Picture Gallary

I spent a bit of time this weekend getting my image gallary off the ground using Cocoon's imagedirectory generater pipeline. Which works but doesnt go quite as far as I first hoped.

First up, I expected cocoon to generate image previews for me in some kind of way, dont know how it would be possible but I kinda of expected it anyway. Then I also expected the generater to support EXIF so I could pull data out of the photo, such as when it was photographed, etc. But no good. Anyway I've been looking into the area of EXIF again and come up with a bunch of links for next time I got time to look at this area in more depth.

Stuffware Photo Studio – Free and deals with all types of photo and movie metadata the best of the lot.
The specs for EXIF and the Camera file system.
Jhead's EXIF to XML complete with a whole host of useful links too.
W3c's Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP note.
OpenEXIF.
metadata extraction in java, also loving the look of Drew's photo gallary. Surely there has to be a way to intergrate this into cocoon, as its just a jar file?

Oh just a quick mention that the Stuffware Photo studio is the bomb and I'm loving it. Just wish I could find a way of cocoon reading the EXIF data and the embeded jpg thumbnail rather than me making another directory for thumbnails! Yes that really sucks bad… Made my feelings be known on the cocoon wiki

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Web standard Slash dot?

slash dot logo, news for nerds. stuff that matters

One day I would love to beable to use slashdot on my ipaq without scrolling here there and everywhere. Anyway this is written after reading the alist apart article. The challenge of changing slash is a interesting one, as there are many good opensource applications which dont do standards well, slash being one of them.
Next week: printer-friendly and handheld-friendly Slashdot with a few simple additions. – I wonder if people will catch on to the fact that the new palmtops support css now, which is ignoying as they shouldnt.

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More t-shirt ideas

American Apparel plus logo

David, one my 1st year students pointed me towards this site the other day. Its a follow on from my previous post about tshirts. Thinking of ordering some for when i go to America for xmas, then bribe or ask someone really nicely to do a print for me in the fashion department. Also should speak to Dave about it as he done it himself last year.

Surely there has to be a UK or European equal to american apparel? If you know, leave a comment please…

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WordprocessingML schemas in the wild

InfostructureBase - facilitating intergration

Caught the link to the WordML schemas in my aggeragater this morning. Seems the Danish Government have published the full wordML scheams. Then dave reminded me to blog it later in the day.

The schemas are seriously, wildly complex and I cant believe what i'm looking at… Makes Docbook and Openoffice schemas look like little kiddie schemas. Took a few minutes to generate the documentation out of XMLspy, check out the beastie – ALL 14.9meg of html zipped into a 3.4meg file.

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Linux on the xbox

Gentoox logo

I am now a proud owner of a xbox running gentoox 3 home edition. Seems I forgot to full wipe the CD-RW I was using and that was causing the errors. Anyway, I choose XFCE over KDE because its easier to use on a Xpad and much quicker on a xbox. I configured SSH which works nicely, FTP, Samba and VNC which I havent tested out yet. Also changed the Xbox from DHCP to a static IP.
I'm quite happy with it but would like to get a usb connection for it soon, so I can plugin a keyboard as the xpad is frustrating. Now i'll be spending lots of time around the gentoox tutorial section.

You've got to love opensource software…

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Wired does RSS

Ok I dont know if i'm old news? but I just found wired's beta rss feeds. When you do a search for example this is a search for string theory under wired. And there is now a rss link at the top and bottom. This simply puts a flavor or format on the end. http://search.wired.com/wnews/default.asp?query=string%20theory&format=rss. I've added wired to my feeds by adding this rss feed. It will not allow to do it without the query querystring.

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String theory explained

Ok I'm looking forward to watching this documentary on Channel 4. I'm hoping it will explain string theroy in a simple way, so I can show others it and have disscussion afterwards. It worked with Carl and time travel, i explained the theory and showed him the channel 4 documentary and he finally got it and we could then have a leveled discussion about time travel.

Didnt know the tv show was presentated by Brian Greene, the author of the book I was actually thinking of buying a while back


me holding the elegant universe by brian greene


I was kind of happy with the documentary, but would have liked to see the others first. It wasnt as good as the Time travel one but good enough to follow and understand. Very interesting concept M-theory or Super String theory, will have to wait for cern to finish there project before I can say for sure i'm converted.

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Acres of Roses and Diamonds : Reuseit

Jakob Neilsen next to a wall

At long last the winner of the reusit contest has been announced. Where did i come? well I didnt do it that badly, about half way down which isnt bad considering I spent 1 hour doing it while on jury service back in August.

Visual Appeal – 1.89
Usability – 2.00
Valid HTML – 5.00
Valid CSS – 5.00
Cross-Browser – 5.00
Accessibility – 5.00
Total Visual Score – 1.94
Total Validity Score – 5.00
Total Score – 3.47 – not bad seeing how number 1 was 4.58

I love the fact no one really liked the style of it but it was valid html/css, accessable and cross browser. Just wish I kind of finished the white edition. As that was cleaner and more pleasent on the eye. Saying that I think i was one of the only entries which deployed a dark background with white text.

On the downside, one of my MA students came 2nd from last which isnt good as they didnt even validate there xhtml or css. Oh well thats what happens when you face the rest of the world.
Talking of which, some of the entries were great work, nothing as radical as the stuff you see on csszengarden but very practical and useable layouts, real attention to detail style. I kinda of feel better than I didnt come near the top ten with my lame effort. Its quite cool how alot of them used a picture of Jakob Neilsen but I decided against it as I wouldnt put a picture of myself on my own website. I cant believe my entry was viewed by some of the great minds of the web at the moment, Zeldman, Meyer, etc. By the way nice to see Louise Ferguson on the panel. Would like to hear what Jakob says about the entries…

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XForms and Microsoft InfoPath

Straight down to the facts Xforms vs Infopath. For those too busy, heres the conclusion. Both InfoPath and XForms are version 1.0 efforts, and both are likely to improve substantially in future revisions. For organizations that have already licensed Office System 2003, InfoPath will provide an excellent means to automate data collection tasks. For use on systems not running Office System 2003, including Mac and Linux desktops, phones, PDAs, and even some PCs, XForms remains a better path.

Oh this isnt really related but a interesting case study anyway.

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Personal publishing / Social software hotting up

A image from microsoft's Wallop?

I was reading this on wired.com the other day and a good heads up on the state of play for personal publishing.

I had never heard of Wallop, but to be fair to microsoft it looks really good and backing it though the instant messager door is a good move. This is exactly what we've been trying to do with blogs and instant messager for a while now. Give students flexablitiy but depth when they publish. And theres little wrong with bundling already well known features into one packages, this is what makes apple popular. But on the other hand you know as well as I do, its going to be all propitery and propitery plus propitery does not equal fun at all. As wired says, it would be great to see Microsoft adding effort to the Atom spec.

At the same time though, some companys like Nokia are not so sure about user generated content. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have both launched initiatives to encourage people to use their multimedia handsets — one to take and share images, the other to just watch. Seems criminal that Nokia are not embracing the personal publishing idea, well it will be there lost in the end when sonyericsson, microsoft, apple, etc will dominate in this area. Maybe Nokia's Ngage says it all…

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Resin 3.04 upgrade

Just upgraded to Caucho's Resin 3.04 and theres no douht its super quick. I browsed my gallary of berlin pictures in extremely quick speed, much faster than resin 2.x. Did some tests and boy oh boy its quick. Caucho do claim that its almost as quick as Apache 2.0, and i'm not douhting it. I did do a test against IIS and you can guess which one lost out by along way. I actual couldnt believe the process power needed for IIS compared to Resin 3, and resin does JSP, XSP and Servlets.

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