dvrom.eu

Somehow, I am not very good at pretending I don’t know anything about computers, and I recently ended up building a essentially-simple but constraint-complex portfolio site.

Hoping that it could be useful for anybody else that frequently finds themselves in a “friend / relative / XXX” who is a “computer guy / gal “ kind of role, and who is expected to easily and quickly solve any computer related task, here goes one possible quick and simple solution for building the aforementioned portfolio site.

Building a portfolio website is certainly not the most complex of I.T. tasks nowadays, however, the constraints surrounding my business case did make it quite challenging:

• My knowledge on Web Design and Website construction has not advanced since the early 00’s (CSS effects, Flash and HTML5 remain quite a mystery to me)
• The total cost of construction / hosting….and anything else, must be 0
• No ugly side effects of free hosting (such as popups) are allowed
• The portfolio must allow easy album management: uploading, coding and any other technical aspects are to remain transparent for the end user

Although it offers much more than GPS data logging, the eTrex Venture HC is a good choice for GPS data logging needs.

Although cheaper and more limited (functionality wise) models can be found, the eTrex Venture HC is great value for money.

The 10.000 point logging capacity, excellent reception and 14 hour battery life, and the Garmin Mac-friendly software utilities, were enough to convince me.

With Road Trip for example, it is possible to export recorded data in GPX format.

GPX is a standard XML format used for describing GPS data.

One possible source for such information is, for example, a GPS data logger.

The path from GPX to Google Maps can be completed in 3 simple steps:

Almost one year after jumping into the mac world, these are my must-have (free) apps for Mac OS X:

Just as easy as resizing images with mogrify…

1. Download and install GIMP

2. Open Image

3. Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow

Couldn’t be easier!

Simply:

1. Install ImageMagick

2. Setup the needed environment variables:

export MAGICK_HOME="/opt/local/var/ImageMagick-6.5.3"
export PATH="/opt/local/var/ImageMagick-6.5.3/bin:$PATH"
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/local/var/ImageMagick-6.5.3/lib"

3. Resize:

bash-3.2$ /opt/local/bin/mogrify -resize 525x700 image.jpg

(NOTE: Overwrites image (does not create a new image))

If you like good, easy-reading and free knowledge like me, you will surely find taking a look at 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know worthwhile.

Every software project is different, and has it’s own and unique needs, and as Edward Garson points out in Context is King:

“I feel there is a certain irony in trying to impart something about architectural ideals, when the very premise I wish to begin with is that effectively there are no ideals. If this is indeed the case, then surely there is nothing to write, I am a contradiction and by doing this I run the risk of the universe imploding or something like that.”

However:

“But alas, ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

I also believe that software engineering projects do share some common issues (or at least I hope for this, any morale booster is welcomed: software engineering is such a challenging discipline that despair is frequent !).

“97 Things” points out some topics and solutions that should probably be applicable for any software engineering endeavor.

There are some big names and many years of experience behind these tidbits of wisdom, and in my short career so far, I have found many of the described issues in “97 Things” in past and present projects.

Because 97 things are too much for my short term memory, these are the top 3 things to know that I strive to remember:

Michael Nygard is a professional programmer and architect with over 15 years experience, and also the author of “Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software”.

Having encountered this book on many “Top Books a Software Engineer Must Read” lists, I thought i’d give it a try.

This will not be a in-depth review, as there are already many out there, but rather a summary of ideas that will stay with me after this first read.

Michael’s book is all about the problematics related to successfully executing software systems in production, and although it is centered on high availability and large scale distributed systems, many of the discussed topics can be applied to any software system.

The book covers all the possible elements and layers of software engineering I can think of: management, delivery, testing, design, coding…, front-end, back-end, deployment, etc., and rather than trying to answer all the questions, it tries to point out the good direction in which to go.

This is certainly a book that I expect to come back to in the future, as the ideas and scenarios that will stay with me after this first read are only the ones which I can relate to, because I have encountered them in current and past projects.

1. Get a pair of Flickr API keys here

2. Write the code to invoke the REST url through curl, parse the xml, and transform the result into a nice array:

When I first discovered google search some time ago, one of the first queries I issued was “David Valcárcel Romeu”, that is, me.

Regardless of the reasons why one would want to know the degree of one’s internet presence, such as ego or curiosity, the idea has come to be quite a common practice, and several terms have even appeared to identify this trend.

New possibilities of querying the world wide web appear at almost the same frequency in which new ways to share information become available, and with the advance of the Semantic Web, it is incredibly easy to explore the web in different ways.

While thinking about this idea, I wondered if it would be possible to “self flickr” myself.

For example, thanks to the flickr API, it is possible to query the flickr photo base in innovative ways, such as integrating flickr content with a semantic web version of wikipedia.

As the moment of this writing, flickr has over 80 million geotagged photos.

I myself have a collection of photo’s that have been geotagged.

Could it be possible to find myself in someone else’s photo, somewhere in the background, inadvertently becoming part of the picture?

For each one of my photos, I created a link that allows to query flickr for photos that were taken at more or less the same time and at more or less the same place.

Timestamp and geolocation information is extracted from each photo, and used as search criteria for the flickr API call.

For the moment, I have not managed to find myself in somebody else’s photo, although results are surprising: some photos were taken at almost the same time and at almost the same place.

In theory, the possibility of finding myself should increase day by day, as users continue to embrace photo geotagging technologies.

Thinking ahead, it should be possible to include other photo sharing sites that offer querying APIs, and thinking even more ahead at a larger scale, one could even consider running queries continuously, and analyzing results with face detection applications for examples…

The question that remains is if all this is just some sort of egolized form of amusement à la Where’s Wally?, or if this and similar ideas is something to bring up next time you run in to some idea-searching VC’s…