Today was the first day of winter training for next years Triathlon season. Basically I managed to drag my sorry arse to the swimming pool and found out just how much of my fitness I've lost by having a month off...
I only managed around 2.2Km, which is a smidgen over half of what I was knocking out a couple of months ago. My arms felt like lead for the majority of the session and I couldn't hold any sort of pace. I was quick surprised that I managed to go as far as I did.
I'm now planning to go swimming four times a week and running three times a week, I'll fit the bike in where and when I can. So that means swimming on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday and running on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. This may change to running at lunch time at work and biking on Sunday mornings, we'll see how it goes.
Ages ago I used to run a photo gallery with IDS, a Perl based album system. Unfortunatley my hoster, CSoft, changed the OS of the machine I was based on a couple of times and PerlMagick, the Perl interface to ImageMagick, stopped working. This forced me to look at other album applications, one of which was Gallery.
My initial view of Gallery wasn't positive, it was just lacking in features compared to IDS and I really didn't like the admin interface or default layout. I ended up running a script that generated static HTML pages, but this was really limiting and even though I could template it, the results were disapointing.
I decided that I could write better static album software using the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API and set about writing a small application. It was based on the chain of command pattenr and used Jelly to construct the final HTML pages. I have a very basic version working, but as with most things, real life got in the way and I never got round to finishing it.
What I really wanted to do was write a Struts based web application that was similar to IDS, but used the JAI API to manipulate the iamges. The only problem with this is my hoster doesn't do Tomcat or any other Servlet copntainer, so I would have to host the thing myself and deliver it over my ADSL connectio nfrom home. As I've not had time to setup the home network properly, I've never got round to starting this option.
Earlier this week I decided to archive all the Photo CD's that I have to make sure we didn't lose any. I also wanted to create a master web album on a machine at home so that I knew what photos we had available. I decided it was about time I wrote the Struts based application, but decided to do a quick test to see if my hoster had got PerlMagick to work yet, they haven't. So I did a quick Google for gallery software and ended up on a webiste running Gallery v2. I didn't recognise the software and thought it looked quite good, so was plesantly surprised when I saw it was the next incarnation of Gallery.
I downloaded a copy and installed it, the setup procedure is fantastic, a few steps, all explained with only minimal work required on a number of those to get the system up and running. First impressions of the new system are very positive, it's a massive step forward from the old version, however, it's still missing basic stuff like a site news section on the root album.
I've chucked a few albums into the install and I've deleted the old static gallery I had. I now need to read up about how to create custom themes and integrate it into my website.
A combination of being a lazy sod and being horrendously busy at work has resulted in me not posting anything here for ages. The volume of work isn't going down, so I doubt anything much will appear here for the foreseeable future...
