Venza's blog

After several years of inactivity on that section of the site, I uploaded an update to the software pages. It is a small implementation of the ARP protocol, part of a job interview I took some months ago.
I happen to code all the time, at work, but unfortunately I am not allowed to share that with anyone. It would be interesting, as I am currently writing an embedded application that generates QT graphical widgets on the fly, trying to comply with safety coding rules  (EN 13849 and IEC 61508-3) for critical code paths and throwing in some real time concepts here and there.

On the photography side, this month I spent some hard-earned cash stocking up on equipment. I will be posting some new photos in the near future, but not before arriving to a satisfying situation with the photo galleries and blog.

I have already started to do some work. I shifted all the photo metadata in the EXIF and IPTC tags of the photos and changed the PHP code to get that data directly, without relying on external databases. This way I have to maintain a single set of titles, descriptions, locations, in the photos. You can see a result of this work here. I also got rid of all the Javascript nonsense about greybox galleries, adding the Google Maps code in its place.

Next I want to review the current layout, it is too fixed and looks bad in lot of common browser window sizes. I am particularly proud of the CSS magic contained in the page linked above as it scales well, with different window and font sizes.

Before undertaking this work I questioned my motives for both, maintaining a gallery at my own site (why not use Flickr?) and developing my own software (why not use Gallery or Coppermine ?). The reasons are there, even if they can be a bit irrational as seen from the outside.

I do not want to use Flikr or Picasa because I do not trust corporations to behave in my interest, especially those that provide free services. I hate the silent TOS changes and ridiculous usage rights some of those sites force on you. This gives me a bit of a visibility problem, since someone has first to find my site, then find a photo, while on a social site like those linked above they could appear on anyone of the millions of searches they get every second. Let’s say that it helps to distinguish me from the masses…
I uploaded some photos to Panoramio, but that was to have them appear in Google Earth.

As for the PHP gallery products, they have a lot of features that I do not need and about 60% of what I do need and for which I would have to write plugins and modify themes. Then I would have to keep it updated because of the security problems such complex systems have. My gallery system does not have a single HTML form in it and doesn’t use an SQL database, so I can just ignore whole classes of security issues and do something else with my life.
I am already keeping WordPress updated and it irritates me (I could use the built-in update feature, but then I would have to set everything as world-writable…).