Keukenhof

Keukenhof – undeniably one of the most beautiful spring gardens in the world. The amazing colours of the millions of tulips is a treat and if you are a photographer, you will love the opportunities that this place presents. The day I was there was a bit cloudy, but that did not take away the charm of the place. The fields around the park were equally impressive with tulips of all colours.

Tomorrow is the last day for visitors to this park. If you have missed it this year and are in the Netherlands next year, make sure you visit Keukenhof. It is one of the must see places in the Netherlands.

Barcelona – Part 2

The second day, we visited the Sagrada Familia in the morning and Park Guell, the beautiful beach and not to forget FC Barcelona in the afternoon. The weather was really pleasant and we spent a lot of time at the beach.

FC Barcelona

Road from Park Guell

Sagrada Familia – The other facade

Sagrada Familia

Colon Columbus

Yacht at the beach

The beach

Barcelona – Part 1

After two weeks in the Netherlands, it was time to head to a place with some sunshine. A few of my friends had planned on visiting Barcelona and so I hopped on. We were told it was raining in Spain but to our relief, it was not the case and the sun was out in all its glory.

Barcelona is a beautiful city, which is best admired on foot. It has a much relaxed feel and the people are friendly. The architecture is gorgeous here with almost every building having plants and flowers on the facade. The food was fantastic and we had our fill of tapas.

Pictures are better than words and so here we go.

La Rambla

Utrecht, The Netherlands

Three weeks ago, I arrived in this small cold country from our large and really hot country. Fortunately, the winter is behind us and spring is in the air. There have been some really sunny days. I couldn’t get as many pictures as I would have liked to, but here are a few

Pigeons

In the past few months, a few pigeons have made our neighbourhood their home. Here are a few pictures of them feeding on rice on my neighbour’s terrace. I just love their grace and their colour.

Trying Zooomr after a year

About a year back there were lot of problems with the photo sharing site zooomr.com and it took help from Sun and Zoho. Today, more than a year later, I thought I would revisit the site and check how things are.

A lot of features like the Zipline – something like Twitter – has been added. Users can now purchase PRO accounts and such.

But the site is about photo sharing and my interest was only in checking this feature. Uploading and viewing photos worked perfectly. Even from Linux I was able to upload photos but was not able to use the flash uploader. Thats ok, I was able to do all the other stuff on the site without problems, except just one.

One thing that did not work correctly everytime was creating Sets. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not. Sometimes it listed the number of photos incorrectly which later got corrected to the right number.

Other features like labeling, tagging people, geo tagging, privacy settings, licensing, and sharing on social networks worked just fine. Overall, I am happy with the way things are working on the site.

I used this post as an opportunity to test Windows Live Writer. Though I have used it in the past without much liking, I wanted to see how it fared now.

RockYou

Today I had some free time on my hands and so thought let me have some fun. Well, this post is nothing about Linux, not even remotely technical or related to what has been going on in this blog for the past several months.

I had remembered this site called RockYou which I once used to create glitter text for one of my friend’s birthday wishes. I thought I would check out the other features and created this cool little slide show. The best part is I can post my slide show on a variety of social networking sites and blog platforms.

So here is my little slide show for all of you.

[rockyou id=123618320&w=426&h=320]

Inserting photos from other services

With my WordPress storage fast depleting, I was trying to include photos from Vox and it works 🙂

Last time I tried to include from Flickr but could not get it done. But this time on target.

Update: Well, I am running out of options again. The picture does not seem to load today. 😦

I am going to try Picasaweb

Update: Trying to insert from Picasaweb.This requires some work. Copy the code from HTML to embed in website and take the src portion to get the photo alone. If you want to direct your reader to the web album, you can post the entire code.

Update: I setup my Flickr account to post photos. But that was not what i wanted. So below I try to just post the image and not an entry from Flickr. I have made the Photo public. No success. So I think I just can continue with Picasaweb.

Sorry for too many updates. Just one more image posting to confirm things are in order. Looks like they are.

Update: I removed the image I had posted yesterday from Picasaweb. Today I tried Photobucket and I am impressed. They give me a direct link which I can use to post here. The image below comes from there.

Whats happening to Zooomr (again)?

Well, even fully knowing what was going on with Zooomr a couple of months back, i signed up for the service yesterday.  My experience was not all that cool.

First, I tried to upload photos from my Ubuntu box and failed miserably. I tried both Firefox and Opera. No luck. I then read the zooomr blog and understood that there was a problem.I would like to note one thing. The blog they have linked to says Flickr uses a similar tool for upload and faces similar problems. if Flickr faces similar problems, then it does not imply that Zooomr should face the same issues too.

Ok, the purpose of my post is this. While I uploaded a few photos using my Windows box, I notice a general latency using the site. While I was able to switch between blog view, detail view and square view, I was not able to select an individual photo and delete. I need to delete some of the photos I have uploaded and I have been trying to get this done for two days. The response I get from the server is Zero Sized Reply

Can someone tell me how I can delete the photos?

One other thing. After I logoff and try to login from that screen, I keep getting the message Logout  Successful. Guys, I am trying to log in and not out. Providing unlimited space is one thing, providing a usable service is another. I prefer the latter.

I know there are a few of you who would tell me to use other services, fine. But, please fix your site since it gives new users like me a bad idea of what you are doing.