.Mac Revisited

iPhoto Gallery Publishing

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:04:15 +0100

After some mind-boggling adventures (getting married et al) I decided to pick up iPhoto gallery publishing.

et voila ... it works.

You’ll need libjpeg header files and the perl Imager modules installed.
For now, the following features are supported:
Gallery publishing
Exif info (lacks gps info)
downloading of hi-res images

Code is available in the iLife branch on googlecode.

We’re trying to push the iLife branch towards stable.
Bob already merged in some code for commenting (iWeb pages) which isn’t quite finished yet (Bob’s been quite busy getting out his first release on CPAN - gratz Bob!)
We’re hoping to make some progress on that part too.

iWeb Publishing

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:50:36 +0100

Although it must have seemed awfully quiet at our googlecode pages, a lot has happened behind the scenes.
The iLife branch is being actively developed; and just today we welcomed another developer to our team:

Welcome to our team Bob!

The good, the bad, and the ugly:
The good news is, that iWeb (’08) clients can ‘Publish to .Mac’; the bad news is, that we’re still having a lot of issues before moving to stable; the ugly news is, that we’re actually generating segfaults on ‘general’ proppatch requests (deleting properties on a resource where no properties are defined yet).

We introduced a new dbi backend as promised.
You’ll need to run the 2 perl scripts from the /dotmac/private
folder (actually; read them, before running) for now. We’re hoping to introduce a brand spanking new idiskAdmin in the near future.

If you insist on trying, checkout from the iLife branch.

It will not get you far yet...

...seeing this for the first time made my day though ;)

A wonderful accident

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:25:00 +0100

Last December we focused on getting a ‘stable’ release out. This meant (much to Rob’s regret) that he’d have to halt his work on the iLife implementation. As he joined the one-man developing team, this would be a perfect time for (re)structuring code, documentation and code-cleaning.
After all - when having multiple developers, the need grows for having structured, readable code. I would be on vacation for three weeks in january; Rob promised to keep on working on getting the binary release out.
Whilst being on vacation, after two weeks, I finally got a chance go get on the internet (in Hanoi). Of course I had to scan the googlecode pages - and found out Rob wasn’t only quite near finishing our first binary release; he had also added a new developer to the team.

Welcome to the team, Sean!

Now you might be wondering what the picture above has to do with all this.
It’s not all the places I visited in my 3 weeks holidays, nor is it the predicted path of debris hitting earth, after the USA have shot their defective satellite to pieces.

Whilst scanning my logs, I remembered Rob once pointed out a hardcoded URL in the code for cleaning (he even added: “unless you’ve got some ingenious tracking device attached to it”). I never thought about it again, until today.
I found my server was getting a growing number of requests to an image, from a specific Mac client. That client happens to be the .Mac preferences pane.
The site has been there for ages; when you submit a list of ip-addresses and time-stamps there, it will render you a world map.
Actually, you’re looking at all fresh dotmac installs for last month.

Oh - by the way - this is you.
Hi!

Leopard 3

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:17:56 +0100

And welcome to our developer team: Rob See

Update: 12 - 25 - 2007
Some of you already unpacked your presents!
For those who didn’t:
Leopard iDisk sync support is available at svn.

Bored already ?
Not Safe For Girlfriend (or for work):
The Christmas Gift:

Leopard 2

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:02:49 +0100

Pictures say more than a thousand words...

I’m pretty close to emulating .Mac on Leopard.
So far, the preferences pane, iSync, iDisk and Backup are working. iDisk sync doesn’t work yet as Cupertino decided on introducing some more non RFC compliant commands.
Syncing between 10.4 and 10.5 clients is (currently) not possible.

I’ve had several success stories from people who already implemented dotMac on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Solaris...
Keep those stories coming @ walinskydotcom_at_hotmail.com

The code can of course be found on the google project pages. SVN has been updated almost on a daily basis; so you might want to checkout SVN regularly.