Digital Photo Albums at last

Yesterday I had a chance to put some more work into Gallery Mage 2 – the digital camera album solution.

Nowhere near complete, or even a friendly release, but the good news is that it works, so I can start captioning the galleries and uploading them (most popular ones first).

Currently only Ali’s Graduation photos have been uploaded.

You can view them at photo.omegadelta.net

More will be added as I go. Soon also I will be upgrading from the very usefull yet non-dynamic SPGM to a fully dynamic PHP solution of my own making. But the great thing about Gallery Mage is that it is Gallery Viewing Software independant.

How it works is that the captioning, crop and rotation data is actually stored in the same directory as the original hi-res photos. This prevents loss, because even if you rotate a JPEG image, you are recompressing it and therefore loose data. Then you click a magic export button, and all of the images are rotated, cropped and resized to fit your web page, but you still have the originals and the flexability to edit your captions easily.

If anyone (that I know) wants the original hi-res photo, a colour print out or a proper developed photo (kodak) then email me with the unique photos ID number (as listed below all photos) and I will try and accomidate you. Kodak photos will cost however.

Will.

uq delivers

not a sentance you see much ;) :)

but I now have my correctly spelt and capitolised degree :D I thought it would actually take longer than it did – but then again, the signatures arn’t even real so it wouldn’t have been hard to do.

Will.

are the PBF computers l33t?

it appears they are.

Unless corneal is normally spelt with a 0 :) which one particular computer has taken a hobby of.

Will.

Chuck Lives

At 2200 hours Eastern Standard Time on the 6th of June 2003, everyone’s friend, Chuck woke at last from his coma.

It was a heroic struggle by the battler, after his heart transplant failed due to rejection, his body had to be replaced to suit the transplanted heart. After many months a qualifying one was found, and the operation was performed with care and precision and thus far *touch wood* has succeeded. He will remain under close observation for some time to come however as a precautionary measure.There is upgrade capacity now too for the speed of his Memory and a heart (which can be replaced with one which beats twice as fast). So the cheap $140 upgrade turned into a more expensive $250 upgrade. Still not too expensive, but another $100 of that could have got an XP2.4/IntelMboard/512DDR Ram. So it’s a pity I had already invested in the other chip. Ah well. Picture left is a triumphant Chuck, proudly displaying the Blue Screen of Life (BIOS CPU temp monitoring) residing over his old heat sync and CPU with his Linux boot disk in hand. Long Live Chuck!

Will.

The Dodge

“When logic and reason fail you, use the dodge”

Windows is about reinstalling, dialog boxes, licensing and doing the dodge.

I have in my time at the PA hospital required in several cases to trick Windows into accepting a program or data. I detail the “worst” case of dodging below:

For those who have had to use Access in a multiwindowsversion environment, you will no doubt know of the inherent lameness of Access when it comes to external function references namely the $date function. Well I was having terrific trouble with a particular commercial (and therefore uneditable, unthinkable and unfixable) database. I tried everything. Windows 98, Windows 2000, different versions of Office, different combinations of office installed components, applying service packs, not applying service packs, eating an apple. Desperately trying to emulate the computers which had this particular DB working, but all to no avail.

It was then I realised that I was being far to logical. For I was trying to get one windows machine to emulate the other by installing programs. Since the orthodox method had bit the concrete with vengeance, I turned to a more unorthodox one (although gaining in popularity) The Dodge.

Now alas I was soon to find out that Windows 2000 was infact Dodge proof, however on testing Windows 98 after a few convulsions bounced back nicely. What did I do? Well quite simply, I dumped (using Ghost) the contents of the computer’s HDD that I was trying to match onto the offending machine, sacrificed a goat, and booted it up. Windows 2000 alas is very brittle and didn’t get very far into the loading, Windows 98 however booted fine, chucked a spaz about all the drivers on the machine, rebooted about four times but then was fine. Now this machine is working perfectally. And everything is already installed and it only took me about 20 min. If only I had turned to The Dodge instead of relying on silly logic for the best part of half a day.

This isn’t a singleton case either, I have personally resorted to a variant of the Dodge several times in the past. In this particular case, I had the data for a program (MSSQL) but the program didn’t want to take it. So the Dodge variant was applied – an new empty file of the same name was created. Then I replaced it with the correct data, and jump started the program – all with a 100% success rate.

Next time, when working with windows, I shall endeavour to waste less time on logical thinking :)

Will.

MySQL Sock Error

“Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2)”

How to fix this error.

$ vi /etc/my.cnf

Find location of mysql.sock

$ cd /tmp
$ ln -s /path.to.mysql.sock/mysql.sock .

Done :)

Will.