An extended post responding to James Gosling’s Java is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby, or C# (that site, java.sys-con.com, is the worst I’ve enountered for quite a while with regard to ad content — annyoing pop-up DHTML ads not caught by Firefox’s pop-up blocker, a million flashing, blinking, and whirling ads. awful): I [...]
I’ve been working on an update to my homegrown RSS aggregator for a while now. It’s been “nearly” ready for a while, but it took me time to convince myself it was actually ready. It’s funny how quickly I become relatively conservative about pushing out updates to a tool that’s in use, even if it’s [...]
The other day I wrote about a script to simplify GPS plots for plotting polylines using Google Maps. The momentum from that finally propelled me to learn enough about this stuff to be able to have the script output this: (The inlined image is resized to fit into my WordPress layout, it links to the [...]
I’ve been storing the raw data from each HTTP my RSS fetcher makes so I could run tests in the future with real data when I revise my processing code. The future is now. I’m entirely glad I kept all this data (around 7 gig) because it really helps to have lots of real-world data [...]
I was reading Ryan’s post about Google Maps and could not resist hacking together a relatively simpleminded track simplifying script. It reads a GPX file and prints out the JavaScript necessary to plot the track using the Google Maps API. Its use of the Google Maps API is pretty simpleminded (it just centers on the [...]
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 [...]
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, the order these services were specified in the [...]
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 [...]
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 implemented a bunch of infrastructure to allow me [...]
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 cron and made this [...]
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 fetch the feed (since [...]
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 XMP [...]
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 fine [...]
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.
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 [...]
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 for it for my [...]
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 [...]
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 is pointed [...]
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 many instances will [...]
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 faster (since I [...]