project

Filesystem Photo Gallery

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been looking for a good filesystem-based Gallery system for a while. I haven’t been able to come up with one that has the features and is as lightweight as I’d like it. Therefor I decided I’d write my own. I implemented the first version in .NET but have since ceased development and decided to move away from IIS/windows and begin using linux/apache and an external host (powweb). I also want the Gallery system to work seamlessly with WordPress and any other PHP based content management system (or blog engine). Therefor I decided to scratch the .NET version and start on a PHP based version.

I started working on my new PHP filesystem based Gallery system last night. It’s intended to be extremely lightweight with no database interaction. It will assume the first image in a directory should be the ‘thumbnail’ for that directory. It will dynamically generate thumbnails for images which do not yet have a thumbnails. This is so that they are only created once.

I’m very surprised at how fast the The system is coming together. I suspect that in a few days I’ll have a working version with most if not all of the features I’m looking for.

The only problem is I have no Idea what to call it. If anyone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

As soon as I come up with the name I’ll publish a google code site with all the documentation and downloading goodness.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

Uncle Jerry's Senior Photo

Aunt Pauline's

About a year ago I started a major project. The digital archiving of all my parents old photo albums. It’s a slow and painful process but often times very rewarding. I have been rather busy lately but for some reason today I decided to scan an album or two. I happened across 2 pictures of some importance. One of my uncle Jerry and another of my Aunt Pauline. Both of which I think may be their Senior pictures. The reason I think this is because they both look very nice and on the back of my Aunt Pauline’s picture it says her age at the time is 18. It’s amazing how much they still look the same even after more than 40 years.

With all the recent talk of alternative transportation and some of the photographs I found, it made me think about how things have changed so much already, but not as far as they said they would. In the 50’s people were claiming we’d be driving Nuclear powered cars. The 60’s gave us The Jetsons. What happened to all of the promises? Well as far as the Nuclear car goes, experiments soon led us to understand that even if it were possible it wouldn’t be safe. As far as the Flying car goes, I’ll let Dante and Randal explain:

Watching the video again made me think about what did happen to the flying car so I did some googling and came up with Urban Aeronautics. Seems crazy and a bit far fetched doesn’t it? I thought so to so I did some digging and their X-Hawk seems legit. Check it out. There actually seems to be quite a few examples so the flying car may not be as far off as it seems.

Clean Slate

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Ok so… we’ve tried word press before and never kept it up. This was basically because we tried to be retro-active in posting a bunch of stuff about what we had already done and it was overbearing. We’ve tried blogger but to no avail… Hopefully we can get this site going. We’ll use it as a place for people to know what Rachel and I are up to.

For those of you who don’t know Rachel and I bought a house (duplex) 6 months ago or so. Well… we’ve learned some things since then. Quite a lot in fact.

  1. It’s true what they say. You never really are done. when we bought the house we only had a few things in mind. Since then the list has grown daily
  2. No project is really as small or as easy as you think it is.
  3. You dont really have time anymore.
  4. Old houses are full of surprises.
  5. Insurance companies suck.
  6. Water can cause a lot of trouble.

on to that last one for a second and then i’ll end our first post…

A little less than a month ago we had a pipe break in our ceiling. Wow what a pain. It happened while we were both at work and conveniently enough the only day in months that i’ve forgotten my cell phone. Our tenants came home to about 4″ of water in the basement. They went through some hurdles and finally ended up calling the fire department who promptly came and took care of the problem. This does NOT end our problems however. Since then we’ve pretty much not had a dining room. We’ve got a cracked floor joist, drywall and pipes to replace, flooring to put down electric to run etc etc.

Anyway… that’s all for now. Rachel and I are off for dinner and a movie.