Flickr Elements

I like Picasa, and Photoshop Elements. Both do a great job of managing my photos. Right now, PSE is my manager of choice because of the tagging and excellent editing capabilities. However, I have yet to find a Photo manager, free or paid, which utilizes one or many of the free online hosting services. Granted, some of these sites create their own photo manager software such as Ofoto, Shutterfly or Imagestation. However, those are all closed source and not open for development.

Again, in my spare time, I’d like to be able to develop a client application (not a web based app) that will manage my photos on Flickr as if they were on my local drive. Here is a list of my requirements:

• Add and update photos from the client
• Choosing the source of your master copies of images (either your local drive, or Flickr.com, or both)
• sync up your master source with your other area.
• Create a slideshow
• Create a screensaver
• Create a collage
• Rotate your desktop background

Coders Block

These past few days, I’ve been pairing on a rather large refactoring. We’ve been at it for a week now, and the data model is still rather confusing to me for some reason.

Our task is to represent a 2-dimensional graph of pareto data. The axes change because we can click on a bar and drill into a particular column of data. Nifty yes, annoying to code though. So, we decided to use a hashtable of hashtables so that we can easily store and retrieve the different buckets of data along each axis according to its value. That is, the hash of hashs allows us to retrieve a point in the coordinate system using a string name on each axis.

There came a point in our problem where we realized that we needed to be able to sort this data according to the y-value of each group of data (the second level hash was a sigle group). I’m still not too sure about the whole thing, luckily my pair wasn’t as confused on this as I, and coded up a solution that we will now start writing some automated tests around. (I’ll post a pseduo-algorithm later).

As I was pondering this, I couldn’t help but wonder what is wrong with me lately. I’ve solved problems much more complicated than this 2-dimensional data sort. I think I’ve reached a point where what I have what is essentially writers block. I’ve got a lot of distractions going on at home that are taking away valuable brain cells from my code.

Desert Code Camp

Today, I had the opportunity to attend Desert Code Camp (Dessert code camp would be good too).

I attended several informative sessions on the following topics:

• .NET Extensability Best Practices
• Ajax Introduction
• PIC Development (Programmable Chips)
• Advanced CSS
• Ajax.NET Controls and Extendors
• C# 3.0
• Windows Presentation Foundation

I found nearly all the presentations to have many useful nuggets of information. However, I had hoped that many sessions would go more in depth than they did. Although other sessions did just that.  It was a good balance of intro sessions and advanced information.

I marked on the survey that I would help present at a future event. Maybe they’ll call.

Code de Mora Launched

#include <stdio.h>
printf(stdout, "Hello World...");

---

My name is Saul, and I’ve been writing code since my freshman year of college back in 1995. Those were the days: HTML was the hot language, the dotCom bubble had yet to burst, and I was only 18. I’ve come a long way since then. I finished school with a degree in Computer Engineering, and I picked up a few languages as well: C, C++, Java, C#. Do you notice a pattern?My goal with this blog is to have a place to put my notes, post learnings, and in general to try to integrate myself more into the developer community. I hope to give back to the community through code, ideas, collaboration and projects. I only hope I can have enough spare time between my family, and my work.

Happy Coding!