Monument

I wanted to write a post about a happy memory to do with programming and networks.

Many years ago I used to help teach programming on a Scripture Union camp called Transformers. Our lab was at the top of a hill, with a large window looking down the grassy slope and facing a similar window in the building at the bottom. That building was the radio studio. The radio show broadcast all day over our wired ethernet network, and was played by a spare machine in every lab. After several hours of broadcast there was a lag of several seconds.

One day, someone requested YMCA by the Village People. When the song started in the programming lab, we looked down the hill to the studio. The radio crew were dancing, so naturally we stopped talking about recursion and started dancing too. This repeated itself on several following days, until people elsewhere who weren't in on the joke kept complaining on IRC about the same song being played constantly.

The joke was to play it late in the afternoon so that there was a large lag. When you're dancing to the same music as people you can see, but with a lag of ten seconds or so from what they can hear, it's surprisingly amusing.

Fortunately, someone took a photo:



I think my favourite part of this picture is the kid on the right who is quietly getting on with his assignment.

If you're not interested in coding nargery, you can skip this post.

Two things you need to know to read it:

1. It's a lot simpler to pass lists of strings over DBus than it is to pass lists of pairs of strings.
2. Images on imgur.com are identified by a five-character code, such as c7bC9. This gives us a URL of http://i.imgur.com/c7bC9.jpg , but you can also find a thumbnail by appending an "s" to the basename: http://i.imgur.com/c7bC9s.jpg .

I have a call in the DBus service that forms the back end of the imgur integration: it lists all the images you have uploaded. Now, a thumbnail of each such image is held on disk with the same basename as the image's ID. So here, "/home/marnanel/.local/share/imgur/c7bC9.jpg" (note: not c7bC9s.jpg, even though it's the same file as the URL which ends that way).

Clients might want to know two things about each image: its ID, and where to find a thumbnail. We could just list IDs, but then the client would have to make a call for every ID, asking where the thumbnail was, and that would be wasteful. I could have passed pairs of strings, but that's a bit clunky. What I did instead was to say that a filename was considered a non-canonical form of ID. When you pass in a filename, it takes the basename and uses that as an ID instead. So we can just supply a list of filenames of thumbnails, and the client can use those filenames as IDs, and we still know what they mean. It works rather well.

Now I would like to extend this by allowing people to look up not only images they have stored locally, but also the popular images of the day. Clearly the filename trick could be extended to URLs. But as mentioned earlier, http://i.imgur.com/c7bC9.jpg is the address of the original image, not the thumbnail. So we have a choice between sending them a list of full-size images, and sending them thumbnails and having to rewrite the canonicalisation rules.

I could

• say that six-character IDs ending in "s" are a non-canonical form of five-character IDs with the "s" removed. I am leaning towards this option. It keeps everything in line, but it's a bit of a hack, and after all we're receiving the actual thumbnail URL. On the other hand, we could always check that the actual thumbnail URL is what we expect, and discard the entry if it isn't.
• supply five-character IDs, but expect the client to know how to turn the URL of an image into the URL of a thumbnail. This is also a bit of a hack, because it's specific to imgur.com and I expect it might be useful to run this program against other servers.
• just give up on this thing and supply pairs of strings instead.

Your thoughts, gentle reader, are as welcome as ever they were.

I spent perhaps too much of today coding. I didn't really mean to spend quite that long on it, though it was a lot of fun. Will Thompson's help fixing DBus problems was invaluable. Version 0.50 of imgur integration will be coming to a Maemo repository near you soon:



Later, since it's my birthday tomorrow, we went out for a curry. It was pretty good, but rather mild. I was amused that the people at the next table to us were clearly English as well. Then we went to the bookshop, came home, and had some coffee. A pretty good day, all told.

And on another issue: nobody on IRC seems to know a solution, so perhaps someone here does: is there a known issue that would cause libtool to add an X to the start of every line of its input? (The result looks like this.)

This is rather a nuisance, because it stops me doing things.

Update: autoreconf -f -i -v fixed it. Thanks, anonymous hacker!

A spot of lunchtime hackery brings you imgur integration v0.4.0, "Stieglitz". Here's the original announcement, in case you'd like the background.

New in this version:

• Configuration files.
• A man page.
• Recording of details of previous uploads, API to check them, and commandline switches to access this API.
• Details are always printed to stdout, even if the browser is launched.
• Extra column in stdout details, giving the ID of the whole record.
• More tests.
• Bugfixes.

Next version will concentrate on getting Maemo libsharing working, which will be of great interest to some of you and none at all to the rest.

Download the tarball of 0.4.0, or look at the source control.

There is no packaging yet except for Gentoo; thanks to Dean Matzkov for doing the Gentoo packaging. Deb and RPM will follow soon.

Unrelatedly, the planets may like to hear about an awesome review of my storybook.

Every contact database program I know has a "nickname" field. Today I was thinking that I use the same values in that field for EXIF tags, and what I'd like to see is a plugin (or better, to see it coming out of the box) with a button on each person's contact record. The button would query Tracker, and then launch gthumb or the local equivalent to show images of that person. The button would not display if there were no such images.

Something like this (on Maemo, though the principle is the same for GNOME):



(It's interesting to consider whether the plugin should assemble the list and then pass it to gthumb, or whether gthumb should be extended so that it can be passed a switch to display all pictures known to Tracker with a given tag.)

Of course, Tracker also tracks things other than images, so you could also have buttons for wordprocessor documents, emails, and so on. I could do this (in a while, when I have some time); would any of you want it?

I have had this sitting half-written in my projects directory for far too long, so I present: Imgur Integration version 0.20. imgur.com is a website which allows you to host arbitrary images without creating an account. This program includes a DBus service which allows posting of images to imgur.com, a command-line interface to the DBus service, and an Eye of Gnome plugin to do the same. It is not an official client, but I have talked to the imgur admins and they are happy about its existence.

So when you open a picture, you have a menu option that uploads it and opens a browser at the right page, with no configuration, thus:



You have to turn on the plugin in eog after installation (Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Post to imgur.com). If I package this, I may make it turn on automatically, since it's a little hard to find this.

As originally conceived, it would have also allowed you to use libsocialweb to tweet/dent the resulting URL. I took this out for now because libsocialweb also has API to post pictures, and I wasn't sure how best to do it. There is still a rather useless dependency on libsocialweb. Sorry about that.

eog seems not to look in /usr/local/share/eog/plugins, only /usr/share/eog/plugins. You may therefore have to set --prefix appropriately, or simply copy the files from /usr/local to /usr by hand after installation. Sorry about that, too.

There was a partially-written libsharing plugin for Maemo which used the imgur DBus service, but it's not finished. It could be finished, if people would like it.

Other thoughts on how the program could develop are in the README. You can download the program or look at the source control. This is quite a rough draft. Patches and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

There has been a lot of fuss about del.icio.us shutting down (along with AltaVista— my goodness, I used that when I was an undergrad. How weird to see it go).

I am worried that someone out there is going to go to all the effort of writing a new del.ici.ous. Or more likely several someones, and all the results will be incompatible. As Mark Pilgrim points out, this is a bad idea. Don't do it.

I'd like to offer a better suggestion. Write something that takes the not-really-XML of the del.icio.us backup format and uploads it line by line to a given identi.ca account. So, for example,

<DT><A HREF="http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html" ADD_DATE="1104124425" PRIVATE="0" TAGS="flash,linguistics,phonetics">Flash-based IPA charts</A>

becomes

http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html Flash-based IPA charts #flash #linguistics #phonetics

That way

• you keep your bookmarks somewhere
• that somewhere runs on free software
• tags still work
• you can make feeds
• you can get daily dumps added to your blog

and so on.  If there's something it can't do, it's far better to do it in identi.ca and then extend identi.ca than to write a whole new site.

The main issue is that the string becomes longer than 140 characters, but there are ways around that.

If anyone writes such a script, let me know and I'll link it here.

Further to my previous post:

Here's a live AJAX-based version you can play with. It's not very fast unless the word is cached, and it only takes at most a word of context (unlike the real thing, where the context is everything you've ever typed), but it should serve to demonstrate the principle.

Now to release the code, and to look into patching existing VKB systems.