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Rat problem!
Can you believe it! Photodeus.com (and all sites under it) were down for several days because of rats. They ate through the optic fibers that connect this server to the internet. It took the ISP quite many days to get it fixed, but we’re finally back online!
Tomcat updated
Just writing this as a reminder to myself. Today I upgraded the Photodeus.com server software from Tomcat version 5.5 + JDK 1.6 to Tomcat 6.0.18 + JDK 1.7.0 ea (early access), and compiled native the APR libaries to boost performance.
Fun.
Photodeus on Flickr
In the last few days I’ve been uploading photos to my flickr.com page (because my site is experiencing yet again some technical difficulties).
Gallery broken!
Slow turtle
Oh no, there is some database error in my photo exhibition, and all galleries are not shown correctly. I am working on fixing it, sorry for the inconvenience all!
I will try to get it fixed on Sunday. On Saturday I have my sister’s birthday party to attend to.
Edit: So, after a bit of investigation I concluded that there wasn’t an error in the database, but I was merely experiencing a side-effect of being a bit careless.
I suspect a folder got password protected when I edited its name and properties. Firefox 3 has this silly habit of pre-entering passwords into fields, a wrong one in this case, and I missed to clear the password before hitting that save button. Really annoying to say the least. Maybe I should complain to the Mozilla developers about how the password cache works badly, or perhaps I could modify the Photo Exhibition software to use different names for password fields (for login and album properties). That might prevent passwords for getting mixed up liket that.
My website has a forum, webmail, sql administration panel etc. all with different passwords, but somehow Firefox still can’t get it right. Never had the same problem with Opera, by the way. Even Internet Explorer seems to do a much better job at it!
This. is. Photodeus!
As I went through my links page (located up there in the top menu) I revisited one gallery I hadn’t visited for some time. What I was impressed with was the gallery software available on the site, a modern AJAX-based system, not requiring any browser plug-ins (except for JavaScript enabled). Way cool! Obviously I wanted to try this out for myself. So I present to you, not as mighty and cool as Sparta, but my new test site.
Happy 5 + 10 + 30 years = 2008!
Ooh, I should have written about this ages ago but I’ve been busy, lazy and ignorant for the past month.
2008 is triple milestone in my life.
10 years ago I moved to Finland from Sweden.
5 years ago I started working at the company I work for today.
30 years ago I was born (oh well, later in August. Those other two happened in January)
Happy happy, joy joy?
As it turns out, sure. I’ve had lots of happy times these past 10 years, but I can’t say life always gives grapes, there are bound to be some lemons from time to time.
I’m planning on making some changes in my life this year. Can’t tell yet if they’re for the better or for the worse. Not yet anyways.
I also made a few New Year’s resolutions, mainly as a joke, cause I don’t really like to make them (and I promised in year xxxx that I’d never make then no more).
Of course I chose almost impossible things, so I lasted for about 2 weeks (cause I’m a slave for some of my obsessions ;P). From now I’ll just hold on to my resolution I made several years ago….
Scripting is my passion still it seems. I’ve been working hard (ha!) on the Popodeus scripts, you know, the ones that are supposed to replace my Numeric Grades (+ others). Remember me mentioning that I’m planning to change a few things in life? Well, as a side-effect, I will need to find another server for my website, and I’m currently in the midst of testing it out. If it seems efficient and stable enough (I have my doubts, cause it’s way too cheap….) I’ll move everything there before the big launch of POPODEUS.
Other things hindering development: It requires a version of Greasemonkey not widely available yet…
But we’ll soon be there guys. Grand opening! I promise!
Don’t be trigger-happy, or you could shoot yourself in the foot
Okay guys, so here’s the deal:
There is a slight problem with releasing the photos me and my friends have snapped. Currently there are over 2 200 photos from RMJ and Tuska taken with my camera alone. That is almost 6 GB worth of images (more than one normal DVD). I think I have more photos somewhere else, but that’s how many I found on my laptop and this other computer. So far I have uploaded 51 random images, go look at them here. My friend Antti has lots of photos too that he’s going to release on my site, so hopefully you understand this little delay we’re having :)
There is no way anyone has the time or interest to browse all the photos to find just one picture. We will be hand-picking out a select few images that we think have the most entertainment value, but as promised, we will try to release all of the images (excluding the super-blurry ones and the ones that have too much nudity ;).
We will have to put the date and time visible by each photo, so if you remember when and where I snapped a pic of you, you will have a better luck finding yourself in the photo gallery. This will require some modification of the gallery software and we’re on it!
Expect some technical difficulties for a few days.
Single Sign-On for the entire Web?
Today, I stumbled upon something called OpenID. It sure sounds interesting and I really think this technology (or something comparable) will be a necessity in the future with all these websites available on the Internet that we use daily…
Don’t we all feel a bit fed up with having to remember at least half a dozen user names, passwords and identities? Currently this technology seems a bit lacking and abusable (only identity, but no provision for trust)
If this is abusable by spammers, it won’t be that good in the end, but maybe OpenID version x+1 will have some counter-measures against that.
Since I liked the idea of “get one identity, use it globally” I wanted it on my website too (although I am a bit afraid of global datastores keeping too much personal info about you, but that’s another matter for another day).
Too bad that I couldn’t get OpenID to work on my site right out of the box; I tried to install a plug-in for Wordpress, but then the comments system stopped working on IE7. Ahh, well. Technology never ain’t easy. I usually say, “You can always trust a computer and software… you can be sure they never work when you really need them to”… I hate being right so many times. Now I need to fiddle with the plug-in internals a little bit more to get it up and running.
1.5 years
So I admit, I’m a slow worker sometimes. Most times I’m even slower.
It took me only 18 months from getting this domain and setting up my site to this state. Not ready by a long shot, but still a little better than what it started as.
Hopefully after another 18 months you’ll see a well organized and well-managed website that really has something interesting to offer:
Beautiful photos, for viewing only, and maybe some stock-photos for royalty free use. After all, I want to make a photography site.
Photography tips and tricks.
Since I’m a software engineer, I’ll probably include some various articles about programming code tips and tricks.
Now is the time for change
Whoa. That’s a year quickly passed. I’m about to upgrade by exhibition software and I want it to look completely different from now, I’m not too pleased with the current layout.
Also the blogging system will change, it’s currently too manual, and needs something more intelligent software.
Nothing new, ever?
Yikes. Too busy with work… But soon.. Soon I promise you!
Nothing new?
Still here, haven’t forgotten about this. Not much going on on this site for now. I’ll plan to have public content up by January, not too much sooner. This is going to be a busy year for me with work.
Site up!
I have just begun building this site, so my galleries are not yet available for public viewing. If you have stumbled upon this site by accident, then I must congratulate you for being one of the first visitors here!
Planned content so far:
- Links to interesting reviews from the photography world
- Personal photo galleries
- Photo print purchasing option
- Some weird and fun applications (after all, I am soon-to-be a software engineer)
- Photoshop editing technique
- Thoughts on Canon 20D and Minolta Dimage7i