Premature Optimization

I have been quite busy lately, trying to find a new apartment in Tel Aviv (not an easy task), and under allot of work. I’ve decided to take advantage of the rainy weekend to do some maintainence on my laptop, including a kernel upgrade from 2.6.18 to 2.6.19 (Gentoo ck-sources).

It seems that 2.6.19 introduced some major changes in ATA/SATA drives. For some reason, my SATA drive is no longer /dev/sda as it always was, but is now /dev/hda (which kind of makes sense, as it is not a SCSI device…). This in turn caused quite a headache - it has been long since I had to work hard for a kernel upgrade. [more...]

I just started getting the first comment spam attack on my blog today. For some reason, it seems that someone really thinks visitors to my blog are seriously into porn and gambling.. maybe they are?

Anyway, I thought the WP-HashCash WordPress plugin would be good enough to fight those, but it seems I was wrong. I’m doing a little research now to see what technique (or combination of techniques) will give me maximum spam protection with minimum user annoyance. Until I find that solution, you might see some spam around - I apologize in advance for that, but I prefer having some dirty, offensive spam around than blocking comments to registered users only for now.

Believe me, I’ve been under worse bombardments than this

Earlier this week, I finally (after long and hard work) pushed the Zend_Http_Client out of the incubator and into the core of Zend Framework, and it will be released with the 0.6 preview release.

Now that it’s mostly done, I had some time to do some benchmarking. But first, maybe a short explanation about the new client’s adapter architecture:

One of the things we introduced in the new client is the “connection adapters”: The idea is that there is a different object in charge of performing the actual communication with the server. This “adapter” object can be replaced, and this way you get the same interface (the Zend_Http_Client interface), with a different method to connect to the server.

[more...]

I’ve been spending allot of time sorting my gallery and uploading my photos to Flickr. I’ve even bought a Pro Account (!!). But manually uploading pictures to Flickr is not that easy. Flickr does offer some desktop applications that use Flickr’s web serives to upload pictures - but not for Linux (what did you expect?)

Anyway, this is where I came access F-Spot: It’s a very nice image database administration software for GNOME. You can tag your photos and sort them in all kinds of ways. It also does some basic image manipulation (it’s not GIMP - but it does most things you need to do basic touch-ups). The best part: You can automatically export your photos to Flickr. Very slick and easy to use.

I’ve also came accross some other apps, which I didn’t try - I know there are things especially for Flickr uploads, for example Glimmr. I’ve also seen Gnickr! which doesn’t seem to be mature enough, but looks like a very nice concept: It uses gnome-vfs (I guess.. correct me if I’m wrong) to create a virtual Flickr file system - so you can upload / view your pictures through Nautilus.. Cool!