Cafe Bucky

New York tomorrow. Mind in full anticipation, and in constant Traveling Soundtrack mode. 5 weeks away. Big Trip.

Got everything ready to pack, but haven’t figured out what bag gets most of the equipment (cameras, power adapters, two laptops, a keyboard, and so on). I’ve traveled enough now to have a pretty good idea of what I will actually use. That’s the problem: being interested in photography and computing means power adapters and all sorts of bulky, heavy gear. I should have been a clarinet pro, or perhaps a Blues Harp (harmonica) musician. Less to pack.

A pox on the power adapter people! Every single one has to be heavy, bulky, and just a little tweak different from every other one out there. I have about 8 of them on this trip … It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya!

Oh, and it’s getting cold there. Jackets++

But you know what? Once I get there, unpack, get some sleep, and get out there, I think I’m gonna love it. All sorts of pilgrimages to take: The J & R store, Apple SoHo, B & H Photo, The MoMa, P.S.1, The Met, and others. Lots of photo/linux/blog meetings to get to as well. A main goal is just to get out there, every single day.

Gotta go pack.

I just glanced at a headline on CNN.Com:

“U.S. troops teach Iraqi kids American football”

Somehow, this is backwards. It should be the Iraqi kids that teach the U.S. troops Soccer! The thought of us imposing Americanisms into a country that is very leery of us strikes me as wrong. Even if it’s something so seemingly innocent as American-style football.

Soccer is THE worldwide sport. The subtle point to be made is that even at the level of interacting with local kids, we should be showing a little bit of international flair. The kids aren’t necessarily going to understand the difference, but I can picture Iraqi adults rolling their eyes over this. It’s a bit like setting up McDonald’s tents, or some other form of “in your face Americana”.

I could be wrong on this. Perhaps I should have a Coke and a Smile?

Earlier this morning, I was going to entitle today’s entry something akin to “Apples”, but then had one of those “oh no, not now” moments. One of those Tech Freak Outs. I got a new 17″ Powerbook yesterday, and spent lots of time configuring a development environment, and otherwise bringing it up to speed. Another computer in my house seemed to take exeption to this … You have to bear in mind that I just saw The Godfather, and was up way too late last night watching The Godfather, Part II. Could the vibes from a movie turn my study into a Silicon Sicily? Stage set now? Ok then.

Like I said, I spent lots of time on “Manhattan”, my new PowerBook, setting up things like MySQL, PHP, Fink, my usual Mac OS X environment, and so on. This Mac is awesome. For you Crystal Method fans, It’s Wild, Sweet, And Cool. I had Joy mixed in with a sense that the trip to New York looms ever higher on the horizon of my calendar, and there’s tons of stuff to attend to (yes, I know I’m writing a blog entry - I can stream of conscious this out in 10 minutes, so like, dontcha interrupt me Scooter!)

Rewind two days. A goal of mine is to show FlexiPhoto running on TWO laptops, doing the Wifi thing with each other, Linux and Mac OS X. I spent some time ditching Red Hat on my Toshiba 3110 laptop, so that I could feed it some Debian. Astute 3110 afficionados will immediately flash on the “whoa, hardly anyone buys the insanely expensive Toshiba external CDROM drive for that!”. That’s right, I don’t have one of those, so booting off of a CDROM was out of the question. It does have a floppy drive …

… and so does my main Linux box, Germany, which I used to make a couple of boot floppies for the Toshiba … being temporarily thrown off by the fact that “rescue.bin” is a boot disk, and “root.bin” isn’t. That made me create extra floppies, as I started wondering if I had a couple of bad ones. The weakest part of Debian is the install, and the docs for it.

Fast Forward. Bleary-eyed 3 hour sleep grey morning old coffee sawdust granola. Went to boot Germany, walked out of the study, came back.

Hmm, still booting. Wait. Isn’t that the initial Nvidia graphics card identifier screen? Ok, watch. More messages. Wait. Isn’t that the initial Nvidia graphics card identifier screen? Oh oh.

Now, being a somewhat experienced Silverback, I have cross-backups of my development stuff. Off-site, even.

Still, having a machine not boot, right before a trip, and right after I got a new machine, and right after thinking about all of the treachery in The Godfather … well, it just doesn’t seem bloody likely, right? Gotta be something else, right?

And so it was - I had left a floppy in Germany (from the whole Toshiba/Debian party), and that floppy wasn’t one of those nice bootable kids from a good family. No error messages, either. Germany would have looped all day. Eject it. Boot. Relief!

Ah, what a great evening.

I was savoring a Guinness, and decided to get my mind off Trip Prep for a while, and see what was on TV …

The Godfather. Perfect! I missed the first 20, but with my faithful pal TiVo, I started recording and headed for the kitchen.

Pasta. Sauce. Zinfandel - Red, of course. My wife walked in, saw me eating, saw a scene where the family was eating, and bust up laughing. It’s ok. I think it’s a Guy Thing to love this movie. It’s got so much: love, sadness, violence, vendettas, treachery, a feeling of family.

“In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”

One of the best movies ever made. Pass the cannoli.

The hilarious machinima series Red Vs. Blue has an excellent Public Service Announcement #5. It takes aim at SCO and the RIAA, without ever having to say so.

Brilliant!

I’ve been working on, or at least thinking about, a few threads revolving around work, digital imaging, photography, and relocation for some time now. All of the little roads are starting to converge. October’s the month, and New York is the place!

FlexiPhoto is available to preview if someone wants to check it out (and will be public soon). I will be launching my personal photography site pretty soon, which is SnapSmith.com. SnapSmith will be an example of what FlexiPhoto looks and feels like in a straightforward photographer site. It’s going to be about the photos, not necessarily the tech. My wife will be migrating her site, SusanPrice.com, to use FlexiPhoto; so that will become yet another example.

I have given thought to the work/demo front. I just ordered a new 17″ 1.33ghz PowerBook! I’ll have it sometime next week, and will quickly get it together with Apache/MySQL/PHP/ImageMagick, so that no matter where I go, I can at least have a standalone web site to show FlexiPhoto. I was way overdue to upgrade my laptop, and wanted something with a big screen that’s going to resize images in a snap. It’ll also be my development machine while I’m in New York. I’ll also have my little Toshiba 3110 Linux laptop along, which I’ll set up to wirelessly do FlexiPhoto browsing off of the Mac (mixed environment in my messenger bag? check!)

Another thread over the next month is just getting out and meeting programmers, photographers, people interested in photo cataloguing, and so on. I’m looking forward to making some new contacts.

For now, all roads lead to New York. I am at once hopeful that the trip will bear some fruit, and also mindful that sometimes it may be Big City, Closed Doors, and perhaps a disbelieving face or two. A typical day should involve meetings, some photography, and some programming. I have no illusions that any of this is going to be easy, but I happen to have the time to do it, am in great health, and just don’t want to look back later with a big sense of “what would have happened? what if I had?”, etc. Gotta take time to really check things out ever so often!

Hey, it’s my 100th blog entry! I don’t have any pictures of ticker tape parades on hand, so the next best thing is to toss in a coffee mug from New York. Ok, it’s not quite the “next best thing”, but my camera phone is super convenient for quicky mug shots (bluetooth upload).

For me, a blog is a nice outlet for writing, and that makes me happy. I don’t care if I’m on someone’s linky list. I’m doing it for me, Baby! Some of the time, I do pull some punches. I do scrap some ideas because it’s pretty cinchy to write a Rant. Life’s too short, most of the time (sometimes a rant can be fun. I think Jamie Zawinsky has more of a handle on the art than most.) I try to write about something positive, or funny. When I get lucky, I try to write something positively funny. Not likely to happen today, at this rate …

I recently got a comment on an old posting about Rubens Barichello, one of my favorite Formula One drivers. In a way, it’s a reminder to me to write more on F1, and on EPL Soccer. So I will! Getting a comment on such an old posting is also a nice reminder about the sort of net.history one puts out there - Each post can come back to visit.

Going forward, I want to get the look of this site sorted out, and will be using more photography. This blog will start grabbing photos out of my FlexiPhoto database at some point in the next month, as a demo of how to embed images with arbitrary scaling and quality. I do want to get away from a wall of text, day after day. I really do have more of a multimedia leaning than I have shown.

To those that have dropped by, thanks! I’ll keep writing, and will strive to keep evolving, and never get complacent. I’m in no rush to get to #200, and will enjoy the journey there. Cheers.

A couple of entries ago, I was going on about the security problems of OpenSSH. In the back of my mind, I knew there was an update I needed to do to Movable Type (which despite all of its wonderfulness, has a really primitive approach to going from one minor version to another). Just did that. I won’t presume that everything is unbreakable though. Us Grizzled Silverbacks know better than that!

So that takes care of the words.

But here’s the fun one … PHP and handling images. What a rigamarole. I had upgraded to PHP 4.3.3 a few days back. It has some security patches, so that makes me feel good about that aspect and all … I’m doing my duty to protect my server, future clients, and am showing some due diligence. I wipe a patrotic tear away from my face as my installation script churns along to the background strains of “The Stars And Stripes Forever”.

But looky here, the new PHP can’t handle not-so-large images. I’m not talking about 15 meg large. I’m saying it gets memory errors on a 700k file. With a nod to Dr. Suess, This PHP New, it will not Do, it is Through. I will Compile Anew.

In other words, considering that I am developing a Photo Database, having PHP choke on a garden variety JPEG is baaa-aaa-aad. I scouted around, trying snapshots from snaps.php.net, trying the latest “stable” build. Broken Broken Broken. imagecreatefromjpeg() becomes ImageNahGonnaDoIt().

I momentarily thought about trying PHP5, which is very much beta. But if I want to demo FlexiPhoto next month in New York, having a beta app with a beta language doesn’t seem like a good plan. Folks would pat me the back, give me points for being so bleeding edge, and say “grab your umbrella, ’cause it’s time for you to leave Right Now, Mr. PHP Crasher!”

Some alternatives that I considered:

• Call NetPBM apps through exec()
• Call ImageMagick through exec()
• Install the PEAR imagick package, and call the ImageMagick API that way

I’m going for Curtain #3. I’m not a big fan of calling outside executables if I can help it. Michael Montero, who wrote the imagick package that lets PHP talk to ImageMagick, assures me it’s a good move. Rockin.

Of course, all of this means that my requirements list for installing FlexiPhoto will get a little more involved (will need ImageMagick, will need the PEAR package for calling it). For the target audiences, that will be fine.