Panoing

This morning and first bit of the afternoon I was processing the last two panos that I took a few days ago and didn't manage to process yesterday.

The last pano took quite a bit time to do as unfortunately the brightness of the images was quite variable. For one image I think this was because the battery ran out while taking the image, so the exposure time was quite a bit less than it should have been (I didn't realise this at the time).

Then the images taken after the battery ran out were quite a bit darker as they were taken a few minutes after the other images (I didn't have a spare battery so I just tried to warm up the run out battery for a few minutes, before putting it back in the camera and finishing the image sequence). Because the light was fading fast, this meant that the few extra minutes between the shots meant that the post empty battery shots are quite a bit darker (probably about 2 stops) than the pre empty battery shots.

So I had to do quite a bit of work on the pano trying to get the light levels relatively equal across the images. This meant processing the pano multiple times using images with different RAW exposure compensation applied until it looked 'okay'.

The other pano I had to process didn't have any features on the zenith shot to align it with the other shots. But it did have a telephone (or maybe electric) line going across the zenith, so it needed to be aligned perfectly. I managed to get it looking 'okay' by doing some copy-paste-warping.

I also finished off the pano I was working on yesterday where PTGUI didn't want to render the handheld nadir shot. I just removed the handheld nadir shot from the PTGUI project file, added it again, added some control points again, and this time when I ran the optimiser it worked okay and didn't make the handheld nadir disappear.

When I'd finished getting the panos processed I did a backup, then started up my Ubuntu Virtual Machine. I tried to get Nginx et al running at startup. I had thought that by putting the Nginx init script in /etc/init.d, it would start up automatically, but this wasn't happening. Doing some googling, the answer to getting a program to startup with Ubuntu was to edit /etc/rc.local and add the command you wanted processed to that file (before the line that says exit 0).

I added the programs that I wanted started up in my username to a file which I called start-progs.sh.

I then edited my crontab crontab -e and told it to run start-progs.sh every 30 minutes, and also @reboot (this is the same setup as I have on the webserver). But when I restarted, the nginx I had added to /etc/rc.local was running okay, but the programs in my start-progs.sh weren't being started.

Doing some more googling, I read that Ubuntu needs there to be a newline after the last command in your crontab. Editing the crontab, it looked like there was a new line after the last command (which was the @reboot one), but the editor said the document had 2 lines, so I added another new line just to be sure.

I saved the crontab, and restarted again, but still the programs that the crontab was meant to start weren't started. So I tried running my start-progs.sh file manually, and found it didn't work - I had forgotten to set execute on it! So after making start-progs.sh executable it all worked okay, and the crontab will now run the script that will start the programs each time Ubuntu is started.

I tried to get rid of the annoying backup tilde files that are created in Ubuntu whenever I edit a file, and found that actually it is not Ubuntu that creates these files, but gedit. To stop gedit creating backup tilde ~ files, in gedit go to Edit > Preferences, then in the preferences dialog go to the Editor tab and untick 'Create a backup copy of files before saving'. Easy!

I got my pano website and wordpress working on my Ubuntu machine, and then it was dinner time.

After dinner I watched a couple of youtube videos with Mauser and L. I also watched Mauser go on Dirt and went on Dirt a bit myself.

I did a bit of work on my pano website and watched a couple of episodes of Power Rangers with L as well.

Food
Breakfast: Tangerine Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 1½ Cheese on Toasts; Apple; Clem 'n' tyne; Cherry Bakewell; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Posh delee sausages; Mashed potato; baked beans. Pudding was Rice Pudding with Jam. Coffee.