Michiel . van Vlaardingen

I know, you can’t keep everybody happy,  but it still feels like the best thing to do most of the time.  However, keeping everybody happy by adding more and more features to PicturePush made us run out of resources soon, making the site slower. We would have to add extra resources, making the business unhealty…  The Free model just does not work very well for us in terms of income.   Last week we almost ran out of storage space, forcing a hard decision:  closing uploads or do a major investment. We choose to do something in between: We will expand storage capacity with minor means,  but also put severe restrictions onto the Free membership level.   It won’t harm the existing wealth of photos stored there, but it does restrict new uploads to 200 MB per month.

This choice will probably slow the growth of our service down and might even cause some of our members to leave unhappy.  However, it will also make PicturePush a more healthy undertaking, making it future proof in terms of growth and self support.  In the long run we will be able to offer a service of much higher quality to those members that really value our offe

We recently decided to choose Python over PHP for a new project. I did not know Python, so I’m currently learning it.  I was always in love with the C like syntax of Java, PHP, etc. and could not really imagine someone liking anything else. However, I have turned around now.  I really, really like Python’s whitespace sensitive approach. It makes all your code look so clean and compact.

It is clear from the start that Python really forces you to take one approach. That seems inflexible at first, but ultimately it gives you less to make a decision about and improves consistency of the code.

I do think there is a lack of documentation at some point. The core language and most important modules have excelent documentation, but that is not true for everything, so sometimes I really felt the need to look at the source.  Which fortunately is very very easy to read.

What really helps me to learn Python as fast as I can is the commandline interpreter, which allows me to simply check what works and how data looks. Furthermore, the PyDev environment is a really great help, with immediate feedback about syntax errors.

If you did not give Python a try yet, please do, even if it looks a bit weird at first, it is really nice to work with.

So what do you do with a pink stone? Well, you could turn it into something like this:

I have just finished this second project. You can see intermediate steps at my PicturePush album.

I’m not sure yet, whether I’m completely happy with the result, so I might change it a bit later or just leave it as an experiment.

The use of JavaScript has evolved over the years.  In the early days we would address a form element using:  myform.elementname .      Nowadays we prefer to use myform.elements[‘elementname’].   A related problem I ran into and only solved yesterday was, why    myform.submit();  was not working. Google presents the answer as the first result: www.thescripts.com/forum/thread542837.html for the query form.submit does not work.

Because my button was named “submit”    myform.submit refers to the button instead of the function.

Today I encountered a similar but harder problem.    Imagine this form:

<form id=”f1″ action=”go.php” onsubmit=”return ajaxSubmit(this);”><input type=”hidden” name=”action” value=”something” /> ….</form>

So I use  document.getElementById(“f1”).getAttribute(“action”);   to get the action and submit using AJAX.   Which works perfectly well in Firefox… and not in IE…

Apparently  IE does not really get you the action attribute but simply  object.action…. which in turn is the input element instead of the action attribute, similar to the first problem.  Unfortunately I can’t come up with a way to fix the script, so I had to replace the HTML all over the place.  (removing the action named input element by defining the action as action=”do.php?action=something”).

Last week we came up with the idea of adding a nice illustration to the MovingLabs website which would give a good impression of what it is all about. Normally we would just select some stock photo, but I decided to give it a try myself.

The first attempt was using a paper and pen:

I did not get the right atmosphere, we are not a fat and lonely scientist. We are young, experimental and moving. A second attempt followed:

That’s better… but we can’t put a ballpoint sketch on our website, can we? So I took a photo to digitize it and used it as a background in Adobe Illustrator. A few hours later it ended up like this:

Which is what you currently see on the website. Although I definitely should practice some more, overall I do think it came out nice and serves it’s purpose.

This blog will be there for you to refer you to all my online activities as well as for publishing thoughts that do not fit in elsewhere.