About Me, This Site, &c.

The Obligatory About Page, with Colophon

Hi there, I'm Chris Nunciato. I'm a software developer living in Seattle, and I work as a software engineer at RealNetworks. That's me on the left, in my old office in Orange County, CA, where I wrote code for nearly a year for the clients of my consulting company, before relocating to Seattle to join Real in May, 2008.

Despite the thinness of this incarnation, I've been blogging for many years, having built my first one (in 1997, powered by Classic ASP and a rockin' Microsoft Access database) way back before "blog" was even a word. In those days it was called a "personal site," and I wrote for mine almost daily, usually in short bursts about all manner of topics (whatever was on my mind that day -- politics, movies, books, the miracle of beer, etc. -- it didn't matter, since so few people were listening), but today, while I do stray occasionally, I tend to write more on topic, less often, at greater length, about stuff having to do with the wide world of software -- the Web, programming practice, trends in application design and development, and other technical and related esoterica. What can I say? I'm a nerd, for God's sake.

Anyway more than blogging, I'm into photography, which is why I started, back in 2005, taking pictures with my cell phone and posting them directly onto the site you see here. While the project as a whole remains far from where I'd like it to be -- it still needs search, comments, more tagging, the UI's a tad clunky and there's much more navigational stuff to be done -- it's a fun, ongoing work in progress and experiment of sorts that, if nothing more, my mom totally loves.

In addition to the sporadic, long-winded blog posts and more-frequent photos I collect here, you'll also find me on a handful of social-networky sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us and Twitter. Feel free to hit me up on any of them, or to contact me directly, use this fancy HTML form.

Colophon

The site's written in ASP.NET, specifically C#, targeting .NET 3.5. Backed by the fine (and free!) SQL Server 2005 Express, it's built on an object-oriented foundation that I wrote myself, after several frustrating years spent wrestling with the likes of Blogger, TypePad, WordPress and even DasBlog, and ultimately giving up on getting any of them to do quite what I wanted. It's probably taken, so far, the better part of a couple of weeks to put together (what with the class library, the CMS, the UI, the mobile and server pieces, blah, blah, blah), but it's been fun, and maybe one of these days I'll actually release the source code, so my nagging friends (you bastards! I shake my fist at you) can stop hassling me for copies of it already.

The "site," though, is actually the product of five separate, interoperating pieces: the main site you see here, the protected CMS (which I use to create and edit posts, tag photos and assign metadata, ping aggregators, and so on), the Windows console app that handles the photo processing (more on this below), a C# class library defining the objects shared by all four, and the backing database. I host everything myself on a racked Dell PowerEdge 2650 at Vericenter, my excellent ISP -- and whom, incidentally, I highly recommend -- and the page design is my own as well.

While the mobile stuff prompts the most conversation, it's actually really simple. Basically, after snapping a photo with my cell phone (currently a Sony Ericsson K790a, set to capture at about two megapixels, though it actually shoots three), I just send the photo by e-mail, from wherever I happen to be when I take it, and the rest just happens automatically through the combined magic of SMTP, my mail server (MDaemon, which I own and manage) and the aforementioned console app (triggered by the server) that cracks open the message, extracts and deserializes the stuff I need -- JPG imagery, audio, video, titles, captions, tags, etc. -- makes thumbnails of everything and puts it all in its proper place to be made available automatically on this site (and then on Flickr). All I have do is take the pic, add metadata, send, repeat, and have another beer. Isn't technology awesome?