång får att se hur det känns!

Rane’s gallery update reminded me that I should update mine. The reason I re-built my galleries was to make them easier to manage so I would update them more frequently… but it appears that it hasn’t helped much. Nevermind.

Since I had such a productive week last week, I dedicated a whole gallery to the pictures I took during my holiday in the mountains. Some of the them are already familiar from the blog, but most of them are new. It’s not possible to comment directly in the gallery, but this blog post is open for commenting…!

EDIT 2009-08-27: I’ve removed the Autumn 08 gallery referred to here, and moved the pictures to other galleries (Autumn, Mountains and Waterfalls).

Just a plug for minnak.net: I’ve updated Flowers and Orchids. The Orchids gallery in particular is brimming with new flowers, most of them already seen in the blog but check out the last one – I caught the bog orchid today!

I have now updated all of the image galleries on minnak.net. Welcome for a visit!

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Now that I have set up the galleries for easy updates, all I need is some new images! Problem is… just when the flower season is starting, the snow came back. I took a look at the lily of the valley buds behind my house, and they were looking very sad indeed. So no white flowers yet, but a white lawn instead. And it just keeps on falling.

I have uploaded a new flower gallery on minnak.net. I was going to update all the galleries and make some other changes to the website, but instead I wasted my time with a minor tweak to the gallery page.

The tweak concerned the rounded corners – the right side corners now move with the gallery frame. Originally I had used a 900px wide background gif, but that doesn’t scale so the right corners disappeared if the window was too small. I’m no coding genius so it took me quite a while, but in the end I figured out a way to get scalable corners which work in Firefox and in IE and hopefully in other browsers as well. They should work anyway, it’s all done with simple CSS. When I had finally figured it out, I found out that browsers interpret the code differently – the lower left corner which looked fine in Firefox, displayed 1 pixel too high in IE, which left me a weird line in the corner. I ended up positioning the corner gif at -1px and now IE shows it correctly, and if it’s 1 pixel too low in other browsers it’s not very easy to see anyway.

So, the whole scalable corner thing, you’d think it’s easy to do and I’m just making a big deal out of it. With my (lack of) coding skills though, it’s a whole evening spent with Google and trial and error and then finally a moment of triumph when it works!