Cafe Bucky

See 2.5a3 (Sumatra), and the Wiki for the latest bit on FlexiPhoto.

I would like to get a contract soon to do some programming. FlexiPhoto is evolving into a bit of an online portfolio (code is rough, as it’s still showing the “port” from PHP 4, but still, it’s a non-trivial bit of work). I’m up for a wide variety of gigs. See my resume.

I’ve been putting off the day of upgrading this server (daniel.org, flexiphoto.org) to PHP 5. In order to start demoing FlexiPhoto 2.5, I’m going to have to bite the upgrade bullet.

One thought is to get PHP5 to coexist with PHP4, and only make use of PHP5 for FlexiPhoto. I kinda don’t like this, as it just seems to put off the day of “doing it right”. WordPress and MediaWiki are supposed to run fine with PHP5, so it would seem that a well-planned “swap of mod_php” would be the way to go. We’ll see! (and of course, things are backed up first …)

If you see nothing more than a splash page sometime in the next few days (hopefully for a brief time), it’ll be due to the swaparoo.

Kilimanjaro - it’s still early days. I won’t write an “INSTALL” doc for another version or so. Just a snapshot.

Back in June I wrote No More Than A Mac Mini For Now

How completely silly of me. I wish to use these pixels to express my nearly unbridled lust for the new dual-processor, dual core core G5. The machine is ffffast! Yes, I know there will be an Intel box (eventually), but there’s also the idea of Getting More Done Now. Yes, it’s irrational, and yes, it’s just a shiny aluminum box. It’s one of those “if you don’t know, you’ll never get it, and if you do, no explanation is necessary” things.

I bet Susan will get one first. We both use our 17″ PowerBooks as our main machines, and with just 1gb of RAM, we’re in memory to disk swapping hell. We could buy more ram, but what’s the fun in that? She’s going to come back from PhotoPlus Expo all jazzed (rightfully so) about Aperture, and will need a hefty Mac to make good use if it.

And with Winter coming, it doubles as a heater!

Just a quick note to say that there are a couple things going on under the front page covers of FlexiPhoto.org. It’s such a soft launch, that I’ll make you copy/paste the URLs :-)

• Wiki @ http://www.flexiphoto.org/fpwiki (my next task)
• Blog @ http://www.flexiphoto.org/fpblog/

Downloadable code of a very early alpha does exist. You can ask me where that is, and I’ll provide a couple of notes on it. It’s only there as a stake in the ground — something to look at on a spare, non-production personal machine (no authorization yet, obvious bits of security to address, etc.)

From this point on, I will write most of the FlexiPhoto blog stuff over on that site, and will link to postings from here. I don’t want to overly clutter up my personal blog with the project …

I’ve been a busy bee, porting FlexiPhoto to PHP 5, and generally rearranging some of the internal structure of the app. I’ll be looking for people that want to try out a photo database. This goes beyond some of the simple galleries out there, in that:

• Photos are searchable by keywords, captions, and comments
• Collections are groups of one or more photos
• Photos can be moved amongst different Collections
• defining a new user interface is straighforward, and can coexist with other UIs. Each UI can be available in multiple languages
• Photos can be retrieved directly from FlexiPhoto, with arbitrary scaling and quality, so that they can be embedded in any web page (there’s a “get photo” url)
• Doing Flash and AJAX front ends will not be hard. I’ve already done a simple flash gallery that taps into FlexiPhoto.

I’ll have more to say on Monday, or before. The initial version of 2.5 is going to be very alpha. One motivation for this posting is to give myself an initial cut-off date for getting the new web site going. More soon.

My daughter and I picked up a couple of books to feed her voracious appetite for words (Eldest and Inkspell). We then ambled over to Dempsey’s to feed our own appetites for Beer (me), Roy Rogers (her), and various cooked animals.

Somehow the notion of the Harry Potter iPod came up, with its engraved crest and Audiobooks. We started wondering how the blind use iPods …

One of the gadgets I have is an iTalk. Imagine something like that capable of speaking menu items. Someone with little or no vision could use an iPod by pausing on menu items for a second, and the device would read the name of the playlist, artist, genre, song, etc. It would be text-to-speech navigation.

Sophia and I think it would be straightforward (though we haven’t the hardware tech chops to back that up!). Seems like a device you could plug into the top of an iPod, that could retail for under $100. Hey, Belkin & Griffin Tech - go for it!

Another Major AJAX App: Google Reader. This one is a feed reader.

update: looks like the servers hosting this are getting /.’ed, web2.0′ed, digg’ed, and generally hammered …(but ya just know Google will throw another 100 boxes at the problem)