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7 <title>pr0n FAQ</title>
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12 <p>Last updated July 23rd, 2006</p>
14 <h2>So, what is this pr0n thing anyway?</h2>
16 <p>pr0n is my very own gallery system. It is used on a few different
17 host names, most notably at <a href="http://pr0n.sesse.net/">pr0n.sesse.net</a>
18 to show images I and others have taken at events I care about (some
19 more than others, of course).</p>
21 <h2>Why the name? Is this some kind of fetish site?</h2>
23 <p>The name "pr0n" (scriptkiddie-speak for "porn", of course) was just seen
24 as a very good fit for an image gallery. :-) There is no (and will not
25 be any) adult content on this site.</p>
27 <h2>Can I upload my own images here?</h2>
29 <p>Yes, you can, as long as they're related to one of the events already
30 here. Contact me (see the bottom of the page) for more information.</p>
32 <h2>Can I download all the pictures for viewing?</h2>
34 <p>Sorry, no. First of all, please don't use any "web mirroring" program to
35 download all the images -- of course, I can't stop you, but you're
36 putting a lot of unneccessary load on the system. There are two main
37 reasons for not downloading all the pictures: First, there is a
38 question of copyright; not all images here are taken by me, and I've
39 been given permission to display them here, not to pass them on. Second,
40 keep in mind that some of the events contain several gigabytes of images --
41 do you really need all that? I'd advise you to crank up the thumbnail
42 size to the maximum possible size instead; it's quite comfortable to
43 browse images on without having to click back and forth all the time.</p>
45 <h2>I just changed thumbnail resolution, why is everything so slow?</h2>
47 <p>Probably the requested size was never generated before, so the server
48 has to scale all the images. As the scaling method used is geared
49 towards getting good-quality, sharp thumbnails, not speed, this can
50 take a while. It's all getting cached on disk for later re-use, though,
51 so the next time somebody views the same images in that resolution,
52 it will be snappy as usual.</p>
54 <h2>Why didn't you just throw up Gallery?</h2>
56 <p>Because it didn't fit my needs, and the same goes for all other systems
57 I've seen. I wanted something no-nonsense that would work for <em>my</em>
58 purposes -- I don't want to click around endlessly just to watch some
59 pictures. Others are of course free to do as they wish, I can't impose
60 my will on anybody :-)</p>
62 <h2>What are the primary features of pr0n?</h2>
64 <p>Mostly that it's no-nonsense and just works, without being in your way.
65 Also, it has dynamical rescaling (of good quality -- proper,
66 sharp thumbnails, no crappy nearest-neighbor scaling) of both thumbnails
67 and images (most client-side scaling sucks quality-wise, unfortunately),
68 an easy-to-use <a href="http://www.webdav.org/">WebDAV</a>-based upload
69 interface and in general good performance (being a set of persistent,
70 optimized Perl modules; I've seen it throw out over 300 hits a second,
71 but I won't guarantee it would withstand a Slashdot attack ;-) ). Also,
72 it has quite OK skinning capabilities, so it's able to adapt into
73 different designs quite easily.</p>
75 <h2>What hardware/software does it run on?</h2>
77 <p>pr0n currently runs on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with 2GB RAM and ordinary
78 SATA disks. (The server does a lot of other stuff besides running pr0n, of
79 course.) pr0n itself is a custom-made system by myself, tightly coupled
80 into <a href="http://www.apache.org/">Apache</a> 2.0, <a
81 href="http://perl.apache.org/">mod_perl</a> 2.0 and <a
82 href="http://www.imagemagick.org/">ImageMagick</a> 6.x (as well as various
83 other Perl modules), using <a
84 href="http://www.postgresql.org/">PostgreSQL</a> 8.1 as the back-end
85 database for metadata et al. The base operating system is <a
86 href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> etch (ie. “testing”).</p>
88 <p>The Perl modules aren't really that big -- we're talking about only
89 approx. 1500 lines of code (of which ~30% is the WebDAV part; I should
90 really make that a bit cleaner once). Most of the real work is done by
91 the software on which pr0n builds on.</p>
93 <h2>How much data is there in there, anyway?</h2>
95 <p>At the time of writing, approximately 45GB of image data (that is, over
96 36000 different images), plus cache, plus metadata in the SQL database.
97 (These numbers are growing rather rapidly, so they could be outdated at
100 <h2>Can I get the source?</h2>
102 <p>Probably, but are you sure you can get it to work? It's
103 non-trivial to set up, as it depends on lots of odd modules and a lot of
104 custom configuring; this is not a pre-made, user friendly package for your
105 favourite Linux distribution. You can probably get a tarball, but I'm not
106 going to hold your hand configuring it. :-) If you really want to try,
107 contact me (see the bottom of the page) and we'll see what we can do.</p>
109 <h2>Will you implement feature X?</h2>
111 <p>Probably not; I have a lot of things to do besides programming new
112 features. Also, I'm not really sure if I want tons of stupid people
113 writing stupid comments under my images, or icky HTML pages with
114 "previous" and "next" buttons instead of just getting directly to
115 the images :-) If you really have a novel or cool feature, feel
116 free to contact me (see below).</p>
118 <h2>Is the upload WebDAV server RFC-compliant?</h2>
120 <p>Unfortunately, no. When and if somebody makes a sane framework for
121 making WebDAV servers I can use, it probably will, but ATM it's just
122 too much work for what I need it for. It would be a lot easier if
123 I only had to support WebDAV level 1, but due to silly restrictions
124 in Mac OS X' WebDAV client I have to support WebDAV level 2 as well,
125 and, well, most of that is faked. ;-) In addition, there are multiple
126 minor features in the system (like autorenaming files on name clashes)
127 that just aren't easy to adapt to WebDAV. The WebDAV service is
128 restricted, though, so I guess rather few people will get hurt just
129 because I'm not fully compliant ;-)</p>
131 <h2>How do I get in touch with you?</h2>
133 <p>Try <a href="mailto:sgunderson@bigfoot.com">e-mail</a>, or reach me
134 on IRC as Sesse on EFnet, IRCnet, Freenode or OFTC.</p>
137 <p class="footer">pr0n v2.04,
138 © 2004-2006 <a href="http://www.sesse.net/">Steinar H. Gunderson</a>.</p>