Not getting anything done

This morning I was mostly working on getting my KML/geo sitemap up and running on my photo website.

I also played around with making a multiple resolution favicon for my site. I made a favicon with 256px, 48px, and 32px images with alpha channels, and 32px and 16px images with no transparency. The idea being that the 16px and 32px with no alpha channel are suitable for displaying on older systems, while the larger images with full alpha transparency would be suitable for displaying on newer systems. The larger icons should be displayed when making a shortcut to the website from your desktop, for example.

But when I viewed the icon in windows explorer, it only seemed to display the 32px image with no alpha channel, no matter how large I set the icon size in windows. If I opened the icon file in Windows picture viewer/photo gallery, I could page through the different images contained in the icon file though, and they were all there and with correct transparency.

So I'm not sure if my scheme worked or not, or if I've just created a large favicon for no reason.

In the afternoon I accidentally deleted some XMP files, so I found the file recovery software I've got a licence for and installed it. Then I spent ages trying to find where I'd saved the licence key. Eventually I found it by logging into my hotmail via the hotmail website (instead of using Thunderbird like I normally do to check my email). It seems that the folders on Hotmail aren't recognised by Thunderbird.

I also found that Hotmail had put loads of messages into a Junk folder, which Thunderbird hadn't received. They were mostly Junk, but there were also some legitimate emails in there. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to turn off Junk mail filtering in Hotmail (just settings of low, medium, and high), and Hotmail doesn't support IMAP either.

After activating the file recovery program and restoring the XMP sidecars I accidentally deleted, I found that I couldn't call exiftool from the command line. I must have spent about an hour (at least) messing about the PATH environment variable and restarting the PC after each change in an attempt to get exiftool working without having to include the full path to the exiftool.pl file.

Eventually I gave up, then when I changed the drive I was in on the command prompt to the same drive that I have the exiftool script on, it would now let me call exiftool without entering the full filepath. So it seems that the PATH environment variable only works so long as you are on the same drive that the file you are trying to call is located on. (I have exiftool on E: and was originally trying to call it from the C:).

In the evening I eventually got round to processing a few photos, but found that Capture NX 2 wasn't playing nice with my Wacom tablet.

I also installed the Adobe Master Suite CS5 trial today. So far Photoshop CS5 (64 bit) seems much less responsive and jerkier than CS4 (64 bit). My custom XMP File Info panel doesn't work on PS CS5 either - when you click on the tab for my panel in the File Info dialog, the panel just disappears. Anyway, now I've got the CS5 Master collection installed I can try improving the panel and rebuilding it using Flash Builder.