Author Archives: miljenko

2010 gallery finished

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I’ve published all photographs belonging to the 2010 gallery. This basically contains the best images I’ve taken in the year 2010. This is my third year digital photography and post-processing, and in my opinion is much better than the previous one, but don’t spare any comments, I’d appreciate it…

Digital photography and processing specialist (v2)

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Just a week ago I wrote about taking a specialization course in digital photography and processing, and how I was excited to attend it. Well today, I’m just a bit less excited, reason: I can’t publish my photographs taken during the course.

Unfortunately, due to rules of the course I’m not able to publish my own photographs taken during this course, but on the other hand they are able to publish my photographs for the purpose of marketing their course and college.

Not unexpected, but not fair at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love this course, my colleagues, and I’m very satisfied by the experience and the knowledge I’m gaining. I personally don’t care at all if they will be using my photos for their marketing or such purposes, as long as I can use them for my…

Also I’ve removed the SDFO 2011 project from the projects list for obvious reasons.

Digital photography and processing specialist

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Well, I hope to become one, anyway. I’ve started a specialization course a week ago, and every day I go/work/listen, I learn more and more. I’ve also created a project, titled SDFO 2011, where I’ll soon be posting photographs taken while attending the classes and workshops.

Edit:
Unfortunately, due to rules of the course I’m not able to publish my own photographs taken during this course…

SCRUM – putting a value on features, and other

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I already wrote how overjoyed I was about using SCRUM, and the joy and the enthusiasm just keeps growing. After a few iterations on my latest (Srum-runned project), I’ve discovered a few things different than my previous work methods.

  • importance on putting a value on features
  • breaking down “complicated” features to more simple ones
  • the obvious scope increase after some “clarifications”

Putting a value on features

All features are not all as hard and as complicated as others, some are easier, and other are harder. Some are “unknown”, and other known, so estimations are practically impossible to define unless we break up all tasks to simple features. So burnup/burndown charts of finished features finally make sense. Usually if the tasks are listed and progress is shown in a burnup/burndown chart, the actual work done and work remaining on the chart have nothing to do with the actual progress, usually due to “not clarified” or “misunderstood” client requests and features that have not yet been started.

Breaking down complicated features to more simple ones

I’ve read a “rule” for estimations is never to estimate anything as a single task if the estimate is longer than 2 days. I absolutely agree with this. I’ve seen features estimated to take 20 days or 50 days. I consider this estimations to be lazy and risky, and this is often done to the lack of specifications or clear client requests. Cure for this would be to (even if you do not have clear client requests or specifications) write the list of features as you understood, estimate them and offer that those features will “cost” that many days/points/money. This brings another issue to this whole story.

Obvious scope increase after “clarifications”

Sure, I could misunderstand the client request, or specification, but I did promise to finish the estimated tasks in that period at that price, and if that’s wrong, it’s my problem, but if the scope increases after “clarifications”, it should be a normal thing to:

  • increase the period in which the final product will be finished
  • increase the price
  • if this clarified feature must be finished in the current iteration, the client can:
    • select a feature (weighing same amount of points) that will be excluded from this iteration
    • understand that it cannot be done, finally understanding the importance of clear specifications we’re all talking about

Finally, clients are not stupid or disrespectful of our work as we often feel. Working with SCRUM has helped me demystify the whole request/specification/estimate/development process. Earning me reduced pressure, more respect and trust from the client, and more pleasure in working on the project for both of us.

Hello world!

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After some months of developing the theme for this website (it wasn’t that hard, but I managed to work approximately 20 minutes a day), it’s finally finished to the point of being able to be published online. I’ll soon be publishing all the photos from the 2009. and older in the 2009 gallery.

So browse on, and enjoy…

PHP’s HttpRequest object – delayed and fragmented requests

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Having trouble receiving HTTP requests made by PHP’s HttpRequest object? Well I did… A HTTP request made by a proxy service written in PHP was being send to a Web-Interface-Server written in QT, and it mostly worked fine, but every now and then, and almost always with large requests (with lots of POST parameter data) it became laggy, and lasted for 2 seconds without any good reason.

The problem appeared to be that the request came in two parts, and the second part was send about 2 seconds after the first one. After a colleague of mine point out a solution to this same problem when using curl, I fixed the problem with the HttpRequest in the same manner.

Curl solution:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Expect:'));

HttpRequest equivalent:

$r->setOptions
(
    array
    (
        'headers' => array('Expect:' => ''),    // send the request as a whole
    )
);

What does this actually mean? Well, when making a request, either by curl or by HttpRequest object, by default, header contains “Expect: 100″ parameter, meaning that the server should return HTTP code 100 before receiving the other part of the request. As this wasn’t the case on our server, we had slow and delayed HTTP requests (and I wonder why there was any in the first place). By removing or at least modifying the Expect parameter to have no value rather than 100, we fixed the issue. I hope this helps you out…

Whole request code:

$r = new HttpRequest($requestUrl, HttpRequest::METH_POST);

// configure the request options
$r->setOptions
(
    array
    (
        'headers' => array('Expect:' => ''),    // remove the expect parameter
    )
);

$r->addPostFields(array('proxy' => 'proxy'));    // add some post parameters

try
{
    // make the request
    $r->send();

    // check the return code and render contents or an error message
    if ($r->getResponseCode() == 200)
    {
        $responseBody = $r->getResponseBody();

        echo $responseBody;
        die();
    }
    else
    {
        // handle this yourself
    }
}
catch (HttpException $ex)
{
    // handle this yourself
}

For loop with a delay in JavaScript

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I recently had a need to run a simple for loop in JavaScript, but with a delay (or a pause, or sleep…) of few milliseconds in between iterations. It’s not as simple as I thought, but it can be done, with plane old JavaScript. This is that simple for loop I was talking about:

var words = ['Hello', ', ', 'I ', 'am ', 'in ', 'a ', 'loop', '...'];
for(var i in words)
{
    document.getElementById('output').innerHTML += words[i];
    sleep(1000);
}

Simple, yes, but it doesn’t work, however you can make something similar to have this functionality, but it won’t be a loop, and it won’t look this simple, but at least it’s possible.

var words = ['Hello', ', ', 'I ', 'am ', 'in ', 'a ', 'loop', '...'];

// (1) define the variable for the array index
var i = 0;

// (2) define the delayed loop function
function delayedLoop()
{
    // (3) do action
    document.getElementById('output').innerHTML += words[i];

    // (4) if the end of the array has been reached, stop
    if(++i == words.length)
    {
        return;
    }

    // (5) recursively call the delayed loop function with a delay
    window.setTimeout(delayedLoop, 1000);
}
delayedLoop(); // (6) start the loop

What is this example doing:

  1. define the variable for the array index
  2. define the function which will pose for the loop
  3. that function does the same action as in the loop in the first example
  4. make a check if the loop should end
  5. uses the window.setTimeout(function, delay) to recursively start that function again, but with a 1000 ms delay
  6. everything above only defined the delayedLoop funcion, so you need to call it to do anything

Working example below:

Start…

Output area…

Running multiple web-sites in your local WAMP root folder

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Confused already? Of course, I’ll try to explain, so suggest a better title if you wish. If you’re using WAMP server on MS Windows (perhaps this would be even simpler to do on Linux) like I do, sometimes you add new applications to new folders in your default root folder of your WAMP server, for example:

  • c:wampwwwapp1
  • c:wampwwwsite2

which are respectively accessible from the follwing URLs:

  • http://localhost/app1/
  • http://localhost/site2/

Sometimes you will need to run an application in your root folder (http://localhost/). Sometimes you will need to run multiple applications or websites in your WAMP root folder, and since you can’t run multiple websites in your root at the same time, what would be the easiest way to switch between rooted applications?

You can do this:

  • create a set of batch scripts which would make switching websites in WAMP root fast and easy
  • and an added bonus you can even modify your hosts (c:WINDOWSsystem32driversetchosts) file to have the www.mylatestsite.com requests redirect to localhost

Main advantage of these two things is that you can develop the website locally and just deploy it to the live server without any patching for absolute URLs to your local server. More on running multiple web-sites in your local WAMP root folder