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July 20, 2005
Yo Ho, Yo Ho
A bachelor's life for me...
Dawnise left for a week and a half stay in Southern California yesterday afternoon. Ostensibly she went to visit her parents, and help out at the quilt store she used to work for, but I think the working was just an excuse the quilt store owner used to write-off the cost of the plane ticket.
So I spent last night tinkering around with photo-management software.
<geek-mode>
I managed (after waaay too much effort) to get mono installed on my linux box, and figured out how to get the libraries necessary to compile f-spot. Most of the trouble came from the fact that I'm running a 64-bit system (FC4 x86_64) and Novell doesn't have appropriate 64 bit mono packages. I'd built mono from source a long while back, and it was the very definition of dependancy hell (oh, and for some reason that I've never understood, the mono team doesn't distribute up-to date SPEC files or SRPMs.)
So I ended up using the 32 bit installer, which meant that I had to install a bunch of 32 bit libraries that f-spot needed, and set the build flags appropriately to build 32 bit shared libraries (CFLAGS="-m32" LDFLAGS="-L$MONO_ROOT/lib" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$MONO_ROOT/lib/pkgconfig", in case you were wondering).
What a pain in the arse.
</geek-mode>
I had been managing photos using gallery, but I realized that I didn't update it very often, and my initial plan of running it on my machine at home any sync'ing the contents to the machine it "really" runs on went out the window the first time Dawnise started actually sorting photos on the "wrong" server (made perfect sense to her, and it's my fault for not adequately explaining it).
f-spot definitely has promise. It's interface is fairly simple and intuitive, though the restriction that tags be organized hierarchically seems draconian. It also claims to have gallery integration - which I'll try as soon as I can figure out why it can't correctly determine the date some of my pictures were taken.
On-tap for tonight? Eating badly, and possibly firing-up Half-Life 2 for the second time (never mind that I've had it since it was first released...)
Oh, and as a random aside, if you use Firefox, check out the Beta Google Toolbar. The in-browser spell-check alone makes it well worth the price of admission (free).
Posted by dberger at July 20, 2005 4:20 PM