Tunisia

Since switching over to Dreamhost a week or two ago, I’ve been working on transferring over all of the static content that I maintained in parallel to my Wordpress installation at my old webhost.  Finally after much futzing about, I transferred over the first two real pages of photographic content.  Behold, minimal content from the very first few days of my time in Tuinsia!  There are literally only two of the very first pages completely transferred.  It takes significant effort to coroberate between what I have on my old site, what I am putting onto this site, and Gallery2’s structure.

Speaking of Gallery2, it can be a real resource hog.  I guess that’s partially my own fault though.  Rather than only upload the images that I plan to use in the sizes I want, I uploaded ALL of the original images.  At last check, I was pushing close to 11,000 images.  Just the battle to get everything uploaded and imported into Gallery2 took a week.  And I haven’t even organized but a few galleries worth of photos.  The biggest problem comes from the image manipulation packages that Gallery2 uses.  They eat resources for breakfast.  Trying to resize all of the original massive images to thumbnails of various proportions, several different resized viewable images, and the like on top of watermarking everything can really bog the server down and ocassionally makes it barf out full-size images for no apparent reason.  This is especially problematic on the left column of my Wordpress theme (Tarski) where I end up with the odd MASSIVE IMAGE OF DOOM.  It appears though that the ooccurance of these images might be largely limited to when I am logged in as an administrator to the site.  Otherwise, I believe it just returns a blank image box.

A slightly less big problem is trying to perform any operation on the Gallery2 database, which runs through a MySQL backend, that accesses more than a few records.  It seems that I must be on a heavily loaded database server with Dreamhost, or Dreamhost has a draconian policy toward MySQL queries and the number of records that can be accessed at any one time, or Gallery2 is particularly resource intensive when working with very large numbers of images.  Whatever the case, it makes dealing with the entire image set a bit difficult.

If only there were a way to perform tasks such as creating resized images and thumbnails, optimizing the database, and other maintianence tasks on my own machine rather than on the server…  That way I could actually get them to complete correctly AND not drain the resources on my shared hosting plan.

In other news, my masters thesis is slowly coming together.  There are so many sources that I am still trying to digest!  I read through a 300ish page textbook yesterday evening and skimmed the majority of the important sources.  Each new book or paper I encounter holds a roughly 25% chance of being something quite valuable that demands a day or two of attention.  While processing all of these sources, I am also trying to write bits and pieces of the acutal thesis.  Hopefully in another few days, I’ll be able to start writing in ernest.  First though, I have to clear two 1000+ page tomes and about 40 articles related to those monsterous works.