trisweb.com

Someone just brought it to my attention that comments haven’t been working for anyone for the last… few weeks, probably. And I thought it was just that no one read anymore.

Anyway, comments should be working again. I tried to hack wordpress to send a certain spam phrase to exit(), but apparently it made everything die. Note to self: test after hacking next time.

Sorry for the stupidity… go back and post your comments again if you remember them!

If you’re seeing this, then all the nameservers have switched and this is coming off a brand new server. You should see a speed boost in just about everything, so enjoy.

I’m working a little on zenphoto this week, mainly fixing bugs and things. Hopefully the path problems can be worked out soon. After we’re satisfied enough with it (and make a new site for it), we’ll call it 1.0 and truly release it, and then start working on toward 2.0, which we already have tons of magical ideas for.

More on that later. For now, just enjoy the fast server

Just a heads-up that I’m moving trisweb.com (and zenphoto.org, and all my other various domains) to a new server. This one’s been great, but how can you pass up a dedicated server?

Downtime could be unpredictable and sporadic as the change happens, so I apologize in advance. I’ll try to get zenphoto.org stable first, which should be easy.

Other than that, not much happening. You shouldn’t even notice the change.

I updated the header images (and the background) for the new season. Have to admit, it is one of my favorites. The other three of my favorite seasons are pretty good too though…

I tried to make a major visual adjustment, but realized I didn’t have enough time to play with the CSS tonight, so it’ll have to wait for another time. Or maybe I’ll just do the cool thing and redesign. I was thinking something simpler, cleaner, and with no shadows. Shadows are so last year. I’ll see what I come up with in my (ha) free time.

Edit: Hm. I think the background’s too bright this time around. Maybe I’ll darken it up a bit later.

Finally got around to moving my own photo gallery to zenphoto. Check it out. I uploaded a couple new albums to sweeten the deal.

I’m not sure if it’s a gift or a burden, but for what it’s worth, I’ve given my little brother a weblog. Check it out. He might say something interesting. He does that once in a while I guess.

Finished my CS project last night, and after an all nighter the night before, I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to work on NowPlaying. It’s really looking nice now. I integrated album art into the list, and fine-tuned the search algorithms so that it’s really amazingly accurate.

I’m not quite ready to release anything. It still needs to be tested a lot, and I’m also planning on making a simple administration interface so you can delete songs you don’t want people to see, or change the album art to something else, or delete the album art alltogether. But if you don’t pay any attention to it, it should always work. Also I need to make the bloglet, which should be easy. You’ll know when that’s ready by looking at my sidebar.

So, any comments, suggestions for the interface, etc? I know the navigation is still non-existant. I’m working on it.

Been working on the playlist program in-between a giant project at school. Somehow I find this to be more useful than a primitive lexer and parser for Python. I have a feeling Python already has a great compiler, and the world doesn’t need a badly written one.

But I don’t think the world has seen this. At least not much. Basically, I’m searching for album art through Google Images, parsing the result page sent back for all image URLs in it, grabbing the images one at a time until I find one that’s square (to a tunable tolerance), resizing it to a specified size, caching it in a specified directory (with an optional maximum number of files cached, using a least-recently-played replacement policy), and returning the resulting image. Of course, if the album already has art cached, it doesn’t go searching; and if it can’t find anything on Google Images, it uses Froogle, which is more likely to have the image if the CD’s still on sale, but the images are lower quality. If neither Google Images or Froogle finds anything, it uses a specified default image.

Whew. It’s cool. Very cool. Take a look at the album art for the most recently played album.

Eventually this will be fully integrated into the playlist program, with the additional function to show a “bloglet” display for your sidebar or anywhere else. You’ll be able to simply tell it the width you want the bloglet to be (along with the margin for the images), the number of images to display, the configuration (eg: 4 images in a 2×2 block, or 6 images in a 2×3, etc), and the criteria (eg: most played songs, most recent albums, etc.). It will then produce a nice little DIV right into your page with images resized to fit. It will rock, to say the least. Expect more soon.