Secret Projects:

Iconpacks for Gallery

The administration of Gallery seems to require an endless supply of tiny icons. I wrote new code to check all the available modules for things that require icons. I fixed the code that checks the css files for defined icons. That stuff won’t get checked in until after the next release (I don’t intend to finish it until then, anyhow), but I needed better tools to perform the assigned task. The last two icon sets will require either new icons from their creators or me just giving up and assigning them placeholders. I give it to tomorrow to hear back, and then I stride forward boldly.

No E_STRICT errors in Gallery2 under PHP5

I was told or it was at least implied that I shouldn’t work on this, but to date I have only been given onerous tasks with regards to Gallery. I enjoy futzing with this stuff.

PHP, easy as APC

The current front end for this opcode cache looks more like C than PHP5. I started by making it validate, then started to lint the PHP, then just gave up and started tearing the code into thin strips and gluing it back together in the shape of a horse. The next thing I knew, I was futzing with the C in the extension (which, honestly, is the happiest I’ve been programming since forever) to see if I could find what was causing errors when the cache was getting full after running for a while. I don’t know that I found the errors, but I found other things, and maybe things that I will bow and scrape and submit to the actual developers.

I predict one of two results:

Get off your knees, son, for no person is a king here, we are all equals! I approve of your code and shall champion its cleverness across these great Nets of Inter, for the time of your code is upon us and we shall all cry your name in wonder!

or

Aren’t you the guy who was loud and drunk at the Microsoft thing last fall? No one thinks you’re funny, and your code doesn’t compile.

Maybe somewhere in the middle.

1, 2, 3, Baby, You and Me!

Sarah is forcing* me to go to Brainerd to be at or on Pequot Lake with her family. I’m gonna put on my blue eye shadow and head out!

Gallery Code Reviews

I’m pretty sure that I did the most reviews in the month of May, and possibly April. I think that I ran out of reviews to perform in June.

Oh the Huge Manatee!

Fancy seeing what it’s like to pilot one of those gentle giants? Try it online! The narration is… the best part. There’s also bowling. As long as your eyes are crossing up with incomprehension and horror, you might as well listen to the hot summer jam “Pleasurefist, penned in response to a tweet by the glorious rstevens. What? When you make a better Pleasurefist song you can point fingers. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable with the family-friendly Handy Andy World 2 game that we made at work. I did pretty much all of the sound effects this time — a feat which has been described as “delightful and creepy,” and had the side effect of yielding a new description for me: “delightfully creepy,” which is possibly better than just being called “creepy,” but really, is not, and I would prefer to stamp that out directly, but I’m holding on to the cold stares for an emergency.

Fixing images in this blog

There was an… incident… in the database for my gallery. Some things got… moved. Rest assured that I am working tirelessly to identify all wayward images.

Gettin’ some new business cards

Take a look at this business:

Now imagine it way more awesome AND in physical form. Chandler has agreed to help me negotiate a steel mankiller of a printing press to crush my image into a set of business cards. As if that weren’t enough, she agreed to redraw the portrait such that it won’t look like the painful scratches of a drowning two year old. Her words! Oh. No, my words.

Additional Gallery2 Integrity checking

I think that my original project, meant to be implemented outside of the Gallery code base so as not to fall down if something were deeply wrong with a person’s Gallery installation, is being sucked in — perhaps to its eventual detriment. Nonetheless, I persevere and even have an early version of the code in the Gallery code review system, so it is less likely to be completely forgotten about.

I saw my older sister

I can’t remember for sure the last time we saw each other — possibly two years ago. It was almost as weird as a couple of weeks ago when my grandfather said that he didn’t recognize me, even after being reintroduced, but for totally different reasons.

Some other stuff

I can’t remember, and I might actually be getting tired, which would be nice. If I toss and turn again, I might read some more of Catch-22. Why didn’t anyone tell me that it was this good?

Fun fact: some people can’t say schmutz! I guess that I assumed it to be a term of wider use. Maybe it hasn’t been assimilated and still needs to be italicized as a foreign word: schmutz. Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you, you’ve got some schmutz on your shirt.

*no waterboarding was involved

Mom, can we drive through the cemetery? I want to see if there are any zombies.

“About” implies not pictures but words, and yet I shall hold back on the words, since mostly it was just a sweaty mash of hip hop kids with the occasional old guy photographing the band. Oh, that was me! I was the old guy!

All I can say is that is was a great show. Plenty of great beats and rhymes and stuff. If you want to rifle through all of the pictures, they’re here:
http://gallery2.jpmullan.com/v/scans/2008/06/20080601_Doomtree_Grand_Old_Day/

It's 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I've got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: "the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall", "john has a long mustache, john has a long mustache". It's twelve o'clock, American, another day closer to victory. And for all of you out there, on, or behind the line, this is your song.

Things are going well, and I think that I am going to have beer with some friends. End of message.

I should really make it a point to visit more taquerias here in Minneapolis. I think that we may have preferred this joint to the “Mexican” place we had visited a night or two before, where a karaoke machine fired up mid-meal and we were regaled by a variety of folks singing highly improbable hits from the 80s.

At one point in the day, Sarah took a nap with our Lo-Pan pillow.

This was the day that we visited SF MOMA, but seeing Lee Friedlander’s photos made it hard to take photos of our own. To add insult to injury, we also visited the Fraenkel Gallery, which had not only dozens of Friedlander’s works, but Diane Arbus, Garry Winograd, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, and a host of other photographers whose work I could barely afford if I devoted months and months of salary. Seeing their silver gelatin prints was humbling to say the least.

We did, however, stroll over to Chinatown, where we couldn’t resist photographing Mao and a huge wooden cock.

On the way back, we saw a really truly massage parlor.

We closed out the day by eating at a downtown restaurant.

The day ended with gentle sleep amidst Saturday night clamor in the alley several floors down outside our room. Sarah slept her usual dead-to-the-world slumber and I tossed restlessly, knowing that the next day would put a convertible into my itchy palms and spirit us away northward to highways that twisted along the coast and amid tumbling hills.