Still Not Perfect

FotoBuzz is a nifty Flash and PHP/Python widget for adding annotations to your photos. One of the few Flash things I have seen that could actually be useful (Flash is way overdone lately). Also, the user interface is a bit nicer than Flickr’s similar feature “notes”. Could be a nifty add-on to my Flickr Gallery WP plugin when the Flickr API starts to support adding notes. Cal Henderson of Flickr says the following regarding notes features being in the API:

oops - it’s not actually. API methods to deal with notes are half done. i need to port them across from the old API at some point soon. i definately plan to.

Interestingly, FotoBuzz stores the notes actually in the image file. Not exactly what I would want it to do for easy integration with Flickr, so I’d have to modify it a bit (the PHP/Python parts where the code would need to be changed are released under the LGPL — but the Flash part is under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license so I can’t [and don't want to] touch it). The changes shouldn’t be too hard to do, so I’m really just waiting on Flickr to allow posting notes through the API. It would be neat to have users be able to add notes to your photos through the Flickr Gallery plugin instead of having to follow the link to Flickr to do so (which nobody ever does).

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

Update (1/8/2005) - A new version is available here with some of the features requested in this post’s comments and also some bug fixes.

Flickr’s recent outage uncovered a bit of a security hole in my Flickr Gallery plugin. When Flickr goes down, or for some other reason your server can’t execute the API calls against their server, the remote fopen() calls were blowing up. The fopen() calls were throwing warnings (unless you have warnings turned off in PHP - which you should) that showed the entire URI of the API call it attempted to make, including the user’s email and password. Obviously this is undesirable. So, I’ve manually surpressed errors and warnings on any statement that could contain a password so we don’t get passwords spit out in the output stream anymore and caused it to fail back to the cache if that happens.

Also, Stewart (a Flickr developer) made a good point about EXIF data not needed to be refreshed in the cache because the EXIF data won’t be changing, so I’ve made that caching permanent. Stewart also had some concerns about how often we were refreshing the API call cache, so I’ve extended that from 10 mins to 1 hr by default. Unfortunately that’s not quite as drastic as Stewart would like us to be, but I think it is fair because the caching the plugin does is pretty efficient from their perspective (no matter how many users hit your gallery pages, the plugin will only hit the Flickr API once per hour for each API call).

So, this should probably just be a minor number release (security and bug fixes), but I’m making it a major number release because I’ve also added a few features like:

• Pagination of albums and photos in albums
• Slightly better navigation through gallery

Get the newest version in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here. Follow the installation instructions in the README.txt. Or follow the installation instructions here, except now the line you put in your gallery.php file is (to support paging):
<?php flickr_show_photos($_GET['album'], $_GET['photo'],
$_GET['page']); ?>

System Requirements:
PHP 4.1 or greater - with allow_url_fopen enabled (to make remote API/REST calls and download images)
Wordpress isn’t actually required because this doesn’t use any of WP’s plugin hooks

Of course this code comes with no guarantee. If you need support I’ll be glad to help (within reason) — just shoot me an email. If you want to suggest future features or just tell me that you are using my plugin I’d appreciate that feedback too.

Copyright (c) 2004
Released under the GPL license

As if the last couple of days wouldn’t have been crazy enough with the Thanksgiving holiday and family get togethers, we decided to throw a couple of hospital visits into the mix. Thanksgiving day we had a good time visiting with the family and eating lots of great food, but on the way home Alex told me she was feeling contractions (cue Ray getting really nervous). So she started timing the intervals - 5 mins between, then decreasing down to 3. So I finally convinced Alex to call the on-call nurse who tells her to take it easy and drink lots of water for an hour. We wait for the hour and things are actually getting worse. So the nurse tells us to come in to the hospital. Read the rest of this entry »

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

Update (1/8/2005) - A new version is available here with some of the features requested in this post’s comments and also some bug fixes.

This is an update to my Flickr gallery plugin with a couple new features and some bug fixes. Some of the salient features include:

• Flickr photosets as “albums” - complete with descriptions and meta
• Support for Flickr “notes” feature - just this plugin uses all CSS and Javascript instead of Flash (the plugin’s output looks like this)
• EXIF data support to display camera settings the photo was snapped with — in addition to the description and meta info from Flickr
• Valid XHTML output
• * new * Option to respect photos marked “private”
• * new * Thumbnail size choices

You can download it in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here.

An example installation can be found here. Read on for installation instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

Update (1/8/2005) - A new version is available here with some of the features requested in this post’s comments and also some bug fixes.

I’ve been working on a Wordpress plugin that integrates some of Flickr’s great photo sharing services. This plugin allows you to display your Flickr photos and photosets on your site like a photo gallery using Flickr’s API. Some of the salient features include:

• Flickr photosets as “albums” - complete with descriptions and meta
• Support for Flickr “notes” feature - just this plugin uses all CSS and Javascript instead of Flash (the plugin’s output looks like this)
• EXIF data support to display camera settings the photo was snapped with — in addition to the description and meta info from Flickr
• Valid XHTML output

You can download it in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here.

An example installation can be found here. Read on for installation instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

The weeks seem to go by so fast, but not as fast as the weekends. I’m finding myself falling into the “living for the weekend” rut. I just look forward to having my own time. The weeks go so fast because work dictates so much of my time, socializing (which is a big drain sometimes) fills up a lot of evenings that I’m not on-call, and what little is left after that is for everyday chores (needless to say they don’t often get done when they should).

Then when the weekends do come around (which lately seems surprisingly fast) they get filled up too. I try to avoid the social stuff on the weekend, much to my wife’s chagrin, and instead work on my own projects at home, read, or otherwise relax. I just wish there was a way to slow time down so I could fit all the things I wanted to do in the weekend. Of course if I could slow time down I wouldn’t even need a weekend because I could get work, socializing, leisure, and rest all in everyday.

How do people even busier than me (of which there are many) not go crazy?

Robin Good reports that the far-reaching PATRIOT Act may even be applied to blogs. US Federal District Judge Victor Marrero notes that the FBI can abuse the National Security Letter power given to them through the PATRIOT Act to go after bloggers. Judge Marrero says the FBI could use NSLs “to discern the identity of someone whose anonymous web log, or ‘blog,’ is critical of the Government.”

Those NSLs of course come equipped with a full gag order and can be issued without any judicial oversight (a judge doesn’t have to approve the FBI to issue one). Anybody see the warning flags yet? Seems to me that this could be a huge infringement of First Amendment rights as persons expressing dissenting opinions are bullied by the FBI for exercising their right to free speech. This amounts to censorship.

I’ve noticed that Flickr has been having performance problems of late (mostly while I was developing a Flickr photo gallery plugin for WP). They mention them in FlickrBlog here. You can see their traffic graph for one of the problematic days there too. Flickr’s growing popularity is certainly stressing their systems. Also it appears that there was some sort of attack that contributed to the problem. So the problems appear to be due to network design decisions that couldn’t quite scale to meet Flickr’s new popularity, and malicious activity probably also due largely to their new popularity. Looks like it’s hard to be popular.

The Flickr engineers were able to respond reasonably fast and the issues seem to be mostly resolved by now. As popular as Flickr has become of late, I wonder what their bandwidth bill looks like.

John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General and champion of the deceptively named PATRIOT Act, has resigned. His successor is still being discussed, but will likely be White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. I’m glad to see Ashcroft on his way out, but I’m not sure that I should expect any better from any potential successor - at least not under the current (and next term) administration.

I’m pretty disappointed with Ashcroft’s Justice Department. Their much touted PATRIOT Act was supposed to be just the tool they needed to fight terrorism, but why are they using it against a small time pot dealer and a corrupt strip club owner? Now I’m not refuting that what those people were doing was illegal, but this law was designed to fight terrorists not small time domestic criminals. I think the true intent of the PATRIOT Act comes out in this: to suspend due process in investigation and prosecution of anyone, regardless of any terrorist ties. It is not a law for fighting terrorism like it is so often claimed, but a law for spying on citizens, even innocent ones. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla has launched the version 1.0 of their popular Firefox web browser. This release seems even faster and even more stable. Besides, Firefox is not vulnerable to all of the the exploits that plague Internet Explorer. This means browser hijack attacks and unwanted popups are a thing of the past (if you are a Firefox user [hint hint]).

The migration of users from IE to Firefox continues for the 5th straight month. How much longer until IE fires a volley back? In the meantime Mozilla seems to understand what users want much better than Microsoft.

Get your copy here, but prepare to be patient - their servers are getting hammered. Or, get the torrent.

(Update) Mirrors:
http://64.12.168.21/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0/
http://207.200.85.49/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0/
http://trillian.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
http://mozilla.osuosl.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0/
http://mozilla.ussg.indiana.edu/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/