Yesterday morning I rolled out of bed at around 6:30am, hastily chucked some clothes on, grabbed my camera equipment and laptop and left the house.

After cursing that I hadn’t filled the car with petrol earlier, I filled the car with petrol and then made my way to St Kilda Pier to meet Trav and spend some time photographing anything and everthing that would take our fancy.

Trav and I spent around half an hour shooting a number of shots at St Kilda Pier before proceeding into the city to meet Damien “under the clocks” at Flinders St station. I managed to find a free parking spot on the street while Trav opted for the comparative safety of a parking garage.

Before long, we were again snapping shots of anything and everything that caught our respective eyes. We made our way down Hosier Lane, which I’d never actually seen first-hand — Hosier Lane is legendary for it’s graffiti, if you weren’t aware.

Next, we wandered over to Parliament House and some gardens which don’t appear to have a name. We gave Damien a quick lesson on shutter speed which he seemed to like, as there was a fountain nearby and catching water splashes mid-air is always a fun thing to do.

About an hour later, we’d gone up to Carlton Gardens and back down again to Bourke St, where we stopped to have a delicious pancake lunch.

Rested, we walked back to Flinders St where I grabbed the car and drove to the Shrine of Remembrance while the others walked (yeah, I’m lazy). Yet more frames were shot, and we were reminded to take off our hats while in the Shrine.

Damien wanted to check out the Botanic Gardens, so we did. We were becoming a bit tired by this time though, so a reasonable amount of walking was taking place but not much shooting. After sitting at the lake for a few minutes we decided that seven hours of walking and shooting was probably more than enough for the day.

I made my way back to the conveniently-parked car (see, it was a good idea!), drove home, and collapsed on the couch.

I had a great day and hope we can do it again soon — I think the walking to shooting ratio was a bit low (too much walking, not enough shooting) but it was still fun. I’ve calculated that we walked around 8-10km which is quite slow over seven hours.

You can see what I shot if you like (I’ll upload more as I get time). You can see Trav’s too and if he uploads any you can see Damien’s.

At work the other day, I happened to stumble across totally free software called “Wildfire“. Wildfire is an instant messaging server which provides a service similar to MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger and so on.

The biggest difference is firstly that Wildfire uses the totally open source “Jabber” protocol (also called the XMPP Messaging protocol). There are many clients which can connect to the Jabber protocol — Miranda, Trillian, GAIM and many other clients designed specifically for Jabber.

I installed the server — which happens to be totally Java-based which means it’ll install on pretty much operating system — on one of our old, slow development servers and after a while configuring it, I managed to setup an account for myself to connect, but this method is pretty cumbersome and doesn’t really improve on our old method, which was simply using the external AIM service.

The reason I downloaded this software though, is that it supports LDAP and AD integration; this means that you can connect it to an existing network and — in many cases — it will use the already existing user accounts and groups!

I created a group on our Windows network of users I wanted to access the Wildfire server, and the added the already-existing user groups that they were in (i.e. “Finance”, “Human Resources”, etc) to the group with access to Wildfire and after a but of mucking around, all the users and the groups in which they reside is published to any user on our network the first time they connect.

What does all this mean? Any time a new user is created, we simply add them to their groups as normal, and then add them to the Wildfire-access group (if desired), then they can use their normal username and password to connect, and the first time they connect everyone else will appear in their contact list.

Another benefit is that since the server is internal, we aren’t relying on the external Internet to be working, and we have complete control on how everyone accesses it. With a server plugin, I have even been able to add “presence” views to our staff phone list, which means that there is an icon beside everyone’s name which shows whether their Instant Messaging client is offline, online or online but away. Assuming everyone uses it as they should, this is a really useful way to see if someone is available before calling.

I’ve gone on rambling for quite a while, but having enterprise-wide Instant Messaging service which requires very little extra effort to manage and maintain, is much faster and doesn’t require an external service is pretty exciting to me… which reminds me of those TXU ads.