As you may, or may not, be aware, these days I’ve been dealing with coming up with the definitive purpose of my major project.

Tomorrow at uni we are having this activity, in which Jon Wardle suggests we will have a much clearer idea about our projects by the end of the day. In any case all this got me thinking, and one of the things in the brief we received for tomorrow’s activity was this link. This bloke Bruce Mau wrote it a few years ago and I have to say I agree with most of what is written there.

The third point in that manifesto is one that got my attention because I feel I can relate to it. It’s title “Process is more important than the outcome” I think represents one of my aims for this major project. How is this possible? well, we have to go back to about a year ago, when I was doing my Authorship project here at uni, also known as the PHP Project. I had this idea for this site called locofoto.net for which I would have to work my ass off. It consisted on a kind-of photo-sharing site in which people would be able to edit their pictures, but no on a contrast/brightness/crop/levels way, but in a funny way. They would be able to put funny stuff on people’s faces, speech balloons and different sort of things. Of course, to begin with I had NO IDEA on how to do this, but that would not stop me.

The first thing I did was to find out if my initial idea of mixing PHP/MySql with flash was possible, and it was, but all the tutorials I found were very, very, very simple and what I was doing required a bit more complicated coding. Still I got into it and in the few weeks I worked on that I managed to pull it off… I managed to do this very basic system where people was able to upload their pictures, edit them, save what they edited and in a very primitive way, share them with their friends. I was quite impressed with the feat, since it wasn’t easy (to me at least).

But that is NOT the whole story. The system -to get to- the part where you edited your picture was not very friendly and it was a bit confusing. Besides that the uni server was basically crap when it came to MySql and all that. Everything worked wonders on my test-bed but on the uni servers it didn’t work all the time, even if I didn’t change anything. Still the time to hand it in came, and I duly did. Then a few weeks later I got my mark back, only to find out that I got a third, which I was obviously not expecting. I then found out that the marking lecturer never got to the thick of my project because of the log-in system and all that that I didn’t had time to work on, so he never saw the “editing suite” as I called it where you could do the fun stuff I was aiming for.

It was a bit of a blow to find out about my mark, but the truth is that I stop caring about it almost right way. I am, up until today, very very happy with the work I did for locofoto and hopefully I will be able to pick up on that project in the not-so-distant future. So I go back again to the beginning of this post… “Process is more important than the outcome” and is a similar experience to that I am trying to find for my major project. I want it to be cool in the same way locofoto was for me. I want to learn stuff in similar way, and for this one I have way more time that I had for locofoto so hopefully it will be fully working by the end of it. Somehow I already started that part of the process with the small camera control experiments I did last weekend here at home. Hopefully I will get the direction to start working on the prototype really soon.

There are many things on that manifesto I agree with, and some of them I directly relate to. Maybe for some people saying that I don’t care I got a third sounds like I don’t take university seriously; to those I just have to ask them to trust me I DO and very. I just think my perspective is a bit different than “usual” (whatever usual is).

Just felt like writing about this, maybe no one will read, hehe still I guess it will be good for PDP or something like that. Ha!

-j

Ok.

Locofoto.net , authorship-project version is done.

Is decent (me thinks). It has a lot of php going on, with a crazy amount of loops and stuff. BUT it does have room for improvement. I should have put a list of users where people can simply click and see their pictures (if the owner allows them). Maybe a little friends network, which makes perfect sense for a site like this.

I would like to improve the site. Now without the pressure I might be able to keep adding bits here and there to make it a bit more friendly. The loading of saving pictures for further editing is not happening at the moment. I need to work on the flash bit for that, and if I do that I should use some sort of switch for the php to recognize if the picture has been edited before or not and act accordingly. For now I am going to rest a bit and try to do the essay on time

Anyways, I am happy with it. Let’s see what the mark says afterwards.

blah blah blah blah.

I thought my project would be in better shape by this stage… hey, don’t get me wrong , I think is looking nice.

the problem is , as usual, the code syntax.. action script for some reason is not doing what I want it to do… which basically sucks… big time.

Anyways… I’m going to get it working I’m sure… and when I do that everything is downhill from there, and the site will be usable.

While doing the great amount of testing i’ve been doing on my laptop-server and on the uni server, I found out yet more areas that need to be improved… but then, the whole site is a big thing waiting to be improved… I reckon i’ve learned a lot about how php handle things and its possibilities, and same with flash. I’ve always known flash is powerful, but is still so annoying to work with it that sometimes it just kills me.

I’ve already asked for some help with the flash bit, and I am going to try to make the whole site a bit more user friendly by adding a couple of graphics and simplifying the process, cos right now you have to click “continue” like a zillion times. to see anything… but again, that was part of the developing stage where I am still.

Hopefully the site will be usable by tomorrow in the afternoon. The problem is that the mySQL uni server is a total disaster and when everybody is working it just dies, and as most of everybody’s pages the first thing they load is the connection to it, means that pages don’t work cos they can’t connect to the mySQL server. Which is already a HUGE problem while we try to test our sites in the impserver.

Our demonstrators never told us, but I am wondering if we should have used the…

msql_close();

…command at the end of our pages, since that may close the connections and open a new one on the next page, instead of leaving many connections open… but I am no expert and I have no idea if what I am saying makes any sense. joe? matt?

anyhow… wish me luck.. I really think my site have some sort of potential but for the hand in I wanted to prove that I can use and make something useful out of php and mySQL… while providing a website that people can, somehow, USE for themselves…. considering i’ve never used either before this project and think i’ve done aright… but at this stage I already realize how I could have done things a bit different to make it even better… but that’s part of the learning , isn’t?

-j

Ok.

My project have moved on at an amazingly steady pace… which is good I think.

small update: the uploaded files now resize *almost* properly, the script I am using maintains aspect ratio which is good, the problem is with images that are a bit wider than the usual 4:3 ratio…

Also, the website now have a more self explanatory text in english, which is going to be useful, since I pretend to go on a first public-beta release soon… Besides that now there are 5 usable graphics and in general is very nice. I would like to post the address, but so far the website is residing on my computer and although I have done some testing on my server with people checking the site from the internet, I rather wait until I move it to university server, hopefully I will do this week.

My dilemma now is about the “sharing” bit. There are two solutions. The first one (and the most unlikely to implement) is using flash to take an snapshot, then generate an jpeg.. the problem is this technique is not very practical,consumes a LOT of cpu and the process is slow in general… and this has a shortcoming that is that the user wont be able to “edit later” in case they want to save their progress and continue later…. the other option and more related to the technical skills required for this project is to use a “live” system… how live? well, all the positions of each used object are written in a table that holds them for further use. If you are the original editor, you will be able to move them around on a later stage, if you are not you will be able to see everything, but no editing… that is a first stage, I would like in the future to let other people edit the pictures if the original editor allows them too, or maybe allow SOME people, like his friends or something. Right now im working on that system and I already got some ActionScript to get the information, now I need to find the way to send it to PHP on the server, so it can be written on a given table.

Wish me luck, I think is not impossible and I am slowly getting grips with ActionScript.

 -j

Ok, on my site people will be able to upload pictures. (duh!) So far the filter is set to take jpeg’s but no gif’s or anything else. Should I add the .png file type?

I think .png is not as widely used for anything and much less for pictures. The thing is that *in general* I want to restrict the uploaded images to actual pictures of something preferably people, not photoshop artwork or stuff like that. Since the main idea is people sharing their pictures “with a twist” (ha! it starts to sound a bit boring now) with their friends.

If you have a suggestion on the topic, or you are a avid user of png’s for family pictures and parties, please leave me a comment.

ta.

-j

As you can see now, my project have a proper name. It wasn’t easy, but I finally found it.

locofoto.net is not related to trains… for those of you who don’t know (im sure plenty of you DO know) loco means crazy in spanish… so you know where this is coming from. I have a prototype of a little flash title which will show the purpose of the site more clearly, but is not done yet and is not high on the priority list.

So far things have moved along on the project. I have a working login/registration page, which interacts properly with the database, then I also have a little page where each user can see the pictures they uploaded. Today I started to work on the nitty gritty of this project which is the flash interaction with the data of the database. I already had a little (horrible) interface on the flash side and now I am triying to get it to work with the data from the database. The problem is, as usual, FLASH itself. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, of what you think. Flash is extremely unfriendly to work. I am sure the only reason flash keeps looking the same as the first few versions is because that’s how they learn to use it. I’ve used many different pieces of software and I have to say Flash is the most unfriendly one. Nothing is clear in flash, everything is a mistery and if you try to find a simple answer on the web, what you get is extremely complex examples that don’t work. Hopefully Adobe will do something about it, as autodesk did with autocad. at first it was all text based and you needed to code to use and design in autocad, today you have a great amount of graphic tools that the new users can quickly learn, or you can still use it the old school way and both ways work perfect. I guess I am paying the price of the problems we had with flash tutorials last year. . . anyways, i’m doing my best and is working so far.

The PHP thing.. the PHP issue. . . I don’t find PHP that intimidating and actually I think is quite straightforward once you have an idea of what’s going on. And I think the problem has been that the approach in the first couple of weeks wasn’t the correct one. We were never told why would we need php, we were just told what it can do in very basic terms, and I think some of us still don’t know exactly what is php. But in general terms , im getting the grasp of it. I have to say that getting the grasp on how dreamweaver can make the communication with the DB and the generation of php code for me has helped me a lot. Meaning that I don’t spend hours coding but I just tell dreamweaver which data I want from the DB, or what data I want to write on the DB, what to do with it and keep moving. Dragging the little lightning symbols is quite an useful thing to avoid typing variables and stuff. Slight modifications of the code are sometimes neccesary but nothing too complicated.

I really want this to work out. I still have to figure out a few things, but I have a feeling that I am getting stuck in things I shouldn’t get stuck at. Which sucks of course.

Hopefully functionality will be ready for the hand-in date. Hopefully it won’t matter if it doesn’t look as pretty if it actually works.

-j