Premature Optimization

I had some troubles yesterday importing images from my new Canon EOS Rebel XTi to my Gentoo - I installed UFRaw and gtKam and was trying to import RAW images into GIMP. For some reason gphoto2 wasn’t seeing my camera (although it was listed with lsusb) and so I couldn’t import photos from it using any application.

After several attempts (and very little information on Google), I gave up and went to sleep. Today I tried again and a solution came surprisingly fast: The problem was probably that I didn’t compile libgphoto with ptp2 support. What I did was:

- Add ‘CAMERA=”canon ptp2″‘ to /etc/make.conf
- Emerge libgphoto2, gphoto2 and hal again (I’m quite sure libgphoto2 was enough).

Now everything works and I’m off to play with some RAW images with GIMP.

It’s been a week since I got to Hyderabad, India - but today was the first day I actually got to hang around a little bit and not only work. So first of all, I’ve posted some pictures to my flickr page - check them out! They’re not incredible - it turns out I was overexposing most of my pictures today until I noticed I had a crazy shutter set… Still getting used to the new camera.

Anyway my colleague and friend Massi and I are here for some work (I’ll stay a week and a half more, and Massi leaves in a few days). Everything here is amazing - the culture is nothing like anywhere else I have been of course. I’ll probably be posting some more photos and write some more about it in the next days. The food, the clothes, the people - it’s all incredible.

Dirty, polluted - that’s true, but also incredible. It’s all very contrast in many ways.

Zend/PHP Conference 2007 is over - it was lots of fun and lots of work, and I enjoyed it even more than last year’s ZendCon. San Francisco was as beautiful as always, meeting colleagues from all over the world (some of whom I get to see only once a year) was fun, and of course, you get to learn from the smartest people of the PHP world, and also get drunk with them!
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ZendCon07 is going very well so far. I’m done with both of my talks, and it’s all very fun. Great people, great atmosphere… Also, I just got my new camera - my very own Canon Rebel XTi - I’ve been playing around with it all day and will probably post some pictures soon.

Anyway I just uploaded the slides of my “Building Scalable Development Environments” talk to SlideShare:

The talk is basically a set of tips and best practices I picked up over the time for building a healthy, scalable development environment. It covers several topics such as coding style standartization, SCM / Branching models, Bug Tracking, Peer Training etc.

I hope you’ll find it useful, and if you have any comments, I’ll be happy to hear them.

My colleague Massi and I landed here in San Francisco yesterday after an exhausting 15 or so hours in the air (Tel-Aviv -> Frankfurt -> San Francisco). Trying to minimize the effects of jet lag (is that actually possible?) we did our best to not go to sleep and spend another 8 hours or so doing some sightseeing and just hanging around with some friends from the team (Zenders from Israel, Germany, France and the US). We also watched the Blue Angels air show that was on yesterday - it was nice, but not too exciting (after all, growing up in northern Israel I got to see enough real fighter jet action…).

Today we’ll do some more sight seeing (it’s my second time in SF, I have some family here and I really love the city). I’m staying at the conference hotel - so if you’re around, come and say hi.