Habitually Good

Here’s another one of my photography outputs. To take this photo, I had taken a glass vase, which was quite round, and put some soil in it, plant some plants, and then put some lady bugs in their new ‘home’. Added some raisins, and water, and we had a cozy, comfy place for them to live.

I wanted to try out Macro photography. Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as good as it should be, but I still love this shot (click to see larger picture and go to my album on Picasa with more such shots):

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Many problems can arise out of testing email sending function in your applications. You can end up getting plenty of dummy messages in your inbox; you might send dummy mails to real users by mistake; you need to test thousands of messages; the list goes on and on.

Well, there is something that you can do to handle this situation better, and here’s an article that tells you how: http://www.nagarro.com/blog/a-better-way-to-test-email-sending-functionality-is-to-use-your-own-smtp-server/

This article was also written by me at my employer’s corporate blog. Going forward, I am going to be pointing to any articles I write on that blog from here.

One of the things that I find myself doing quite frequently is using Image Search (whether Bing or Google, though Bing is better). And I am also used to just typing the search term in my browser address bar and pressing enter. Normally to do image search, you would have to either go to the respective image search page first, and then enter your search term there (but then you are not using the enter search term in address bar shortcut). Or another way is to enter the search term in the address bar, press enter, and then choose the Image search link from the top menu of the search engine (again, pretty clunky).

So, how do we solve this problem? Well, Chrome offers us a very cool functionality (which FireFox also has, I believe) where I can add many search engines to address bar, and I can choose which one to call by adding a shortcut word/letter before my search term.

Let me show you how you can do this, and let me take Bing image search as the example (since I use this).

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It has been quite some time since I posted on Photography (a subject quite close to my heart). My last post was back in March when I visited Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary. Since then life has been in a tumble – our dog Trinity gave birth to an awesome litter – and our hands have been – as a lot of people reminded us – litterally full. So, while I have been taking some photos on and off of the puppies, I didn’t get a chance to process and post them.

Most recently, I decided to take photos of Peach (the pup that we are going to keep with us), and it was becoming an exercise in frustration as she is so active and moving all the time. I was shooting at night, and indoors. And I didn’t want to use a flash, but for my abilities, she kept giving me blurry pictures.

So, I thought, that maybe I need to improvise. A thought struck me, and I turned all the lights off, and made the room pretty much completely dark.

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Almost a year ago, I switched to Amazon S3 for hosting the images that are part of my blog posts. It has been a great move, and has kept me happy, and hasn’t cost me a lot (given that I don’t pull so much traffic anyway). However, there has always been the occasional moment where I have found the change in my workflow to be tedious. The fact that instead of just pulling the images into LiveWriter (the application I use to blog) and pushing the publish button, I had to first use CloudBerry Explorer (an excellent application for Amazon S3) to upload the image to S3, then get it’s URL, and then embed it into my post.

So, today I thought to myself, maybe I should consider writing a WordPress plug-in for automating this task on the WordPress end. And the moment that thought came to me I almost kicked myself. Because I was suddenly 100% sure that someone probably already did that (I should have searched for it an year ago). But better later than never, I say. And so, when I searched, there it was waiting: Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress, by the author of tan tan noodles blog.

The rest of the article is about making it work for my setup.

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