After that I tried to see if I could find a good Wordpress theme for my pano website, but I couldn't. I wanted one with a white background and a wide enough post size to fit in the panorama preview images, which I currently had set at 640px wide. A lot of themes seemed to have 2 sidebars with the same information in both sidebars, so that ruled them out.
I did find a theme that I was quite nice, though the post width was a bit thin, and couldn't fit in the full width of the image (the theme automatically resized (browser resized, not server resized) the image to fit the posts. I thought maybe I could change the CSS to make the post width wider, but then I noticed a link at the bottom of the theme to an acne website.
Obviously the theme was one of these sponsored ones where a company pays the theme creator to have a link to their website in the theme somewhere. I didn't really want a link to an acne website from my pano website, not because it's not relevant, but rather because linking to rubbish sites can harm your own site's SEO.
So I went back to the theme I found yesterday. The main problem with this theme is that it's blue, and so makes my blue coloured twilight photos look rather flat and boring (well, okay, more flat and boring than they would do on a white or black background). It has a couple of other problems e.g. a 'read more' button when there isn't any more of the post to read, and also the hierarchical categories don't seem to display (at least certainly not in a hierarchical manner).
But I guess I just get the site online with the current theme and then worry about fixing this things later, otherwise I'll be in the same situation I'm normally in where making the fixes turns out to be much more complicated and time consuming than I envisaged and delay the site from being online.
I tried to get a pano working using the FPP show_pano.swf file, which is meant to do some flash version detection before loading the pano, so that users with old versions of flash will get a prompt to upgrade rather than a non-working pano. But I couldn't work out how to pass the panorama parameters as a query string, so (after googling without success) I asked in the FPP forum.
I processed a couple of non-pano images from my walk (just over a week ago now), and then tried geo-coding all the images from the walk in Robo-geo. Before doing the actual geo-coding, I checked that the co-ordinates to be geo-coded were correct. They weren't, as the camera time was an hour into the future. So I told Robogeo to change the time for each file to minus 1 hour, then it was lunch time.
After lunch Robogeo was still applying the time change to the images - or was it? Unfortunately the Robogeo window just went white, and maxed out one CPU core, so there wasn't any way to tell if it had just crashed or was actually doing anything. Just have to wait and be patient.
Yesterday evening I put a bid in (via goofbay) on a virtually new Canon 500mm/4 L IS lens with Canon 1.4x TC II for £2850, the price on ebay at that time was £2200. The normal second hand selling price on ebay for the lens alone is around £4000. But when I'd gone to bed I thought about how I didn't really have any money, and that I wouldn't have much time to use it, unless I wanted to do less macro or panoramic photography.
So this morning I removed my snipe, though actually as it happens, I wouldn't have won anyway as the end price was £3125. A good deal for the winner. The reason for the cheap price I think is that the seller only had 9 feedback, and none of it recent. Still, not as good as the £2500 and £2200 (or sumat like that) 500/4s that a seller with 0 feedback sold a year or two ago (and yes, positive feedback was left for both transactions).
I thought when the recession started that second hand lenses (and new lenses to some extent) would become a lot cheaper as people can't afford to bid so much and also sell off their lenses to try and get money for things like paying the mortgage. But that hasn't happened, new lens prices have increased quite a bit (thanks to the strong JPY compared to weak GBP), and I would say that not much has happened to second hand prices, though they may have increased a bit as well.
I guess maybe the low interest rates have meant those on tracker mortgages actually have more money to spend.
Robogeo did finish updating the times on the images, so it hadn't crashed, but then I had another long wait while it did the actual geo-coding. And thanks to the high CPU and disk usage by the geo-coding process, there wasn't a lot I could do while waiting for the geo-coding to finish.
While I was waiting for Robogeo, I thought I might as well scan some pogs in on Mauser's comp. But unfortunately Mauser is now using Windows 7, and I couldn't get the scanner drivers to install properly on it.
Eventually Robogeo finished, and I had received a reply on the sitepoint forums about the problem I was having with PHP dying. So I started Ubuntu up and tried their suggestion, and found that the php imagick extension was causing the problem.
So I recompiled PHP without the imagick extension. While I was waiting for that I cut out some Pogs in Photoshop.
When L got back from School I asked him to make Mauser's PC go into Vista so I could scan some pogs in. He did, then I scanned the pogs in. When I'd done that, I got Bo to put the pogs away in the folders.
PHP finished recompiling, so I installed the imagick extension, and my page now worked, yay! Using
top I monitored the PHP memory usage, and found it went up to nearly 900MB, then went back down to about 450MB. I also found that it would alternate which php process handled my request, so if I uploaded the same file twice, I would end up with 2 php processes using 450MB each!After dinner I watched a couple of episodes of Power Rangers with L.
Doing more testing on my image upload/resize script, I found I was occaisonally getting messages (warning popups) from Ubuntu that I didn't have much free space left. After deleting the duplicate uploads and emptying the trashbasket, I still only had just over 1GB free space, so I shut down the Ubuntu VM and modified the hard drive size in the VMWare Server admin control panel web interface.
It took me quite a while to get the VM so I could boot into the gparted iso, but I managed it eventually. When in gparted I then had to play the rearranging partitions game. While gparted rearranged and resized the partitions I played on Dirt a bit.
When the Ubuntu VM had finished having it's new drive space added, I did some more work in trying to see where all the memory was going. I fopund that just loading the image with imagick took about 367MB (so about double the uncompressed image size). Loading the image and resizing it took about 487MB. Loading the image, sharpening it, resizing it, and sharpening it took about 967MB.
I wanted to see how just loading and resizing the image with ImageMagick from the command line would compare. So I looked to try and find out what the equivalent command for ImageMagick would be. Then I needed to monitor how much memory ImageMagick was using when it did the resize. But I couldn't find out how to monitor the memory usage of a process that wasn't already running, so I asked WebFaction how to do this (since they had said they'd try and help if I had any questions).
I did a backup and also noticed a new Canon 500mm/4 IS was on ebay for £3500 (so nearly £400 more than the one that ended earlier today and also had included a 1.4x TC), and it already had a bid on it as well. Ebay is quite weird in how variable prices can be.
The weather today was rainy in the morning, the overcast the rest of day. Nearly all the snow is gone now.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Seriously Strong Farmy Cheddar Cheese with Salad Cream and Sweet & Crunchy Salad Sandwich; Banana; Clementine; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Breaded Fish Portion; Chips; Peas; Ground Black Pepper; Salt; Tartar Sauce. Pudding was a double Choc Chip Muffin that L made at school today. Coffee; Piece of Sainsbury's Truffle Chocolate; Piece of Sainsbury's Caramel Chocolate.
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