I feel the need to reconnect with the woods this morning, so we’re going hiking in Umstead State Park. Hallie will ride along in the backpack.

The sunny, mid-60’s day expected here is helping drive us outdoors.

Got a busy, but fun day planned once we get back.

I’m loving the new gallery script I’m using called Singapore. It really looks stylish, and most importantly, it works great for posting lots of pictures quickly. I needed a script which is smart enough to work with pictures I dumped into directories. Singapore is great for this.

My two gripes with it: its slow speed and lack of database support. Speed isn’t really Singapore’s fault, since it relies on external apps to resize the thumbnails. And database support would be great for image captions.

I figured out where the slowdown is for thumbnails, too. I’m using ImageMagick to resize my images. ImageMagick produces high-quality thumbnails at the expense of speed. I could use GD, but thumbnails generated by GD are crappy.

Anyhow, ImageMagick’s convert utility spends its time shrinking a 1500×3000-ish pixel image down to 100×200-ish size. Those it uses for its gallery indices, which is fine.

The REAL slowdown is when you view an image at its largest size. While convert can spit out the larger resized image fairly quickly, there are five tiny (50×100) thumbnails at the top of this page. Each tiny thumbnail also spawns a convert process, bringing the server to a crawl.

I’ve decided the tiny thumbnails are redundant, since the galley index thumbnails (the 100×200 ones) should be more than adequate for this page. Since they’ve already been generated, the time it takes to view images should speed up by a factor of five. Now we’re talking!

I’ll patch the PHP code tomorrow and offer my patch to anyone who cares to ask. This should also give me a good excuse to dig into PHP.

Try clicking around Hallie’s gallery to see what I mean.

So the Smurfs play Dook today, showing on ESPN. I don’t have cable because I don’t want to pay $30 for 30 channels when all I want is one. This is called “tiering” and its big sux.

Back in the day when cable was getting started, the decoder boxes used for premium channels were dumb as bricks. The circuitry was only capable of turning on blocks of channels instead of individual ones.

All that’s changed now that digital cable is here. There is no longer any technical reason why a cable subscriber can’t pay for one or two channels of his choice.

Instead, we have tiers artifically inflating the importance of things like “The Grass Channel” and whatnot. Advertisers get roped into using these tier numbers as proof of who is watching, when it isn’t the case.

In a perfect world, I could pay for the three or four channels which really appeal to me and leave the rest to rot. In a better world, I could pick the shows carried on these channels and only pay for them. These would get streamed to my home media server, just like TiVo.

I’ve been poking into systems such as konspire to do this, but so far its a lonely system. One of my weekend projects is to package kast into some Red Hat packages in an effort to get it more widely used.

Media will work a lot differently, once I have my way!

I read Doc Searls’s weblog every day because he and I share a lot of interests. One of those interests is free speech, especially in relation to the Internet and radio. I followed post on Doc’s page which brought me to some great commentary on the now-defunct Communications Decency Act.
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Three days after being linked from this blog, Mojo Nixon has announced his retirement. He will play his last show in Austin on March 20th.

“I have nothing more to say,” says Nixon. “Not only am I empty, but obviously nobody gives a rat’s ass about the things I have been saying for twenty years. The masses are just as blinded by the light of stupidity, prudery and the shiny objects of hate.”

“I have debased your false icons, mocked the myths and tried to shine the light of truth and freedom on the Big Lies” says Nixon. “I have done all I can.”

The world weeps.
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I heard from one of the local ham luminaries that FCC Commissioner Michael Powell will be in Fuquay-Varina this afternoon, eyeballing BPL in action at someone’s house. Media reps and local ham club reps will be on hand.

I predict fistfights break out between the hams and Progress Energy techies.

We had a surprise visit from our friends the Hibbles. Geoff and Robin drive 26 hours tomorrow night on their way to Colorado, but they still had time to visit.

Two hours were not nearly enough to catch up after two years apart. Think its time we consider a trip to Colorado soon!

A fuel cell undergoing testing in Alaska has passed the 5,000 hours mark, producing over 20 kwh in its lifetime.

So, when can I get one installed? 🙂