Have I mentioned lately how much PHP rocks? Ah, yeah…

Today I researched and created the server side code for generating permanent thumbnails upon uploading. The beauty to this is that the server will only take a cpu hit on uploading (not often) instead of each view. The only downside is that it will eat into some of the space that you will be allocated. No big deal really as some of the thumbnails take up to 5k… ooooh.

Of course accomplishing this was much easier than I ever imagined and as usual I have PHP and Airor to thanks for that. Gosh, I’d hate to think what I would be doing now if Airor hadn’t shown me the light.

Did some preliminary work on beautifying the gallery viewer. Using lots of new CSS for the first time for extra fast, efficient and pixel perfect pages. Not to mention much easier to update.

Only the occasional client side JavaScript quirk for the image previews (nothing do to with generating thumbnails on the server) is bothering me now. I’m thinking that I can clean up the routines a bit and stop the function from rechecking itself so often. I’m guessing that sometimes it’s too fast and/or pulls the wrong value cause it’s programmed to be hyperactive.

Everything is going great. Time to go relax now.

Today I was researching how to scale down large pictures that can be previewed using the new client side JavaScript in the gallery. Doing the math to figure out the width/height ratio wasn’t too bad and after fumbling around with ways of setting the image size it finally worked!

Images will show in a 160×120 (4:3 ratio) box as best as they can. Tall images will be ???x120 and wide images will be 160x???. The final gallery upload feature is going to look so good.

Work was a blast today as usual. Not quite as productive as i wanted to be but I did get sidetracked by no less than three major tasks.

Warlord (co-worker and paintballer) and I took some really funny pictures of his action figures with the new accessories I bought. Needless to say there was much giggling and embarrassing situation recreations. Can’t wait till the gallery is finished so I can start uploading these wacky pics along with other gems I have.

I been working like a mad man on the PHP mod file reader. I make really good progress each day, usually adding one major stepping stone to completion and learning a whole bunch of cool stuff on the way.

Tonight’s code stepping stone was reading in the order of the song and then looping through only the patterns that I needed to calculate BPM and song time. Tomorrow I’ll try add some code to tally up all the speed change commands and use it on a test mod to make sure everything gets calculated accurately.

Perhaps when I finish up the reader and post my mod music collection for all, I’ll reward myself with a brain vacation for a few days, not thinking about anything. Hopefully it will include watching TV, playing video games and sleeping a lot.