It’s becoming a fashion lately to release the source code of older but legendary commercial products to the public. Now Adobe decided to gift the source code of their flagship product Photoshop in it’s first version from 1990 to the Computer History Museum.
“That first version of Photoshop was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, with some machine language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor where execution efficiency was important. It wasn’t the effort of a huge team. Thomas said, “For version 1, I was the only engineer, and for version 2, we had two engineers.” While Thomas worked on the base application program, John wrote many of the image-processing plug-ins.”
Since my wife started working as a photographer on a daily basis the daily routine of getting all the pictures off the camera after a long day filled with photo shootings got her bored quickly.
Since we got some RaspberryPis to spare I gave it a try and created a small script which when the Pi gets powered on automatically copies all contents of the attached SD card to the houses storage server. Easy as Pi(e) – so to speak.
So this is now an automated process for a couple of weeks – she comes home, get’s all batteries to their chargers, drops the sd cards into the reader and poweres on the Pi. After it copied everything successfully the Pi sends an eMail with a summary report of what has been done. So far so good – everything is on our backuped storage server then.
Now the problem was that she often does not immediately starts working on the pictures. But she wants to take a closer look without the need to sit in front of a big monitor – like taking a look at her iPad in the kitchen while drinking coffee.
So what we need was a tool that does this:
take a folder (the automated import folder) and get all images in there, order them by day
display an overview per day of all pictures taken
allow to see the fullsized picture if necessary
work on any mobile or stationary device in the household – preferably html5 responsive design gallery
it should be fast because commonly over 200 pictures are done per day
it should be opensource because – well opensource is great – and probably we would need to tweak things a bit
It’s called GalleryServer and basically is an embedded http server which takes all .jpg files from a folder (configurable) and offers you some handy tool urls which respons with JSON data for you to work with. I’ve written a very small html user interface with a bit of javascript (using the great html5 kickstart) that allows you to see all available days and get a nice thumbnail overview of each day – when you click on it it opens the full-size image in a new window.
It’s pretty fast because it’s not actively resizing the images – instead it’s taking the thumbnail picture from the original jpg file which the camera placed there during storing the picture. It’s got some caching and can be run on any operating system where mono / .net is available – which is probably anything – even the RaspberryPi.
The second edition of the book “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson is available as a full download. It’s quite a reference and a must-read for anybody with an interest in security (which for example all developers should have).
“When I wrote the first edition, we put the chapters online free after four years and found that this boosted sales of the paper edition. People would find a useful chapter online and then buy the book to have it as a reference. Wiley and I agreed to do the same with the second edition, and now, four years after publication, I am putting all the chapters online for free. Enjoy them – and I hope you’ll buy the paper version to have as a conveient shelf reference.”
Choosing the right javascript library is one of the key elements to create a good prototype in very short times – productive applications even. If you want to get new impressions, hints and links to those javascript libraries that will render your next project a success look no further:
“A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day” is one of the statements this great blog article makes on the matter of interruption of professionals while they do their hard work.
It’s an important thing to understand how that idea to code conversion thing happens. For anyone without that experience: Think of it like being very very concentrated and juggling things. When you get abstracted it’s very likely that you drop something. In the worst case you never even get something to juggle…
