Titali dabooch li maine :D

The week has been a very hectic one, spent a lot of time preparing for the final release of Coppermine V1.3, with more than 225000 recorded downloads and several ISPs giving it as default install the dev team is happy, but I feel that major task lies ahead for us, while the software has been reported to run smoothly with more than 100,000 pictures (after a few tweaks) I am not sure how it will face up to heavy traffic. One of the bigger tasks would be profiling and then optimising the code, thankfully on the viewer side there are only a couple of files which do the grunt work.

I also feel time is ripe to roll out what I term as E-Com enabled versions of CPG these will hopefully be several distinct projects each suited to a niche – planned are versions for Paid picture gallery (read porn sites), Stock photography sites, hopefully followed by Individual Artists Sites with Print ordering and Paid photo hosting.

Also downloaded GIMP 2.0, simply put it rocks. I have always like how you have to know the science behind the image manipulation technique when you work with Gimp, unfortunately that along with the now trade mark minimalistic GUI makes it a daunting software to master… I am just about beginning. Another surprising news was that GAIM has forked to OpenGAIM. Guess with no releases since some time now from the GAIM team time has come to move on to ’s

Swati has developed Achilles tendinitis and needs to rest. The day today was spent lazily shooting some pictures of friends and then settling down to watch a fantastic movie “Teen Deewarein”

Have just returned after hogging home made Mutton Biryani from my khala’s place… time to wrap up.

And the title of this post is just a private joke, nothing more 😀

Building redundency in your team

It is an eternal dilemma for small companies like ours – what if the key programmer on a project leaves suddenly! I lived in that dread till I went through it and survived successfully. Here are some notes on that in no particular order.

First and foremost – how so ever small you are, no project which is going to last more than a week should be handled by a single person, this does not mean that you have two people where one is needed – It just means that the other person should be aware of the requirements of the project, should read the the daily reports which the lead programmer sends and keep an up to date CVS check-out of the project.

This leads to the fact that daily reports are a must – these may not be very elaborate just a couple of lines about what was done during the day.

Another thing that you should insist is that all the programmers follow a the same consistent variable, constant and file naming pattern.

The code has to be commented in phpDoc (fill in your fav) style, I personally generate the API docs every 3 to 4 days from the code ensuring that the commenting is coherent enough.

If you can afford keep a junior (fresher) programmer always free as a stand-by

Lastly you as the CTO/Boss should never be so out of touch with any project that you cannot take it over and finish it if needed. It also helps if you have a latest CVS check outs of all the projects on your personal machine safe and secure. Also again remember that while employees will be mostly loyal and honest they almost never understand the intricacies involved in running a business, besides understanding that is not their job anyways.

Has life been reduced to insipid, semi technical one liners?

It may look so from what I have been putting in my LJ since nearly past two months, well the fact is – it is not so..

After several years of using ipchains / iptables scripts borrowed from friends and several sites, then tweaking them by hand I finally chickened out into using Guard Dog for all the machines which are directly connected to the net.

It is easy to use but somehow leaves me feeling a bit uneasy no particular reason…

Working these days in a very tense milieu but thats just tense not stressed out. As I explained it to someone
tense == manageable == good
stress == out of control == bad

The experiment that I started here did progress very well but I have to abandon it as I soon realized that I cannot write commercial code and at the same time do my job at SANIsoft.

As things are being readied for a release of next version of Coppermine I decided to spend an hour and hack some code which allows users to download their favorite pictures as a zip file.

New Cable Internet Connection

Today we got a new cable internet connection this time from a different person who has proper papers and is running this business since past 2 years. Judging from the traffic on my eth1 this network is much better managed and sanely configured. Though a slightly irksome part is, for some reasons they have blocked all out going pings.

My affair with photography continues…