Didn't do today what I said I would do today yesterday

This morning I checked my email, and had received a reply from WebFaction to say they had set up my 'phpStack' for me. So I spent most of the morning looking at that. Here's what happened in relation to this so far with WebFaction:

• 01 Jun 2009 05:42 PM I contacted them asking how to install a php extension
• 01 Jun 2009 09:18 PM WebFaction replied to say they could set up a private php stack for me so I can add my own php extensions
• 01 Jun 2009 10:07 PM I replied to say yes, please could they set up a private php stack for me
• 03 Jun 2009 03:58 AM WebFaction replied to say they were setting the private php stack up for me now
• 03 Jun 2009 06:00 AM WebFaction replied to say the private php stack was now set up for me, and they've set up my websites to use it. They included detailed instructions on how to install PECL php extensions.

Upon running the phpinfo() page on my site hosted with WebFaction, I found that they had even configured it with IMagick! WebFaction's support also came across as friendly, and not thinking that they know it all. So I'm quite impressed with them so far, though of course the only thing I have hosted with them so far is a phpinfo() page.

In WebFaction's message about how to install PECL PHP extensions, they said that pecl install uses the /tmp directory, and they didn't know any way to force pecl to use a different tmp directory. This means that you can't use pecl install to install php extensions on the server (as obviously they can't give users access to /tmp for security reasons). They also said if I knew a way of changing the tmp directory that pecl uses, they'd appreciate it if I let them know.

Well, I didn't know, but did a bit of googling and found this thread: PECL help. Now I haven't tried it, and perhaps I'm completely off-base, but from that it seems that you can do the following to get pecl install working a shared host:
install a local copy of PEAR
pear config-set temp_dir ~/mypecltmpdir
pear config-set download_dir ~/mypecldownloaddir

So I sent that suggestion to WebFaction. Thanks to them already having ImageMagick installed, and installing the Imagick php extension for me, I don't think I actually need to install anything on the server.

Somehow that managed to take up all of my morning. Also in the morning, a bloke came round to look at the boiler, and wanted to know why I wasn't at school. Skill and embarrassing how people always think I'm dead young. When I said I didn't have a job at the moment and was studying Web design and development, he said that was a rubbish job as you'd be inside all day and that I should be a plumber.

Then I said I was also interested in photography and he told me about 10 times in a row how his wife took a photo of some old ships being lit up by a beam of sunlight and after she took the photo the sunlight disappeared again and what a great photo it was.

After lunch I went on Animal Crossing, then I moved the CD-I to Ben's room and tested it on a TV in there. The screen didn't jump up and down all the time, so it must be some incompatibility between the CD-I and Moocle's TV. I think he had the same problem with his Wii on his TV before.

Ben's room was totally dusty, and also he'd got some silver paint from his papier-mâché sword on one of Moccle's DK Bongos Gamecube controllers. So I decided it was probably best not to leave the CD-I in there, knowing what a lil' trasher Lad is.

Since the CD-I didn't work properly on Moccle's TV and there was also a high probability of it getting trashed in there, I decided to box it up. I had to re-arrange my cupboards a bit, which took a while, so I could fit the boxes of CD-I stuff in there (I made one box with the console and accessories in it, and the box contained the CDs).

Before I put it all away, I tried to see if I could read the Hotel Mario CD in my PC and maybe rip the videos or audio or sumat. However, when I opened the CD in My Computer, it couldn't see any files. In my Ubuntu Virtual Machine it said it couldn't mount the CD. Not sure if that is due the Virtual Machine not being configured or it just meant it couldn't read the CD.

Anyway, googling about I found The New International CD-i Association, which suggests using IsoBuster to read CD-i disks. So I downloaded and installed IsoBuster. It could read the CD-i disk okay, but there weren't any 'normal' files on there.

After that I tried to get my camera neck strap to fit on my 450D. As you can see here, the holes for the strap on the 450D are indented into the body, and so you can't fit the loop of my strap through them.


I had a look in the garage and found the box for the 450D, and got the strap that comes with the camera. I was hoping it would have some little metal bits like the D200 has that would hang off the camera strap loops and allow me to connect the strap to camera via the rings.

Unfortunately the strap didn't have little metal split rings on it, it was just fabric. I didn't want to use the proper neck strap that comes with the 450D as I want to be able to add and remove the neck strap easily when it's needed.

So I got a couple of keyring split rings, and put one of them on the 450D. It didn't have much movement in it though, and I feared that when used with the neck strap it would put quite a lot of force on the ring and possibly damage the camera body by the ring or might make the camera go in a weird position.

So I took one of the split triangle rings off the D200, and tried that on the 450D, which had a lot more movement in it:

Luckily the keyring split rings fit on the D200 fine, so I added the D200 split triangle rings to the 450D and the keyring split rings to the D200. So I can now attach my neck strap to both cameras (though not at the same time). It remains to be seen how well this works in practice, it won't be any good if the camera hangs at a weird angle.

The rest of the afternoon and part of this evening, I read a great article (and all the comments on each page) about Digital-Image Color Spaces.

After finishing reading that, I watched Springwatch. Then I tried to find out how to remove an Image's embedded Thumbnail, and it seems you can do this in exiftool by setting ImageThumbnail to a blank string like -ImageThumbnail=

I think there may also be the possibility of a PhotoshopThumbnail, but I haven't looked into that yet. When I tried to remove a thumbnail from one of images using exiftool, I got an error about my user defined tags not existing. So after checking the exiftool website, and not seeing anywhere about this, I went on the exiftool forum to ask about it.

Then when I was on the exiftool forum website, I decided to check and see if Phil had replied again to my question a couple of weeks ago about the -json option not extracting structs in arrays correctly.

He had actually replied over a week ago, with a pre-release version of 7.77, which had a -struct option to create the correct json structure when extracting tags. So I spent the rest of the evening testing this and then posted back my results to the thread.

The weather today was overcast all day, except in the late evening about one or two hours before sunset, when the sun got through. I'm not sure if there was much of a sunset, it did look very cloudy towards the horizon where the sun would have been setting though (and I didn't see the underside of the clouds lit up pink or orange, so I'm guessing the sunset was hidden behind the clouds).

Food
Breakfast: Orange marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Ham with iceberg lettuce sandwich; banana; caramel Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2x chicken burgers; jacket potato; baked beans; cheese. Pudding was butterscotch whip with tinned mandarin segments. Coffee.
Supper: Fly biscuit; milk chocolate digestive; cup o' tea.