It’s also made me *finally* upgrade to the latest version of WordPress!

So now over a year after I first saw it Microsoft have released a version where anyone can create and upload their own Photosynth (I’m not too sure I like the name) and early this wet August Sunday morning I went out and give it a go near my local station. Anyone can view it providing that they’re using Windows preferably with IE7 or Firefox3 (no mac support yet, so I had to use vmware to view and create this - mac support is in the works apparently?!?).

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=48faf711-c989-4610-914d-8f204a357e45

After it finally generated and uploaded to the PhotoSynth website I was fairly happy with my results for a first try, but I wish I’d taken more photos from more points and from different distances to really show what I think this technology can do. Then again I did take over 120 photos, but I reckon to do it well I might need 4 or 5 times that! A few things I wish they could add are:

• A better editor for more control over the end result as currently you have to upload the photos online and hope it all works.
• The ability to add more photos over time to a current set of photos would allow me to gradually expand the detail and scope of the synth.
• Geotagging of sythn’s so they could be placed onto a mapping service.

But over all if you like taking pictures then this is a new fun toy to play with…

Over the last few weeks i’ve moved over all my pictures from my php gallery to flickr, so now I really need to replace my hosted gallery with something better than a link to my flickr account. My solution to this was to create (what I think is) a nice little mashup of flickr hosted based pictures and a javascript visulisation of them. Rather than use one of the many flickr mashup’s out there I decided it was more fun to wrote my own…Simply i’ve taken 36 square thumbnails arranged in a 9×4 grid from flickr and used a combination of prototype, cube (with some modifications), lightbox2 with some javascript glue of my own to bind them together.

What does it do…

Well it’s easier to see it, but every second or two a randomly selected thumbnail in the 9×4 grid will rotate to a new picture from flickr and then this repeats forever. You can also click on any of the thumbnails in the grid to hightlight a picture and eventually i’ll provide a link to where that photo is hosted on flickr, once a figure out a better way to do it than to put the link into the title.

How’s it work…

Well i’m using a php script on my server to get a selection of photo details using phpFlickr; I decided to get 72 photo objects ever time I accessed to script, but on the initial load I display the first 36 onto the page. I used prototype to handle the Ajax request and json parsing, I guess I could I done this without prototype, but I couldn’t be bothered and it would have taken longer and lightbox2 requires it anyway! Then using a javascript image cube animation library I found this will animate a image rotation to a new picture from the remaining 36 pictures. Although I did have to modify the cube library a bit to use absolute positioning and setting some divs to be inline apart from the first thumbnail of the row. Once the page has runout of pictures from the initial server script load a new call is made to that script for another page of 72 picture objects from flickr … and so on … and so on … I also used lightbox2 to load up a larger version of the square thumbnail when you click on the thumbnail.

You didn’t take those pictures…

At the moment I’m just using the interesting pictures from flickr (they look better than mine), but once I fix the odd bug or few I’ll replace my hosted gallery to a nicer version of this mashup using my own pictures. Phew! PS Thanks firebug!

• Languages: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript
• DB: MySQL (as Dreamhost doesn’t have PostGres) 
• Test frameworks: rSpec, Selenium
• CI: CruiseControl.rb

At the moment I’m thinking of porting the lovely RoundCube mail project from PHP to Rails, it’s something that uses concepts that i’m fairly familiar with i.e. email protocols and I guess i’ve never been all that happy with any self-hosted web mail client, so I guess it’s time to put up or shut up and build my own. Obviously I want to refresh/update my Ruby and JavaScript skills and it’s associated agile components as well. Also as i’m using rSpec i’ll try and develop the project using BDD, but how i’m going to map business value priorities to a web email client could pose some interesting questions, although mapping behavior in tests might work better with the way I think … I think It’s not all that exciting, but if anyone has any other suggestions then just add a comment and i’ll consider it?

• Anonymous requests can now be made where permission to do so has been set.
• Authenticated/Alluser groups and ACL get and sets have been implemented.
• All REST calls have been implemented (except postObject)*
• Exception handling matches the S3 documentation (with some guess work)
• The REST layer was completely rewritten using test driven development
• phpDocumentator comments are being added to the code, so docs can be generated
• I’ve created a web form to help you create new users to the service

So what’s next …. ? I guess I’ll polish what’s been completed so far and add some documentation to make it simpler to deploy. And as i’m off Snow boarding from Saturday i’ll wait to see what sort of feedback I get before getting started on the SOAP section which should be easier now that I’ve got a good testing setup + looking for a new job as i’ll be leaving mine soon! I’ve also found that the most popular php client for S3 (from a google search) is missing some useful functionality, so i’m pondering re-writing it and making several optimizations so it can stream downloads from S3 etc etc…

The best use for this software, apart from academic curiosity and mocking is probably a failover/backup service incase S3 goes down (which it has done). This would work best if you are CNAME record to map to s3.amazonaws.com as I believe that as this is under your DNS control it is fairly trivial to map it to another host.

Other than that I’ll write a blog on how to set it up using xampp on windows and macports on a mac (when I MacBook Pro arrives)…

You can checkout the latest code from here: http://svn.magudia.com/s3server

* As this service hasn’t been developed to work to meet Amazon’s data consistency model I implemented getBucketLocation, but essentially it does nothing. Although in theory I could use MySQL clustering to implement this I’m not going to unless someone wants to pay me and I also don’t have a global server network to play with

The problem is that it’s quite easy to replicate the ‘happy path’ of the specification as that’s been quite clearly documented, but when you try and recreate how and when different errors are thrown from just the documentation things become a little bit more murky. Say the document states that it throws different errors depending on if the Content-MD5 or the Content-Length don’t match was calculated by what was received by the service, then how do you know which will get sent first as it’s quite likely if one condition fails then the other will also fail? The specification doesn’t answer this, but my answer is that it’s probably best that it shouldn’t and these sort of questions are best left to developer forums as sometimes a specification can so detailed that no-one ever reads it!

Then today I was thinking on my way to my parents house that maybe I was wrong to create the back end database layer first and I should have stuck with a contract first approach, but later on my way home I remembered the reason I didn’t: The Amazon S3 REST service doesn’t have a contract, it has documentation - which simply isn’t the same. The S3 SOAP service does have a contract of sorts - it’s WSDL, but even that doesn’t help you recreate/describe the ‘unhappy path’ of the underlying service. The only real way you can do this is to write tests against the real service and hope they (the people who own the service) don’t change it much and your tests map out most of the potential paths which exist. Even better if the specification came with a downloadable set of software tests (JUnit et al) then that would make building a client even easier … a baseline reference implementation of sorts.

Simply contract first development works well when you own the software behind the contract and the contract itself. I’m not fully convinced it works as well when you have neither and your trying to clone a service. I could write tests against S3, but they would mean signing up and possibly breaking the T&C’s, but this project wasn’t to threaten S3 or get sued, but to understand it and the fundamental principles of well behaved web based services it bases itself on. I guess I’m someone who likes to take things apart to see how it works and that’s what I’ve done.

Also from my current experience it’s harder to develop a REST service than it is ‘in theory’ a SOAP service; BUT I think a REST service is easier to consume by clients of the service than SOAP. Simply because SOAP has massive interoperability problems between tool kits as the SOAP specification it itself ambiguous and are in small parts incompatible with several languages and REST simply has none of this because it based on the great HTTP RFC 2616 which the entire web is based on (including the majority of SOAP based services).

I have no solutions, just more questions and that generally isn’t a bad thing!

I’m not sure how i’m going to say this, but I think our time together is at an end. I’m not sure that we were ever that suited to each other even when we first met; around that time I’d had recently left Commodore and I think I was just looking for something different.

We’ve been together for many years now (15 years I believe) and I’ve seen you change from 3.1 to 95, 2000, XP and now finally Vista. I guess we’ve just grown apart and we simply don’t have the same interests anymore, you’re more into your business work and i’m still just a hacker at heart, which I don’t think you ever satisfied or appreciated. I should tell you that while at University I met Solaris (who knows Unix and Linux) and that’s were my doubts about you started, but even then I stuck by you as they had serious issues which meant I couldn’t imagine living with them.

Many years ago I met Apple at work and although we didn’t like each other at first (OS 7 - 9) a couple of years ago I cheated on you with Apple by buying a MacMini. Now after having fun with Apple for a couple of years I’ve decided that Apple and I are better suited than you and I ever were. You may think this is just a phase i’m going through and you may be right, but I think I need to try, so Apple is moving in next week (MacBook Pro is on it’s way!) therefore i’m sorry to say you’ll need to move out (and BT says I can’t keep you). I’m sure we’ll see each other around the office.

Take care,
Milan

 

 

Tags: Flock, Facebook, Twitter, Social Networking, Flickr, Firefox

My mate Piotr and I were baffled on what this could be; I was tempted to turn off all my wifi kit just in case it was some sort of semi pro wifi hacker? Other options were some sort of mind control device, a not very discret surveillance car, a mobile pirate radio station or even someone who really really wants to get a good radio reception! It had gone by the time we’d finished playing squash … maybe I should have turned my wifi off!

I think I’m going to stick with the old but useful XML Resume to update terribly out of date my CV!