One of the things that I learned at Bert's London workshop, back in the now dim and distant past, was the importance of setting yourself assignments when you're doing non-paid, personal, playing-around-and-learning-things work.

So, I need some assignments for the new year. Now, because I know that you're a twisted and inventive lot, I figured that you might be able to come up with some (it's not as if I'm not going to be coming up with some of my own; I just thought it'd be fun to crowdsource this a bit).

If you feel like suggesting an assignment to me you can do it in one of several ways:

• Leave a comment here
• Email me at blog [AT] grahambinns.com
• Contact me on identi.ca (@gmb) or Twitter (@codedragon)

Note: When I say "assignments" I'm talking about made-up, not-for-real, things-that-I-can-play-with assignments; nothing serious. I'm not accepting commissions here.

I'll post the best ideas here at some point in the future, assuming that there are some.

So, let's begin at the beginning, shall we?

In December, I'm due to go to UDS Jaunty, which is to be held in Mountain View, CA, at the Googleplex. Okay so far (except for the 10-hour flights, but what can you do). Now, I've booked my flights with Virgin Atlantic for the following reasons:

1. I've no wish to fly from terminal 5 at Heathrow, which I'd need to do if I flew with BA.
2. I've been told wonderful things about Virgin by the people who've used them in the past.
3. I've been told horror stories about BA (though I've never had a problem with them myself in all four flights of theirs that I've been on).
4. I'm an idiot, and didn't bother to check cabin baggage allowances beforehand.

Point 4 is the problem. Virgin Atlantic has a ridiculously small cabin baggage allowance of no more than 6kg (13lbs) for Economy travellers like me. BA, by contrast, has a cabin baggage allowance of 23kg. The problem is, of course, that I'm planning to take at least the following:

• Laptop + power brick
• Camera
• At least three lenses

The bag that I usually carry such stuff around in fits well within the dimensions laid out by Virgin (which are smaller than the standard guidelines, but we'll skip over that), but with all that packed I'm likely to be well over the cabin baggage allowance, probably by at least two or three kilos.

So, my questions for you, dear lazyweb, are as follows:

1. Does anyone know just how strict Virgin are about cabin baggage weight on a flight from Heathrow to SFO?
2. If I'm over weight with my cabin baggage, what happens? Am I sent to check-in and forced to pay an excess fee, or do I have to re-pack some of my items into my checked luggage (which, come on, I'm not really going to want to do with camera gear, am I).
3. Should I just not bother taking the camera (which would be agony for me considering that I take it just about everywhere with me and I was really looking forward to doing a lot of photography at UDS - alongside my work duties, natch ;))?
4. Is there another option?

Answers in a comment, please (OpenID required) or by email to blog this domain.

Dear Lazyweb,

I've been taking a lot of photographs for quite a while now. Since the start of the year I've taken nearly 10,000 shots, both good and bad, and I want to organise them. Now, being the hard-drive organiser that I am, I've got everything organised roughly by category (so, 'Events,' 'Holidays,' 'Wildlife' and so on) and then by date (the folders are named in the form "%Y-%m-%d $subject"). Importing stuff is a case of either dragging and dropping the folder from a memory card into the correct folder in Nautilus and then renaming it or, alternatively, using gThumb to move the photos from one lcation to another.

Once I've got everything on disk I want to be able to view the images, tweak them if necessary, put them in a slideshow and so on before uploading the ones I want to upload to Flickr or wherever else. And it's here that the trouble starts.

You see, whilst I'm a freedom advocate and I'd rather be using an Open Source tool to do what I want to do with my images, I find myself using Picasa.  Now, as it happens Picasa is a fantastic piece of software. It does what I want organisationally, allowing me to list my folders chronologically as well as allowing me to tag my images so that I can find a subset of all my photos with the click of a mouse. It has some excellent non-destructive editing tools (I'm a big fan of non-destructive phot editing because there's nothing worse than editing a photo and then coming back the next day and realising you could have done it better, if only you still had the original to work from). It even allows me to edit RAW files without putting them through a coverter first. Finally, it allows me to upload my images to my online Picasa albums and, via a plugin, to Flickr. Fantastic.

But it's not Open Source, and forme, whilst it's not a show-stopper, it's a big failing.

"Ah," I hear you cry, "but there's an Open Source alternative: F-Spot!"

Well, yes, dear reader, there is always F-Spot. But the truth is that I don't like it for a number of reasons:

1. It's in-built editing is pretty limited compared to what Picasa has to offer. Now, maybe that's an unfair thing to say, but the truth is that Picasa is pretty much the best free (as in beer) photo management software out there that I'm aware of (correct me if I'm wrong), so F-Spot really needs to compete.
2. It's written using Mono, and I'm not a big fan of Mono. Now, that's perhaps a slightly silly attitude to take - after all I don't complain if something is written in, say, C++ rather than C, but even now after several years and a lot of promises I'm not wholly certain that there isn't a Microsoft submarine patent lurking somewhere, ready to come and bite the Open Source community in its Mono-running arse.
3. It's slow. Often, when I'm doing an import, the F-Spot window will grey-out, which is Compiz's way of telling me that the app is not paying any attention to its UI (usually because it's busy).
4. It's a resource hog. When F-Spot is running my system runs at 30-50% CPU utilisation. Ask it to do anything - add a tag to a lot of photos for example - and that climbs to 50-80% utilisation. When you're using a laptop that means that your knees get uncomfortably hot.
5. Finally, a little bugbear really, but a significant one for me, who's already done some of his organisation with the whole folders-within-folders thing (which, lets face it, makes it easy to find things over a network): F-Spot doesn't let you view your photo folders chronologically or, indeed, at all. Everything seems to be lumped together in one big group that you then have to comb through. Though there's a time-line feature at the top of the index view it really doesn't when you know exactly what date and subject to look for.

So my question, dear lazyweb, is this: Is there an Open Source solution that's as good as Picasa? Is there a tool out there that will allow me to do what I do now in Picasa (the most important thing for me is the editing toolset, which is pretty comprehensive bar a few features that you really need the Gimp for, such as healing blemishes) but which is something with which I can happily tinker in my spare time?

If there isn't, I'm not massively concerned, at least not yet. I think Picasa's a fantastic piece of software and, were Google to ever open source it (even better if they were to make it cross platform rather than having it run on Wine) I'd be happy as a clam. I'm even open to the idea of trying to write my own Picasa/F-Spot replacement at some point, although I confess that I'd have to do a significant amount of learning to be able to produce something useful (though that said that's the beauty of the OSS community: someone out there will know how to do what I want to do; I just have to find them).

I await your answer, dear lazyweb, with bated breath.

I can't be bothered to comment on this story (I'm busy finding new ways to not do things that I should be doing like tidying the office). But it's okay, because Warren Ellis has already done so, and that's far more entertaining.