1. Start your VM

2. Open a terminal and use the following command:

VBoxManage controlvm “<VM>” setvideomodehint “X″ “Y″ “32″

Where

VM = Name of your guest VM

X = screen resolution width

Y =screen resolution height

The sign-up process then confirms a credit card (again, Amazon had more than 1 credit card for me in their records), billing address, and then asks for a telephone number for verification. The verification service then provides you an authentication number and calls the telephone number you supplied, asking you to enter the verification code when it calls. Fantastic!

Once the account is created, Amazon asks you to verify your selection, and sends a verification email. And not just one. My inbox was cluttered immediately:

Amazon EC2 - emails on signup

You can manage your account online by visiting: http://aws.amazon.com/account. Here’s the starting account summary:

Amazon EC2 Account Activity Summary - On Startup

Once your account is setup, what better way to manage your account than a plugin for Firefox? Enter Elasticfox, downloadable from Amazon. Download the plugin, and use the Firefox menu to fire it up. The first time the plugin is invoked, it asks for:

1. Account Name – Text descriptor to identify your Amazon Account
2. Access Key – Your Amazon Access Key. You include it in each request, so it’s not a secret.
3. Secret Key - Each Access Key ID has a Secret Access Key associated with it. This key is just a long string of characters (and not a file) that you use to calculate the digital signature that you include in the request. Your Secret Access Key is a secret, and only you and AWS should have it. Don’t e-mail it to anyone, include it any AWS requests, or post it on the AWS Discussion Forums. No authorized person from AWS will ever ask for your Secret Access Key.

For more information on EC2 Access Keys, follow this link.

Once you’ve added your access keys to Elasticfox, you need an Amazon EC2 key pair to launch *nix/Windows instance.The key pair ensures that only you have access to the instance. Click on “KeyPairs” to create a new key pair. Note, you may have to restart Firefox since the plugin doesn’t seem to establish connection to EC2 sometimes:

Create Key Pairs to access Amazon EC2 instances in Elasticfox

Once the keypair has been created, Elasticfox asks you save the .pem file. Select a secure location and remember it; for this will be used later. You can also see all the keys you have generated on your EC2 console.

At this point, Elasticfox will have established a connection and will update the available images under the “Images” tab:

List of available Amazon EC2 instances in Elasticfox

Next, it’s time to setup a Security Group, which is similar to setting up firewall rules to restrict access to specific ports on your EC2 instances. Create a test group by navigating to the “Security Groups” tab in Elasticfox:

Creating a Security Group in Elasticfox

In the above case, we have created a Security Group called “Test Group” with SSH and RDP enabled. Once the group is created, notice the “source CIDR” shows your host address / netmask. So all hosts on your subnet will be able to SSH (with correct credentials.

With that done, time now to select an AMI so that we are within the free AWS Tier. Selecting exactly which AMI to choose from the long list was more difficult that I imagined. Defty Googling resulted in a few options:

Using an Ubuntu image and resizing it down to 10 GB (the free AWS tier) as suggested here

Using test builds for Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 from here and here

Since I wasn’t keen on messing with 10.04, I chose to go with Ubuntu 10.10, and found the official page for that AMI.  Here are the key details:

Details of Ubuntu 10.10 AMI

Armed with that info, I boldly decided to search for that AMI on the list of images in Elasticfox. And lo!

Ubuntu 10.10 image in Elasticfox Images search

While official page clearly states this AMI is designed to run on t1.micro, m1.small and c1.medium instance sizes, however; Elasticfox wouldn’t show me an option to run the AMI as a micro instance:

Elasticfox: No option to run Ubuntu instance as t1.micro

Thinking the AWS Console might allow for micro instance, when I login to the console, I see the same thing, after selecting the AMI:

Step 1 - Select the desired AMI

Step 2 - Select Instance type for our AMI

This is where I realised I was using the wrong AMI. ami-­1a837773 is instance-backed, but to launch a micro instance we need to select AMI which is EBS backed. Going back to the page where Ubuntu 10.10 server instances are listed, I found the correct AMI ID is: ami-508c7839

However, even with an EBS-backed AMI, Elasticfox doesn’t show me an option to launch a micro instance, which AWS console allows me to do. I happily selected instance type “t1.micro” and accepted default options for Kernel and RAM disk ID. I added a couple of tags to remind me of this instance, selected the key/value pair I had created earlier, and added this instance to the Security Group I had created. AWS is now ready to launch this instance:

AWS - Ready to launch instance

Now then, once the instance is launched and running, Elasticfox will show us its status as “running”. Right click and select “Connect to Instance”. You may get the following error message:

Please login as the ubuntu user rather than root user.

Go to “Tools” in Elasticfox, and change the SSH user to “ubuntu”:

Elasticfox: Change SSH user from "root" to "ubuntu"

You will then get a terminal window (if you are running Elaticfox on Linux. If not, then change the “SSH command” to point to PuTTy on Windows). You’re now up and running!

Highlights of AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch alarms**

Fore more info, see here

Gartner, Inc.  highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, held in Orlando October17- 21.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years”. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

1. Cloud Computing - The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between the spectrum of “open public” to “closed private”. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management.
2. Mobile Applications and Media Tablets - Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web.The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices.
3. Social Communications and Collaboration – Gartner divides social media into 4 sub-categories. Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Frienster, etc), social collaboration (wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing), Social publishing (usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr), and Social feedback (feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon). Gartner estimates that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications.
4. Video - Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.
5. Next Gen Analytics - Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action
6. Social Analytics - Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.
7. Context-Aware Computing - Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.
8. Storage Class Memory - Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up that valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.
9. Ubiquitous Computing - The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox’s PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT.
10. Fabric-based Infrastructure and Computers - A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or external.

There are a number of private cloud providers, however, for any enterprise to make an informed decision, the following use cases must be supported fully:

1. Request Service – This is provided via a self-service dashboard which provides users with correct authorisation to request a service (composed of one or more servers, networks, storage, backup and monitoring capabilities), and obtain access to that service after the service approval process. For example, developers in a team may require a set of servers to use as a dev/test bed. A request is put in through the self-service portal, and the cloud administrator(s) may approve it after suitable review
2. Integrate with service desk and IT asset management – As new services are provisioned, consumers of the services will require assistance should any problems occur. The helpdesk within the enterprise should then be able to identify the service(s) which may need investigation, and open trouble tickets to track the resolution of the issues. Therefore, it is essential for this integration to exist for private clouds, rather than bolting this integration after deployment of the private cloud. Similarly, a service is made up of several components which need to be identified and tracked by the asset management systems – in the simplest case, the private cloud management software should be able to identify when the available pool of resources needs to be upgraded.
3. Provision Service – After a service has been request (and subsequently, approved), it should be provisioned on the private cloud hardware.
4. Storage & Network Provisioning – In addition to provisioning of CPU / Memory, true provisioning in private clouds is capable of provisioning storage and (virtual) networking, as required by the service
5. Service Discovery & Change history – As services are consumed and changed periodically, their status will change, along with the configuration. For a private cloud provider, it is essential to monitor the health of the service, track the configuration changes and perform an audit for compliance / governance purposes.
6. Monitoring – All provisioned services need to be monitored for private clouds. This could be both active and passive monitoring. It is desirable to generate alarms where Service Level Agreements are not being met. This is where the loop with trouble ticketing system is closed (so that tickets are raised automatically as the service status is affected, and SLAs are recomputed)
7. Service Dashboard – All that monitoring is used to update a realtime dashboard of service model, depicting availability status for all services in the private cloud
8. Metering – Track the usage of each service (in fact, individual elements of a service, such as Network, Storage, IP address remapping, etc), as well as usage stats for software (OS, DB, Application), model billing rates and generate usage reports.
9. Visualisation – The cloud management software should provide views for all services provisioned in the cloud (such as hierarchical logical views of elements that make up a service) along with their status. Think of a network map for services.
10. Manage Service Level Agreements – Send alarms to administrators when SLAs for configured services are at the risk of breach.

The features above can be depicted in the following diagram:

Use cases for service management in private cloud

It enables the data center to accelerate the creation of service platforms for a wide spectrum of workload types with a high degree of integration, flexibility, and resource optimization.

ISDM is for customers who want to get started with a private cloud computing model. The product enables you to rapidly implement a complete software solution for service management automation in a virtual data center environment, which in turn can help your organization move towards a more dynamic infrastructure. It is a single solution that provides the necessary software components to rapidly implement cloud computing.

The core capabilities of ISDM are:

• Integrated service management for delivering cloud computing services
• A self-service portal interface for reservation of computer, storage, and networking resources, including virtualized resources
• Automated provisioning and de-provisioning of resources
• Real time monitoring and energy management
• Virtualization management
• Metering Usage and Accounting features
• High availability of services

ISDM Bundling

• IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring
• IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager
• IBM Tivoli System Automation

Tivoli Service Automation Manager

IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager assists in the automated provisioning, management, and deprovisioning of IT landscapes, comprised of hardware servers, networks, operating systems, middleware, and application-level software.Tivoli Service Automation Manager helps you define and automate services that are lifecycle oriented. Examples of such services are those that establish and administer an IT server network for a limited period of time to satisfy increased demand for processing capacity or to serve as a test environment.

For more information about IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager, you can follow this link

IBM Tivoli Monitoring

IBM Service Delivery Manager includes the stand-alone software that monitors and manages system and network applications, tracks the availability and performance of your enterprise system, and provides reports to track trends and troubleshoot problems.IBM Tivoli Monitoring provides a way to monitor the availability and performance of all the systems in your enterprise. It also provides useful historical data that you can use to track trends and to troubleshoot system problems.

You can use IBM Tivoli Monitoring to perform the following tasks:

• Monitor for alerts on the systems that you are managing by using predefined situations or custom situations.
• Establish your own performance thresholds.
• Trace the causes leading to an alert.
• Gather comprehensive data about system conditions.
• Use policies to perform actions, schedule work, and automate manual tasks.

For more information about the product, features and functions, you can read here.

Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager

IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager includes a standalone IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager software that helps you improve IT cost management.You can understand your costs and track, allocate, and invoice based on actual resource use by department, user, and many additional criteria.

IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager can use the IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager metering function. IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager instantiates and manages service instances. It is able to track creation, modification, and deletion of a service instance itself, and the capacity assigned to it. This information can be periodically extracted and transformed into a so-called CSR (Common Server Resource) file, which can then be retrieved by IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to generate reports.

IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager helps to measure service usage data. In the IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager context, this is the amount of resources (CPUs and memory) allocated or assigned to servers provisioned by the Self-Service Virtual Server Provisioning component over time. Servers belong to deployment projects and projects belong to the service. Each project has a user. The user can own project coming from different services, request new projects, or request changes to the existing projects. For accounting purposes, it is required that organizational information be defined for the user, that is, at least a department identification has to be assigned to the user identification. For a project, one can distinguish between the requester of the project and the organization being charged with the project. Organization information for a project is defined by adding an (optional) project account code for the team that is using the project.For more information about IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, you can refer to the following website.

Tivoli System Automation

IBM Tivoli System Automation helps systems administrators easily manage complex IT infrastructures, while moving the IT organization from reactive error correction to proactive service protection. With advanced automation capabilities, Tivoli System Automation is designed for high availability and disaster recovery solutions, providing the ability to automatically initiate, execute, and coordinate the starting, stopping, restarting and failing over of applications running in heterogeneous and virtual IT environments.

Through these capabilities, systems administrators can more effectively:

• Quickly detect and recover from outages, failing IT components, and help reduce the frequency and duration of incidents that impact IT availability
• Manage planned outages and guard against and address unplanned outages caused by hardware failures, software failures and operator errors
• Reduce cost by automating manual, labor-intensive and error-prone operational tasks and by leveraging advanced clustering configurations to minimize hardware requirements
• Prevent failures by automating a recovery process or workflow
• Ease management of complex IT infrastructures through advanced, policy-based automation
• Build and edit automation policies through an enhanced Web-based, easy-to-use, powerful GUI.

For more information about IBM Tivoli System Automation, you can refer to the following website

ISDM Value

Benefits of IBM Service Delivery Manager

Improved time to value Reduces the amount of integration work required to deploy a cloud by offering a pre-bundled and integrated service delivery software stack

Accelerated deployment Automated image deployment, cross connection and activation of components allows clients to shorten deployment times.

Reduce complexity Self service, standardization and automation simplify use and minimize errors.

Leverage existing hardwareAllows businesses to leverage existing hardware while reducing capital expenditures and generate greater ROI

ISDM Manage From and Manage To Environments

As the image above shows, ISDM is delivered as a set of virtual images, which resides in a separate h/w platform, called the “manage from” environment. It is separated from the actual cloud infrastructure which is used to host the services offered in the cloud (called the “manage to” environment).

The graphic also clearly states that while at the moment, ISDM itself runs only on VMWare, it can manage virtual machines on all popular hypervisors. Therefore the cost of hypervisor in the overall cloud infrastructure is at a minimum (since the “manage to” environment doesn’t need to run a specific hypervisor).

Interesting quote from Gartner has been doing the rounds in Google groups – one that claims, that according to Gartner, public clouds may be more secure than private. After much digging, the most referenced source for this seems to be an article on computerworld here.

Interestingly, this article is on computerworld australia and not US (not sure if that makes any difference), but from this point onwards, it sparked a large number of intense debates on the subject (and not just Google groups). This one article has been referenced several places.

Having designed a number of IaaS infrastructures, I’m not sure if I agree with that. There are a number of articles on Google about security incidents on public clouds such as those provided by Amazon. While a public cloud provider may have support for multi-tenancy, ultimately, the level of security provided depends upon the business case for cost / ROI used to build the public cloud. As more elements of security are factored in, the cost per VM (or EC2/hour) increase, sometimes exponentially.

Citing Gartner itself, there are a number of security concerns in the Cloud:

• Data exposure and compromise;
• reliability of service;
• reduced ability to demonstrate compliance with regulations,standards and SLA’s;
• and the ability to manage the security environment.

Gartner seems to contradict themselves by then saying “..Hosted providers cannot ensure absolute security, so enterprises should consider carefully before using them for information that must remain confidential, such as intellectual property or data that is material to the enterprise’s financial health…” So which one is it?

Personally, and a nod to my employer, a complete security framework requires an approach that provides end to end protection with compliance reporting across people and identities, data and information, applications and processes, IT and physical infrastructure.

Specifically, following areas need to be addressed in Cloud security:

• Identity and Access Assurance: efficient user lifecycle administration and access controls with integrated auditing
• Data and Application Security: for fine grained application entitlements, centralized security policy management and centralized encryption key lifecycle management
• Compliance Management with automated user activity monitoring, tracking, reporting and remediation is an integral part of all of the IBM offerings.
• Security Threat Mitigation offer end-to-end risk management solutions to protect against the latest threats while reducing the costs and complexity of security.

Unless a public cloud provider has security solutions for each of the areas above, it can never be as secure as a private cloud (assuming a private cloud provider will have these security offerings as part of a SaaS offering).

The areas above can be broken down to the following traditional aspects of security:

• People & Identity management
• Data & Information security
• Application and Process security
• Network, server and endpoint security
• Protection of physical infrastructure

Let’s examine these in detail:

• People & Identity Management – For a Service Provider looking to deliver SaaS, how do you manage (named) identities? For example, say an email application is offered as a service – how are these users provisioned on the cloud? Some of these users may have access to other services on the cloud – how are those managed? What happens when a user’s role changes, or a user leaves the (consuming) organisation? How are tasks for managing identities being performed? How auditable is the system?
• Data & Information – How do you define the “perimeter” in the Cloud (private or public)? At what point is the data unprotected (whether at the point of hosting, or access)? In addition to support for multi-tenancy, how do you protect yourself against well-meaning employees who may mishandle data?
• Application & Process – What are the implications if a process used to deliver SaaS is breached, especially since a number of processes in SaaS / SOA environments might be well known (think of web-apps running well-known Java frameworks)? How do you ensure these apps comply with standards?
• Network, server & endpoint – Even though most of this infrastructure is virtualised, what about the physical hardware used to deliver the Cloud?
• Physical Infrastructure – Think of thefts, frauds and other threats within and outside the organisation.

The page lists a number of options, such as:

• digiKam
• Shotwell
• F-Spot
• Google Picasa
• gThumb

I have already tried F-Spot (which is incidentally the default graphics editor on Ubuntu) and hate it, I decided to try other alternatives. In this post, I will discuss my experiences with digiKam

First up, the page on photograpy-on-the-net dampened my enthusiasm since it only has 16 bit / channel support for color depth. Looking past that I decided to go to the homepage. Although there’s a link for “Download”, I found a handy “blog” entry referenced on the homepage titled “Install digiKam 1.6 on Ubuntu 10.10″. Perfect!

However, the very first response on that blog entry is a warning – apparently, the repository for digiKam not just digiKam but other software that a user may not want to upgrade. Yikes! The very first thing then was to check the packages in the PPA. Again there was a handy link for the PPA description. Quick glance revealed nothing serious that my system would be affected with, so I decided to take the plunge!

Installation is straightforward:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:philip5/extra
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install digikam

After the installation, I fired up digiKam and was pleased to find a decent enough interface. However, it is very irritating that it first wants me to create an Album. Once an album is created all pictures that I subsequently select for download get added to that Album. I couldn’t find an option for it to create the album automatically (for example, by date). All pictures in an album remain in the same folder. This isn’t too pleasing a functionality for photogs like me, who may have a lot of content (taken over days) on their camera.

I was also somewhat disappointed that it didn’t automatically detect when a camera was attached to the PC, and the navigation menu is slightly confusing – the very first menu listing is for “Albums”, while I expected it to be “Image” (or something to do with Images).

However, when a camera is connected, it does show it under the “Import” Menu:

It did connect to my Canon EOS 5D Mark II and I could see the pictures:

Irritatingly, it shows the last photo first (which can be bothersome if you downloaded some pictures off your camera earlier, and want to subsequently download the rest/newer pictures). But that’s easily fixed by toggling the “Show last photo first” in the View menu:

At this point I find the UI begins to show its limitations. You cannot right click in the list of pictures to make a selection. There isn’t a checkbox (like the one provided in Canon ZoomBrowser) to select photos. You have to manually select (Ctrl+Click) the pictures you want to download. There are however menu items to select all, etc.

Select the pictures you want to download and the transfer process begins. Note that it doesn’t automatically track the pictures you have already downloaded, so you can end up with duplicates (though it does hae a function to help you get rid of duplicates!)

Another interesting feature in this menu is “Capture”:

However, I couldn’t figure out how that capture truly works. Sometimes it takes one picture, sometimes two. Additionally, as the picture above shows, the captured picture doesn’t seem to be right, as visible in the thumbnail with caption “capt00000.rc2″.

Once your pictures are downloaded, you get the “Album” view, with the list of albums on the left pane, with the pictures in each album on the top pane and a larger view of a selected picture in the lower pane:

However this is where the GUi gets quirky. As soon as you click on the image (which I have to admit, I end up doing quite a bit – perhaps because I’m so used to it), the view changes to the thumbnail view:

Additionally, even in the picture preview mode, I find the navigation is quite difficult. There is a tiny arrow to navigate back and forth between your pictures (which is quite easy to miss, and it ends up taking you to thumbnail view). There is an option to view your pictures as a Slideshow (either all pictures in the album, or a selection), however; when I selected a few pictures to view a Slideshow, it only shows the first picture in the selection in the Slideshow!

There is a cool feature to find similar pictures based on a fuzzy search with an acceptable level of threshold. This fuzzy search is similar to one by ImgSeek and is based on the Fast Multiresolution Image Querying paper. When you select the option to find similar the first time, it asks to build an index. Once the index is completed, you can then select/modify the acceptable threshold and an image for which you want to find similar images:

In the screen capture above, there are 2 matches with 70% threshold. However, if the threshold drops down to 50%, it picks up ALL the images similar to this (even the one that was out of focus!):

Pretty cool! I suspect this feature will be used quite a lot! Another way of searching for similar pictures is by drawing a “sketch” for a fuzzy search. This search seems to be a search based on the pen size and colour (which probably determines the area over which the chosen colour is spread in all the images in the selected album):

Lastly, you can search for duplicate images within an acceptable level of threshold – a feature I find quite handy, especially since I end up shooting lots of pictures of the same subject, with slightly different angles and settings:

Going back to the Album view, there is a pretty decent context menu that allows you to edit the current image (either within digKam itself, or a host of external programs):

There are some pretty decent editing capabilities within digiKam – but more on those later!

My verdict? I think digiKam is the best open source photo management tool out there. It’s robust, powerful and best of all, it has API interface (which I have yet to try!). There also exists a more user-friendly interface, Showfoto – which most users will find very attractive. digiKam isn’t going to give PhotoShop a run for its money just yet, but it’s definitely a notch better than Picasa, and pretty close to LightRoom!

Fast forward 2 years. I figure it would have had a number of improvements, and I’d be able to use it. Sure enough, I install it (and am pleased that it’s available on Chrome as well – which I started using about a year ago). I decided to install it first of Firefox, just to see how things go.

• I was able to authenticate myself with blogger
• The interface seemed a bit better than before, even though the pane to write the post is still small and somewhat out of proportion
• On Firefox, copy / paste of images work, but not on Chrome
• When a post with images is published on Blogger on Firefox, images do not appear on Blogger.
• When a post has images added to it on Chrome, it asks for access to Picasa Web Albums. All images are then uploaded to Picasa and referenced in the blog. Wonder why this doesn’t happen on Firefox?
• While trying to resize the “Post Content” pane on Firefox, if you accidentally click on the ScribeFire icon on the status bar, you lose all edits that you have made to your post. Without warning
• The layout of the buttons (such as “Send to Blog”) gets screwed up as you try to resize the ScribeFire panes
• The small button above the ScribeFire add-on pane to close the add-on doesn’t always work on Firefox
• Since the button layout can get easily screwed up (at least on Firefox), you may find your post gets scheduled instead of being posted to blog
• Adding links to posts is still archaic. At the very least, it should capture contents from the clipboard, making it easier to add hyperlinks
• Users preferences should be remembered. For example, if an image is added to a post with orientation “middle”, it should remember that as the default choice subsequently
• Some keyboard shortcuts should be introduced for things such as adding hyperlinks. Where keyboard shortcuts already exist, these should be added to the tooltips
• Posting with ScribeFire on Chrome doesn’t always add a post to blogger. ScribeFire sometimes displays the posts as scheduled, but I couldn’t find them on blogger.
• ScribeFire doesn’t seem to be handling the posting schedule properly. Two posts on the same day were posted in reverse order

On my wish list, I would also like to see:

• A capability to add “References” to my post – this could simply be a bullet list of all links in the post (like another Firefox plugin, Zotero)
• Ability to integrate with search engines to suggest more references on-the-fly