I sent my friend Nam-ho a link to the new release of Lightbox JS, a slick Javascript based way to overlay images on a webpage. As far as a javascript onlly solution, it could be an impressive method for displaying a slideshow. In response, Nam-ho sent me to SimpleViewer, a much slicker Flash-based solution for image slideshows. It doesn't require much technical knowledge to put a SimpleViewer slideshow together, because it can plug into Picasa, iPhoto, Porta, and via kipi to a number of linux image management tools. There is also a php based web admin application to organize photos into albums. Finally, the data for the images used in an album is fed to the viewer via an XML data file. It would be pretty straightforward to hook SimpleViewer up to a dynamic data source. To check out the results, I made two albums.

Some of my favorite pictures.

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Simon, our beagle.

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Read Sandy's post about excellent investigative expose about the creation of horses in today's modern world. Make sure you read it by this Friday.

If you're using Internet Explorer, or are forced to use it at work, you should seriously consider switching browsers until Microsoft deems it time to release a patch to the latest Internet Explorer security hole. This one is pretty serious as it does not require any action on the user's part beyond visiting a compromised website. Once you visit such a site, spyware and keyloggers can be installed on your machine to steal personal information. From the washington post article linked above:

Rather than download a "beta" (read: potentially unstable) version of IE or wait around for Microsoft to issue a fix, a far better idea would be to ditch IE altogether (or only use it only when absolutely necessary). I use Mozilla's Firefox for everyday browsing, but your mileage may vary. There are other options, of course, such as Opera and Netscape, to name a couple.

More details and interesting links on Asa Dotzler's post titled Just think of it as an executable.