Photo Gallery

I certainly like the Photo Gallery software that came with Vista. The application allows you to organise your photos quickly and with relative ease by integrating its features with the Operating System. You can select a group of photos as you would normally within a folder, and then do batch operations. So with the required images selected you can carry out any of these actions; rename, delete, attach an existing tag or create and attach a new tag, create a new folder, move the images to a folder. This list represents the main task that you want to do with your images to organise them for ease of access later and it’s all done in a minute if not seconds. If you have the habit of organising your images using the Operating System via Windows Explorer then this is fine as Photo gallery has no problem keeping track. Photo gallery did not come with Windows 7 candidate version but it was downloadable from Windows Live.

Cams for Coffs Harbour

We do have quite a variety of needs in the crags around Coffs (Glenreagh) but if you can’t buy the whole set of Black Diamond Camelot’s (http://www.blackdiamondequipment.com/gear/camalots.php) then the low to midrange sizes would be the best starting point, such as, .4, .5, .75. To be noted is that the range of cracks that they can be used in is quite wide so there is overlap in sizes giving you some choice. I find it very useful to have a small cam such as the blue alien (http://www.aliencamsbycch.com/l) along with a set DMM nuts.

Web Site validity

Reading an article recently about web sites and if they are genuine. Well I would not be so wary of unprofessional sites but my experience has led me to be wary of the more professional when someone is trying to ‘rip you off’. The issues that I look for are; Links to other sites; a contactable web master; prompt reply to an email query, no bad mentions of the site via a Google Search; contact details tested; longevity of the site.

Explorer 8

There does seem to be some problems with installing Explorer 8. I have heard on the grapevine instances of computer lock ups etc. Certainly wise to use the system restore before installing any new programs.

My first hand experience is with web sites. It seems that some sites won’t run properly in Explore 8. The reason for this would seem to be incorrectly written code in the site files. Some programs that produce web pages such as MS Publisher produce code that won’t validate via the W3S requirements. Pages coded by some people have been sloppy which results in incompatibility problems between programs. It would seem that Explorer 8 is more strict in its structure needs of the XHTML and therefore sites are producing errors. This effort to make XHTML consistent I would class this as a good thing and a trend that will continue because it will assure that web pages present correctly in all browsers. Unfortunately for those who have developed their sites with software such as Publisher, usually because of budget issues, will need to look at producing code that is valid ( http://validator.w3.org/ ). The options open to you; well you would try and validate the code, and in this way the coder can go through and fix the errors; Have the site re written using better development software such as Dreamweaver., Komposer (free), Amaya (free) or a development environment such as Joomla.