Normally I didn’t take a seat at the window, but the plane was not so full and I had the chance to test my mobile phone camera. I wonder if George W. and all the other prime ministers also recognize how beautiful our planet is and if they think we really do our best for the future…
It’s a very seldom moment when I’m sad regarding the development of our clime, hope my child have still the chance to see such a panorama.
We reached already the PETA bytes. I heard some time ago that Ebay is already calculating their hard disc space in peta byte ( which is 1 000 000 000 000 000 byte ), but the memory limit of a PHP environment is sometimes only 8 Mbyte.
Is this a problem ?
The last days I get more feedback from users that they get a fatal error when they activate NextGEN Gallery or a blank screen when uploading some pictures (which is a fault on my side , that I didn’t do a correct error check). Now lets have a look at nextgen.boelinger.com
A simple WordPress installation and only 1 plugin activated :
And now have a look on alexrabe.de (WordPress plus 22 plugins )
I also calculate the required memory for a 800 x 600 sized jpg, when you want to create a thumbnail : It up to 2,2 MByte in my internal tests… Now go and check you memory_limit 🙂
UPDATE :
Due to the fact that most users didn’t understand the behaviour of the PHP GD library. Here an additional test I found on this discussion (taken form http://www.webmasterworld.com/php/3286309.htm ) :
During imagecreatefrom(type) calls, the memory usage is related to the number of pixels in the source image. So, it doesn’t matter if you have 3500×3500 pixels which are all the same color or 3500×3500 pixels of random color noise, the memory allocation will be identical with gd. You can test it by making two JPEGs which are of equal pixel dimensions but dramatically different file sizes then run each through this script.
<!–p
<?php
ini_set('memory_limit', -1);
echo 'Start: '.memory_get_usage().' <br />';
$filename = '/path-to-your-file/3500x3500-72.jpg';
$im = imagecreatefromjpeg($filename) or die ("Cannot Initialize new gd image stream");
echo 'ImageCreate: '.memory_get_usage().' <br />';
imagedestroy($im);
echo 'ImageDestroy: '.memory_get_usage().' <br />';
?>
I ran a 72 KB 3500×3500 JPEG and a 904 KB 3500×3500 image and both used up just under 62 MB of memory (61,392,088 bytes to be exact).
OK, here is something to laugh :
I start with a jQuery plugin and study the plugin jCarousel . I’m at the moment not able to understand and to use the real basics from jQuery. I configure an array of pictures (this.imgarray) and would like to wrap around a link and some div’s. This is the first result :
// get to start point
this.container = this.list.parent();
for (var i = 0; i < this.imgarray.length; i++) {
this.innerHTML = '<a href="'+ this.imgarray[i][0] +'">';
this.innerHTML += '<img />';
this.innerHTML += '</a></div>';
this.container = this.list.append(this.innerHTML).children();
}
// add the div container
this.container.wrap('<div class="ngg-gallery-thumbnail-box"></div>');
this.container.wrap('<div class="ngg-gallery-thumbnail"></div>');
Here the result :
Mhh, It’s ok , but I think it’s the wrong method or to complicated. Could be easier at least… need more time to learn jQuery 😦
At the moment the development is a little bit delayed, this is based on summer (golf time) and my paid job (yes, I’m did something else). Right now I’m looking to for a redesign of nextgen.boelinger.com as basic work for a better documentation page and a new forum, cause my actual version is to buggy for the increasing requests on NextGEN Gallery.
Please let me note that I’m very happy that I get so many response and some people are using this plugin already in a productive mode, but keep in your mind I call it a “Alpha” version until I finished the most features I personally would integrate till version 1.00 . This include that I maybe need to restructure some database parts, and maybe some users from a very early version need to redo their work , when they want to update to a actual version. I hope I can avoid this, but it may happens.
Now what’s on the list as next feature ? Thanks to KeViN we did a big step into a better Sidebar Integration, I will integrate the Multiple file upload very soon (with a new jQuery plugin) and the JavaScript based page navigation like :
http://cross-browser.com/toys/img_gallery_2.php
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/photoalbum.htm
This should be recoded with the help of jQuery and I hope for myself that I get this running…
It’s only a matter of time
A decision is a final product of the specific mental/cognitive process of an individual or a group of persons/organizations which is called decision making, therefore it is a subjective concept. It is a mental object and can be an opinion, a rule or a task for execution/application. From Wikipedia
So I’m back on earth, and as I already said, I rethink the last weeks… The hacker attack is still going on (200 attempts yesterday, did they not recogize that I changed the files ? Stupid…).
One decision is to reduce the amount of plugins on my page. I’m responsible for them and I’m not able to maintain them all , because I have still not time for this. Therefore I will remove the hosting of some plugins.
Three plugins are still my favorites and the downloads and feedback response, bring me to the point that I will do my best to work on them as long as possible : wordTube, wp-Table and of course NextGEN Gallery.
The hacker attack show me one major problem : I’m not able to inform all the user of this plugins in a certain time. There a still a plenty of pages , which didn’t update the plugins and this I want to do better in the future. I already integrate a version checker in NextGEN Gallery and this function class I will integrate in the next month also in wp-table and wordTube. So if a next major failure occur I’m able to inform the users about a update in a much better and faster way.
Thanks to all the people who write me a mail or comment that I should go on, this was very very helpful in a period I lost my complete motivation to move on…
Ok, after this week , full of blame, frustration, disappointment, stomach ache and shame, I take my personal timeout. As I said, I’m not reachable by mail, web, internet, sms, phone, mobile…
I hope this web page is still online when I return and I found my personal motivation again. I must rethink what happend. Thanks to those people who send me some comforting mails , that I should continue my work.
This situation explain the enormous responsibility you have as developer, indepened if its a freeware , shareware or a paid project. My hobby to study this language and the idea to share my little code project with you, didn’t bring me to the idea that I create such a potential risk. I’m getting blind for the obviously failure I did in this case, but it can happend again, because I have no time to test my code against all hackers ideas.
So, back on the 14th May it’s time for decisions…
My plugins get hacked and in the same way like myGallery
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/04/30/please-update-mygallery-plugin/
I update all plugins (except NextGEN Gallery, which is safe), please update now to the latest version !
Please check your server log if you see external access to :
Then I recommend you to delete this file, the TinyMCE button will not work, but it’s better for the moment.
I analyse at the moment what the hell they get already for information from my site. I hope this is not a bigger problem, but for the next days this page can be offline from time to time…
Sorry for all the problems, I’m not aware of this when I program the plugins, I do my best that this never happend again.
Here are the hacks :
http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/3825
