Author: Tarique Sani

Bird and bug watching

On last Saturday Aasim got promoted to 1st standard, this means after summer holidays he will be in school from 9am to 3:30pm will have to carry a bag and will have exams… He is a BIG boy now!!!

Finally I found a good bookmark server Sitebar. Works great with Mozilla and is written in PHP, allows multiple users, groups and shared bookmarks. Also some time during the week version 3.0 of my earlier favorite text editor JOE was released I am almost tempted to go back but most remote servers only have Vi(m) these days…

The hilarious site for the week was https://badmash.org , I found this particularly funny 🙂

Most of the week I took a lot of bird pictures in the garden… most of them turned out real lousy due to the fact that I had to use at least 1.6 digital zoom. I think if I have a 2x tele converter it will be great. Most of the pictures can be found here.

On Saturday someone raised a bogey of security vulnerabilities in Coppermine it turned out that the said things affect only the older forked versions for PHP nuke and then also depends on a PHP nuke vulnerability to assume Admin permissions… All credits to CPG for CMS team for a fast patch up

On my way to XUL nirvana I came up with a nifty utility – Coppermine sidebar for Mozilla. It displays categories and albums of a gallery as a tree, shows the last uploaded photo and has some small user preferences settings, so if you use mozilla and want to add my photogallery’s sidebar Click Here(Damn, LJ does not allow javascript: in href) will release the code as soon as I write some basic documentation for it

Work as usual

I guess I finally may have a use for GMAIL – collect all the porn from Yahoo Groups there, I was almost heartbroken when Yahoo stopped storing attachments in the group archive 😉 Jokes apart it will interesting to watch how GMAIL evolves…

I finally got to handle the Nikon D70 and the verdict for now is that I am sticking with my Nikon 5700. The kind of pictures I want are only possible with a lens which costs more than the D70 itself and the default lens which comes with it is too puny, plus there are also several small usability issues like fixed LCD screen etc.

I guess the studio kit and my Coolpix will be a great combination. Several (well three to be precise) have asked if I was considering going commercial / shifting profession. I would like to put on record – NO – this time I am determined not to let a hobby become a profession.This has happened at least three times in the past and every time I discovered that, soon the pressures of commercial work rob away the pleasures no matter how much you love doing what you are doing…

In tech lessons of the week I learnt what the file /etc/security/limits.conf does after a brain dead sys-ad set the user CPU time to 2 seconds on a remote server

Started learning XUL (and RDF, XBL etc etc ) in earnest, the very first day screwed up my local install of Mozilla, solving the mystery as to why the book recommended using separate install for development, however I would like to get to the bottom of the fact that how can a chrome mess a user install… I ultimately want to create an XUL based client for Coppermine which will also allow you to maintain a local mirror of your album on your HDD.

The new programmer has taken to the new techs very well, I hope to put her on to commercial work the comming week, In other work related stuff our aging and overloaded UPS is again showing signs of illness – this time it looks like it will be terminal.
 
Thankfully Friday and Saturday saw some rain which cooled down the temperatures considerably. Today we tried out a new recipe for Prawn in Coconut milk curry – turned out to be very good.

A mini vacation and a bit more

Returned on Friday from Vizag. For the first time it has happened that nothing major got screwed up in the office or home while we were not here. So how was the trip?

The days essentially consisted of catching up, sleeping in the AC and cursing the heat… the evenings however were great

We landed at Vizag on Sunday afternoon, was taken by my brother to see all the ships of Eastern Fleet of the Indian Navy – Aasim had a grand time it was his first time on a ship and that too a fully armed naval ship!! The next evening was spend lazing in the huge swimming pool, the evening after that we all went to the Erada beach via the newly constructed Naval Officers colony which is situated on top of a hill, superb roads and gives a great view, the beach itself (at least stretch where we were) was very clean and almost empty. 14th evening was spend in the town culminating in a nice dinner at some place I don’t remember the name of… Unfortunately my brother had to sail on 15th….

Saturday evening Aasim opted to go to Swati’s parents to spend the night leaving us to… So we went out for a dinner at one of our favorite places. Sunday itself was spent doing nothing in particular but still a lot of things happened, we managed to do something which we had tried a lot of times but never got it right.

Oh yes I did take some displayable photographs during the week – they can be found here

Tomorrow I am appointing a new programmer – hope she turns around fast enough for commercial work…

hARP Storm

The highlight of the week was – Vivek – *the* fashion photographer of the city (also happens to be Swati’s friend) calling up to say that he had been to https://tariquesani.net and was very very impressed. He wanted to help me and wanted to me to help him as well!!

Me an Swati promptly landed up at his studio with my camera and he helped me try out real pro lights. The best news is that with a hot shoe my Nikon can handle everything 🙂

On Wednesday Aasim’s WinXP install fried itself…. and I was reminded once again why I hate installing Windows. This time I have put the My Documents folder on a Network Drive.

I had very naively presumed that switched networks are safe from sniffing but after discovering Ettercap and Ethereal I have gone right back in to the voyeuristic pleasure of network sniffing 😉

First there was connection to SQL database using Mozilla then QT and KDE based applications using JavaScript, things are really going to be exciting. Those of you who haven’t already seen the, now bit dated, Mozilla Amazon Browser take a look here

Today evening we are leaving for Vizag to meet my brother for a few days – its been a long time since we met. We will be back on 16th morning, I hope being away from work will help in forgetting about it. Yes we did survive the week and it was not so bad either.

Mail, males, and run of the mill stuff

After nearly 4 years of faithful service I decided that it is time to retire my current local mail server, so I got a headless box with 1gig of RAM.

Whoa! I don’t need that for a mail server, mail servers are puny machines in dusty corners which nobody notices quietly doing their work till something goes wrong with them…. so much like some people.

So much for a mail server setup, I ended up configuring Apache and PHP to my liking, this will be the test bed for optimizing code etc, I hope that running Apache (along with my experimental apps) will not kill the server too often 😉 In short it looked like I had already messed up the plan for a cleanly laid out mail server. None the less I did manage to get Postfix along with Spamassassin running on it with a bit of help from here and there. It has been running for three days without any problems and behaving exactly as I wanted it. On experienced advise I chickened out of installing IMAP and continued with POP3

Swati wanted to try scouting for experienced PHP programmers, so we gave an Ad in the paper – the kind of riff-raff we got was hilarious in the very least, needless to say that I did not appoint anyone. So we are back to our original method – get freshers who know at least one programming language well and train them. In six weeks the right candidate is ready for commercial work. The problem arises when they leave too soon (< 6 months). I don't like to bind people in contracts and bonds but it looks like the outsourcing boom will result in job hopping as a side effect and I feel that serving 6 months (on a decent salary) is not too long a period specially if I have imparted a vocational skill. On the hobby front I need a better/more professional set of lights I have been losing out on too many fantastic pictures because of either camera or model shake which occurs due to long exposures required for tungsten lamps. Watched for the first time today, a movie which had been recommended by my parents "Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam". The coming week is threatening to be very very tough on the work front - just hope to survive

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.