6th Apr, 2008, 10:02pm
Archive for the 'Bright Ideas' Category
15th Sep, 2006, 6:41pm
Bright Ideas III: Flexible Project Management
There are lots of different ways of tracking a project (i.e. a list of tasks, dates, calendars, time frames, notes etc), with various tools (MS Project, Basecamp from 37Signals, Google Calendar, Horde and a gazillion other applications and online tools).
But so far not all of them manage the ideal all of all of the information everywhere. I would love to have the information spread acoss my PDA (Palm, online & offline), Laptop(Outlook, Thunderbird, online & offline) & web-based online access. Certain amounts of this can be done with SyncML, various sync tools & sites (Zyb, ScheduleWorld, Funambol). I like replication. Safety in numbers. Add into this the fact that I work in some awkward environments (I have my corporate laptop, with Outlook/Exchange, I have client sites where I only have OWA, and sometimes I want to get at the data when I’m out and about)
So, how to solve this problem? An application that supports various storage backends.
Tasks & Calendars that can save out details to Horde, Google, Exchange (over WebDAV/IMAP)
7th Sep, 2006, 8:11pm
Writing, Briefly
My job seems to have morphed into writing a lot and not doing a lot[1], while distracting myself from something I should have been doing, I stumbled on this: Writing, Briefly, from Paul Graham. A good read. Although I’d break stuff up more than he does/has in that article 
28th Aug, 2006, 6:02pm
Bright Ideas II: Photo Tagging
I use a mix of photo gallery software, I use Flickr for some things, notable stuff that’s public for other people to use, I also use Fuzzy Monkey‘s My Photo Gallery, which is simple, but has some neat features (like auto thumbnail generation, keeps photos and thumbnails seperate, allowing me to use Unison/rsync to keep my online photos in sync with an offline copy, simple passwording etc).
But I’m beginning to dig tagging, so I hoked about for some web gallery software that does this, and there seems to be a real shortage, I found Original and a modification of it that supports tagging, but it mix of php & python, and I couldn’t get my head round all of the Python.
So this got me thinking about what is the best way to generically tag my photos so that the will work in my online gallery and with my offline tools. Microsoft have added a couple of tags in the EXIF standard, eg XPKeywords. There is some stuff on XMP, Extensible Metadata Platform from Adobe. IPTC gets mentioned quite a bit, and is also supported by Google’s latest incarnation of Picasa, but is supposedly being phased out in favour of XMP.
Notably all of this is support by Phil Harvey’s ExifTool, which is a Perl library and CLI tool.
All of this comes under metadata, i.e. it’s data about the images. So, where to start? Well, I think I need to do the following:
- Decide which format to support! (EXIF XPKeywords, XMP, IPTC etc)
(actually, the gallery should probably support multiple methods, but let’s try and focus on one to start with) - Extend My Photo Gallery so that it can scan it’s directory of photo data & build a tag database
- Extend My Photo Gallery so that is can generate a tag cloud.
- Extend My Photo Gallery so that it can manage tags in the management UI.
Easy eh?
Where to start? Minimal overhead to start with, probably use SQLite for the tag/photo database, make it scan photos for tags, then work on building a tag cloud. jbrout looks like the thing to start tagging with. Then add tag management to the web UI.
Here’s some of my background reading:
- http://assente.altervista.org/?q=how_to_manage_exif_xmp_metadata_on_linux_gnome_kde
- http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/delivering/faqtagging.html
- http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/delivering/metadata.html
- http://search.cpan.org/src/EXIFTOOL/Image-ExifTool-6.29/html/TagNames/EXIF.html
- http://jbrout.python-hosting.com/
- http://idea.zanestate.edu/archives/2005/11/photo-organizing-in-linux/
11th Jan, 2006, 2:49pm
Business Idea #1: In airport WiFi flight updates
So your sitting the departure lounge of one of the “silent” airports, like most airports these days are, and all the seats facing the departure screens (the ones telling you which gate to go to..) are full, so you grab a seat else where, whip out the laptop like you were going to anyway, logonto the local WiFi provider, and as part of the service, you get a little ticker telling you about the flights, you could even tell it about your flight so that it only bugs you when your flight is being called!! If somebody makes money from this, I want a cut