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I’m a little late to the game, but that’s what the holidays do to you I suppose. Matt and Jason at Slicehost have tagged me in this, so here’s five things you probably don’t know about me…

1. I raised guinea pigs for 4-H when I was really young (though I was mostly in it for the Computer group).


2. I was a partner in a failed startup about a year ago. Some good ideas there (and some bad ones), but it didn’t work out whatsoever.


3. I’m trying again now with another startup and a more concrete piece of software. This one is much more promising.


4. My third home is a small island in the middle of the Tuolumne river in Yosemite National Park. No, not literally…


5. I like girly music, chick flicks, and cuteoverload.com.

There you have it. Happy new year! More thoughts on 2006/7 later.

Oh, and while I’m at it, check out slicehost if you’re looking for a great VPS host. So far I’ve been incredibly happy with the product and the people behind it. Wonderful company and a perfect example of how to do it right. I’ll be switching my domains as soon as I have my email server set up (fun!).

What a Christmas! The weekend was full of fun and family just like every year, which is always great! I’m now back in Berkley (I never thought I’d be here on Christmas…) to bus down to San Diego at 5:45 in the morning with the band for the Holiday Bowl! Go Bears!

Here, have a puppy.

Following the mantra “Release early, release often” I’ve followed up 1.0.5 with (logically enough) 1.0.6! This release is small, but includes some good fixes for sorting, so I’m sure you want to upgrade!

On another note, I’ll be migrating to a VPS (“practically my own server”) hosting plan sometime this holiday season, so you might see some downtime, but probably not. Since I’m in no rush this time, the switch should be seamless. No rush also meant I could search and research (search again) all I wanted, and I believe I found a really great hosting company to stick with. One good sign is that they’re currently sold out, expecting more servers this week (so they don’t oversell, which is a Good Thing). After I get it set up, I’ll re-install Confluence and JIRA and Zenphoto will have its bug tracker and Wiki back up!

Go download 1.0.6! Install it! It’s easy!

In return for the Cal Band free lift tickets, Kirkwood has asked us to advertise that UC Berkeley students with a valid Cal ID can get a full day lift ticket for only $35! I think that’s a pretty good deal, so I thought I’d spread the word.

We’ll be at Kirkwood on January 12th if you want to see the band play on the slopes. Then for the next two days we’ll be at Sierra at Tahoe. We like both resorts, they’re very hospitable and nice to us! So go, ski/snowboard, watch the Cal Band, and have fun!

Oh, and watch the Holiday Bowl on December 28th, and Go Bears!

But wait, I’m not even in school anymore… eh, it’s still fun!

My finished accomplishment was my application to the UC Berkeley Graduate program in Computer Science. The odds are low, but I think I may have a chance. Wish me luck!

This time of year is always busy, and I’m probably going to be traveling hundreds of miles up and down the state in the next three weeks. Places I’m going, in order:

• Wholesome Folsom fun at Tara’s house.


• San Jose for Christmas with family.


• San Diego for the Holiday Bowl (December 28th! Go Bears!)


• Ojai for new year’s.


• Some mysterious place that’s not Tahoe from January 2nd to 7th


• Berkeley again, and THEN


• Tahoe for the Cal Band Ski Trip

That is one busy holiday season! Probably my worst/best yet.

Now, off to Christmas Shopping

Just in case you don’t check the home page or forums, zenphoto 1.0.5 has been released with a ton of fixes (since 1.0.3). 1.0.5 was a quick fix for an overlooked little problem, all the real meat was in 1.0.4.

Big changes include:

• Performance Improvements—lazy evaluation and some smart algorithms to sort the image array out of the database contribute to up to 12 times faster page processing in albums with lots of images.


• Database Generalization—all data storage has been abstracted to a PersistentObject class, which the Image and Album classes inherit from. This reduces specific database calls, groups them together, and allows for easy addition of new classes and new database systems later on. This is a Good Thing.


• New Themes included—I’ve included three new themes with the default release: Default Dark, Stoppeddesign, and Sterile. More choices! Yay.

The other big change of course I am not advertizing, since it’s not fully implemented yet, and that is sub-albums. The code now supports them. However, the interface for managing them is still under development. You can download the sub-albums testing theme if you don’t mind the incompleteness just to see how it works, but don’t expect much yet.

Also, there’s a big problem with sorting images in this release. See this thread for more information and a temporary fix if you need it. I’ll be releasing 1.0.6 this week to fix it for good, and I’m adding unit testing to my list of things to do.

Zenphoto is back!