Cafe Bucky

First off, Happy New Year!

I’ll be at Macworld SF next week, at least on Tuesday and another day. I don’t have a conference pass, so I’ll check out the exhibits and get to events to meet people. A couple of events are the TWiT broadcast, and Deb Shadovitz’s Party For The People. Those are on Tuesday. The Netter’s Dinner on Thursday looks like fun.

I’d enjoy meeting up with folks next week at MWSF, particularly if they’re into PHP/web-dev stuff, or photo databases, or splitting things up with Linux (what do you like to run on which platform, etc.) I’d also like to talk to folks that have had success with Ruby on Rails - I’ve read why’s (poignant) guide to ruby [1] and some other Ruby docs, and totally get it. Looks like an excellent thing to learn. If you know of a web-dev gig, check out my resume. If it seems like there could be a good fit, let’s meet up this week, or at MWSF.

[1] which is a bizarre bit of writing, sort of like Hunter Thompson writing a book about cooking. But there is good Ruby info in there.

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.

A diagram of core web development interests, with a few comments …

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Nope, I haven’t forgotten to write. I actually have tons of stuff to write about.

I am pretty sure I will be going to O’Reilly OSCON 2005 in August. I’m getting myself set to end a long detour, and get back to the types/forms of software development that have an active community (AJAX, FAME, LAMP). Part of that involves reconnecting with the tech and the people.

I enjoyed Portland in 2003, so it’ll be fun to get back.

This is a quick followup to the post Commands, Scripting, and Wading Through 10,000 Files. I had mentioned that I like to keep a copy of a checksum file, but I didn’t show a script that really takes advantage of pairs of them. “comparesnaps.pl” allows you to see changes across the same set of files over time …

Without further ado, here is a link to comparesnaps.pl

I’ve been very impressed lately with what’s happening in the AJAX world. There are so many new pieces of tech out there that are just waiting to be assembled in exciting ways.

Check out an edit-in-place example. Sure the TiddlyWiki does this, but this is also showing all sorts of drag and drop functionality. I especially like the Slideshow Sorter. Also see Walter Zorn’s site

Then take a gander at HoverSmack, which is combining search requests with DIV generation

And then watch Sam Stephenson’s movie, where he goes through the process of converting a form to use AJAX (with Ruby on Rails) in just a few minutes …

Now imagine these elements coming together is more polished, fleshed out web apps …

Another thing I’ll check out soon (I need to be discplined, and get back to my real work, and my WP plugin) is Lickr, which accesses Flickr content in pure HTML and JavaScript.

A good place to find out what’s going on in this space is on del.icio.us

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.

I wrote an article about PHP and Heredocs, which has just been published at ONLamp.com The gist of it is to use here documents to separate PHP classes, SQL statements and other resources, and HTML templates. The article evolved out of work I am doing on an upcoming web-based photo database. Enjoy!