Ramblings

Been playing around a bit woth some tools I’ve wanted to mess with for a while. Let me know what you think: http://frodo.quad4.org/cgi-bin/mrtg-rrd.cgi/

It appears that Gollum dropped offline about 4AM this morning. I have no idea why, but I sent off an email to my father, who normally troubleshoots these types of issues locally for me, asking about it. I don’t know if he read the email or noticed on his own, but Gollum is obviously back online since you are reading this.

Court Sends Signal On ‘Under God’

I’m in the middle of getting Gentoo 100% here at work. The only thing really left is getting this machine offically joined to the NT domain and using Active Directory for authentication, which Lucky has been helping with for the last couple of nights. I am typing this message from Firefox 0.9/Gnome 2.6/Linux 2.6.5, at work! I still don’t have official approval to go ahead with this project, but I still have the Windows install (and GRUB configured to dual boot) if I have to jump back over for some reason. I’m trying to configure everything so that I don’t have to go back to Windows for anything. I’m having fun …

Very useful. I’ve always wanted to mess with MRTG:
Monitoring Server Performance & Advanced Server Monitoring

I know it was meant to be serious, but come on. They’ve got all the cool signs here: Ready.gov – From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Colin got me looking at TV tuner cards again. I seem to keep coming back to this one: WinTV PVR 250

A reasonable, if a bit dated, article on using mplayer to watch TV under Linux: Setting up a TV tuner card in Linux

I’m about to have to publish the latest version of all the web payment (ecommerce) stuff I’ve been working on lately. I’m scared because I’m afraid something will break in the move, causing more headaches (I’ve already got a pretty bad one today). Oh well, here goes nothing: Student Payments.

[Update] It appears to have gone fairly well so far. I haven’t found any glaring problems in the last few minutes. Here’s hoping …

OK, I have the urge to do some recreational programming again, and I think my project will be a photo gallery system. I know, I know, there are a ton of them out there already. Hey, I use one of those that already exists. I just think I can do it better, at least better for me. I want real ACL control over everything from galleries down to individual photos. I want an external API that will allow third parties,or myself, to build applications that can control the system without knowing the internals or having to hack my scripts. Right now I’m not too concerned about database abstraction, as I only have MySQL installed. Once I get things clearly defined I might consider spending the time on that item.

OK, enough ranting, here’s a quick, mostly intelligible, list of features to this point that I want:

• Batch (zip file upload) and individual photo uploads
• Add photos from filesystem (already on the machine somewhere). Don’t mess with the originals, copy them over to the webroot and deal with them there.
• Externally visible API – all functionality needed to do everything the web pages can do
• Database based config management.
• The option to choose between pre-caching resized images, on-the-fly caching, or no caching at all.
• Extensive stats tracking – galleries viewed, photos viewed, etc.
• Comments on everything from galleries to photos.
• Ratings on everything.
• Nice URLs for distribution (mod_rewrite).
• User favorites
• Keywords/descriptions on everything.
• Custom fields (unlimited number) on everything.
• Users/Groups.
• ACL control.
• User profiles (Real name, email address, physical address, website, etc).
• Galleries (equiv to multiple installations) with “Albums” that can be nested. No “Categories”.
• Group/User level control of ratings permissions, comments, uploads (no/yes/moderated), image rotation, etc.
• Basic image editing (rotation, resizing, etc).
• User defined featured photo (choose the image that represents the album).
• User defined photo order inside albums.
• Live resize on display (allow the user to select a resolution to display the current photo. Not persistent across site).
• Theme support.
• Watermark support. I don’t necessarily want it, but I know it’s a popular request.
• Backup and restore functionality.
• Offline mode for creating static web pages?
• Mirrors. Use API to add objects to remote servers or require manual sync?
• XML output for templating or just use good XHTML with CSS?
• And a whole lot more … ambitious isn’t it?