Photo Manager Picasa is by far the best photo managing software for a variety of reasons, here are my Top 5

1. It is free to Download
2. It sorts photos easily by folders or allows users to define photos by tags
3. Picasa provides basic photo manipulation capabilities such as red eye, contrast, and brightness editing
4. You can also easily email photos to other through the application and store your photos online on Google’s free web album that is similar to Flickr.com
5. The software has a very user friendly interface

I like to do business with neighborhood businesses within walking distance, so I recently purchased a copy of Delicious Library from Delicious Monster.Com here in Seattle, Washington. As a company they are more unique since they have no storefront, and do all of their work out of the neighboring Cafe Zoka on Blakeley Street in Seattle Washington. The owners are a spin-off from Omnigroup, makers of Omni Web that is on the same street and whose offices are next door to Cafe Zoka.

Delicious Monster is a personal Library application for Mac OS. Using an Apple iSight web camera or a bar code scanner that Delicious Monster sells, you can scan the UPC or ISBN bar codes on your books and DVDs. A successful scan will trigger a search to Amazon.Com. If there is a successful hit, information on your title will be downloaded to your personal Mac database. If a book cover or DVD image is available it will also be downloaded. Two of the more interesting pieces of data downloaded, are the original list prices of the book or DVD and the current value. Most books and DVDs have current values dramatically lower than the sale price. However, in some cases, the current value is greater. This always produces a smile in your heart!

Now for the fun.We all lend books and DVDs out to friends and colleagues. When you do, you add their name as a loaner from the Mac Address Book. Next, drag the image of the book cover or DVD image over their name. Three things then occur: The item is added to your checked out items book shelf. It records a default loan time of two weeks, and adds the return date as an event to your iCal calendar in a special Library calendar and sends a reminder to to your friend. about the loan and the due date. When the book is returned, you select a menu item, Check In item. The book image is then removed from your checked out list. You may also email all the bibliographic data on your titles to your friend from a button inside Delicious Library. I have used a standalone iSight camera, and an iSight camera integrated into the screens of my MacBook to successfully scan items into my library. It does not take long to get the hang of scanning. You have to pay attention to distance between the barcode and the camera, and ambient illumination. If an initial search for your library item by UPC code does not produce a successful hit in the Amazon database, lookups by ISBN code are an effective backup. There will be times you get a successful hit, but no image of the book cover. Manual cut-and-paste of images of the title elsewhere on the web will work as a substitute.

A new era of web hosting is starting. Shared and dedicated web hosting is always based in one server machine. Meaning that in case of a peak of traffic that server gets vulnerable, and most of the times crashes. New players in web hosting are appearing, these are Amazon, Mosso and Media Temple. This new services consist in one virtual machine from a grid of hardware servers. Being able to support peaks and not vulnerable to hardware failures.

The price is very competitive when compared to dedicated machines, from $20 USD to $99 USD per month per virtual grid machine. Though Amazon has a different price model based on hour of usage, 10 cents per processing hour. The Amazon EC2 solution is great for occasional operations or beta testing.

STATGRAPHICS – the software for the professional and the occasional statistician. Most people need to incorporate statistics into their work from time to time. They also may find it useful to provide a statistical graphic for their readers to help them understand the scope of the data.

While there are several fine statistical software packages, the one that stands out for both ease-of-use and an extensive library of quick-to-generate graphics is STATGRAPHICS Centurion. Realizing that many users may not have put together a statistical formula since college, the software uses a standard spreadsheet to hold the data you provide and the 150 available statistical functions are called from the menu bar. Need a multiple variable analysis of production numbers? STATGRAPHICS will provide one or more windows with text explaining the data and functions such as average, variance, standard deviation, etc. Other panes will provide various types of plots that can be modified with an array of graphic tools. Dialog boxes allow you to add or remove detail according to your requirements.

One additional feature that was pioneered by STATGRAPHICS is the Stat Advisor. The Stat Advisor provides detail about the results in plain English text. If you are working with functions such as regression lines and you are a bit rusty on the math (F-Ratio, P-Values), the Stat Advisor will explain the expected value and why your data does or does not fit. For anyone interested in trying out the software, there is a demo version available on the www.statgraphics.com site that is fully functional. The only limitation is that the software will cease to function after 30 days if a license is not purchased. If statistics are part of your job, STATGRAPHICS might be a tool that makes your life easier and more productive.

Computer searching moves a step forward – Search with PHOTOS to be made possible. Polar Rose a Sweden Company is on the verge of introducing new software where search in the web can be made with photos to locate similar photos. Similar looking people can now be reached over the web with the help of this software.

The software analyses digital photos to locate faces, then convert the data from two dimensional into 3d models. Then these skeletal models are rendered to “face prints”.The face prints will be used for search and matching process. The actual photos are not stored, only the face print summaries are stored in the database. These are then compared with other face prints enabling to create a large searchable index for comparing and cataloguing of digital images. The photos can be labeled by name or their face print signatures.

Thus, the Internet, that has revolutionized the world communication system will move step forward when this software is released. Now searching for persons with criminal records, missing person’s etc., will be made easier.

One of the best free FTP programs I have ever used is FileZilla. This is an open source software that has all the bells and whistles of well known premium FTP Clients. FileZilla is available in variety of formats so you can install it on Windows XP and Linux.

It’s current stable version is 2.2.29. Besides being a superb ftp client, FileZilla also has its own ftp server software. It’s also open source and free to download. I haven’t try its FileZilla server yet but I heard good things about it. Overall score I rate FileZilla a 8 out of 10 and 10 being the best free ftp software.