PicMonger / News: Recent posts

Well, once again, my other commitments have led to a big dropoff in development. The client seems to be very stable at this point, and most of my originally-intended functionality is there. If anyone has ideas about features they'd like to see implemented, send some email my way.

Some nice person sent me a binary RPM of PicMonger-0.9.6 about a month ago, and I'm just getting around to releasing it now. The "extra feature" (see previous news post) included in 0.9.6 is compiled in there, and since the only way to disable it is to change the source, you won't be able to do that with the binary RPM. If you want to make sure you get even the smallest of images from the newsgroups, you should use the tarball instead, and read the last news post about how to disable the size-screening feature.... read more

I just discovered a "hidden feature" in version 0.9.6, just released last week. Actually, it's a future feature that is complete -- except for the GUI interface, so it can't be controlled.

The "feature" places a lower limit on the size of Usenet images that it will keep. As released, this is hardcoded into the program, and images smaller than 300 pixels in either dimension are automatically erased when submitted to the HTML generator. I'm happy with that; I hate it when people post 30x100 thumbnails they pulled off the net somewhere.... read more

Well, as you can see from the release date on version 0.9.5a, PicMonger development has slowed to a standstill on my end. Part of this is because I've been busy with some other projects, part because I've moved in the interim, and part because PicMonger does most of the things I originally set out to do -- and then some. There are some ideas I'd like to have implemented yet, and they will come, although slowly (unless some other developers jump in to help out.) These include:... read more

Hi all...

It looks like the Gtk-- team may have made a change that will give me fits, once again, with the 1.2.0 release.

The 0.9.5 release of Picmonger includes generation of aspect-scaled thumbnails that utilize a gdk_imlib wrapper that came with Gtk--. My preliminary understanding is that it has been removed from the Gtk-- 1.2.0 release. I've sent email to one of the Gtk-- team leaders about it, and am waiting for a reply.... read more

0.9.4 is out as of now. It's mostly a bugfix release (but quite a few nasty bugs were involved), though some people will be very interested that downloading/decoding of CSV files is now supported.

I'm thinking I'll try to (finally) get around to making the HTML generator options available for 0.9.5. If I remember right, I did the groundwork for those somewhere around 0.9.2, but just haven't put the GUI interface in for it yet. ... read more

Grrrr.

Well, I'd hoped to have 0.9.4 out this week, but it's not going to happen. I fixed one bug that seems to have uncovered a series of other bugs (improperly handled exceptions, mostly) that need to be fixed before I can justify releasing it. Finding these bugs isn't so difficult, but testing to see if the fix works properly takes a long time, because (for most of them) I have no way of artificially introducing the error condition; I just have to let PicMonger run for several hours and hope it runs into the same error condition as before.... read more

Ugh... I'm having a tough time with tracking down a bug in PicMonger 0.9.soon-to-be4. It's one of those deals where an exception gets thrown somewhere and the program bails out, leaving a stack trace that tells you absolutely nothing. What's worse, I can't seem to reproduce it. If anyone out there has noted any pattern to it, or has a patch to fix it (heh), please send some mail my way!

theoren

Hey all,
I went ahead and committed some things to CVS and released them as 0.9.2, since the SourceForge bug decided to remove 0.9.1 from the summary page. Though there are no real new features, the GUI has been updated. You can see it on the new (basic) homepage and decide if you want to download it. Apart from the GUI changes, it's virtually identical to 0.9.1.

--theoren

http://PicMonger.sourceforge.net... read more

I seem to have uncovered a bug in the SourceForge project management programs. The upshot of it is that version 0.9.1 *is* available for download, though the "Releases" column now says "No releases."

If you follow the "View ALL Project Files" link right below where the new release would usually show up, it will take you to a page where you can see the release notes and download the version 0.9.1. ... read more

PicMonger is now in CVS. If you want to check out the latest development snapshot, you can find it there. Just follow the CVS link from the project page for instructions on how to get it. As of right now, the CVS snapshot contains updates to the GUI so it better represents progress in resumed sessions than in version 0.9.0.

Just getting moved in to SourceForge here. I'll be getting the latest version up in CVS... just as soon as I figure out how to do that. The latest is 0.8 -- as yet unreleased -- but is fairly drastically changed from 0.7.1. More details to come once I set up shop here...