My father and I got our 5D MkIIs on Friday and we could hardly wait for the batteries to charge. He took his to SF to test its vaunted low-light performance and posted this 60-second 1080p clip (along with other resolutions) on his SmugMug site: Click to watch it auto-sized for your monitor or check...

SmugMug wins Best Design at The Crunchies 2007 by Luca Filigheddu Photography I loved the idea behind The Crunchies even before we won for Best Design last year so I’m glad to see their triumphant return. And I see that nominations are open for 2008! It looks like we’re probably eligible...

Network.com setup in Vegas, Thumper disk bay, green by Shawn Ferry As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a few reasons: I wanted to see what the “...

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim. I’m a Linux geek,...

Man, to say I’m excited about this would be a major understatement. We’re huge Apple fanboys over here, so when we got accepted to the first wave of SDK developers at Apple, we were stoked. Shizam went to town almost immediately and after a few months of hard work, SmugShot was born. (An...

SmugMug’s API now supports OAuth! We actually rolled out support a few weeks ago, but our documentation has turned into such a mess, I delayed announcing it. Finally, though, I just couldn’t keep quiet - I’m so excited I just had to tell someone! So I’m sorry the docs are all...

Everyone knows that SmugMug is a heavy user of S3, storing well over half a petabyte of data (non-replicated) there. What you may not know is that EC2 provides a core part of our infrastructure, too. Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and hi...

photo by: Local Sports Online My poor little sister just got totally destroyed by awful Delta employees. She was trying to fly cross-country for the first time with her 4 month old baby. Disaster ensued, and Delta totally blew the customer service. Money quote? “I asked [the supervisor] if she...

  Sam “Shizam” Nichols, creator of the video player, donning his SmugMug Hero persona. See it in HD. The state of video codecs online has been a mess and there’s been no clear choice, making it very difficult to do awesome video sharing. Luckily, all of that changed when Adobe...

I realize I’m already way behind blogging about other new Amazon Web Services features like the recent EC2 release with static IPs, availability zones, and user kernels not to mention the new block storage service.  I’ll still try to get to them - but I didn’t want to wait for thi...