Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Coding

It's sometimes funny what automatically added advertisements can produce. This morning when I complained about lack of Windows developers for Gammu and shared my unwillingness to work on Windows, Microsoft sponsored this email ;-).

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:55:56 +0900
Michal Čihař <michal@cihar.com> wrote:

> I have totally no interest in investing into Windows license and
> finding out how to use totally free MSVC.
[...]
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
> Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005.

After searching for new gallery and investigating lazygal, I finally decided it's time to give it some real world usage. My current album from Japan is being processed by this damn fast tool.

It needed a bit of hacking, but as the core was already there and Alexandre Rossi is quite cooperative upstream. I managed to implement almost everything I requested in original post. The only thing I'm still not completely happy with is the theme, but I hope I will improve it over time.

From original requirements, I completely dropped links to full size images. There is simply no reason to put here crappy pictures which my only camera I currently have here (built in camera in Nokia 6234) produces. Also once I'll buy new camera (what will be most likely Pentax K10D), I probably won't upload huge 10Mpix images on web server as I don't think it would be good for anything else than wasting my bandwidth.

I received number of reactions on my photoalbum post. Several were saying "I'm using some great Perl tool which is not actively maintained anymore.". Well I know such tools. I also used BINS some time ago, but it did break something (I don't recall what exactly right now, it's quite far far away in past) and I was unable to fix it. That was reason I switched to Matew.

The other replies were much better. One of them recommended trying lazygal (well it was recommended by it's author). I gave it a try and it seemed to fit my basic needs quite well and extending it's EXIF support was a piece of cake. I will continue to tune it to my needs, but I'm pretty close right now. The hardest thing for me will be to come up with some good looking themes, but I will most likely steal my ones for Matew :-).

After (again) searching for some good photo album generator, I'm more and more inclined to writing yet another tool to do this. Maybe I just want too much from this, but I haven't found solution that would fit my needs:

• Generate static HTML (or XHTML).
• Design should be done using CSS.
• Ability to process whole tree of photos into single album with directory based sub albums.
• Generate data only for changed/new photos (timestamp checking).
• Support for including EXIF information in results.
• Clean and nicely looking default template.
• Support for image comments from EXIF, JPEG comment field and external file.
• Automatic generating of images suitable for web browsing as well as including links to full sized images from camera.
• Somehow active development. I fear of using code which has not been updated for 3 years.
• It should be fast. This excludes anything written in bash as spawning tons of external programs can not be fast.
• Written in some language I know. I'm pretty sure I will hit some bug and I would like to be able to fix it. In fact only suitable language for me seems to be Python.
• Command line interface is a must.

So far I'm using a bit customised Matew which really does not fulfil everything, but at least works reasonably good (but extremely slow). However the more and more pictures are in my album, the slower this beast seems to be, so it's probably time to switch to something new. So far I haven't found anything that would actually fit, but PyAC seems to be usable as starting point for my new project for generating albums. Or is there a working solution?

I never knew, that someone would certify few lines of Python code, but Softpedia did so:

   Your product "IMAP utils 0.2" has been tested by the Softpedia labs and
   found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components.

   We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to
   keep this high standards in the future.

   To assure our visitors that "IMAP utils 0.2" is clean, we have granted
   it with the "100% FREE" Softpedia award. Moreover, to let your users
   know about this certification, you may display this award on your
   website, on software boxes or inside your product.

I still wonder why simplest "product" I ever released is getting so much publicity…

goText (Java apllication for your phone to send messages onver GPRS) has just received support to send messages to Czech Vodafone network. It is using public SMS gateway, the only drawback is that you have to detect captcha used on this page. But it still is cheaper than sending regullar SMS :-).

To use this service, add following URL to your goText services:

http://www.gotext.org/pub/cz-vodafone.php

For long time I use few Python scripts to manage mails on IMAP account. On Tuesday I decided to put them under version control and improve them a bit, because I didn't want to have login information hardcoded in every script.

I made several improvements, added support for distutils and then I decided that I could also release this to public. I've named them IMAP utils, I made announcement to freshmeat.net and Python Cheese Shop (thanks to ./setup.py register) and now I wonder that these simple scripts have over hundred downloads and eight subscribers. Maybe it is not that useless as I thought :-).

If you want to follow SVN commits on some of my SVN repositories, you can subscribe to appropriate maling list, which gets notification on each SVN commit. I hope I set up mailman correctly and everything will work as I expect :-).

This list is also automatically forwared to packages.qa.debian.org, so you can also subscribe there for Debian package changes.

Current Gammu versioning scheme confuses people a lot. For some time 1.x.0 versions are stable and 1.x.y are testing. However when somebody sees 1.10.5, he things this is updated version of Gammu 1.10.0. So it's probably time to move to something more obvious starting from next development cycle.

To stay as much compatible as possible with current scheme, I thing about minor change - so start testing releases on something like 1.11.90. I thing this is also quite often used (I've seen such versions in PyGTK in past) and nobody will confuse it with patch releases. Or should I switch to something completely different? I currently do not consider 1.11.0-rc1 as I'd like to keep version only numeric.

When migrating tags from Bazaar to Subversion, I generated lots of commits. When I did that, I didn't realise, that CIA will count all my tagging as commit and I will become most active author and Wammu will read 6th position among most active projects. Anyway this has just happened and maybe it will advertise Wammu a bit.

But don't expect that I or my projects will reappear there in near future ;-).