Cafe Bucky

I have updated the FlexiPhoto site

There is a new preview version there which fixes a lot of bugs, looks a lot nicer, and reflects some input I’ve had from outside my own little bubble.

If you would like to check it out, upload a few pictures (assume this is temporary), and so on, then email me and I’ll let you know where to find it.

I don’t want to open up access to the general public at this point, because I am not looking to get into the hosting business. I’m not keen on having random folks uploading random photos of randomly varying legality either. I’m just sharing where I am at this point, and would love to get any feedback.

I’m looking into how I will handle the source licensing for FlexiPhoto. My inclination is that I want to Open Source it. I also want to make an exceedingly comfortable living jet-setting all over the globe, doing custom FlexiPhoto installations and custom work for non-profits, museums and glitterati alike!

The truth is that there are a number of niche areas for FlexiPhoto (Photograher/Artist web sites, small scale photo stock agencies, photo catalogs, HR departments, ad infinitum …)

Something that would help in the near-term: I’d love to find someone that has strong CSS/Design chops, AND who has a handle on how to work in an LAMP environment (or Mac with MySQL/Apache). For the moment, this means being able to run a couple of shell commands, and be comfortable editing (X)HTML bits within a here document. I can pay for a few hours of help (mostly showing me things I am doing wrong/could do better) This would NOT fit a designer that is used to strictly GUI, static html + CSS.

Yo Jerry! Ya out there?

p.s. btw, yeah, FlexiPhoto is ambitious. Anything worth doing is. I wouldn’t have taken it on if I knew I couldn’t chip away at bits of functionality I want.

The last few days have been very pixel oriented. There’s desire, and reality. Desire is: cameras I don’t have to clean, a movable type template that doesn’t get wierd on me when I use a large thumbnail size, and something saner than CSS.

And then there is reality.

I decided to try some photos with my 80-400 zoom on the D1. As a quick refresher, the Nikon D1 is very much an SLR, with the image sensor tucked away behind the mirror. It attracts little specks of dust. When you have a high f-stop, like f16 or so, the little specks start getting really obvious. I cleaned and cleaned, and snapped and snapped. Yuk, spots. I hear that using an AC Adapter on the camera to keep the mirror up while cleaning (as opposed to manually holding the shutter down on “bulb”) is the bees knees. We have one – In California. I’ll get to try it when Snapper Susan gets here. In the meantime, it’s going to be a perfect time to work on shallow depth of field shots …

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I am so happy to be in New York. But I won’t be getting out and about too much today. I’m wrestling a bit with my old pal, Cascading Style Sheets. The picture here (popup version should be legible) is an example of what I am trying to get together. I know enough CSS to be dangerous, but always get thrown a bit when it comes to nesting DIVs. Captions and Keywords are just containers for text. A collectionContainer holds collectionElements (individual photos and their info). Earlier on in developing FlexiPhoto, I had a set number of columns. I have chucked that for this page [1], and let collectionElements flow, one after another, adjusting as a page is a resized. A goal for today is to get this nailed.

[1] for the default look and feel (UI) … There can be many. I’m just trying to nail down what elements are available on a given page. Good thing I’m going to a web designers Meetup tomorrow night. I’ll be like a goldfish wandering into a bowl of Piranhas :-)

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.

FlexiPhoto now exists outside of my house!

What the heck is it?

FlexiPhoto is a web-based photography database. It’s meant to give site admins a powerful way to run a photo db on their own servers, capable of handling multiple languages and UI’s at the same time. You can also install it multiple times on the same server, making it easy to have separate databases.

It’s a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP app. I will get into a much more thorough overview later this month.

I’m not ready to really show it off in free-for-all mode yet, but am willing to give folks a test installation on my server that they can play around with. The usual caveats apply (don’t give out the link, don’t post anything stupid and/or illegal, realize that I am under no obligation to hang on to your photos, etc.) You can email the Flexiphoto 2.0 (Avocado) address for more info.

I expect to be in alpha/beta for a few months. The primary push lately has been to get it ready to show to people when I go to New York. That made me put off some major bits of functionality that have potential to be destabilizing (example: an “exhibit” is a gathering of photos which may be from different collections. Another: user/group permissions & preferences)

That’s it. I’m setting up another Linux environment @ home to be a pseudo-production environment (he says, eyeing an old iMac that’s already running Debian).

The day started well enough. Sun out. Birds chirping. My Russian Blue feline Tasha taking up residence on the verandah … Dizzy Gillespie singing “On The Sunny Side of the Street” … Fixed a couple of Perl bugs. Rice Crispies. Hot Coffee (today being so special, I treated myself to one of the clean mugs)

Ah, but then I actually tried to get something more significant done. Copied a preview version of FlexiPhoto up to my server (I have my own Penguin 1U Linux box, sitting in the Sonic.net colo facility up in Santa Rosa, CA) … go through a simple test .. choke! This install of PHP never got all of the image-creating goodies! And … exhale. Kinda hard to show a photo db that can’t resize an image, eh?

Oh well, it was an old enough version of PHP where I needed to upgrade anyway. I was all psyched up to have the day go one way, and now it’s leading me down the path of Neverlasting Upgrades (because you upgrade something, but the effect never lasts long enough).

So that’s my story today. Upgrades all around! Drinks on the house! And an iMac running Debian at home that will mirror my colo box, so I have something to do test runs on. Yeah yeah, I know this from all my time in production environments, etc. I was just being hopeful this morning that it would work :-)

I’m following up from yesterday’s entry FlexiPhoto Collections, Spanning Time. I made a lot of progress on it.

I was writing about the idea of specifying starting and ending dates for a photo collection. An easy UI to this from a browser is to have HTML select menus (popup menus, whatever you want to call them this week). I do have that in FlexiPhoto, and that bit is very straightforward.

The more interesting bit is to provide a text input field for users to specify a range of dates. Why? So that they can copy & paste dates from elsewhere, as one example …

So I wrote most of the date parsing code yesterday, and am doing my best to let users be absolutely lazy in how they specify ranges of dates. (trying to live up to the “Flexible” in “FlexiPhoto” …)

Here’s some of my test suite, and the results:

"2002-02-03, 2005": 2002-02-03 to 2005-12-31
"2002-02-03, 2005-9": 2002-02-03 to 2005-9-30
"2002-02-03": 2002-02-03 to 2002-02-03
"1999-05, 2001-1": 1999-05-1 to 2001-1-31
"2001": 2001-1-1 to 2001-12-31
"2000-5, now": 2000-5-1 to 2003-09-04
"now, 2004": 2003-09-04 to 2004-12-31
"now": 2003-09-04 to 2003-09-30  // bug!

I’m aware of a couple of bugs, but it’s encouraging to get most of the obvious cases worked out so quickly. I’ll no doubt hear from someone wondering about hours, minutes, and seconds. I’ll just say that I am writing it in such a way where the door is definitely open to that.

While munching on my over-processed apple cinnamon cheerios this morning, trying to work out whether they were very crunchy, or merely stale, I pondered a FlexiPhoto programming bit I’m working on …

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