Working a little on the content mismanagement system I use for my pictures as well as for my images scanned from old books. Managed to wreck the RSS feed briefly, but it's back now. Probably just as well.

The cache for the image search engine now gets deleted more aggressively when it's invalidated; it gets up to two or three hundred megabytes per day, which is fine as long as the cached query results are useful. I don't bother with LRU; the pattern is that they are all invalidated if I upload a new image, and since that generally happens at least once a day, all I needed was for the out-of-date files to be deleted automatically. They were in any case being ignored when out of date, so I had got that part right.

Next is to manage a queue of pending images to upload, and to make a suitable front end so that other people can contribute images more easily.

I should mention that I'm interested in other people's collections of high-quality scans; let me know if you find any cool ones :-) and maybe we can merge or I can link to them. High quality ideally means at least 1200dpi scans, though, in most cases, so as to be without murky grey bits everywhere.

All this by way of procrastination: I'm supposed to be working on a paper on microformats for Extreme Markup, which I think of as the XML conference I find most interesting and thought-provoking; I'm also supposed to be working on an article for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on XML.

Image of the day: The Discovery of Tin in Britain (a cartoon from the 1890s). Caution, it's a bad joke.