Pictures and Code

I tried to install the Cache package for PEAR on Mac OS X 10.4.8 ( xampp installed ). Got the

error message: No handlers for package.xml version 2.0

Found the following solution:

pear upgrade --force PEAR-1.3.6 Archive_Tar-1.3.1 Console_Getopt-1.2
pear upgrade --force PEAR-1.4.11
pear upgrade PEAR

Than i was able to install ‘HTTP_Request’ and ‘Cache’.

Update: that was not all … i tried to use the Graphics.php for caching some gd calls. Got a Fatal Error on line 247 because of undefined function ob_end(); so that function really doesn’t exist, i guess its some dev note or so. But still after removing that line, there are massive errors. In the end i better coded my own caching functions.

Sometimes it is not that easy to tell people how to use wordpress admin interface for writing posts or even upload images. Sometimes you have to make it even simpler than simple.

I was looking into wp-mail.php at my wordpress installation and tried to figure out how to modify it for accepting attachments. On my way  i came to the wp-mailblog plugin. Lots of people were complaining in the comments area of that website and so it was pretty clear that it wont work for me. After that i found out that John Blade replaced the default wp-mail plugin with wp-mail 0.312 plugin. Sadly his website is totally bugged and most posts regarding that plugin are missing. Economy Size Geek picked up the project and continued it.

The new name is postie. It is the plugin i was looking for. You can post pictures and other files via email, which enables you to blog from your mobile phone pretty nicely. The installation was easy but the amount of options in the postie configuration is overwhelming. The biggest problem i’ve noticed was the char-set difference to the email client. But with some patience you can match both char-sets easily.

worked for me …

In the old days I was a big fan of ACDSee 4.0 , but it lacks of proper RAW support, because I always had problems with their buggy RAW plugin. The following versions became slower and slower and slower, not really usable in terms of speed. Next I became a user of IrfanView. It was fast but the video viewing capabilities were too slow on loading. Next I came to Picasa 2 which is not really meant for a double click in the explorer and exit by pressing Esc. Too slow for quick folder browsing. My latest discovery was XnView. It took quite long to startup and needed 2 times Esc pressing.

Than I came to FastStone. The FastStone Image Viewer 3.0 didn’t offer any skin that was looking good with my milky style. Although it had that problem with Multi-Page-Image-Files. When browsing a folder, it always get stuck on these types of images ( .tiff in my case ). But FastStone offers a smaller tool, called FastStone MaxView 2.0 (freeware). You can use it as a borderless window which makes it fitting into every environment without esthetic problem regarding the window manager style.

Why I like about it:

• fast startup from double-click in the Explorer
• exit by pressing Esc once
• excellent magnifier customization
• very fast image browsing, even on big images ( 4096×4096 and bigger )
• moving the mouse to screen edges brings up additional menus
• continuous browsing by holding down the arrow keys
• blazing fast on browsing folders with RAW files ( using embedded preview images )