There is one single tool that rules the world for photo management. This tool is called Picasa. Up until now, it was only available for Windows, which sucked bigtime and I definitely liked the app. Big Google rules (again!). They created a linux version!
OK, not really. They made an installer that includes a specially configured Wine to run Picasa on Linux. But it functions just like a native Linux app!
So go and download your Picasa for linux 
It's funny. Earlier this week I encountered this problem, and then just now, someone else writes about it. Though their problem is exactly opposite to the problem I encountered, the cause and the solution is the same.
So what is the problem? In the php.ini, you can configure the session.gc_maxlifetime setting. This setting controls how long a session may live before the garbage collector kills it because it has expired. Then, in your own script, if you feel the php.ini setting is too short or too long, you can specify your own gc_maxlifetime by using ini_set(). So far, no problem.
The problem we encountered was that our php.ini setting was set to something like 24 minutes, and we wanted 24 hours. So we used ini_set() to set the maxlifetime to that value, and still we got reports where a session would time out much earlier than expected. Not good.
Last week, after a bit of digging, we found the cause of the problem. We have multiple applications running on this server that use sessions. Most use the default php.ini setting, and not this adapted setting. All sessions are saved in files in a directory (/tmp in our case). But when the garbage collector is triggered, it does not discriminate between sessions created using the default php.ini setting and the one we set manually. No problem when the garbage collector is triggered from our script. But a big problem when it's being triggered by the other applications. The garbage collector will go through the /tmp directory and see a lot of session files that have expired. It will delete them. Gone is your session that should've lived for 24 hours.
This is, in my very humble opinion, a big shortcoming in PHP's session handling. There is an easy work-around though: those of your applications that use a custom gc_maxlifetime should also be saving the session files to a different session.save_path. Here also, ini_set() will support you in setting this value. This should of course point to an existing directory which is writable by your php/webserver user.
Now, the next step of course, would be that php would change their session handling. I can not imagine this being too hard. Each session file would, aside from the already present (serialized) session data, contain a tag that is in some way seperated from the actual session data. This tag contains the timestamp of the session's expiration. When a session is being written, the session handler can easily calculate the moment of expiry for the session based on the current timestamp + active session.gc_maxlifetime. Now, when the garbage collector is triggered, it need only read the first line of each session file and purge the files that have a timestamp lower than the current time. I understand that this is probably slightly more resource-intensive than just reading the timestamp of file, but it would enhance php's error handling in such way that I personally feel this is not a problem. It could even be an optional php.ini setting (session.enhanced_session_lifetime = 1). Of course, I'm not in the PHP group, so I guess for now I'll just have to implement a custom session handler with this functionality. Quite a pain though, since I'll have to do this with all my sites then. Or just implement the above fix of course 
As you may or may not have noticed, I've been tweaking the site a bit. OK, so the tags plugin is still not working, but some other things are working again. For instance, the Recent Music listing in the sidebar, as well as the AudioFlickrScrobbler. And I've changed the 'Author' info a bit, seperated it into it's own page where I can give you slightly more information you don't want or need
Now, to get those tags working again...
I've been a bit busy lately, so I nearly forgot to announce that finally, TomTom HOME is now available! The software that, together with my colleagues, I've been working on for the past months (I've done the server component with some of my colleagues from the PLUS department) is now available as a free download. Check it out. Enjoy
Everyone of course knows the movie. Not everyone knows the book. This happens a lot of course. I was in the same situation.
I've now read the book. It's nice. It took me quite a while to get into the book. It seems to start very very slow. But once things start happening, the book is very nice. I ended up really enjoying the book. And eventually, you remember your last impression, not your first impression
Privacy has been a problem in the USA for a long time (though for some reasons on some levels the US is more free than other countries). Europe has so far not become the 'Big Brother' state that the USA is on a lot of levels. However, we've now come one step closer.
posted on May 15, 2006 - 3 comment(s) - tags: politicsThis weblog is now supporting CoComment users. zeroK pointed me to this nice service which you can use to track comments you leave around the world on weblogs. At the moment, unfortunately, only CoComment-supporting weblogs can be used, but they're working on extending it to all weblogs.
posted on May 8, 2006 - 8 comment(s)Zimbio allows users to create a new portal page including links, a forum, a collaborative weblog, and many more features, based on the idea that anyone can add and edit.
posted on May 7, 2006 - 1 comment(s) - tags: technologyI am pissed off about the way this country handles our WWII memorial and Liberation Day.
posted on May 4, 2006 - 1 comment(s) - tags: personalRewriting an old site can be a drag, but it can also be an adventure
posted on May 2, 2006 - 0 comment(s) - tags: technology
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