Cafe Bucky

This is a quick list of a few projects, past and present.

• FlexiPhoto is the photo database I yap about all the time. Want a simple gallery with search? keywording? just want a browsing interface? Let me know of any feature requests.
• Canned Gallery is a complement to FlexiPhoto, and also a standalone. You can download it from the lower portion of the FlexiPhoto downloads page, or just save it from one of the demos
• ThereThen addresses are the idea of using a URI to express Location & Time. The link acts as an alias for an existing (or potential) web resource. One use would be to search for photos taken last weekend in San Francisco. This is shelved for the moment. It will be released in 2006 in two forms: a standalone example, and as a feature in FlexiPhoto.
• sub-posts - shelved till 2006.
• Grabchars - this is still out there?! wow. Grabchars is a C utility, and is used in shell scripts to get one or more keystrokes. There are default answers, prompts, timeouts, and input masks. I wrote it in 1991, and it’s mentioned in the book “Unix Power Tools”. If someone has done recent work on it, let me know.

An inevitable question I’ll hear over the next few weeks or months will be “So, Where Do You See Yourself, Five Years From Now?”. There are many answers to that, and it would take too long to list them here.

So here’s one of the answers, focusing on “my personal tech projects”, as opposed to “getting a degree” or “travel” or “write a book”, etc. …

I’ve written about FlexiPhoto quite a bit. What I haven’t gone into is how ThereThen Addresses and Sub-posts tie in. The condensed version is: They Do! There’s an overall concept of being able to click on a link, and have a draggable window pop up that has multiple choices of where to go next, where those choices have to do with relevant Locations and/or Time.

Here’s an example to help out. We’ll deal with looking up photos:

• Click on a location within Google Maps
• That pops up a draggable window with a photo from FlexiPhoto .. one that is closest to that location, and closest to the current time
• The window has a few controls in it, which allow searching by date, or a range of dates, or keywords/phrases, etc.

To sum up, over the next few years, I’d like to work on two front ends for searching photos: one is by Map, and one is by Calendar. The two complement each other very well:

• Map - clicking on a point brings up a Calendar with days/date-ranges indicated. The hotspots on the calendar have photos, collections, or exhibits
• Calendar - clicking on a day brings up a Map of points that indicate relevant photos, collections, etc.

Of course, with a grant, this will take a year or less, and then I’ll have another 4 years left to answer the question! Nah, I don’t seriously believe that. There will be iterations on the theme. My thought is that combining the elements of Location and Time for searching in a web app (and my keen interest is for searching photos) is something that hasn’t been explored enough. A lot will done outside of the context of traditonal forms.

Slight update: obviously a prototype or draft version of all the functionality bundled together isn’t going to take a full-time year. I’m thinking of production quality AJAX & Flash front ends, testing, docs, and so on — that’ll take some time.

I’ve got to make a decision in the next day or so as to whether or not I’ll keep 3 domains:

• ThereAndThen.org
• ThereAndThen.net
• ThereAndThen.com

If you’re into Geo-enabled apps, these may be especially useful. The current content will get moved to daniel.org. I would prefer to get a little ton of $$ for these, but a really good cause or sob-story might work. dls-tt-2005 at daniel dot org.

I started writing this blog in March 2003. If Usenet posts count for anything, I’ve been writing something online since the early 80’s. No stranger to online expression …

But sticking to JavaJoint for a sec, this is the 200th post. I think I’ll do 200 more.

Some personal favorites, somewhat grouped:

Blogging / Context:

Context, Blogs, and Chameleons - where I compare the process of writing a blog to other online forms that have more focus. Something else along the same lines is Nostalgic for Usenet, looking for UseWeb - and sometimes I’ll revisit the theme, such as when I went to NY Bloggers talk: NYC Bloggers make me think of future.

ThereThen Addressing & FlexiPhoto:

There are a number of posts where I mention my ThereThen addressing idea (urls that express time and space). One entry point is: ThereThen: How Important Is Altitude? FlexiPhoto is my web-based photo db, and in my grand plans, I will tie it together with ThereThen addressing. I did implement the notion of how photo collections span time

Looking Back:

I sometimes get nostalgic, such as An Echo or I’ll think of old music such as Camper Van Beethoven.
But also love random memories, such as Snow Kidding.

New York:

Thoughts of my New York experiment started taking form around August, 2003, when I wrote: Big Apple Plans. My “do I think I want to live in New York” experiment started, and this was one of my first impressions. I do talk about the weather sometimes: Brr York City and Winter Splinter.

Geeky:

I pine for super geeky gizmos - but then I’ll balance it out with a someday tech vacation - sometimes I want a different sort of tech, such as my Stratocaster.

There’s much else I could touch on, such as a constant desire to travel, or fave books or movies. I’ll do my best to keep branching out with these entries.

There’s been a nagging feeling at the back of my mind, as projects have cropped up to consume time.

“When am I going to get back to FlexiPhoto?” (my web-based photo database project)

One of the projects has been writing up the idea of URLs that express location and time. That work is at ThereAndThen.org. There is enough there to explain how it all works, what constitutes a valid TT URL, and so on.

ThereThen originated as a feature I want to put into FlexiPhoto. It’s the idea of searching photos (and making transient “exhibitions”) by location and/or time. Once I came up with TT addressing, it sucked me right out of programming, and took on a life of its own! In this case, it was a very good thing, because the concept applies to many things outside of photos, and taking the time to write about it helped me generalize it, and make it adhere to established standards. It will be a feature in FlexiPhoto, though not one of the first ones I am getting to this month.

I’m back on FlexiPhoto now, and happy to be there. I’ll post more in the coming weeks and months about its progress. The real brief description is that it is a web-based photo database (PHP, MySQL, Apache). A prototype version used to be up on one of my sites - it now handles multiple UIs, languages, and much more. One strong point for FlexiPhoto is the ability to blend into an existing set of web pages, without “looking” like a database underneath. For instance, it easily enables navigation around a collection (previous, next, bigger, smaller, up to collection) without cluttering up a page with arrows (though you can certainly have a bunch of visual doodads if you want)

The first customer for FlexiPhoto will be my wife, who is a great photographer and digital image consultant (an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop). She’s at SusanPrice.com Give her a visit!

Yes, I still think about ThereThen Addresses quite a bit! I am starting to review an unrelated tech book manuscript (paying gig, I like that), so I will have even fewer cycles for TT for the next week or so. It’s still something that I want to at least document.

• Creating ThereThen Addresses (updated, but still rough)
• Resolving ThereThen Addresses (brand new, in progress)

Any feedback is welcome. I will make pretty HTML later. For now, I am dumping thoughts into Emacs. If I’m hired or otherwise don’t have time for ThereThen in the near term, at least someone will have my notes for reference.

A new, rough document is up:

Creating ThereThen Addresses

The thought is hitting me that I should put all of the documentation into a Wiki. I am afraid of going off on a detour though, as I just want to get this written up, get demo code out there, and see how it goes. On the other hand, topics such as creating and resolving addresses can go from very straighforward overview to the more involved details (and I lean towards wanting to put more detail in)