Pasta for Pat

Posted on by Ian C.

Pat, another wonderful-to-know MINI owner, was tragically hurt in a work accident earlier this year – he remains in hospital and has limited movement of his body & limbs.
See this MINI2 thread and the Pats Progress website set up to support him.

Today, the First Annual Pasta For Pat event happened down in Rhode Island, with about 100 of his family & friends – including more than 20 MINIs / owners – getting together to raise money for Pat!

Surprise guest of honour was Pat & Angela – warmly greeted by Steve 🙂

Many MINI friends present too … Richard, Annette, Steve, Angela, Libby, John, Sheena, Thom … In addition to the entry ticket, money was raised with various “door prizes” – tickets sold for $1 each which you put in the bucket for the prize(s) you’d like to win – I was lucky enough to win something!

Bonus entertainment – a very strange sequence involving the Mens Bathroom, a group of MINI guys, Annette, a Duck and an Elk!

Gallery 1 .. 2 ..

Posted on by Ian C.

I’ve been running Gallery v1 to hold all my (6200+) pictures since I first set up GBMINI, and I’m very used to it. I find it easy to use, simple to collate my pictures into albums, sub-albums, etc, and I can copy/paste URL links to get pictures to show in my weblog entries 🙂

But, I’ve noticed Gallery getting slower and slower, as more pictures are loaded in to it. Sometimes, the search function fails (due to PHP out-of-memory I think), and I can’t do any of the cool gimmicky things like “random pic” that other folks can do.
Meanwhile, Gallery v2 has been under development for a long time now (many thanks to the Gallery developers!); I tried running it a year or two ago and it was slow, and too different to v1.

Now though, it seems many changes have been made to speed it up, there are new themes that make it look more like Gallery v1, and there’s some very smart “v1->v2 migration” tools – I decided to try it again.

Initially I wasn’t sure that the “migration” stuff worked properly. All the pics went into Gallery v2, but the embedded images in the weblog weren’t showing through. I found that refresh didn’t seem to get the images to appear, while did make them show up – and once they were shown, they stuck around!
I don’t know if that’s an issue with MSIE 6, or with Gallery v2, or with the migration … so for now, let’s see what happens. GBMINI is currently using Gallery v2 to drive it’s images – is it working for you?

I’m not sure either that there’s much basic speed improvement with Gallery v2, but maybe there is – it’s hard to tell right now because all the image thumbnails aren’t built (in Gallery v1 they’re built as you upload, but with v2 you can put off building thumbnails till they’re needed).
There’s also a “performance” setting on Gallery v2 – I’ve got it set to “maximum” for Gallery visitors (you folks!) so maybe it’s working faster for you than for me 🙂
At least the Gallery search works now (quicker, too!)

Finally, there’s a neat “WP/Gallery v2” package called WPG2 which offers to make Gallery v2 seem to be built in to my weblog – however it doesn’t seem to work too well yet, with a wide gap between the Gallery data and the weblog sidebar on the right.
Maybe I’ll find time to play with formatting – or maybe I’ll just forget about it!