VuPoint toy camera and MacOSX?

I was at the mall with Evan today, and we popped through the Toys ‘R Us store. They had a cool looking little toy digital camera for $19, so I just had to pick it up for Evan to mess around with. The box said the software was only for Windows, but I just assumed that MacOSX would be able to see it magically, as it does for everything else that claims to be Windows-only.

No luck. I’ve been googling for drivers or apps or hacks, without any success. Does anyone know how to get pictures from a VuPoint Solutions DC-M1082-VP onto MacOSX? I don’t care if I have to delve into obscure command line utilities, or compile some open source project. I just have to find a way to get Evan’s masterpieces off the camera. And, no, I am not going to buy a Windows machine to do it. It’d be cheaper/easier to just buy a new Canon XTi and hand him my XT 🙂

Evans first camera

He’s been shooting pictures almost non-stop since I handed him the camera. That’s pretty cool.

I was at the mall with Evan today, and we popped through the Toys ‘R Us store. They had a cool looking little toy digital camera for $19, so I just had to pick it up for Evan to mess around with. The box said the software was only for Windows, but I just assumed that MacOSX would be able to see it magically, as it does for everything else that claims to be Windows-only.

No luck. I’ve been googling for drivers or apps or hacks, without any success. Does anyone know how to get pictures from a VuPoint Solutions DC-M1082-VP onto MacOSX? I don’t care if I have to delve into obscure command line utilities, or compile some open source project. I just have to find a way to get Evan’s masterpieces off the camera. And, no, I am not going to buy a Windows machine to do it. It’d be cheaper/easier to just buy a new Canon XTi and hand him my XT 🙂

Evans first camera

He’s been shooting pictures almost non-stop since I handed him the camera. That’s pretty cool.

**Update:** A command line utility called `gphoto` seems to talk to the camera. I haven’t tried it, but [there’s a howto by David Clark posted online](http://blog.dcclark.net/2009/05/how-to-gphoto-primer.html). (thanks to Daan for the tip!)

Alternate PHP on MacOSX?

I'm working on a project where I'll need to demonstrate the process of importing static websites into Drupal, so I'm toying with the import_html module. The only problem is, it doesn't work on the PHP that comes with MacOSX. It requires XSLT to do it's magic (chunking through the DOM of the static site pages).

I've tried installing the Entropy.ch PHP5 package , but that just borked Drupal on my test system. Is there a sane way to install a more fully-featured PHP version that will work with Drupal on MacOSX?

Update: MAMP works like hot damn! What a handy way to have a separate PHP/MySQL stack to play with on my desktop, without worrying about borking the OS-installed versions… Thanks to Matt for the tip!

I'm working on a project where I'll need to demonstrate the process of importing static websites into Drupal, so I'm toying with the import_html module. The only problem is, it doesn't work on the PHP that comes with MacOSX. It requires XSLT to do it's magic (chunking through the DOM of the static site pages).

I've tried installing the Entropy.ch PHP5 package , but that just borked Drupal on my test system. Is there a sane way to install a more fully-featured PHP version that will work with Drupal on MacOSX?

Update: MAMP works like hot damn! What a handy way to have a separate PHP/MySQL stack to play with on my desktop, without worrying about borking the OS-installed versions… Thanks to Matt for the tip!

WordPress Boolean Category Display?

David emailed me this afternoon asking about the possibility of listing posts in a WordPress blog that belonged in a given set of categories. So, you could list all posts that belong in both “Category A” and “Category B”. Ironically, Ultimate Tag Warrior offers something like this for combinations of tags, but the native WordPress category interface doesn’t seem to do it. Some way of viewing /category/CategoryA+CategoryB should do the trick.

I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, and it’s really starting to bug me. There must be a way to do this. Lazyweb, can you help me (and David)?

David emailed me this afternoon asking about the possibility of listing posts in a WordPress blog that belonged in a given set of categories. So, you could list all posts that belong in both “Category A” and “Category B”. Ironically, Ultimate Tag Warrior offers something like this for combinations of tags, but the native WordPress category interface doesn’t seem to do it. Some way of viewing /category/CategoryA+CategoryB should do the trick.

I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, and it’s really starting to bug me. There must be a way to do this. Lazyweb, can you help me (and David)?

Experience with Zope/Plone?

Cole‘s looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I’ve dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale.

Thought I’d fire off a question into the Lazyweb to help Cole gather info (because I’m curious, too).

Anyone have any experience with Zope/Plone? How does it compare with Drupal? Pros? Cons? Scalability? The service may need to scale to an institutional level, IIRC…

Cole‘s looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I’ve dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale.

Thought I’d fire off a question into the Lazyweb to help Cole gather info (because I’m curious, too).

Anyone have any experience with Zope/Plone? How does it compare with Drupal? Pros? Cons? Scalability? The service may need to scale to an institutional level, IIRC…

WordPress/MySQL performance issues?

Since updating this blog to WP 2.0, the WP-Cache plugin has stopped working as it had been (i.e., it’s not doing anything anymore), and the performance of either WordPress or MySQL has been incredibly sucktacular. It can take over 30 seconds to generate a page. Requests are occasionally timing out. This just ain’t right.

I thought it might be a GoDaddy issue – they’ve had database performance issues in the past. But they assure me that everything is running fine. One of the downsides of using a hosting service is that I kinda have to take them at their word.

Next, I thought perhaps I am simply hitting the database too hard, with all of the plugins that I use adding up to 130+ queries to generate the main page of this blog. So, I temporarily disabled all database-related plugins, and switched themes to the stock Kubrick theme. No joy. Still takes (up to) 30 seconds to generate a page.

I turn everything back on, and there’s no noticeable difference in page generation time. The frustrating thing is that the time to generate a page appears to vary wildly – from just over a second, to over 30 seconds. For the same page.

My gut’s telling me it’s a server load issue. The only stuff I have running on my account is WordPress 2.0 (I have a wiki, and PlanetADCE is still there for legacy purposes until I get around to dropping it – but neither of these gets any traffic).

Are there any performance issues with WordPress? Can I go back to GoDaddy and know for sure that they need to fix something?

Update: I just got an “answer” from GoDaddy Support. They suggest that I switch to use their Web Site Tonight product – apparently either a proprietary or private label “website templating application”. Given that the “Premium” package for that product provides you with 20 pages to work with, I don’t think this support person groks wtf a blog is. 20 pages would last me a couple of weeks. And the hosting package I have specifically includes PHP and MySQL servers, which is why I switched to GoDaddy in the first place. Now, they’re trying to upsell me to a higher hosting tier rather than fixing their database performance? That just sucks. I’ve asked the support person to escalate the issue, because the only other viable option is to migrate to a different hosting provider.

Since updating this blog to WP 2.0, the WP-Cache plugin has stopped working as it had been (i.e., it’s not doing anything anymore), and the performance of either WordPress or MySQL has been incredibly sucktacular. It can take over 30 seconds to generate a page. Requests are occasionally timing out. This just ain’t right.

I thought it might be a GoDaddy issue – they’ve had database performance issues in the past. But they assure me that everything is running fine. One of the downsides of using a hosting service is that I kinda have to take them at their word.

Next, I thought perhaps I am simply hitting the database too hard, with all of the plugins that I use adding up to 130+ queries to generate the main page of this blog. So, I temporarily disabled all database-related plugins, and switched themes to the stock Kubrick theme. No joy. Still takes (up to) 30 seconds to generate a page.

I turn everything back on, and there’s no noticeable difference in page generation time. The frustrating thing is that the time to generate a page appears to vary wildly – from just over a second, to over 30 seconds. For the same page.

My gut’s telling me it’s a server load issue. The only stuff I have running on my account is WordPress 2.0 (I have a wiki, and PlanetADCE is still there for legacy purposes until I get around to dropping it – but neither of these gets any traffic).

Are there any performance issues with WordPress? Can I go back to GoDaddy and know for sure that they need to fix something?

Update: I just got an “answer” from GoDaddy Support. They suggest that I switch to use their Web Site Tonight product – apparently either a proprietary or private label “website templating application”. Given that the “Premium” package for that product provides you with 20 pages to work with, I don’t think this support person groks wtf a blog is. 20 pages would last me a couple of weeks. And the hosting package I have specifically includes PHP and MySQL servers, which is why I switched to GoDaddy in the first place. Now, they’re trying to upsell me to a higher hosting tier rather than fixing their database performance? That just sucks. I’ve asked the support person to escalate the issue, because the only other viable option is to migrate to a different hosting provider.

LazyWeb Request: Drupal + WebDAV integration?

I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment – I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).

A quick Google search turned up a WebDAV project as part of the Google Summer of Code, but it’s intended to expose the Drupal database via WebDAV (for backup, or alternate interfaces…)

Any ideas on how a file uploaded into Drupal could be placed into a user’s institutional WebDAV space, rather than in Drupal’s /files/ directory?

ps. this was posted using Flock, and I think it took me longer to enter it via the WYSIWYG interface than it would have taken to just enter the HTML. Perhaps once I get used to the editor… Oh, and no place to enter categories? wtf?

Update: Apparently, editing an existing post using Flock’s editor makes the post disappear from my blog. Have to go in and manually re-publish the post after editing in Flock…

Technorati Tags: , , ,

I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment – I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).

A quick Google search turned up a WebDAV project as part of the Google Summer of Code, but it’s intended to expose the Drupal database via WebDAV (for backup, or alternate interfaces…)

Any ideas on how a file uploaded into Drupal could be placed into a user’s institutional WebDAV space, rather than in Drupal’s /files/ directory?

ps. this was posted using Flock, and I think it took me longer to enter it via the WYSIWYG interface than it would have taken to just enter the HTML. Perhaps once I get used to the editor… Oh, and no place to enter categories? wtf?

Update: Apparently, editing an existing post using Flock’s editor makes the post disappear from my blog. Have to go in and manually re-publish the post after editing in Flock…

Technorati Tags: , , ,