Please step around the corner—so that I don’t have to watch—and get fucked raw. Repeatedly. I’d had the impression that EMacs was a bloated piece of software until I encountered your mess. Several months ago, I managed to get you to actually spew forth legible HTML… but not actually display images, and I gave up in disgust.
Now I come back to the basic problem: “Present images in an easily viewable way with as little hassle as possible to the viewer”, and I find that, actually, JWZ’s gallery.pl is exactly the right thing, a fact I was pretty sure was true at the time but remained, then, obstinate about dicking around with PHP a bit. Jamie’s script is simple, clear, conscious of the fact that storing binary blobs in a database on top of a file system (that is, itself, a database) is stupid, and, for bonus points, it FUCKING WORKS.
It took me sixty minutes with gallery.pl to satisfy its shell-out requirements (hint: pnmscale lives in the netpbm package), customize it to my style preferences, run it across a few recent directories full of images, and make this post. I spent a plurality of the time folding laundry while FreeBSD ports took care of rebuilding and reinstalling ImageMagick, maybe 30% of it in Wordpress’s post editor (writing this), and maybe 15% of it in vi(1) making a few localization changes. That’s a testament to JWZ’s well-honed and beautiful coding style and to his creating a simple tool that just does one thing and does it well, a concept so grossly lacking in Gallery.
Yeah, sure, it’ll take a couple more steps to upload images directly from the iPhone, and I still need to hack in a two-stage resize (down from camera size to sensible web size), but the former was a hack on top of You anyway and you actually suck at the latter. It’d probably have taken me longer to get this working under Gallery than it’ll take me to write an iPhone-friendly photo uploading app in PHP that automatically reruns gallery.pl and add an extra stage of djpeg | pnmscale | cjpeg by an order of magnitude I’d prefer not to consider.
And, regardless of any of those real issues, who could possibly resist using a chunk of code that includes:
use bytes; # Larry can take Unicode and stick it up his ass sideways
So long, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, and good riddance.
PS, an example of Shit Just Working.
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