Archive for the 'Programming' Category

Python Upgraded

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

My sweep for libraries finally found Python 2.4 versions for everything I cared about, so I went ahead and upgraded to Python 2.4 on my Windows machine.
As much for my own reference as anyone else’s, the list of Python libraries I installed into my fresh Python 2.4 installation on my Windows XP machine:

pysqlite 2.1.0
wxPython 2.6.2.1 [...]

Sorting topologically for friendlier configuration

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006

I’ve been working on the bootstrap mechanism of service. One of the problems I’m addressing is the relative fragility of its configuration mechanism. Some services depend on other services (e.g. a “connection handler” service depends on both “authentication” and “database access” services). With the old configuration mechanism, [...]

Rounded corners round-up

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

I wanted some rounded corners for a web site I’ve been fiddling with. After some digging around the numerous rounded-corners tutorials out there on the web, I concluded I wanted:

No extraneous markup — just a div with a class that indlcated “rounded corners”
No JavaScript — all of the solutions I saw that used [...]

Feedshot and musing about Spreading out web UI

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

I was struck by an urge to resume working on my RSS fetcher this weekend. Or maybe by a bus. I’m minding my own business and suddenly it seems very important to finish building the fetcher. It’s still not complete but it’s a bit further along. I [...]

Is “Good enough” the enemy of “complete”?

Sunday, October 30th, 2005

I spent a bit more time on the RSS fetcher since my last post. Mostly I fixed some dup-detection issues and defined a more useful format for the message bus messages. It’s not really where I would call it “complete”, but it’s been good enough that I took rawdog out of [...]

RSS fetcher

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

I suppose it was only a matter of time. For various reasons, chiefly among them that I wanted to see how it’d work out, I’ve been working on an RSS fetcher. Sometimes I’ve had ideas for things to do with an RSS feed, but either it didn’t justify having another thing [...]

photos.xythian.com and Singleshot

Sunday, October 23rd, 2005

I moved my photo site back to a machine I control directly. It’s probably not going to stay there, but it does free me from debugging everything twice when I want to add features.
Since the last Singleshot release I’ve fixed a bunch of bugs in IPTC parsing (and added a fallback to use [...]

Awful patches

Tuesday, October 18th, 2005

Also, apparently something else is also behaving differently on NearlyFreeSpeech, breaking the ImageMagick processor.
I compensated with an awful hack and, just to be sure, pregenerating all of the view images so I can go to bed without, hopefully, leaving photos.xythian.com woefully broken.
I think NearlyFreeSpeech is going to have to go. They seem [...]

Fascinating discoveries

Monday, October 17th, 2005

A fascinating discovery, a while after I launched my shiny new site about which I was very proud: mmap is all well and good on Linux on my home machine and on Dreamhost, but apparently doesn’t work on NearlyFreeSpeech. This .. is problematic for photos.xythian.com.

Housekeeping

Monday, October 17th, 2005

Singleshot 2.0.1, featuring:

Add ~ expansion to singleshotinit.py –root
Fix situation when rewritebase is /
Fix RSS feed (publish_time is now a datetime always); RSS feed now works…
Modify month_dir so it creates datetimes at midnight rather than dates — dates can’t be sorted with datetimes.
Change limits on recent images to take advantage of pagination.
Fix handling in IPTC parsing [...]

Free Perforce

Sunday, September 25th, 2005

It looks like some time between when I last looked and now, Perforce changed the license on their free version to ‘2 users, 5 client workspaces’ from ‘2 users, 2 client workspaces’. Having 5 workspaces is probably enough for me. Given I’ve been sorely tempted in the past to just pay [...]

Reading CR2 and CRW metadata

Sunday, September 25th, 2005

I was curious about some statistics about the photos I’ve been shooting over the past few years and finally got around to begin writing a script to gather the stats I want.
I knew virtually all of the digital camera photos in my tree were from some Canon camera, so I focused only on decoding Canon [...]

Singleshot 2.0.0a3

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005

I slowly creep towards a ‘final’ 2.0.0 release.
It’s mostly bug fixes now based on reports from my legions of dedicated testers. In a3, the caching problem when in persistent mode is fixed. Also an issue with Apache 2 and I added pagination of the album pages to sidestep a problem when [...]

Singleshot FastCGI, other development

Sunday, September 11th, 2005

Encouraged by how fast Singleshot is when running as a persistant process but discouraged by the relatively scarcity of mod_python hosting, I wrote a FastCGI wrapper for Singleshot this weekend. It may be faster than the mod_python version. I feel better about it than the mod_python version, because I know exactly how [...]

Singleshot performance and other developments

Monday, September 5th, 2005

I was dismayed by how slow parsing all that XMP was in Singleshot when all I really wanted out of it was the keywords that the PIL IPTC parsing was failing to get right. So I dug up the IPTC spec and wrote my own parser. Now not only is it much [...]

Oops and more development.

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

I noticed the URLs in the photos.xythian.com RSS feed were broken (http// is not http://). Fixed, but changing the Guids on posts may confuse some RSS readers into thinking they’re all new posts. Oops.
I’ve been finishing up the rearranging of the Singleshot files and preparing to package it with some instructions for [...]

Deployability

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

I finally took the time to rearrange Singleshot so it was in a Python package (’singleshot’). The templates still aren’t quite in a home, but all the library code can now live in anywhere in the python path. I also moved most of the CGI code into a library and defined [...]

Further development on Singleshot

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005

I still don’t know what was causing the weird lossage on the new photos site but it appears to be related to performance. I’ve seen evidence of proxy servers between me and the app and they appear to get cranky if the request is taking too long. The evidence, [...]

Broken things

Sunday, August 28th, 2005

It is of course after I announce it that the new photo site starts losing in strange ways. Some requests don’t appear to complete .. sometimes.
Even requests that don’t go through Singleshot are affected. I’d wonder if my net is just flaky except I can repro it on [...]

New photos site

Sunday, August 28th, 2005

I’ve been working pretty steadily on Singleshot 2.0 and, more directly, a new revision of my photos web site. As soon as I’m sure things are running smoothly, I’ll package up the new Singleshot code and make release 2.0.
I’ll be turning the old gallery.xythian.com site into a bunch of redirects into the new site.
What’s [...]