SSL, Dynamic Flash Slideshows, and CF performance

Friday, September 17, 2004 OK, not that these are really related in anyway, but here are a couple things I've been looking for for a long, long time:

SSL

I've been looking for SSL for a long time? No, I know it's been there forever, but waaay too expensive. $800 on up per year, for a free site, like our church's? No way. Last week I Googled for free SSL (yeah, right), but found one for $20 a year: StarterSSL! Now we're talking! And now we're running SSL on logins to our church site. :)

Dynamic Flash Slideshows

Now, I haven't been specifically looking for this, but I've been trying to build a cross-browser HTML ASP+database driven slideshow for a long time, with pretty good success. There have been several drawbacks: big limitations in image positioning and scaling, lots of server roundtrips, and several behind-the-scene annoyances. Then I discovered Darshan Sawardekar's excellent (and aptly named) Easy Slideshow component. Darshan has created an incredibly well-built and surprisingly well-documented Flash slideshow tool built to read and XML list of files and their properties, then display them in a rich viewer environment. Very nice; thanks Darshan!

CompactFlash Speed Test Database

On another note, did you realize not all CF cards are created equal? Regardless of how fast your camera, your computer, or even your USB 2.0 connection are, you're limited in some way by the speed of your card. Check out Rob Galbraith's extensive database of test data, comparing cards in many popular cameras, as well as PC read speeds.

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