Lets consider how a photoblog is browsed most of the time. A visitor typically lands on a home page showing the latest image and goes through the previous images sequentially, spending a few seconds on each image. Leveraging this fact, if the “previous” image is downloaded in the background using javascript right after the current image, it will be almost if not completely ready for viewing when the visitor is on the “previous” image page. The same can be done for the “next” image, but in most of the cases that image will already be in the browser cache.

This is a very simple change for a tangible usability benefit. Below are my tweaks:

index.php:

// expose the previous image name through tags, so previous images can be
// pre-downloaded in the background for faster browsing experience
$tpl = ereg_replace("<IMAGE_PREVIOUS_NAME>",$image_previous_name,$tpl);

templates/theworldin35mm/image_template.html:

window.onload = function() {
  ...
  var prevImg = new Image(); // for downloading prev image in background

  img.onload = function(evt) {
    ...
    // after current image load, load previous image in the background
    if('<IMAGE_PREVIOUS_NAME>' != '') {
      prevImg.src = '<SITE_URL>images/<IMAGE_PREVIOUS_NAME>';
    }
  }
  ...
};

To verify that this extra javascript is actually doing its job, look at the Net section in Firebug (in Firefox browser, ofcourse). Clear the cache first. On first page load it will show several items getting downloaded. On left arrow, the previous image page will load, and then you can see that an extra image got downloaded at the bottom. Compare with and without my code. Here is a screenshot:

Why ?

1. FB is more like a realtime social thing, and past updates are very difficult to access. Twitter is for more uncensored chatter without the concern of spamming all my FB friends.

2. Conventional blog is good for well thought out and/or usually lengthy articles. It is also not too easy to update on the go, nor is it suitable for small posts.

3. Tumblr is well designed, but posterous is well engineered and more powerful.

4. Posterous can be used like a mini blog tool complete with pictures or videos, and it can autopost to FB, twitter and more with fine grained control via email. It makes sense to autopost from posterous to FB and twitter but not vice versa, since I might post stuff directly on those that is too casual to archive.

5. A posterous widget can be kept in my primary blog so all my content would be in one place.

6. The PicPosterous app on the iPhone seems to make it much easier to associate multiple pictures on a single post. And the pictures can be taken over a period of time and added to the post.

Facebook sucks in giving access to past updates and photos in a good way. I could find a way to download past statuses as a csv, but it has a very buggy format: http://www.socialarchivist.com/2009/08/20/exporting-all-your-old-facebook-statuses/

I wanted to recreate my cross country motorcycle trip updates in posterous but each post must have a title and body. My updates being one or two sentences I decided to put them together in this blog as one post.

Update: Just got Priti moved from her personal blog to posterous. She is reluctant to maintain a serious blog, but updates facebook with text/snaps often so this is probably the best arrangement for her. Besides all old content is still on her blogspot site, so it made the migration a one-click task. Double win.

Update (27-Feb): At this time there is no way to add more photos in a single post (in gallery style), unless you have the PicPosterous app on the iPhone and create your post using that. You also have to keep the gallery/album in the app as long as you want to add more photos in that post.

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.
Apache/2.0.59 (Unix) PHP/5.2.6 DAV/2 Server at localhost Port 8888

Figured out the solution by a little search but it is useful enough to share.

1. Quit MAMP or stop servers.
2. Open /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf file in vim or any text editor.
3. Find this section of code:

<Directory />
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

4. Change “AllowOverride All” to “AllowOverride None”.
5. Save the httpd.conf file.
6. Launch MAMP or start servers, then open up the start page.

It works !

I figured that a bare bones html with a few bits of javascript can go a long way towards making a custom tool just for this task. So if you got a set of paths (e.g. /blog?p=23 or /blog/2009/05/12/hello-world) just put them in the tool alongwith two hostnames, and you will instantly get urls in pairs to be opened on sequential tabs.

The tool is now hosted here: http://joydutta.com/projects/linkgen/

Feedbacks are most welcome. I can add more features on request if they prove to be absolutely essential.

Yesterday I was discussing website development with a friend when we both had a good laugh recalling how our first pages looked like in geocities. And that reminded me, I put up scans of some pencil sketches in 1999 on my geocities site. I still fondly remember those nights in my second year of college. Room B-219, RP Hall, IIT Kharagpur. Each sketch took about 7-8 hours of continuous effort, and ofcourse that meant night-outs.

I wanted to see them again. Badly. Now.

My careful backup strategies paid off with a small caveat. I located those precious scans quickly, but they are only in a web-sized version. I don’t know where the original sketches or the full size scans are, or whether the originals are in good enough condition for a re-scan, but it sure felt nice to get them back.

Clearly, it is not the best idea for incremental development, not without inevitable “production downtime”. Working in a big internet company at least taught me this truth among other things. So, when I started my photoblog using pixelpost, I set everything up in my local MAMP stack and pushed the data to server one time.

joy@localhost ~ $ mysqldump -u user -ppass db > db.sql
joy@localhost ~ $ scp -C db.sql joy@server:
joy@server ~ $ mysql -u user -ppass db < db.sql

Afterwards all code pushes happen by rsync.

joy@localhost photoblog $ rsync -avz . joy@server:public_html/photoblog

This way, even though locally I have a small set of data, I can change code and test all features before doing a production push. Works very well for me. Also I check in my code in a local git repository. Double win.

I am in the middle of setting up another wordpress blog right now, and forgetting a small detail cost me a bunch of time. After getting the blog running locally, I took a mysql dump and synced it with the db in the server. It just won’t load. I mucked around here and there and figured that the blog url is set as “http://localhost:8888/newblog” in the local db. I modified the .sql file and re-synced to production and voila, it worked.

I suspect that I might need to do the db sync a few more times before I have enough volume of data to keep it growing in the server. I will probably set up a sed script to do the search-and-replace in command line.

The upgrade to Snow Leopard a few months back was smooth, except for one fatal thing. The colors from my Epson 2200 went from awesome in Leopard to downright awful, thanks to the third party Gutenprint driver. I only realized this mess today since I had been printing black and whites using the Quad Tone Rip (QTR) driver which kept producing neutral prints.

So I hit google and there it was, a pretty long forum thread on the very same issue. To my surprise I found that Epson indeed released Snow Leopard driver for the 2200 printer sometime in Nov 2009. I installed it, then removed and re-added the printer and voila, the colors are almost back to normal. The interface is actually much better than what I expected, and the advanced color setting panel actually worked (it was mangled up in the Gutenprint driver).

Now that I still had a little magenta cast (as opposed to horrible), I tweaked with the advanced color settings panel. Took down magenta to -9 and suddenly the grays started to look like gray. There is just one thing to be done in photoshop prior to printing. The brightness of the image has to be increased a little bit. A foolproof way to do this is to have a curves layer, with no adjustment, then setting the blending mode to screen with 50% opacity. That makes my color prints about same as what I see on my monitor. For black and white prints using QTR, the last step is not necessary, or maybe about 20% opacity will do.

Looking forward to some print sessions in the coming days.

Update: Magenta -12 works even better.

Update: Brightness +16 nearly eliminates the need to brighten the image using a 50% screen blended curves layer with no adjustments.

We moved to a rented house in the beginning of 2010. One of my two roomies moved out of the old place, and the rent looked pretty steep, so we found a 3br house for a little less. Besides the fact that all of us craved for some open space, the 2-car garage was a pretty good motivation to move my lazy ass.

It took us no less than a week to move and set up, but now I can say that it was totally worth the labor and pain. No more stair climbing nonsense, and my garage woodshop next to the kitchen is a total bliss.

Among my tools, I have only added a wood lathe and a bandsaw. As luck would have it, the lathe was my own over a year back and the current owner would not sell it but trust me enough to let me use it on rent. Could not find a good deal on craigslist so I rented it for 6 months. Who knows if my bowl turning passion will still be active or not. The bandsaw was a great find, and it makes me feel like I got a pair of scissors to cut wood in arbitrary shapes. Pretty darn fun.

Amazing how a little more space can fire up so much energy. I have taken up a little bit of acrylic painting as well, and anxious to see where it takes me. Painted my first 16×20 canvas last week and right now making a 24×24 hardwood canvas for another painting I have in mind.

Hope the creative energy stays on for a while. More later…

Stackoverflow.com provides a spot-on solution to this very precise problem. Not only it is a clean and functional site free of annoying ads, it actually engages the users to help others more. The reputation scoring logic is a feedback loop, which gets a programmer addicted in no time. I think it works marvelously well.

To top it off, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the founders of stackoverflow made their software reusable. There is also superuser.com and serverfault.com based on the same platform but geared more towards sysadmin crowd. And slowly, many other sites are adopting this very successful platform, for example: answers.onstartups.com.

I am very happy to be involved with helping the programming community and learning at the same time. I guess I have nearly stopped spending time on facebook and twitter. I recommend all my coworkers and techie friends to start contributing in these platforms already.