Probably the most important statement in that article is
CFO Blake Jorgensen, who resigned last week but is still on board, added that an online mapping service is very expensive to maintain, and that he doesn't foresee Yahoo pouring significant additional investments into Yahoo Maps in the near future.
In my testing so far the only thing I have found Yahoo Maps better at is that it is accurate with full UK postcodes. Google Maps could probably be fixed by looking up postcodes through GeoNames. The only thing I have found Google Maps better at is that it has built in reverse geocoding (and I prefer the amount and format of the data returned by Google to that returned by GeoNames). Of course, it should be possible to use Yahoo Maps API for displaying the map and Google Maps API for doing the reverse geocode if you wanted.
I prefer Google Maps because they are still actively developing it and they even have a full program (Google Earth), so it seems likely to me they will add more and better features than Yahoo and also probably have a larger dataset and more detailed satellite imagery than Yahoo.
I vacuumed my room, and then checked my ebay. The Manfrotto 410 Junior Geared head I was watching on ebay ended up going for £113.61 + £8.50 P&P. Although it was 'Mint & Unused', personally I'd rather pay a bit more to get it new from a retailer with a warranty (£122.99 + £9 P&P).
I checked my email, then made some changes to my exiftool/php scripts as I had received a reply from Phil (the writer of exiftool) on the cpan forum. I wanted to know why info was missing (the Latitude and Longitude) when calling exiftool from the command line compared to when using it as a perl module. The answer is that when calling it from the command line you need to use the -a option to allow duplicate tags. However when I tried this I found it didn't work when I was also using the -j option (to get results as JSON). Reading the exiftool notes I found the answer:
=item B<-j> (B<-json>)
Use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) formatting for console output. This
option may be combined with B<-g> to organize the output into objects by
group, or B<-G> to add group names to each tag. List-type tags with
multiple items are output as JSON arrays unless B<-sep> is used. The B<-a>
option is implied if the B<-g> or B<-G> options are used, otherwise
it is ignored and duplicate tags are suppressed.
My other question I asked was how to use the -fast option when using Exiftool as a perl module. The answer there was to use
$exifTool->Options(FastScan => 1);.After lunch I tried taking some photos of a dead poppy, and using white card for the background, but changing the background colour by geling the flash.
I found I needed to snoot the flash pointing at the flower or otherwise too much light would spill out onto the background. Geling the flash seemed to work at getting a coloured background. I used my Manfrotto 682B self standing monopod as a light stand, and I think it works well in this capacity due to its small footprint.
Then I wanted to get a spotlight on the background as well, I tried using an SB-800 zoomed to 105mm, but the flash size was still too large (I was doing a reasonably close-up shot of a flower, and the background was only about 50cm away from the flower, so the total background size in shot wasn't that big). So I tried snooting the flash, and that was better, but the flash made the background go white where it was hitting (and it was still hitting quite a large area). So I tried some coloured filters and a 1 stop ND filter. The 1 stop ND filter worked quite well, but I didn't really like the shape of the spotlight.
I really wanted a more rounded spotlight effect on the background, so I tried stuffing my Miranda 24mm/2.8 Macro lens in the end of the snoot. This didn't work too well as the snoot was too long and the lens too heavy, so I tried it with a shorter snoot. It did work, but the results were different to what I was expecting. Instead of casting a round shape, it cast a shape that looked like blinds. I tried adjusting the focus on the lens and reversing it, but it didn't seem to make much difference. It didn't give the round shape I was looking for anyway.
So I just made a round cone shape out of a piece of paper and stuck this in the end of the long snoot, and this gave me a nice round shape, though once I had it, I wasn't sure if it was actually any better than the non-round shape or even just a plain background with no spotlight.
I received the 'Videogames ruined My Life' CD by PIXELH8 today, which I had ordered a few days ago. It cost me £8 including postage. I was a bit disappointed by the packaging, it was just a CDR with a printed label, and packaged in a CD Wallet with a B&W cover/back slip. I put it in the computer and loaded up EAC, and it wasn't in the FreeDB database so I had to enter the tracklisting and details myself. I tried to update the FreeDB database to save anyone else who gets the CD some time, but the FreeDB database rejected my request.
Listening to it, I was a bit disappointed as well. It's not a bad album, but is a bit repetitive and really doesn't compare well with the awesome Amiga Chip tunes I've heard before. Being reminded of how good the Amiga Chip tunes are I decided to see if I could download any more.
I like the clever website design of chiptune.com. They have tracks available created on a range of systems. So far I've downloaded the amiga collection, ZX collection and famicom collection. I also visited chiptunes.org, which just has one archive you can download. Unfortunately when I tried to unzip it I got a message saying the archive was corrupted.
Then I noticed the archive was a tar.gz, so I downloaded it on Ubuntu and tried to unzip it there. But I couldn't get that to work either. After a bit of googling I found I needed to GUnzip it, and then untar it. After doing that I needed to copy it over to windows. However a few files wouldn't copy, one was a link and the other 2 had foreign characters. I spent ages googling about how to sort the problem. I think that the filename must have been encoded in something other than UTF-8 (in Nautilus the filename had a question mark in a black diamond instead of the foreign character).
I tried adding some stuff about character encoding to vsftpd.conf, which then broke it so I couldn't connect to Ubuntu via ftp at all. So I commented out the lines I'd added, and then the files all downloaded okay. Weird!
After that I tried playing the files in winamp, but it didn't work, they were all loads of different file types I'd never heard of, like .aon. Googling I couldn't find anything about playing .aon files, but on chiptunes.org it has a list of players on the left hand side. xmp sounded like a good player since it said it supported lots of players, and I'd like to limit my media players to as few as possible. I downloaded it and the plugin for the Audacious media player in Ubuntu. I also downloaded it and the winamp plugin for windows.
Unfortunately the winamp plugin didn't seem to work (it still wouldn't play the files), and I didn't want to be messing about on the commandline to play tracks. So I googled for something like Amiga chip player, and found a link to a player called DeliPlayer. I'm using it now, and it seems to work great (though only played .aon and .amad files so far).
After dinner I watched the first 2 episodes of season 4 of trashelstar with Mac. The first one was quite good, but in the second episode Trashelstar Trashlactica lived up to its name.
Then after that I did some more work on getting Exiftool working with PHP. I got it working okay where PHP called a perl script that used the Exiftool perl module and then returned a string in the form of an array that PHP could parse. However, when calling Exiftool directly from PHP, PHP couldn't decode the JSON that Exiftool generated. I think this is because of the single quote mark ' characters in the Geo co-ordinates. However I don't see why there should be a problem with these chars since they're wrapped inside a string surrounded with double quote marks ". I couldn't see anything on the PHP json_decode() page about this either.
I'll have to look into this more tomorrow.
The weather today was a mixture of clouds and sun with a very cold strong blustery wind. It rained for a few minutes in the afternoon and there wasn't much of a sunset as the sun set behind a bank of cloud.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x cheese on toasts; French style salad; red grapes; slice of Madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pasta; tomato sauce for pasta stuff; bacon; green beans; small mushrooms; parmegiannio or sumat cheese. Pudding was forest fruits and custard strudel. Coffee; piece of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Turkish.
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