The Software Approach to Flyswatters.
Adam: in other words it’s a sledgehammer for swatting flies. A sledgehammer with lots of knobs and dials on it that all must be set for its user’s height and weight, and the age in hours and zodiac sign of the fly you’re swatting.
Adam: This seems to be common in microsoft tools and APIs.
Alex: With random pitfalls. “I’m sorry, but you’re exactly 2^8 - 1 pounds and the fly is a gemini. Please update your sledgehammer for compatibility.”
Adam: hahah
Adam: yeah
Adam: or worse, “Yeah that’s a known issue, but we’ll have it fixed for the next version and you can buy that.”
Alex: Months later Linus Torvalds posts an essay on his new project, a normal-sized hammer for swatting flies, which can easily be modified for swatting mosquitos, provided the mosquitos astrological sign has a compatible license, therefor sledgehammers are evil.
Adam: There’s also question of whether or not the normal-sized hammer infringes on one or more hammer-related patents, but nobody will talk about what those patents are. Flames fly, large businesses invest in the continued future of the normal-sized hammer. Meanwhile users and developers alike still don’t have what they need: a flyswatter.
Alex: lol
Adam: Bloggers claim the normal-sized hammer isn’t ready for the workshop.
Alex: Usability questions arise. The normal-hammer camp will cry that theirs is a “More lightweight solution”, and while normal users don’t have nearly the level of accuracy required to use it effectively without smashing their thumbs, evangelists will claim that “Well, they just need to bite the bullet and learn to swing a hammer effectively.” The sledgehammer camp will point out the greater surface area and imply that if you can’t swing it, you need to work out more until you have the necessary muscle mass to swing the sledgehammer effectively. At which point, as an added feature, you’ll be able to smash everything around you into oblivion.
Alex: They will also point out that flyswatters do not have this property.
Alex: And, through clever marketing, imply that all walls need smashing, and thus flyswatters simply don’t fulfill the user’s needs.
Adam: Plus, as everyone currently uses sledgehammers, they become frustrated when the normal-sized hammer doesn’t work quite the same way, yet they constantly complain about their sledgehammers holding their hands too much.
Adam: Sledgehammer “power users” are known for circumventing the thumb-smashing protections because they think it makes them work more effectively.
Adam: They complain that the thumb-protections are included at all because they don’t use them and things like that are why the sledgehammer is so bloated.
Alex: Apple will release homes outfitted with mosquito nets. Elitists will smugly claim that the problem has been solved. Both hammer camps will roll their eyes at the idea that buying a new house is the solution to a fly problem
Adam: The mosquito-net houses aren’t compatible with the new sledgehammer addon. Mosquito-net house owners don’t care because they don’t need it, but hammer aficionados continue to cite this incompatibility as a reason why mosquito-net houses are, and always have been toys.
Alex: Eventually a small independant developer releases a flyswatter. Panic-stricken, the sledgehammer company purchases the flyswatter IP from the developer, and adds the flyswatter mesh to the handle of the hammer. Evangelists rejoice, competitors once again roll their eyes. Users wonder what the hell just happened.
Adam: Meanwhile some guy in his basement publishes blueprints of how to build a normal-hammer modification making it compatible with the new sledgehammer accessory. Normal-hammer users rejoice and claim this as a strength of their platform. Sledgehammer users scoff and say, “you have to build it yourself?? Not ready for workshop!”
Adam: Mosquito-net house owners have been in their houses watching fly-free movies this whole time, but nobody listens to those elitist pricks anyway.
Alex: Normal hammer users ask the honest question of how the hammer head flying lose from the handle when swung can possibly be classified as “ready for workshop” in the first place. They are immediately dismissed as trolls
Adam: Because after all, if the hammer head flies loose from the handle you’re clearly an idiot for not knowing that you had to hold the third switch from the bottom with your pinky finger as you swing in order to make the hammer head stay in place.
Adam: Because come on, you’d have to be a total hammer n00b to not know that.
Alex: The normal-hammer camp announces that their hammer has no buttons. The sledgehammer camp cites this as a missing feature
Alex: After all, how do you keep the head on the handle without that button?
Adam: The button by the way is a third-party addon. Usually there’s a trial button shipped with new sledgehammers, but you have to pay a yearly subscription to keep it working right. The sledgehammer manufacturer would include the button to begin with if it weren’t for the fact that the third party would sue for abusing monopoly power.
Adam: Many sledgehammer users in practice don’t know this and continue to use their trial buttons past the expiration date, blaming the sledgehammer manufacturer when the hammer head flies off.
Adam: Sledgehammer power users dismiss them as idiots and say it’s not the sledgehammer’s fault.
Alex: The modding community releases an intriguing solution involving duct tape and industrial strength rubber bands. This leads to the sledgehammer company suing rubber band manufacturers
Alex: The duct tape community, on the other hand, is purchased. A layer of duct tape now covers the flyswatter mesh in the sledgehammer handle, or will once you upgrade to the next version.
Alex: The mosquito net manufacturer, to everyone’s surprise, releases a flyswatter. Unfortunately, you can only use it in a mosquito-net home.
Adam: Someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that he has a patent on wooden handles. The sledgehammer has long used wooden handles and faces a problem. The normal-hammer camp releases instructions the next day about how to replace your wooden handle with a piece of steel pipe from home depot, and all new normal-hammers will use this new method. Normal-hammer users complain that the slick metal gets sweaty and is hard to hold, but these claims are dismissed with, “if you want a hand grip, make it yourself.”
Alex: Everyone, the normal-camp-hammer users decide, either has the proper machining in their garage to make a decent rubber grip, or shouldn’t be using normal-hammers in the first place.
Alex: This is in direct conflict with “Everyone needs to bite the bullet and switch over to normal hammers because they’re free.”
Adam: Somehow normal-hammer users don’t see these two things as being mutually exclusive though and don’t see what the big deal is.
Alex: Cost-analysis by several third parties takes place, as a result of curiosity as to if, at this point, normal hammers are still a cost effective solution.
Alex: Everyone looks to the flyswatters that can only be used in mosquito-netted homes. Crumbling under public pressure, the license is reconsidered. You can now use the flyswatter in non-mosquito-net homes, but only three designated homes per flyswatter.
Adam: Cost analysis is later made even more muddled by the fact that the sledgehammer manufacturer has been selling “upgrade insurance”, promising ‘free’ upgrades to your sledgehammer for the life of the policy. Sledgehammer manufacturer then proceeds to release no new sledgehammer revisions for the life of a policy cycle.
Alex: Mosquito-net-home users rejoice and evangelize this as the perfect solution, because having no social lives (as a tragic side effect of being elitist wankers), they’ve never been to more than three homes.
Alex: Hammer optimization continues.
Migratr 0.9.9 - Gallery2 Supported!
Hello there friends!
A few new things in this version:
1. Support has been added for Gallery 2. This has been tested on 2.2.3, but should work with all 2.x versions. As a sidenote, this requires that you have the “Remote” module installed in your Gallery 2 installation (since Migratr uses the same API as the Gallery Remote client). If you get authentication errors, try downloading the Gallery Remote, and testing with that to make sure your Gallery installation is set up to work with desktop clients.
2. Updated to the newest version of the FlickrNet library. This means some bugfixes, performance enhancements, and most importantly, the ability to disable the cache! Resuming a migration from Flickr & 23HQ should run a little smoother now. This also means that we have all been liberated from having that “Flush Cache” button sitting there in the import screen, generally looking smug and not making any sense. Since there is no longer a cache to flush, it has been removed.
3. I changed the “You tried to export to the same service you imported from” message from an error message to a confirmation (Yes/No) dialog box. Being that Migratr was designed with the intention of moving photos between services, it had honestly never occurred to me that someone would want to import from one service, and then export to that same service. To that end, I wanted to make sure that nobody accidentally went on “autopilot” and accidentally created doubles of every photo in an account. However, several of you in the forums have mentioned using it to move between accounts on the same service. To that end, Migratr will now simply pop up a dialog as a gentle reminder to make sure that you’re selecting the same service intentionally, and then let you proceed as you wish.
And now, for a the traditional “Big Giant Download Button”
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Enjoy the release!
-Alex
Takin’ a crack at ImageStation
Hello again, loyal fans!
A fellow developer gave me some pointers on how I might be able to accomplish migration of data from one of the latest additions to the Photo-Sharing Deadpool, ImageStation. I consider closing sites to be of the highest priority, however, since they’re not allowing new accounts (And while this might indicate why they’re closing, I never heard of them before they actually announced the service was shutting down), I have no way to code against their website.
So I’m asking you guys for a favor. If you have an active ImageStation account with photos on it (preferably with at least SOME metadata… tags, album, description, etc), and are willing to let me use your account as a guinnea pig, I would GREATLY appreciate if you emailed me the login/pass information for your account. My personal email address is callingshotgun@gmail.com. Of course, I will treat this information with the utmost confidence.
What will you be getting out of this, you might ask? Fair question. After all, I’m asking you for LOGIN INFORMATION. That’s kind of ridiculous, and it’s not something I normally like to do. But here’s the deal… You’ll be helping me help you (and countless other stranded users) move your photos to wherever you want- Not roach-motelling them into Shutterfly, which offers no API, and not having to pay them money to burn a DVD and mail it to you. Your choices as of the current version of Migratr will include moving to SmugMug, Phanfare, Flickr, PicasaWeb, Zenfolio, and 23HQ. Or heck, letting migratr just download all the photos and all your metadata to your hard drive, and letting you do whatever you want from there.
So, there it is. I’m asking you. I’m begging you.
Help me set your photos free.
-Alex
What’s Happening with Migratr.
It’s been a little while since a new version came out. I know Migratr was typically on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, and it hasn’t been lately. I feel like it’s necessary to drop in a note and just let everyone know what’s going on with Migratr.
Migratr is still under active development. I haven’t had as much time to devote to it lately, but there’s still a lot of things I’d like to see Migratr do. The thing is that I’ve kind of gotten all the “easy” stuff out of the way, so I can’t really power through a feature in a weekend anymore.
For 1.0 I’d REALLY like to have Webshots and Zooomr supported. Both are, however, being unusually silent regarding API keys. This is especially frustrating from Zooomr, as they posted to the dev group a month ago saying they were going to start handing out API keys, I put in a request, and STILL haven’t heard from them.
Migratr has evolved far beyond its original incarnation as a Flickr > Zooomr migration utility, but until I have Zooomr added to my roster, I won’t be able to consider Migratr a full 1.0 release.
As a sidenote, I’d like to apologize for the ridiculous amount of spam that was all over my forums lately. The forums started to feel like ground zero for anyone wanting to find either porn or tramadol (Not sure why they’re always advertised in combination, but I’d rather not speculate), I’ve read some posts on phpbb spam and made some adjustments to the way the forum works… With any luck, this is now under control.
Thank you for your past & ongoing support, ideas, bug reports, and generally positive attitude.
-Alex
Migratr 0.9.8, Zenfolio Support Added!
I’m happy to announce that Zenfolio is now supported by Migratr! Zenfolio’s a pretty swanky service that’s gotten a lot of mention in the forums.
You might also notice that I skipped my typical version number incrementing system (+ 0.1 for a service, +0.0.1 for a bugfix) and downed it a bit. That’s because, as proud as I already am of Migratr, I don’t feel like it’s QUITE 1.0 yet. Maybe it’s just a quirk of mine, the feeling that it’s never done, that there’s always something that can be improved. Part of that is that there’s always more metadata that can be added to the migration (privacy, geotagging, album descriptions, album/set nesting)… Part of it is that my original inspiration for writing Migratr, namely a group of people in the Zooomr chatrooms who wanted to move all their stuff over to Zooomr, still haven’t been given a tool that’ll do that for them (and won’t, alas, until the API is made available).
I really like working on this project. And I absolutely love hearing back from people who have used it. So if there’s something you want to see added, or if it saved you hours upon countless hours of clicking and typing and dragging & dropping, drop a line in the forums and tell me what you’re thinking! Migratr has been shaped largely by input from the people who have used it.
Enjoy the release:)
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-Alex
