Jason Pearce

Capturing photos and videos via a mobile phone is easy. Posting those files online from a mobile phone, however, is often tedious. In most cases you would email or MMS photos individually to Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.

I was looking for a way to upload multiple images and videos from my mobile phone in a batch. I found two solutions for my Windows Mobile 6 device.

Yahoo! Go

Flickr is a Yahoo-owned property, so I thought I’d first see if I can find a tool they developed. I found and tested Yahoo! Go 2.0 (the 3.0 beta was not yet compatible with my Samsung SCH-i760).

Yahoo! Go 2.0 includes an interface for Flickr, among other things like your Yahoo! calendar, email, search, news, maps, and weather. It’s simple and works great on a mobile phone. It permits you to select multiple images to upload, but no more than six at a time. This was close to my solution, but it limited me to six photos at a time and worked only with Flickr.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 Flickr Tour

The Flickr section of Yahoo! Go 2.0 features an easy “Upload photos” section.

Photos are available in groups of six (no videos). Here I select two of the six photos I wish to upload.

ShoZu

Where Yahoo! Go falls short, ShoZu excels — and then some. Not only does ShoZu support batch uploading of photos or videos to Flickr (just photos), YouTube (just video), and Facebook (just photos); it also interacts with Blogger, Box, Cellfish, Kodak Easyshare Gallery, LiveJournal, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and many more sites I’ve never heard of (see complete list).

With great flexibility, ShoZu also lets up upload to any email address or FTP account. And to take it one step further, ShoZu offers what it calls multiple destination uploading, which is a fancy way of saying it will automatically carbon copy (cc) up to 10 other sites (or FTP accounts, or email addresses, etc.) with the photos or videos you upload.

What this means is that when I use ShoZu to upload a batch of 20 photos to my Flickr account, I can ask it to also post those same 20 photos to my Facebook account, my Picassa Web Album, and store a copy in my FTP account for good measure. It’s a true one-to-many FTP-like solution that resides on my mobile. I don’t even know of a desktop client that does that.

ShoZu Tour

Here I have configured ShoZu to recognize three of my destination accounts: Flickr, YouTube, and a personal FTP site. My carbon copy sites are configured via their website and are not available via their mobile client.

Similar to Yahoo! Go, you may select multiple photos, but you have to first enable the ability to mark multiple images or videos.

Here I select two images to upload, but I may select all of them if I would like.

I may also select videos. Here I select two out of three videos I wish to upload to YouTube. Too bad they don’t offer a thumbnail to help me determine my selections.

I may even view the status of my uploads, which continue to run in the background.

For example, if I wanted to add a few more images to the upload queue, I may easily do so.

When ShoZu finished uploading, I found my photos on Flickr (primary site), Picasa (cc site), and Facebook (another cc site); and my videos on YouTube. My FTP site (also a cc site) had all of my photos and videos. Way cool!

ShoZu Shortcomings

In many regards, ShoZu exceeds my expectations. But now I’m hooked and I want more. Here are a few shortcomings or opportunities ShoZu’s developers should address.

1. Flickr Video: Flickr now supports both video and photos. ShoZu needs to catch up and permit users to also send Flickr videos their way.
2. 10 megabyte per file limitation: While photos won’t hit the 10 MB ceiling, videos most certainly may. With 1 GB memory cards common-place, they should bump this limit up to 150 MB or more.
3. Support more phones: While they already support many phones, my Samsung SCH-i760 Windows Mobile 6 is unsupported. I took a guess and tried their software for another phone, which (mostly) worked.
4. Toggle CC Feature: Sometimes, I won’t want to send a photo or video to many locations. Provide your uses a way to toggle the carbon copy feature on or off. Better yet, let them multi-select the sites during each upload, much the same way they can multi-select which images they’ll upload in a batch.
5. Develop a desktop multi-file upload interface: Although ShoZu offers an upload tool for the desktop user, it uploads only one image at a time. If they developed an AJAX interface similar to Flickr and YouTube’s multi-file, browser-based upload tools, they would gain many more users.

Stephen Turbek’s 2006 article entitled “The Lazy IA’s Guide to Making Sitemaps” and Michael Angeles’ “Automating Diagrams with Visio” inspired me to adopt the strategy of first developing a website’s navigation and information architecture in Microsoft Excel and then use Microsoft Visio to provide the automatic formatting.

I love Visio and often find myself spending too much time twiddling with the look and flow of the sitemap during development instead of remaining focused on the logic, content, and organization. Turbek and Angeles’ approach to using two tools to separate the processes of organizing a website’s navigational scheme from the diagramming phase made a lot of sense to me.

The shortcoming of Turbek’s article and his downloadable Excel examples was that they limited information architects to only two levels (two clicks) deep. Several people commented that they wanted to include three or more levels deep and a few even proposed solutions.

It wasn’t until Edward Garana’s comment that I became inspired to develop a sitemap generator that can go beyond two levels. While my examples are only seven-levels deep, you could easily add as many columns as you want.

Introducing LazySitemapGenerator

Requirements

• Microsoft Excel 2003 or 2008 with Macros enabled
• Microsoft Visio 2003 or 2008 with the Organization Chart Wizard Add-On
• Download LazySitemapGenerator version 1.0

Please note that LazySiteMapGenerator uses a single Macro to do its job. You must have Macros enabled for it to work. If you want to first view the content of the Macro before opening Exel, open LazySiteMapGenerator_FindParentMacro.bas in Notepad or some other text editor.

Instructions

The Microsoft Excel files included with LazySiteMapGenerator are composed of worksheets “Input” and “Output.” As you might guess, Input is where you develop your text-based information architecture. Output is where my Excel formulas and FindParent macro defines the relationships that you’ll use to import into Microsoft Visio.

Step 1: Cells “Input!J2″ and “Output!D2″ must be the only two cells in either “M#cr#Ch#ck” (misspelled on purpose) column to have an “x” in them (empty all gray cells in both worksheets)

Step 2: The “Input” worksheet must have no empty rows/gaps

Step 3: Click on any cell in the “Output” worksheet

Step 4: Press and hold “Ctrl-A” to run the “FindParent “macro

Step 5: Repeat “Step 4″ (continue holding) until all of the values are populated in the “Output!ReportsTo” column

Step 6: Stop holding “Ctrl-A” when the Microsoft Visual Basic error pops up with “Run-time error ‘1004′,” which means you are done

Step 7: Click on “End” to clear the Run-time error 1004

Step 8: Switch back to the “Output” worksheet, click “File > Save As” and select “Text (Tab delimited)”, clicking “Ok” and “Yes” to Excel’s formatting alerts

Step 9: Close Excel, open Visio, and run the “Tools > Add-Ons > Organization Chart > Organization Chart Wizard”

Step 10: Select “Information that’s already stored in a file or database” then click “Next”

Step 11: Select “A text, Org Plus (*.txt), or Excel file” then click “Next”

Step 12: Browse to the tab-delimited file you created in “Step 8″ then click “Next”

Step 13: Select “Name” for the Name field, “ReportsTo” for the Reports To field, and leave the First Name field blank, then click “Next”

Step 14: Ensure “Name” is the only value in the Displayed Fields column, then click “Next”

Step 15: Ensure the Custom Property Fields column is blank, then click “Next”

Step 16: Select “I want to specify how much of my organization to display on each page,” check the two checkboxes, and click “Next”

Step 17: Ensure Employee at Top of Page is “Home” and Additional Levels is “All Subordinates,” then click “Finish”

Step 18: [Optional] Select “Shape > Layout Shapes” to open Visio formatting options

Step 19: [Optional] Set Style to “Compact Tree,” Direction to “Right then Down,” Depth to “Shallow,” Style to “Organization Chart,” Direction to “Left to Right,” Appearance to “Curved,” check “Apply routing style to connectors,” check “Enlarge page to fit drawing,” and click “Ok”

Step 20: [Required] Bask in your cool sitemap glory

Summary

There you go. You now have a handy process for automatically generating Visio diagrams from Excel text files. Now you can focus on the intellectual endeavor of organizing information and envisioning user work flow without being distracted by Visio’s diagramming tools.

Download Lazy Sitemap Generator

Download link: LazySitemapGenerator.zip

In January, my main project at work was to set up three XenServer Enterprise servers and to convert some of our physical machines into virtual machines. This was my first time working with a dedicated virtualization platform that ran at the bare-metal hypervisor level. My prior experience was using VMware’s free VMware Server, which runs as an application running on a Windows or Linux operating system.

Setting up XenServer was rather eventful, which was a good thing. Converting some of our physical servers into virtual machines, however, proved to be more challenging.

What is P2V and V2V

Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) describes the process of migrating a physical server’s operating system, applications, and data from a physical server to a virtual machine guest hosted on a virtualization platform. And virtual-to-virtual (V2V) is very similar, only you are converting a virtual server on one virtual platform — say VMware — to another virtual platform such as XenServer.

One way to move a physical server to a virtual server is to do it the old fashioned way — manually. Basically I’d do a fresh install of a Windows OS in the virtual environment, reinstall of the applications, and them migrate or recreate all of the settings and data the resided on the old physical machine.

Wanting to find an easy way out, I tried my hand at several fully automated P2V software solutions.

Leostream

Leostream’s P2V Direct 3.0 was both my first and favorite solution. They offer one free trial, after that it will cost you about $100 a conversion, which is well worth my time.

Leostream works by installing software on both your XenServer and the Windows OS that you want to convert. Unfortunately, Leosteam only supports 32-bit versions of Windows, but plans on offering a 64-bit version later this year. This was a setback since I had two 64-bit servers I needed to convert.

As for the 32-bit P2V conversions, they went rather well. I did have problems with one server that had two partitions on a single drive, which Leostream support and I couldn’t resolve.

Platespin

Platespin’s PowerConvert was, well, more powerful than what Leostream offered. They also offer a free trial for each XenServer Enterprise license. They have a similar arrangement with virtual provider Virtual Iron.

PowerConvert requires a third-party server. While no software installed on either XenServer or the Windows OS you are attempting to convert, you still have to set up a third server to act as the middle-man during the conversion process. There are many more options offered by PowerConvert, which can be configured via a Wizard or Advance mode. While it was nice having more options, it also added complexity.

Just like Leostream, PowerConvert was incompatible with 64-bit versions of Windows 2003. I still need to find a way to convert two of my 64-bit servers.

VMware Converter

VMware’s Converter is easily the best P2V utility. It is easy to use, it has always worked, it supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, and it’s free. This is the gold standard of P2V software.

Since Leostream and Platespin couldn’t convert my 64-bit Windows 2003 Servers, I decided to attempt a two-step conversion.

• Step 1: Use the free VMware Converter to conduct a P2V conversion
• Step 2: Use the free XenSource Virtual Disk Migration Utility Version 1.1 to conduct a V2V conversion

XenSource Virtual Disk Migration Utility (V2XVA)

The V2XVA Utility is free command-line tool that will convert VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server/Virtual PC virtual machines to the Xen Virtual Appliance (XVA) format. Though this utility lacks a nice GUI and has zero whistles and bells, it’s free and it works. Best of all, I can convert 64-bit operating systems.

The P2V and V2V Procedure:

• Use VMware Converter to perform a P2V conversion
• Open the newly-created virtual machine in VMware Server
• Install remaining drivers and reboot a few times, but do not install VMware Tools
• Once the new virtual machine is stable in VMware Server, shut it down
• Use the V2XVA Utility to covert the VMware virtual machine into a XenServer virtual machine
• Use XenCenter to import the V2XVA-created virtual machine into the XenServer of your choosing

P2VMWC2VMWS2XVDMU2V Conversion

I guess I would call this my physical to VMware Converter to VMware Server to XenSource Virtual Disk Migration Utility to XenServer conversion. Whew. It may make for a long acronym and take a while to run, but it’s free and it works for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 2003.

Today Google released an IMAP interface to Gmail. Once you enable IMAP via Settings in your Gmail account, you then need to configure your client to access Gmail via the new IMAP interface.

Since I’ve never been able to figure out how to get the Gmail for mobile application to run on my Windows Pocket PC (because I can’t find a J2ME Java client), adding IMAP now gives me the ability to ditch their Gmail for mobile browser interface and instead use the built-in Messaging client on my phone, which is also known as Outlook Mobile.

And since Google’s Help Center on the “Supported IMAP Client List” didn’t include instructions on how to set up a Windows Mobile Pocket PC, I thought I’d create a brief tutorial. All steps are made within the Messaging client (Start > Messaging).

Step 1: Menu > Tools > New Account

Step 2: Enter your full Gmail email address

Step 3: Wait or skip the Auto Configuration

Step 4: Enter name, username (sans @gmail.com), password

Step 5: Select IMAP4 and name the account

Step 6: Incoming is imap.gmail.com, Outgoing is smtp.gmail.com

Step 7: In Options, set Connection frequency

Step 8: Require SSL and Authentication are necessary

Step 9: Headers Only make things quick

Step 10: Menu > Switch Accounts & Menu > Send/Receive to test

JB and I attended the NiUG conference in Bethesda, Maryland earlier this week. NiUG is a users group for iMIS, the CMS and CRM tool Lambda Chi Alpha recently adopted.

Conference Photo Pool

more photos from conference

The conference was great. JB had the chance to meet other iMIS developers and learn some of their tricks, while I learned about Crystal Reports and upcoming .NET solutions. Being my second NiUG conference, there were many familiar faces.