Websiting

This morning I checked my email, then checked ebay, looking for fishing shirts/jackets that I could use as a photo shirt/jacket to carry lenses around. I found a few that looked like they might be okay, though it's hard to tell how big the actual pockets are, and whether my lenses would fit in them okay. The shirt that looked the best was the most expensive, and had a few bids on, while most other shirts were less than £10 starting price with zero or one bids.

I also tried to check an auction for a Canon 800mm/5.6 L IS lens that had been listed and finished while I was away last week. When we got back from holiday, and I was checking my emails, I noticed it had sold for quite a low price, but the seller hadn't listed anything previously for about a year (so looked like a hacked account), though they were accepting paypal. I wanted to check it again to see feedback had been left yet to confirm if the auction was legitimate or not. But when I clicked on it, I just got a message that the listing had been removed.

I guess that means that it wasn't legitimate, but quite annoying of ebay to just remove fake auction listings, so it looks like they never existed, rather than just leaving them and putting a notice on the listing page that the auction was not legitimate due to a hacked account or whatever.

After that I did some more website stuff. I found that a text string I was retrieving from the database using GROUP_CONCAT had the end missing, i.e. it had been truncated. I copied the truncated string into Open Office Writer, and did a word count, which showed that it only had 1024 characters. Doing some googling for this, I found (Trouble with CONCAT and Longtext) that 1024 is the default value for the MySQL system variable group_contact_max_len. Rather than changing my group_contact_max_len, I think I will just drop the GROUP_CONCAT, and instead extract all the rows and do the concatenating in PHP.

The rest of the day I did more website stuff, and also took a few photos in the garden (mainly just Ladybird larvae), though I don't think I got any good photos :(

For my photo website, I needed to use the Focal length symbol for indicating the aperture that the photo was taken at. Looking at the Wikipedia article on aperture, I noticed they just use a normal f in italics. I had a look at charmap, and there is actually a special character/symbol for indicating focal length - ƒ (Latin Small Letter F With Hook). But when I looked at the wikipedia article for ƒ, it says

The italic ƒ is, rarely, used as a script f, as a mathematical symbol for "function of", or to indicate aperture in photography (e.g. ƒ/2.8) in place of the more common italic f (in serif fonts) or oblique f (in sans-serif fonts).[1][2] In modern typography an italic or oblique f is generally preferred for these applications.[citation needed]

I guess it's also unlikely that anyone would search for ƒ/2.8, and so is better SEO to use an italicised f.

The weather was rain all morning, and a bit of the afternoon. The clouds started to clear later in the evening, though I didn't see any signs of a sunset.

Food
Breakfast: Honey loops; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Sicilian style ham with sliced vine tomato and iceberg lettuce sandwich; clementine; slice of Iced Lemon Madeira layer cake; Fox's Triple; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chilli bean burger with melted Red Leicester cheese, tomato ketchup, and salad in a bun; Bowl of fake cup a soup vegetable soup. Pudding was Chocolate cup cake thingy. Coffee; Sainsbury's truffle chocolate.