Here is my photo album, where you can find lots of photo albums. The software for this, CMFPhotoAlbum, can be found on SourceForge, but something in the combination of Zope 2.7.2, Plone and this package does not work too well with some of the newest browsers like Firefox. If you get an error, try Mozilla, Netscape or [gack...hack...gasp]IE. I am actually going to see if I can find another Zope/Plone product with similar functionallity, but that will take some free time which has been a very rare comodity the past few months.

And here is a second Family Photo Album, which holds some other photos and will probably become the main location for many of our photos going forward. It too, at present, is a CMFPhotoAlbum based album.

And finally here is another photo area, which holds some photos which have not yet been moved into a true photo album. Indeed, I just created this album because CMFPhotoAlbum has some serious limitations, which besides the browser bug and no apparent development (July 9, 2004 to present is over two years now), have started to, put bluntly, piss me off. Problems I have encountered include:

• A remarkably reliable tendency for the Zope/Plone server to suffer from memory bloat while browsing, and most especially when uploading new pictures via any method short of pic by pic by pic. The latter is so bad that if I upload more than a couple of dozen pics from my Olympus D-575, which takes JPEG images at 2048x1536 as I currently have it set, the server will start getting malloc type failures because it has chewed up 512MB of physical memory and perhaps 1.5GB of virtual memory!!

  Yes, I know this is really a problem with Plone, or even more likely with Zope itself, where somebody is ignoring the fact that there is such a thing as resource limits, and that memory is not unlimited, and hence does not appear out of nowhere or grow on trees. But being a firm believer in the fact that sometimes the alteration of usage patterns is the best solution to a "Doctor! Doctor!" problem, I will alter things until I can take the time needed to investigate whether this happens on a stock Zope server with no extensions, then try it on a base Zope+Plone, and so on.

• I also do not like the fact that CMFPhotoAlbum does not allow for configuring things like configuring how many items it displays at a time in album view.
• CMFPhotoAlbum really should make use of EXIF data stored in the image.
• When uploading a batch of pics, the photo album should make provisions for metadata files, which contain things like the comments for a picture, the date/time it was taken, etc. None of this modify each pic one by one to add comments after uploading several hundred pics bullshit.
• Speaking of the comments for a picture, I really want a photo album which allows the comments/description to contain HTML so that you could do things like have a group photo with links to info about individuals in the description.
• How about the storage of photos on the filesystem. Yea, I know Zope is supposed to be great at storing things in its database, but regardless of what folks say, the filesystem has major advantages. Besides, when you start talking about things like the filesystem, or even a decent relational database such as MySQL for backend storage (or better yet, pics on the filesystem, and descriptions in a relational DB), you can do things like have a pic show up in multiple locations, etc.
• Speaking of storage on the filesystem, how about being able to handle the uploading of an archive file (Zip, tar, etc.) which is then extracted to individual files, which may pics, metadata for a pic, pre-supplied thumbnails, etc. And once all that is done, or a bunch of individual files are uploaded, magic occurs and the photo album is refreshed automatically.
• A photo album really should be able to handle of other media types, such as movies. At best, grab a random frame from the movie, or allow one to be supplied, and at worst, just put up a generic type icon.
• Here is a real stretch item...how about image maps, where if someone goes to the trouble, you could have hotspots on the images which take you to another location!

The list goes on, but those are the ones which come to mind at the moment.

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You can find out more about the music I listen to, and eventually see things such as the books I like, the movies I watch and so on. These pages will also at some point include lists of the music, books and movies which I own. But that is going to take some work, as I need to re-catalogue my massive collection of these items and place them into a MySQL database for that to happen.

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I have also decided to collect some additional interesting links and put them up here. Here is the first one, which is a BLOG by someone in a town near where I grew up. It strikes just the right amount of irreverence towards the political establishment.