The least successful project in the world

About a year ago I had a moment of clarity and drive, where all of my IT talent came together in a harmonious call to produce something brilliant. That something was “Imagistable” (think of “irrepressible!” at the end of the introduction to Monkey).

The Idea drew on my skills in image processing (primarilty from an image search engine I once built, which is now lost, that found images by similarity of appearance), my desire to find the ultimate way of organising photos, and the need to conquer the Open Source world with a stroke of brilliance.

It didn’t happen. Or it hasn’t not yet. [sick] [sic]

To check on my own progress, I recently went to look at the blueprint (and boy was the blueprint good. Brilliant, in fact.). That blue-print was found on this site, at /imagistable/index.html. Being such a ground-breaking document, you’d think I’d make a backup, wouldn’t you? You bet I did. I’m pretty paranoid with backups (shutup you).

But the original and the back-up are both now lost, in the Sea of Ineventuality where lost ideas go, and party. How could that be? And how could Ineventuality not be a real word? Read on.

The little bit of code that I actually wrote for Imagistable (besides my extensive library of image processing code – it was actually pretty impressive code, I think), consisted of a spider that recursively travelled through directories creating thumbnailed hyper-linked collections of photos. Unfortunately I ran that program in my home directory, which had the effect of creating an ‘index.html’ file in each of the 18,000 or so directories in my home folder. So what to do? I deleted all those pesky index files. There went my backup. Now you might be asking yourself, why so many darn directories in your home folder? And that is indeed a good question, but completely beside the point. So shut up already.

Then the original. Some f#cker hacked into my host and found a way to replace all files starting with index.* with his own. And there you go. A brilliant idea lost.

Or at least the groundwork. And that’s all that there was to it. If I knew my mind was a sieve then I would have used a bucket.

The biggest danger in procrastination is in thinking that in some way, some how, that it will eventually get done. “Hope wanes”, said Wayne.