My Morning thus far

My morning thus far:

Woke up. Noticed it had been snowing. Roughly 4-5 centimetres on the ground, and still coming down, although it's more ice crystals than snow.

Since today is the first day that my company is exhibiting at the BETT trade show in London, got dressed in snazzy new company shirt, and trudged my way (30 minutes) to train station.

Bought £21 ticket. Went into station, just in time to hear announcment that all trains were terminating at woking, and there would be no services to London. Damn!

Walked home through park. Snow quite pretty, but cold and wet as well:

Finally got back home. Roads didn't look too bad, so I thought I could at least drive into office. Cleared car of snow and ice, drive 2 metres forward and got stuck, half in, and half out of driveway!

So here's the thing: If the gulf stream breaks down, or becomes more erratic, this will happen more and more. We need infrastructure to cope with the bad weather. How do other countries deal with this?

piwup: A Picasaweb Image Uploader for Linux

One of my pet peeves has always been that unless you want to run google's picasa application under Linux, the only way to upload photos to your picasaweb account is via a klunky web interface that only allows you to select 5 images at a time. When I come back from a trip I have hundreds of photos, so this gets tiresome very quickly.

There is a kipi plugin that is supposed to be able to do this, but it has not yet hit the Linux distribution I am using, and I'm not about to start compiling plugins from source. Besides, half the fun is in making the application!

This is definitely not a finished application! I got it to the point where I could upload my images in a batch, but it needs more work before it's useful to anyone else. Here's a few sample screen shots:

Selecting images to upload.

Uploading the first image.

The application still has a long way to go. Just some of the things yet to complete are:

• Remove hard coded items from the code (account details, service host, album name), and make these configurable via a nice configuration dialog. Make sure password is stored in a secure form - via the KDE wallet perhaps.
• Make the GUI half-decent. Originally I just wanted something to work - I need to go back and do it again with a proper menu and image thumbnail support.
• Bug fixes too numerous to mention here... this is some rouch, cheap and nasty code!

Perhaps, once I get all this done I will attempt to get it officially released into some distros. I think it's a useful application, and the kipi plugin version doesn't seem to be moving along much. Yes, I realize that I'd be better off spending my time improving the kipi plugin, but to be honest I can't be bothered right now - this was a learning experiment for me as much as it was about making an application that solved one of my problems.

The entire application is written in C++ and Qt4. The more I use Qt the more I like it. This application was simplicity itself to make, and I look forward to continued development.

post-vacation blues.

Well, I'm back from my holiday, with a slight tan and some great photos. Works has been busier than usual, so I'm struggling to find spare time to domuch at all.

My next hobby project will be to build my own ADSL / Ethernet / Wireless router box. I'm planning on using a Soekris net 4501 motherboard running a cut down version of Debian Linux. I'll update the blog when I get the parts, and I plan on writing a short HOWTO document which will include selecting the hardware, putting it all together, and the software as well.

I've added a selecton of photos from New Zealand to the main page - these haven't been edited in any way - yes, the country really does look like that!


Until next time!