25 posts from 2006

Pret have flipped into "Christmas" mode: I got a free orange with my croissant this morning. It's still on my desk. I think I'll have it after lunch.

There was a Vox question of the day last week about shopping online for Christmas, which I failed to answer at the time. Here, however, are my heroes and villains of present acquisition.

Villain: Apple

Apple won't take UK credit cards in their US online store. This meant that we couldn't get a present delivered to the US (where we'll be for Christmas), and certainly couldn't get it built to order. Boo.

Hero: Amazon

Filling the breach, Amazon were as usable as ever. The UK and US stores share data (notably address books and payment methods), so there was no problem paying with a UK card for US delivery. They were good about keeping in touch about stock levels, and provide exemplary tracking data. For some reason, their express one-day delivery in the UK wound up being cheaper than the default, so everything arrived in plenty of time. Lovely.

Ironically, after going to the London Vox meet and saying that I used it because I felt more able to write here than elsewhere - something that's still true, but that I'm also still not able to explain - I seem to have run into the buffers here as well. So this is kind of filler. Sorry about that.

Speaking of the Vox meet, it was good. The bar wasn't the nicest in the world, but there were lots of goodies and plenty of people to talk to. I made a beeline for "the photo table", where the 350D owners seemed to have congregated, but later actually did reasonably well at the "mingling" thing (which is usually a problem for me: at London.pm I always talk to the same people, for example). Eventually I might post photos, but this week's been busy. Thanks to the organisers, and the 6A entourage who made it there.

At least it's nearly the weekend.

As I've already said, I've moved a bunch of my old photos across to Flickr. I've also picked off another of the scripting chores mentioned there: I went back to the files on disk, looked up the ordering, and applied it within the sets. I've also ordered the sets by reverse date, and I have a bunch of handy .flickr files so that I can find the ID on Flickr given just the filename on husk.org.

You'd think I'd be done, but my quest for perfect organisation (which will be apparent to anyone who's seen my music collection's metadata- although I have to admit there are niggling holes there too) means that I have further problems.

Replicating heirarchy: sets vs tags

On stem, my old photo album, there was a heirarchy of directories, although I didn't really use it that much. Mainly, sets fell into five categories: "trips", "walks/wanders", "walks/crisps", "people" and "random".

Flickr doesn't (yet?) have a feature that allows you to put sets into other sets, so I can see three ways of retaining this information:

• set titles - at the moment things are called eg "Trips - New York"
• multiple sets - add all photos that were in Trips to a huge "Trips" set, so that the heirarchy is visible in what Flickr calls "context"
• tags - as well as my existing "stem" tag, use a psuedo-triple* like "stem:random"

I think I'm probably going to use the latter, since it feels most Flickr-y, but it does mean I'm going to have to do a bit more scripting to apply the tag across.

Re-uploading

In my previous post I mentioned that a lot of my photos are overcompressed. They also generally have had the EXIF stripped (because I edited them using Photoshop 5.5 - how retro).

In theory, finding the photos which do have EXIF is straightforward- find the photo (using the .flickr files above, that's easy), find its date, and then find it either on the filesystem (reasonably easy) or with iPhoto (which is proving annoyingly hard**). This is also useful for photos I've uploaded in the last year- I don't always have a record of which local file I uploaded to Flickr, and I may want to replace images with their full-res version at some point for printing.

However, for those with no EXIF data, the problem is much harder. One sensible thing I did with stem was to put the date in every folder name, and I've copied this across to Flickr's photo date properties, but it only gives me day resolution. This means that I may have 40 photos on Flickr, and another 400 at home, and have to find the smaller set in the larger. Even worse, the photos on Flickr may be cropped or colour-corrected (again, in Photoshop).

I suspect the only solution is to take the local files, and the original iPhoto images for that day, and use a script based on something like Image::Seek, a Perl library based on imgSeek, to try and find similarites and save me doing so. I haven't really started poking at code, though, so this might all fail horribly. We'll see.

Organising ... and is it worth it?

Finally, there's tidying up the photos before publication; fixing titles (which were previously limited in both length and by what's sensible in filenames), maybe adding descriptions, and definitely adding tags

However, by this point I'm wondering if it's even worth going through all this faff. Is it worth bothering will all this coding and organising? Already, just with day resolution and the old title metadata, I'm finding it easy to look for images. Perhaps I should just call it a day, make everything public, and change my attention to another app - sourcing stem from Flickr.

If anybody has any thoughts, though, I'd love to hear them.

* Inspired, I think, by the geotaggers, I use tags like "lens:50mm" rather than the (much) more common pair of "lenstagged canonef50f1.8". I'm well aware that Flickr doesn't really do anything useful with the colon to turn them into real triples, but I still think I might do some time, and if pressed I'll argue that the tags are for my use, not yours, so I stick with them. If I ever really care I'll batch change them.

** Unfortunately I've come to expect that from scriptable applications. In theory iPhoto (and iTunes) should be able to be fast object databases, queryable on anything you like, including date, name, artist and so on. In practice, sadly, they're not; the timeouts I was getting from iPhoto last night either mean I'm doing something horribly wrong or that it's doing linear searches for date properties. Oh well. I must admit this is a niche activity.

I'm not feeling incredibly verbose right now, so instead here's a hope spelled out pretentiously with a couple of photos I took on the way home from work.

Civility

Works

There's a Seven Deadly Sins meme going around at the moment, and after one of my friends did it, I thought I would too. I wasn't intending to publish the full result, but I pasted it into Vox to see how it coped. After a prompt ("would you like to convert this?" - I said "yes" *) I ended up with a table in the compose page, which I could edit down to just this:

I was pleasantly surprised that it was possible (although a little unclear: the button you want is the "x" in the circle) to remove rows. There's also undo/redo, the ability to size rows, and you can edit the text in fields.

Unfortunately, I can't see a way to create a table other than a two-pass edit, putting in HTML then letting Vox convert it. Nonetheless, I'm pretty impressed.

* This was the only slightly iffy part. I didn't read the dialog very closely, but it seemed unclear what the other option did. Presumably it would have displayed raw HTML to people. I should go back and check this.

On Monday evening, I was poking around with various APIs trying to configure Flickr to post photos to Vox. Now, the former claims to be able to post to the Atom API, and Vox claims to have one, but when I configured it and tried to test post I got an uninformative error.

Delving deeper, I broke out XML::Atom, the Perl library - originally by the CTO of Six Apart, now maintained by one of their technical folk - and tried a trivial test post, not unlike this example in Ben Hammersley's book. It didn't work either, with the somewhat baffling error "200 OK".

Doing more research, it seems that a lot of clients - Ecto, for example - have trouble with Vox. There is an internal Six Apart project for a Mac OS X based TypePad/Vox uploader, called Fence, but it's not finished, and doesn't work with 10.3. After a bit of headscratching, I decided I'd need to spend far more time than I have to figure out what was up, and left it.

This morning I discovered that Flickr have explicitly added Vox as a supported blog type. This just confirms to me that there's something odd about Vox's Atom API. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by this: it's got nowhere near the adoption or longevity of the competing XML-RPC weblog APIs, and only a couple of months ago Anil Dash noted that it was still niche: "the Atom API hasn't gotten finalized in the way that feed format did" and "Atom will probably show up somewhat later in new tools using blogging APIs".

So, Team Vox, one thumb up for Flickr picture posting, since my earlier complaint about posting is now void, but one thumb waggling uncertainly, since the Atom API is obviously - to use the apparently industry standard term - "funky". Here's hoping it gets sorted out soon.

If you came with a warning label, what would it say?
Submitted by chris.

Batteries Not Included.

Feeling a bit uninspired today, so even with an implicit poke from candace, no good content. I've not managed to get my post-upload Flickr reordering done. Hence the "I could do with more energy" comment, and a hope to return to daily posting tomorrow. Maybe I can dredge out one of those drafts. (Hey! Team Vox! Make the background of drafts grey or something, so it's easier to spot! Or maybe I could do a user css file for that. Hmm.)

Hilton Hotel, Park Lane, London

I finally did something that I've been thinking about for months: migrating all the photos from my homebrew photo gallery into Flickr. As a result, instead of the usual 100-so uploads, this month I've managed 3000 (although you can't see them; they're all private*).

Of course, given this was a one-shot script, I managed to make a few mistakes. I haven't preserved the order of the images, or the sets, and I don't have a handy lookup table, so I can't yet do anything clever like serve the HTML on my own site but the pages from Flickr (or, for that matter, set up redirects; I care about old URLs working, especially because Google seems to like my site enough that I get the odd referrer).

Still, it's nice to have got a small bit of integration out of the way, although, like Tom I still have a bit of tension between signing my life over to other people and handling it myself.

* I'm not entirely sure why, though. After all, they're all visible on my site. Perhaps it's because I want to make sure I don't suddenly flood anyone's RSS feed, and that's best achieved - according to Phil Gyford, anyway - by uploading some other photos after the import. There's also the issue that the images have little metadata, and I'd like to add some tags. Even more time-consumingly, I'm thinking of replacing the old images, which have been resized down from the originals and have no EXIF. I think those are good reasons. I'm not sure though.

candace passed on a story in the SF Chronicle's online edition about BART removing carpets from its trains. I must say, I'm amazed that such a thing existed; it seems like an obviously bad idea, on a mass transit system anyway. People will pick up dirty feet and cleaning carpets is really difficult. (However, InterCity trains have carpets, and a good thing that is too. Mind you, there's nowhere near the throughput.)

"The carpet is really disgusting. I don't even want to think about what made that stain,'' said Jennifer Larson during a recent BART ride through the Transbay Tube. The administrative assistant pointed at a blackened splotch beneath her feet. "What on earth were they thinking, putting carpets and cloth seats on the trains?''

From a UK perspecitve, that sentence is great until you get to the last five words. What's wrong with cloth seats? All British trains and buses (long distance and commuter, Underground and DLR, and tourist and coach buses as well as local services*) have upholstered seats, and I've never noticed them being a problem.

In contrast, when you go to the States, the working assumption seems to be that public transport is used by untrustable, unclean savages, who, if given anything other than hard moulded plastic, would instantly perform some combination of ripping it up, sticking gum to it, performing unpleasant bodily functions in the vicinity, then cheerfully exiting without conscience. Certainly the MUNI's bendy buses in San Francisco were unpleasant to ride on for more than a few minutes because of the nasty plastic - almost bucket - seats.

Having said all that, the rest of the article makes no mention of removing the "wider, padded seats", so perhaps there are still outposts of civilisation in American public transport infrastructure. It also looks like they might have learnt a trick from some of London's more, um, interesting upholstery covers:

Initially, concerns were raised that the floors were too slippery -- more perception than reality, BART officials say -- because they were so shiny. They added some speckles to the coloring and the anxiety about slipping subsided.

Here's a hint: it hides the dirt, too.

* There are a very few exceptions. I've been on some old bus stock running to South London where the back quarter of the upper deck has raw plastic, with no upholstery, on the seats, but that's very much a notable exception. In contrast, Routemasters had lovely leather(ette?) seat coverings.