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Proof that more memory can revitalize a dying system: My three-year-old laptop was slow as hell running XP and anything else. I maxed out the RAM up to a gigabyte yesterday, and now it feels faster than my desktop. It’s not actually; my laptop’s processor is half the clock speed, but as long as I’m not encoding video or playing half life 2, it’s more responsive.

That is all. RAM is good.

I’ve been working on it all weekend. I’m still in the first stages, but I’ve finished all image functions, including that spiffy size-in-the-url resizer feature. In fact, that went so well, I made all images in the program use it, which means every image displayed is actually proxied through a PHP script (i.php to be specific). It took some work, but I’ve got it caching images after processing, and sending the right headers so the user’s browser always caches it locally. That makes it behave exactly like a normal image. With mod_rewrite on, you won’t notice a difference.

If you would like a sneak preview of the horrible-looking version .01 alpha, leave a comment with your email and I’ll send you a link. I’m afraid of it being somehow insecure at this stage. In fact, I just thought of two vulnerabilities while writing that sentence. So leave me your email and if I trust you I’ll send you a link

What I’ve done so far:

• Directory traversals for album lists and image lists


• Complete image processing


• Image resize via URL


• Database schema and record retrieval


• Most options in the config file

Just those first two make it a navigable gallery, so it’s a great start. Here’s what I still need to do:

• Database update methods


• Comments


• Database synchronization (garbage collection)


• Template functionality


• Default template design


• mod_rewrite rules


• Groups and Searching (closely related)


• Admin login and interface (uploading, description entry, etc.)


• EXIF and RSS (low priority)


• Lots of other things

This is the official announcement for the start of development of zenphoto, a new, better, simpler, more useful, open-sourced, and overhyped personal web photo album app.

Read the full announcement and preliminary specifications (PDF, 63k).

Keep in mind that I’m very open to comments—I’m building this for you, so I want your ideas and feedback!

So it begins…

Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor (who is a nice guy, by the way, as is his wife) of the University of California, Berkeley, has reversed the previous decision and granted Ignacio Chapela full tenure. Supposedly, Chapela was denied tenure because of his criticisms of the university’s ties to biotech company Novartis. Just a month ago, he sued the university for several things, and I reported on the press conference.

This is great news. Chapela’s rejection seemed to be completely invalid, and this new decision is certainly just. Congratulations to Chapela, all of his students, and the Chancellor for making the right decision.

Warning: No Spoilers Included

I just got back from seeing Episode III, and I want to talk about my experience. The movie was great, as I’m sure you’ll know when you see it, but I’m not going to talk about the movie today. Please, read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

MTV held their over-hyped and overrated launch of the Xbox 360 this evening. Here’s a torrent if you really want to watch it. I’d reccomend reading the rest of this first…

A whole new tilt on topo maps. NASA WorldWind is a “world viewing” application. It basically lets you look at the earth in lots of different ways from lots of different sources and at any angle in a 3D model. You may have heard of Keyhole (recently acquired by Google), which is also cool and does basically the same thing, but with a few different features (like driving directions and flyovers). Keyhole does have higher resolution images in some areas, and can look up places by address, but WorldWind has many different image overlays and lots more information about the geography, weather, land, and just about everything else. It’s also free and open source, whereas keyhole is expensive and closed.