In the previous article I have mentioned the potential issue with some uploaded images hanging in state "Processing image" for surprisingly long time after upload and expressed hope that there is some background "catch it all" process that would take care of all these. As it turned out, there is. All uploaded images that were haging in the processing stage turned up to be fixed by next day or so (it was about 10-20 images out of about 3-4 thousand).

Week ago, my SmugMug 14 day trial period expired and (as expected) I signed up for the 1 year service. Here are my first impressions after over week of use, with over 3000 uploaded photos and 6.8 GB disc space consumed :-). Good news is - it really works as advertised and I still like it a lot. I have not really tried many of the features, but what I did try, worked as expected.

go and get it - at http://www.ghisler.com/ It got nice visual upgrades - look and feel and icons are gently nicer and more XP-ish. Plus many other new features. Upgrade is still free for registered users. If I should pick one single most useful program I ever used on any computer system, Total Commander would be clear winner. I do not remember when exactly I purchased the license - I guess sometimes around 1994-95, when it was named Windows Commander.

Thanks to long weekend and more quiet time in last couple of days (Happy 140th Birthday, Canada!), I managed to read something else than Ruby-ism/Rail-ism. Among others, I finished the Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, a book promising to explain why software is hard. It is pretty tough question to answer. The way this books tries to address it is following the story not very well known open source project named Chandler through it's beginning over period of 3 years.

An interesting article on JavaLobby caught my eye today: Do .NET Applications Run Better on Java? Normally, knowing the not exactly impartial focus of the Java centric site such as JavaLobby or theserverside.com, one should be careful when reading how much Java outperforms .NET. The bias works the other way too - just look at the Theserverside.net or other .NET centric side how much is C# superior :-). With that in mind, I looked atthe technical report.