Where Everybody's Crazy

You know, now I've got this lovely svn/trac infrastructure set up, it's much harder for me to play stupid about source control like I used to; really, it's just two commands for me to put a new project set up and get all the source under version control. And this time I know what the commands are, so absolutely no excuse.

So as well as Glob (this blog) and Songbee, I've added a project for Memories - the trac is here - and I've put a few feature requests into its queue. I'm sure there are more that could be added, and if you can think of any, please add them. When I get IPTC tag access sorted out, I'll call that version 2.0.

Man, all this technology stuff, anyone would think I was a programmer again. Incidentally, you can keep up with all the aggregated changes to all my trac projects now and future at this RSS feed.

    mysql> delete from tag;
    Query OK, 346 rows affected (0.00 sec)
    mysql> delete from tagging;
    Query OK, 2905 rows affected (0.00 sec)
    mysql> delete from thing;
    ERROR 1146: Table 'memories.thing' doesn't exist

"Wait, memories.thing? Oops. Wrong database"

OK, so I was playing around with a new toy and I trashed all the Memories tags. I've recovered most of mine, but now I have to work on recovering all the others.

The new toy was something I was working on just for a bit of fun. I just wanted to spend the afternoon coding, really. So I have started writing soemthing which aggregates tags from all of my tag databases: at the moment, I'm using tags for delicious, Memories and this very blog. It knows about all these. Hopefully I shall also teach it about other things which have tags, when I think of them. So, at last, you can see both what I was blogging and what photos I was taking on 19th March 2004 at the same time. Similarly, all my thoughts on Japan and on mission on the same page.

It's pretty raw and ready at the moment, but the eventual aim is to work backwards and have Memories, Glob and some URL-remembering-thing all writing their tag information to a common source, and, really eventually, querying the common tag database instead of having all the "find all Xs with tag Y and Z" code reimplemented for everything which uses tagging.

Incidentally, though it looks simple, the guts of it are beautiful. Each "thing" has a class, which is a privileged tag telling it where to find methods to, for instance, display itself as HTML. Tags have two components, a value and a style, allowing a use mention distinction. So a class tag class:memories would have a value of memories and a style - which is itself a tag - of meta:class.

meta:class's style is, of course, the recursive tag meta:meta. Did I just say "recursive tag"? Urgh.

A new feature went into Memories today, and a new module appeared on CPAN to support it. I haven't posted anything to CPAN for a year because, well, I've been trying to give it up. But I finally succumbed, because this is a neat one.

It's a port of ImgSeek to Perl (or at least, to XS, so it's not too slow!), as the Image::Seek module. All the smarts come from ImgSeek, not from me.

So now you can view similar photos. The aim is that eventually it'll help you to tag your photos, but for now it's just an experimental toy. It's a bit hit-and-miss but I like it.

Memories now supports forward/back navigation in a search; it supports sticky setting of the photo size when you're not logged in; it puts tags on the thumbnails.

I'm working on a Flickr-style API, and then I'll be rolling out another release. And then it can go into Debian! (Thanks, Ben! I've never had code in Debian before!)

At long last, the promised new version of Memories is available here. It has a Makefile.PL but you still need to read the README and install it that way; it's just for distributors. And it has a license!

From the Changes file:

• Slight calendar fix
• Tidy up display of large datasets.
• Rejig tag searching.
• Edit/delete photos
• Tag hierarchy computed over whole dataset, not just current page.
• RSS feeds available on most pages

This week I have mainly been a sysadmin.

I've been working on the college network with Keith, the IT guy; we've been installing new servers, upgrading services, and installing NetReg. After half a day of messing everything up, it now seems to work very nicely. The next stage is to put Nagios so that we know in advance when things are going wrong.

I've had mixed feelings during the week. In way it's been nice to get back into computery things, and I think it's been very good for Keith to have another geek about, but I've found that I can't seem to get as deeply involved as I used to - my eyes have been hurting this week after staring at the screen, and my wrists are beginning to tingle again. I've been trying to write a TPJ article in the evenings, and can't summon up the motivation. It'll be great article once it's done - doing wavelet decomposition of images in Perl so that Memories can suggest tags based on similar photos. I'm stealing the code out of ImgSeek and porting it across. But I just don't have the yen for the coding right now.

Unfortunately I probably won't get it done in the near future either, since I'll be on the road from this afternoon and don't have a working laptop at the moment. There's a few quid in the laptop fund, but not very much, and I'm hoping that the rumours about Apple releasing a very cheap Intel iBook next January turn out to be true. Otherwise, if you're planning on upgrading or dumping your (t)iBook, please let me know!

It's been a strange week in other areas. We had a music evening at church on Monday - I trundled down to the wonderful JCF House in Acton expecting... well, I don't know. To sing and maybe play a bit of piano, I suppose. Turns out it was more like a private concert - we have a few students from the Royal College of Music at church, and a couple of them did some piano and violin pieces. There weren't too many of us in the audience, either - Pastor and Mrs Morinaga, and their friend Mr O, and one of the girls from church, AK.

Now, I'd seen the letters "AK" at the top of some of the songs we sing in church as the person who'd translated many of the newer worship songs into Japanese, and kinda sorta wondered who it was. And even when my friend AK tried out some of her new translations - "Did You Hear The Mountains Tremble" and "Before The Thrown Of God Above" - I didn't really twig. And then Mr O asked me to be his interpreter at a piano auction the following day, and the week just got steadily more bizarre.

Now I'm off to a friend's Christmas party in London, JCF on Sunday, and then on to Reading for some work Monday and Tuesday. Then away for a brief holiday, and then I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing. I'm just making this whole "life" thing up as I go along, I hope you realise that.

So I've been looking at moving my iPhoto picture library to.... anything other than iPhoto. iPhoto has been unreliable, and slow to the point of unusable for me. Unfortunately, nothing really managed to cut it as a replacement until I had a look at iView Media Pro.

Damn, it's fast. It has a pretty decent first-pass editor for the times I don't need to bring up Photoshop. It handles keywords well. It has a range of ways of slicing-and-dicing the view of the library which seem to fit my head pretty well. And best of all, it's scriptable, so I spent a happy hour or two this evening rewriting my Memories exporter to work with it. So it looks like a winner.

I also refactored said exporter to have a separate Memories::API module, and I spent a while making Memories have RSS feeds for any page with pictures on it. A happy afternoon's recreational coding.

Last night I bundled up a release of Memories, my photo sharing site. You can get the source here. From the changes file:

    - RSS feeds available from http://blog.simon-cozens.org/recent.rss
    - Javascript suggestion of tags
    - Calendaring and system tags
    - Visual cleanups
    - Concept of "enclosing tag" as well as "inside this tag"
    - Minor fixes (zap cache on upload, URI escaping, etc.)
    - Pager uses gifs

There's lots more on the todo pile; this afternoon I'm going to rejig the way tags work, abstracting all the tagging code out to a separate module that will also power Glob, my new (personal) blogging tool.

Since I've now given my talk (which went spectacularly badly, but it's OK) I'm now happier to give out Memories 1.0 source code, and the PDF of the tutorial. Have fun with them. I will be making arbitrary changes (um, I mean improvements) to Memories in the future, so there will be more releases soon.

Well, I'm all prepared for my tutorial - slides and workbook are done, I just need to practice it about twenty times. I haven't given a three-hour talk in a good few years, so I really need to practice the timings.

To celebrate, I hacked on a few outstanding issues in Memories, and I added album support. Albums are useful as well as tags because whereas tags are a public classification, albums are your private way of saying that you want to group particular photos together. They're more like a knapsack than a photo album, because soon there'll be an option to bulk download all the photos in one of your albums. I may also add a bulk upload-to-photobox to make printing easier.

So much for getting photos out of the system, how about putting them in? I think I've decided to use Memories for all my photo storage, and now I've got to work out (a) how the heck I'm going to get everything out of iPhoto and into Memories, (one instance inside college and one instance outside college, and not much overlap between the photos which should go on each) and (b) how to tag 2000 photos. The answer to both these problems seems to be iPhoto keywords. And, to the second question, lots of time and hard work.

I have become folksonomy Barbie - tagging is hard!

Off to Oxford on Sunday for a few days.