Tag: photos

Photos Are Back

Nick Momrik3 Comments

The Photos section of the site is back. It needs a lot of work, but at least it’s there again. I decided to only upload the “important” pictures from the old setup, but I’ll upload new ones as the days go by. It’s a nice and simple interface, which I really like. I’m using SPAM/iPAP to mange the photo albums and it works well. The software needs a lot of improvements, but those will come with time.

Some of the things I would like to see are:

  • Resizing of images on upload.
  • Saving images into folders based on the album, instead of one folder for all of the images.
  • Rotating of images based on EXIF data.
  • Use MySQL or some derivative instead of a flat database file.
  • Better ability for templating. The CSS should be moved out into a seperate file and PHP code should be allowed in the templates.
  • Deleting albums and images doesn’t work quite right yet.
  • Batch uploading. Currently I have to individually choose the images (maximum of eight). I would like to see an option where I could choose a folder and upload everything from it, or upload a zip file that would be unzipped once on the server.

The future looks bright for this piece of software as long as development doesn’t stop. 🙂

May Contain Peanuts

Nick Momrik8 Comments

PeanutsHave you ever looked at the wrapper of a Snickers bar or another candybar? They usually say “May contain peanuts” for whatever reason. Well, it looks like the airlines have taken it a step further with the little bags of peanuts that they give out on flights. Look at the last line of text in the image: “Produced in a facility that processes peanuts and other nuts.” Seriously…where would you expect a bag of peanuts to be produced? In a toilet paper factory?


The Photos Are Missing

Nick Momrik7 Comments

They weren’t kidnapped, I just got fed up with using Gallery to manage my photos, so I ditched it. I’ve found something that looks pretty sweet and should be a nice replacement. Markku is developing a PHP-based application for publishing photos and I like the looks of it. He is either caling it iPAP or SPAM, I’ve seen it called both in different places. Personally I like iPAP better…SPAM is used for too many other bad things, such as that nasty canned “meat” and the flood of messages in my INBOX. Now if only I could get my hands on a test version of his software. 💡

Look for the photos to be back up and running when I get back from my trip.

Gallery Upgrade

Nick Momrik1 Comment

I just finished upgrading the Photos section of the site to use Gallery 1.4.2. The only reason I upgraded was because they had found a pretty big security hole in the previous versions of the software. I didn’t feel like having someone hack into my web server. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, except that I’ve lost all the hard work I put into hacking the Gallery code to make it valid XHTML 1.1. Oh well!

You’ll notice some design changes with it since I decided to use a portion of one of the skins that came with the new version. Gallery is a great piece of software, but I just wish they had worked a little bit at using some standard code. The first time I installed Gallery I took at least a few hours to hack the code so that it would all validate XHTML 1.1. I think I’m going to leave it this time around…at least for the time being. I’d rather get Windows installed on my new server (I had initially put Linux on it) so that I can install Linux on my old PC. The server is just too much power to have Linux sitting on it when all I really want to do is play around with Linux. It’s much smarter to harness that power for my main machine.

My New Digital Camera

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I finally have the new digital camera in my hands. I picked it up from the leasing office when I came home for lunch. It’s a pretty sweet little camera.

I’m not real big on taking pictures, so getting a small camera was my number one priority in deciding on one. I wanted a camera that was digital for obvious reasons (insert geek comment). A few of the other things I were looking for were: ability to take movies, image quality, ease of use, and dependability.

After doing some research I dediced to get a Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Elph. The consensus from many places was that Canon makes the best cameras and has the best lens. I just took out a credit card and I’m not lying when I say that the camera is about as close as you can get to the same size. It can easily fit into the pocket of your pants or shirt, which is what I was looking for. I didn’t want to be lugging a dorky camera bag over my shoulder (or around my neck) and have to continuously worry about my investment. I can keep this one hidden safely in a pocket. They do make a nice little case for putting on your belt that I will end up buying soon.

Some of the specifications are:

  • 4.0 MegaPixels
  • 3.0 Optical Zoom
  • 3.6 Digital Zoom
  • Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery and charger
  • 32 MB Compact Flash Card
  • Size: 3.43 x 2.24 x 1.09 in.
  • Weight: Approx. 6.52 oz

I think what really sold me on this camera though was the review and user comments I read at CNET.

The plans are to create a photoblog and periodically post some pictures (with comments).