Schonhose

It is that time of the year again: March Madness has finally arrived. And as always I look to support the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team. This year they have earned a No. 1 seed in the 2009 NCAA Tournament and will open play on Thursday against No. 16 seed Radford (21-11) in Greensboro, N.C.

I’ll hope to catch some games online through the March Madness on demand: Watch live games from the 2009 NCAA® Division I Men’s Basketball Championship online for free.

Here is the Printable NCAA Tournament Bracket (.pdf) (located on the UNC site).

If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event…what kind of film would you use? – Anonymous

Every once in a while people ask us: “what’s up with Pixelpost?” The latest update was released at July 27, 2008 and they wonder about the current status.

Well, the truth is that the current release, 1.71, is pretty much rock solid and very stable (quite an accomplishment if you look at the code ). Security wise this has been one of the best versions thus far. However, we have made some minor modifications to the code since the release, but mostly we cleaned up the abundance of old code. Perhaps we will release this as an intermediate version between 1.7x and 2.x.

The last couple of months we basically didn’t do much with the old 1.x code. We spend most of our time on the new version: Pixelpost 2.0. This is going to be a complete rewrite compared to the old 1.x code and as you probably know, this will take some time.

On the forums I compared it to building a house. Let’s assume your blog is a house. Everyone likes a different style: some will like brick buildings while others are looking for a simple wooden house. But every house needs a solid foundation. The foundation is the most important part of the whole building. A house can be expanded/modified to your own taste as long as the foundation is solid.

This is an analogy for where we at with Pixelpost at this time. The main focus is building a solid foundation on which everyone can build what they like. For instance: if you want people to comment on your photos you add the comment plugin. If you don’t want comments and correspondingly no SPAM, just don’t install the comment plugin. It is going to be that simple.

If you look at the current 1.x codebase there is no way to disable comments since they are an essential part of the system. Even if you don’t want users to comment on your images it is likely you do receive SPAM comments, because the code for the comments is an integral part of the system.

So hopefully the new version will address all those issues (and much more in the form of plugins/modules, like multiple users, openID, better EXIF support and the list goes on and on). To accomplish that we have to provide a nice, clean foundation build for speed.

Someone recently send me this video by Nick Vujicic, a 25-year old guy who was born without limbs. This is truly an inspiring video, so I decided to post it on my website.

The quote of today is from Rudyard Kipling and this quote was used by Phil Jackson (former coach of the Chicago Bulls and current coach of the LA Lakers) to describe the teamconcept in basketball.

For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.