So, after the demise/µsoftification of iView Media Pro, the time came to switch to Aperture.

However, while Aperture is mighty powerful, its limitation of 10,000 images in a project makes import of my photos difficult. What’s more, my … er … unique system of “organization” doesn’t natively work well with Aperture. My attempt at organization, which predates such things as iView, Aperture, or even a usable Bridge, is predicated on the idea of the filesystem as a hierarchical database of sorts.

For example, I start with a directory called “photos” and within it are directories for “animals,” “events,” “people,” “places,” “things,” “projects,” etc. Within “events” are “political,” “work,” “family,” etc. With each of these are either further taxonomic directories, or what might be equivalent to rolls-of-film directories, e.g., “MothersDay-2007-05-13” or “CocktailsAtBerris-2000-06-14.” Directories are all Unix-friendly (no spaces or crazy punctuation) and are generally CamelCase for multiple words.

So I went through a frustrating attempt to write a good Applescript importer. The problem with languages like Applescript (or Javascript implementations embedded in Adobe products) is that they promise more than they can deliver. They’re designed to interact with Applications, but generally don’t have rich access to application functionality. Why can’t I create a folder in my Aperture library in Applescript? Why can’t I get/set a single pixel in Photoshop with Javascript. Yes, I know both are possible through some crazy GUI-script calls or cryptic Event IDs, but why give me the equivalent of object-oriented access and then leave out all the important methods?

Well, enough ranting. With a lot of help from others who have gone before me and posted comments and, even better, code, I hacked together something that will read in my hierarchy, create a new Aperture Project for each leaf node on my tree, and convert the path to that node into a set of keywords which it will apply.

So “photos/events/family/MothersDay-2007-05-13” will become a project named “MothersDay-2007-05-13” and the images within it will all be tagged with the keywords: Events, Family, Mothers, Day, 2007-05-13. It’l also throw in copyright notices and author name.

There’re provisions for excluding words from becoming tags (e.g., “and”) as well as special case code for directories named “misc,” which I often use as catchalls for a taxonomical branch — these get named for the parent directory plus the “misc” (e.g. “ArthopodsMisc”).

Perfect? No. Better than doing it manually? Yes.

In any case, here it is:
Aperture Importer

So, in the process of organizing photographs, I wanted to examine my deeply-nested hierarchy to figure out how it’s possible I have 30,000 images (Aperture only wants me to have 10,000 in a project, so I need to re-organize the hierarchy even before I import).

So, I figured it’d be easy to use find to list all my directories, and how many images they contain. It turns out that (at least for me) it’s not.

My best stab so far is to use find and a loop, which gives me almost what I want (it not only includes the count of images in the each directory, but subdirectories as well). It fails if there are too many directories. It’s good enough. But it’s not elegant.

So CLI Deities — how would you make this pretty?

find . -type d | while read dir; do echo `ls -1 "$dir" | wc -l` $dir; done

Potential type-face issue disambiguation: after the ls, that first argument is a one, not an ell, although I suppose an ell would work too. The wc option is an ell.

Matthew “Witch Finder” Hopkins, 1647, read as a ManyBooks.net publication of a Project Gutenberg text.

A little too scary for Halloween, this short missive is the earliest FAQ I’m aware of. But it’s chilling — it’s a series of answered questions justifying the author’s methodology for identifying witches.

The answers, and their oh-so-reasonable tone, are completely unbelievable. They didn’t use sleep deprivations on the suspects — the suspects refused to sleep, for fear that their familiars would visit. Hopkins didn’t accuse women based upon marks such as moles, “devil’s teats,” or other “unnatural” markings — it was a committee of learned people who could differentiate between the natural and unnatural. And they didn’t drown witches — the waters would reject a witch just as a witch would reject baptism.

He goes on in this vein, and each answer is more depressing and disturbing than the last.

It’s a potent reminder that people will do terrible things for power or money, and attribute their motives to religion.

As I described back in this article, I was getting segfault errors from eAccelerator.

I’m experiencing it on another, similarly-equipped GoDaddy VPS server. Same software versions, even, for Apache, PHP, eAccelerator, and OS, although this is not a old CMS Made Simple install.

Still, no good solutions out there, as far as I can google.

Here’s the clues I have found:

• The syntax function fun_name ($arg = array (blah)) is fatal.
• The order in which PHP extensions are loaded might matter.
• There are issues with files that get included or required multiple times via different paths.
• Software versions are just Too Old.

This is teh suckage.

Next thing I’ll try, when I have the time, is to upgrade the VPS to Fedora Core 6, and see if pushing those version numbers up a bit helps.

Windows update just told me it was installing a “Malicious Software Removal Tool.”

Gosh, I hope that the virtual hyphen is between the first two words, rather than the second.

*sigh*