Just a hack

I was a bit bored last night and made a cool but useless JavaScript. Try moving your mouse over the menu to the left and see for your self. For a peek at how it’s done look at the script (MouseOver HighLight) itself. On my machine it hogs a great deal of CPU time but only when it animates. It requires CSS and a bit of DHTML i guess. But it’s not that without it the page get unreadable.

GFXindex status

I’ve started to develop GFXindex again. This is what has been done so far:

  • I’ve got my graphics library working and thus the X dependance is gone.
  • Only JPEG loading and saving is implemented

And here is what users want to see in future versions:

  • EXIF support
  • Better PHP version
  • Ability to have captions/comments to images and albums
  • Links to subdirectories
  • Ability to strip of extensions of the filenames under the thumbnails
  • Generate different resolutions (like linuxart.com) of the original picture
  • Ability to replace Prev|Next with the image name

And finally some of my idea of what is left

  • Support for more fileformat
  • Better scaling (weighted) to give a smoother look to the thumbnails
  • More effects on the thumbs
  • Some alternative layouts
  • To have the original photos (eg. 2048×1536) in one directory and have the scaled down (eg. 1024×768) in another directory. This would allow me to keep my original super high quality pictures in one dir and the lower ones in my public_html
  • Add logo/text on full size pictures. Like copyright etc.

So you see that there is lots to do and I hope I won’t loose interest as fast this time.

Btw. I found the embryo to gfxindex while browsing through my Amiga the other day. Quite fun. It’s a shell script and a C source. I will include it as nostalgia in the next version. Speaking of which, the new version of gfxindex, dubbed 1.3.0, isn’t quite ready yet but as soon at it is it’ll show up here. But be warned, compared to the current version it will be a bit crippled.

Unemployment gets worse

I’m just so angry today that I need to get it off my chest. The Swedish government is trying to look good by lowering the statistics of unemployment. To do that all registered unemployed under 25 must not be unemployed for more than 90 days. With that the offices that help people find a job (that also is partly handling allowance) will look bad if they does not meet up to this. So they send out a lot of people under 25 to a stupid computer course. We are still funded by government but not registered as unemployed anymore and the government nice statistics. Don’t think that it’s a teacher lead course. “Study in your own pace” means “Here’s a book, now teach yourself”.

If you wonder what this stupid statistic scam is called, I’ll tell you: Datorteket (Dator=Computer, -tek=-theque (like Discotheque), -et=The (Like the Computheque)).