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My project for the summer is this: Make the best web photo album application ever.

Ambitious? Nah. I’ve wanted to do it for ages, noticing the deficiencies in PhotoStack, albeit it being one of the best solutions available. Gallery, Gallery2 even, Coppermine—they’re what you call “bloated.” PhotoStack had the right idea—keep it simple, make it really easy to do what you want, and make the interface beautiful. Unfortunately, as Joen noted, it’s missing many important features including comments, good descriptions, and being bug-free.

So I want you to tell me exactly what you want and don’t want in your ideal photo album. Use the <ul> tag Use dashed lists… ULs don’t work. Think hard about it. I’ll do it if there’s enough demand and response.

A couple other things I want feedback on are implementation details:

• I started already in PHP and I’ll probably stick with it, but I’d like to try Ruby on Rails of TaDa list fame. Any objections?
• Database or flat-file for comments? (I’m already doing album directories like PhotoStack)
• Shall I use AJAX? I can (in moderation) to great effect in the slickness of the UI (think flickr).
• Any other server environment or implementation preferences would be appreciated, but try to focus on your dream app and tell me about it.

What are you waiting for? Get commenting.

I’ve selected and uploaded 100 of my best photographs ever. I thought I’d only come up with 20 or 30 or so worthy of putting in this collection, and while I admit that maybe they’re not all the best, I’d consider it a pretty good overview of my photographic experience thus far.

I’m highly critical of others and not critical enough of myself, so I appreciate comments of all kinds. My thoughts are that I’m obsessed with three things in general: skies, reflections, and shadows. I always try to frame a shot in some interesting way rather than just point my camera straight at the subject.

I know you can’t see it with the small images, but the truth is, my camera (a Casio Exilim 2MP) isn’t good. The quality of the CCD is horrible. All images turn out grainy and pixelated, and that can only be fixed by resizing down. So prints are bad. It also has no possibility of macro. But the good thing is that it’s really really small, so I always have a camera. Many of the photos in this collection were taken with borrowed friends’ cameras, including a 5MP Sony Cybershot, my dad’s 2MP Canon, and my brother’s 3MP Nikon, all of which have great optics and macro modes.

Anyway, take a look at the photos and give me comments! I won’t blame you if you don’t look at them all. I went a little overboard.

A special bit of first-hand journalism today—Ignacio Chapela was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, who was denied tenure last November for reasons he and many others believe to be corporate or political in nature. Chapela did key research indicating that modified genes in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) were being transferred to pristine plants in nature, specifically untouched corn crops in Mexico. He also did research into the effects of GMO foods on animal development, which, once published in 2001, swept him into a vortex of corporate interests attempting to defame the research. It culminated last year when Chapela was denied professorship, and he is now suing the Regents of the University of California, saying that there were corporate conflicts of interest in the tenure decision process. Read more about the situation (second article on the page).

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Chapela held a press conference today at 2PM, and I went with camera and digital recorder in hand. You can download audio Chapela’s wonderful introduction (mp3, 1.4 MB), or the full conference (mp3, 8 MB) (sorry about the wind). Here are some of key quotes catching the general theme:

“The university used to be the place where people could ask any questions and hear the answers no matter how uncomfortable they were—we used to call that science. And it seems as though the university has lost that capacity to do science.”

“This is not a lawsuit against the university. It is a lawsuit for the university and against the people who have bastardized and taken away the incredible privelage of this campus.”

My own opinion on the subject is near complete support of Chapela and his lawsuit. My only concern is that he brings up the racial factor, which is completely understandable. Still, I believe it detracts from the scientific and academic focus. It absolutely needs to be addressed, but perhaps not at the same time as the scientific point.

In every conversation I have had with scientific minds on this subject (GMOs), I have always felt shunned for bringing up the slightest doubt. When faced with even solid science like Chapela’s, many scientists still will not consider both sides of the argument. This one-sided view on GMOs has very likely been influenced by large corporations funding research at universities like Berkeley, and the effect has been devastating to the scientific process in the field. I can only hope this lawsuit causes some stir in the system, and hopefully lessens the impact of politics and corporate interest on scientific research in genetic engineering.

Just a little event—I’ve been learning piano, and today I played through a transcription of “Evaporated” (Ben Folds) all the way through. I don’t know what it is about the piano that makes such a beautiful sound, but it has always been one of my favorite instruments, so this little milestone is cool. Even though it is a very easy song, it’s so musical and expressive that it sounds impressive. If you ever catch me next to a piano I can play it if you like.

Life has been school has been life lately; so I’m busy. I’m taking a class on compiler design, and the projects are killer. Very interesting though. With that and algorithms, and a couple humanities classes, there’s no time left to think except late late at night, and all I can think about then is too deep to be useful or interesting. I’m getting weird here I know, so I’ll cut it off there. Let’s just say I’ve been thinking a lot about things that I can’t write about here. But life is good! Never fear. Always, even in the darkest times, something about it breaks through into some beauty or wonder, completely unexplainable and completely true.

I live for thoughts like these at two in the morning; gone by sunrise.

I’m in the market for some new headphones… my $29.95 Panasonic HT355’s (which I now consider the most bang for your buck in headphones) died last week—the volume control dial wore out and now there’s no right channel. So I’m gonna need some new ones I guess….

I listened to a friends’ pair of Sennheiser HD555’s yesterday, and I was blown away by the quality. It made me realize that my old ones had some real issues. It also made me realize that I didn’t want to take them off my ears. I had heard Sennheiser HD 570’s before (my roomate owns a pair—hi John) and though they were very nice and detailed, I thought they were way too airy and unnatural sounding for my taste. They were very good for classical and instrumental jazz, but not so much for vocals. The HD555’s on the other hand were nearly perfect to my ears in all genres, and had an amazing realism to them; exactly what I’m looking for.

I’m sure there are other worthy headphones out there, so if you have reccomendations, please let me know. And if you even think the 4-letter B word, I’m gonna whack you upside the head with a stick.