This morning I started to do a binary comparison of My Pictures with my other backup of it. While that was going on I checked my email.
About 11am I went on a walk down the old railway line. I did see quite a few butterflies around the same place I saw a few last year, on the path at an entrance to a field. Unfortunately they were very active, and I didn't get any photos (other than some blurred ones). I think there were Common Blues (mostly), Brown Argus, and Small Copper butterflies. Down the old railway line I also saw Speckled Woods and Orange tips.
In the afternoon I sorted the photos I'd taken in the morning and posted a few to Wild About Britain to try and get some IDs.
In the evening I went out to see if I could find the butterflies in a less active state. I couldn't find them anywhere, but I did find green weevils. Strangely they seemed to just drop off the plants they were on when I got near them. I did manage to get a few photos though.
It looked like there was going to be a nice sunset - there was a large cloud in the sky, and a gap between the cloud and the horizon, so the sun could light up the underside of the cloud as it set. Sadly, the sun didn't actually light up the underside of the cloud as it set, and so the sunset was actually pretty rubbish.
There were lots of mosquitoes about as well, which was annoying.
When I got back home I discovered that my GPS hadn't been recording a tracklog, even though I had set it to before I left. So I had to manually geocode the images in Google Earth (using Robogeo).
After doing that I wrote this blog post so far. I posted to the Wild about Britain website again to see if I could get IDs for my evening photos, then wrote a blog post for my photo website about last week's walk down the old railway line.
The weather was mainly sunny, with a few clouds around, then got more cloudy towards sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Ham with Salad and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; Piece of Tiramisu; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Cornish Pastie; Bit of Potato; Baked Beans; Brown Sauce; Slice of Bread. Pudding was a slice of Blackcurrant Cheesecake.
Supper: Cadbury's Milk Chocolate Digestive; Malted Milk; ½ Cup o' Tea.
Friday 28 May 2010
Thursday 27 May 2010
Waiting for backup comparison to complete
In the morning I finished off processing/sorting the photos I've taken recently, apart from the ones I haven't been able to get IDs for yet (which is quite a few).
After that I started a binary comparison on one of My Pictures backups, to try and check if there were corrupted files on the main disk that weren't corrupted on the backup disk, and vice versa.
The check took nearly all day (8 hours, 20 minutes). I didn't want to use my PC for anything intensive while the binary comparison was ongoing, so I couldn't get any work done all day. Still, I prefer not getting any work done during the day to running the comparison at night and not being able to get any sleep from the noisy drive.
While the backup was running I checked my email and Thom Hogan's website. I also read a bit of one of my insects books.
In the afternoon I tried using my Wimberley Macro bracket along with an SB-800 and SC-29 sync cord with my 450D and 100mm/2.8 macro, to see how it would work for taking close-ups of larger objects (like bumblebees) that are too big for the MP-E.
Why was I testing this bulky setup when I already have the super-expensive MT-24EX Macro Twin Flash?
The problem of using the MT-24EX on the 100mm Macro is that the minimum working distance is quite large (compared to the MP-E). This means that the light from the MT-24EX's flash heads are more pointing towards the subject being photographed than pointing down at the subject, as they are with the MP-E. (Pointing down light is more natural, like the Sun).
The larger working distance also means that the small flash heads of the MT-24EX are further away from the subject, and so the light isn't as diffused as it is with a small working distance lens like the MP-E (see the apparent light size article on strobist).
In my quick tests I did today, I used a Lambency Flash diffuser (Chinese Knock off of Gary Fong's Lightsphere) with foil wrapped round the dome so light would be forced out the top/front of the dome. However, I found that to get the flash pointing down as much as possible, but still illuming the subjects, I would have to change the flash position whenever I changed the angle I was shooting at or the magnification. And of course the setup is quite bulky, heavy, and difficult to carry. Unfortunately, I didn't find any subjects with reflective areas (like Bees) to test the setup on.
So I did some googling to see if there was a better way of using flash for close-up. Looking at various websites, it seems that what most people do with this sort of setup, is just have the flash on a macro bracket, positioned above the lens, and pointing down slightly. So you would still get the problem of 'front-on' lighting, but the larger light size of a proper speedlite with a diffuser attached may give better diffusion than the MT-24EX with diffusers.
I was thinking originally that the longer working distance of the 100mm/2.8 would mean it was impractical to use a 'light tent' diffuser attached to the front of the MT-24EX. However, I haven't actually tried it, I guess it might work okay - it would depend if the flash overshoots the diffuser or if it goes through the diffuser before it reaches the subject. To be certain it went through the diffuser you would either need a very long diffuser sticking out from the front of your lens, or to find some way of holding the diffuser over the subject.
After looking into close-up flash, I decided to look into geo sitemaps. I read quite a bit of info on that, then had dinner.
After dinner I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser and also a Kurosawa film. It had the famous bloke from Gojira in it, but I don't think he had any lines, and didn't do anything. The film was actually like two films - in the first half not much happened, and it was just about the stress for this rich bloke and his family of having his chauffer's kid kidnapped, and whether he (the rich bloke) would pay the ransom fee, which would make him bankrupt. The second half of the film had much more action and plot development, and was about trying to find the kidnapper.
The weather was a mixure of cloud and sun all day, with a strong wind. It looked like it was going to rain a few times, buit only ever rained a couple of drops. There was a nice sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Salad and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Packet of Chilli flavour Doritos; Satsuma; Piece of Tiramisu; Cup o' Tea; Piece of Galaxy Chocolate.
Dinner: Battered Fish Portion; Salt; Ground Black Pepper; Peas; Sweetcorn; Potatoes. Pudding was Rice Pudding with Apricot Jam. Coffee.
After that I started a binary comparison on one of My Pictures backups, to try and check if there were corrupted files on the main disk that weren't corrupted on the backup disk, and vice versa.
The check took nearly all day (8 hours, 20 minutes). I didn't want to use my PC for anything intensive while the binary comparison was ongoing, so I couldn't get any work done all day. Still, I prefer not getting any work done during the day to running the comparison at night and not being able to get any sleep from the noisy drive.
While the backup was running I checked my email and Thom Hogan's website. I also read a bit of one of my insects books.
In the afternoon I tried using my Wimberley Macro bracket along with an SB-800 and SC-29 sync cord with my 450D and 100mm/2.8 macro, to see how it would work for taking close-ups of larger objects (like bumblebees) that are too big for the MP-E.
Why was I testing this bulky setup when I already have the super-expensive MT-24EX Macro Twin Flash?
The problem of using the MT-24EX on the 100mm Macro is that the minimum working distance is quite large (compared to the MP-E). This means that the light from the MT-24EX's flash heads are more pointing towards the subject being photographed than pointing down at the subject, as they are with the MP-E. (Pointing down light is more natural, like the Sun).
The larger working distance also means that the small flash heads of the MT-24EX are further away from the subject, and so the light isn't as diffused as it is with a small working distance lens like the MP-E (see the apparent light size article on strobist).
In my quick tests I did today, I used a Lambency Flash diffuser (Chinese Knock off of Gary Fong's Lightsphere) with foil wrapped round the dome so light would be forced out the top/front of the dome. However, I found that to get the flash pointing down as much as possible, but still illuming the subjects, I would have to change the flash position whenever I changed the angle I was shooting at or the magnification. And of course the setup is quite bulky, heavy, and difficult to carry. Unfortunately, I didn't find any subjects with reflective areas (like Bees) to test the setup on.
So I did some googling to see if there was a better way of using flash for close-up. Looking at various websites, it seems that what most people do with this sort of setup, is just have the flash on a macro bracket, positioned above the lens, and pointing down slightly. So you would still get the problem of 'front-on' lighting, but the larger light size of a proper speedlite with a diffuser attached may give better diffusion than the MT-24EX with diffusers.
I was thinking originally that the longer working distance of the 100mm/2.8 would mean it was impractical to use a 'light tent' diffuser attached to the front of the MT-24EX. However, I haven't actually tried it, I guess it might work okay - it would depend if the flash overshoots the diffuser or if it goes through the diffuser before it reaches the subject. To be certain it went through the diffuser you would either need a very long diffuser sticking out from the front of your lens, or to find some way of holding the diffuser over the subject.
After looking into close-up flash, I decided to look into geo sitemaps. I read quite a bit of info on that, then had dinner.
After dinner I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser and also a Kurosawa film. It had the famous bloke from Gojira in it, but I don't think he had any lines, and didn't do anything. The film was actually like two films - in the first half not much happened, and it was just about the stress for this rich bloke and his family of having his chauffer's kid kidnapped, and whether he (the rich bloke) would pay the ransom fee, which would make him bankrupt. The second half of the film had much more action and plot development, and was about trying to find the kidnapper.
The weather was a mixure of cloud and sun all day, with a strong wind. It looked like it was going to rain a few times, buit only ever rained a couple of drops. There was a nice sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Salad and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Packet of Chilli flavour Doritos; Satsuma; Piece of Tiramisu; Cup o' Tea; Piece of Galaxy Chocolate.
Dinner: Battered Fish Portion; Salt; Ground Black Pepper; Peas; Sweetcorn; Potatoes. Pudding was Rice Pudding with Apricot Jam. Coffee.
Wednesday 26 May 2010
Photo Processing
Today I was still sorting and processing photos that I've taken recently.
In the evening I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser and also a Humphrey Bogart film.
The weather was cloudy and windy all day, it looked like it was going to rain a few times, buit only ever rained a couple of drops. It hasn't rained for at least a couple of weeks now.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Salad and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of Lyons French Sponge Cake; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Shepherd's Pie; Green Beans; Carrots; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was a Creamy Passion-fruit Yoghurt. Coffee; Fake Jammie Dodger; HobNob.
In the evening I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser and also a Humphrey Bogart film.
The weather was cloudy and windy all day, it looked like it was going to rain a few times, buit only ever rained a couple of drops. It hasn't rained for at least a couple of weeks now.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Salad and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of Lyons French Sponge Cake; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Shepherd's Pie; Green Beans; Carrots; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was a Creamy Passion-fruit Yoghurt. Coffee; Fake Jammie Dodger; HobNob.
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Photo Processing
Today I was still sorting and processing photos that I've taken recently.
In the evening I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser, then went out in the garden to see if I could find any live aphids near where I'd taken a photo of a mummified aphid (it's hard to get an id from a mummified aphid, easier from a live aphid). But there weren't many aphids there, and they were all mumified (parasitized).
Later in the evening I did a backup.
The weather was mainly cloudy and windy all day, though the sun did pop out a few times throughout the day.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of Lyons French Sponge Cake; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Pepperone Pizza; Chips; Salt; Salad. Pudding was a piece of Tiramisu. Coffee; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.
In the evening I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser, then went out in the garden to see if I could find any live aphids near where I'd taken a photo of a mummified aphid (it's hard to get an id from a mummified aphid, easier from a live aphid). But there weren't many aphids there, and they were all mumified (parasitized).
Later in the evening I did a backup.
The weather was mainly cloudy and windy all day, though the sun did pop out a few times throughout the day.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of Lyons French Sponge Cake; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Pepperone Pizza; Chips; Salt; Salad. Pudding was a piece of Tiramisu. Coffee; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.
Monday 24 May 2010
Photo Processing
This morning I took some photos of the nettles that were growing in the seed trays that L had planted with a bag of random seeds. The flowers on the nettles were starting to go over, so I wanted to try and get some photos of them before the flowers were gone completely.
The rest of the day I was sorting and processing photos that I've taken recently.
In the evening I also watched the Lost finale, which was a bit disappointing, but could've been worse. Neither Walt nor Widmore were in it! I also helped someone out who was having trouble with their computer.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; ½ Apple; Slice of Lyons French Sponge Cake; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Lasagne; Potatoes; Green Beans. Pudding was a slice of Treacle Tart. Coffee.
Supper: Malted Milk; Hobnob; Cup o' Tea.
The rest of the day I was sorting and processing photos that I've taken recently.
In the evening I also watched the Lost finale, which was a bit disappointing, but could've been worse. Neither Walt nor Widmore were in it! I also helped someone out who was having trouble with their computer.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard and Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Satsuma; ½ Apple; Slice of Lyons French Sponge Cake; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Lasagne; Potatoes; Green Beans. Pudding was a slice of Treacle Tart. Coffee.
Supper: Malted Milk; Hobnob; Cup o' Tea.
Sunday 23 May 2010
Normal Sunday stuff
This morning I started cutting out some pogs in Photoshop, went to church, continued my pogging, had dinner, then finished cutting out the pogs.
While I was waiting for the images to upload to my Pog website I changed the pano quality buttons for my pano website so that they were all one image (an image map) instead of a separate image for each button and each state (2 buttons with standard, hover, and active states made for 6 images).
After doing that, the pog images were still uploading, so I checked bythom.com, nikonrumors.com, and canonrumors.com. When I'd got up to date on all of those, the pog images were still uploading, so I thought I'd get the pano I was working on yesterday evening ready for the web.
But when I loaded it into devalVR to check it was okay, I found that the nadir was really messed up. What I had done yesterday when processing the pano was to take the pano without the nadir patched (that I'd already processed), which was an equirectangular image, and the handheld nadir image, which was a fullframe fisheye image, and put them into PTGUI. Then in PTGUI I set the correct lens paramteres for each image, added control points, and optimised. Then I exported the nadir image.
I put this nadir image into photoshop, and patched the nadir with it in the normal way, just using a layer mask. It looked okay in Photoshop, but when you actually viewed it in DevalVR, it was pretty badly distorted.
So I decided to re-process the pano completely. But the pog images finally finished uploading, so I updated my pog website first.
After re-processing the pano, I spent quite a bit of the evening looking for books on Market Harborough and also looking for some new trainers. We got a Sports Direct catalogue, so I looked up some Karrimor trainers in there that it said were like RRP £75, but they were selling for £20. Surprise suprise, they were £15 on Amazon (not sure if Sports Direct charge extra for delivery as well). The reviews on Amazon weren't very favourable either.
I found two different shoes that seem to get good review, the North Face Hedgehog XCR, which the cheapest I found was £60, and the Berghaus Mens Pro Rush Low II GTX, which the cheapest I found was £75 (actually Amazon only has reviews of the Pro Rush GTX I, but I assume the II version should be even better).
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken Curry; Mixed Veg; Sultanas; Rice. Pudding was Neapolitan Ice Cream. Cup o' Tea; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.
Tea: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard, Cherry Tomatoes, and Salad Sandwich; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
While I was waiting for the images to upload to my Pog website I changed the pano quality buttons for my pano website so that they were all one image (an image map) instead of a separate image for each button and each state (2 buttons with standard, hover, and active states made for 6 images).
After doing that, the pog images were still uploading, so I checked bythom.com, nikonrumors.com, and canonrumors.com. When I'd got up to date on all of those, the pog images were still uploading, so I thought I'd get the pano I was working on yesterday evening ready for the web.
But when I loaded it into devalVR to check it was okay, I found that the nadir was really messed up. What I had done yesterday when processing the pano was to take the pano without the nadir patched (that I'd already processed), which was an equirectangular image, and the handheld nadir image, which was a fullframe fisheye image, and put them into PTGUI. Then in PTGUI I set the correct lens paramteres for each image, added control points, and optimised. Then I exported the nadir image.
I put this nadir image into photoshop, and patched the nadir with it in the normal way, just using a layer mask. It looked okay in Photoshop, but when you actually viewed it in DevalVR, it was pretty badly distorted.
So I decided to re-process the pano completely. But the pog images finally finished uploading, so I updated my pog website first.
After re-processing the pano, I spent quite a bit of the evening looking for books on Market Harborough and also looking for some new trainers. We got a Sports Direct catalogue, so I looked up some Karrimor trainers in there that it said were like RRP £75, but they were selling for £20. Surprise suprise, they were £15 on Amazon (not sure if Sports Direct charge extra for delivery as well). The reviews on Amazon weren't very favourable either.
I found two different shoes that seem to get good review, the North Face Hedgehog XCR, which the cheapest I found was £60, and the Berghaus Mens Pro Rush Low II GTX, which the cheapest I found was £75 (actually Amazon only has reviews of the Pro Rush GTX I, but I assume the II version should be even better).
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken Curry; Mixed Veg; Sultanas; Rice. Pudding was Neapolitan Ice Cream. Cup o' Tea; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.
Tea: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard, Cherry Tomatoes, and Salad Sandwich; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Saturday 22 May 2010
Pano processing
This morning I woke up with a headache. After breakfast I went to bed again for a bit, but couldn't get to sleep, so I got up again about 8.15am.
I processed a pano then did a binary compare between my main copy of my Korea and Japan photos and another copy on My Pictures hard drive. I did this because My Pictures drive doesn't have much space on it, so I wanted to delete the Korea and Japan photos on it. But first I wanted to make sure that there aren't any photos in it that aren't corrupted but have become corrupted in my main copy of the photos.
While the binary compare was running I checked Moose Peterson's blog (and also various other photographer's blogs/websites - but they didn't have anything new on them). After that the compare was still running, so I went in the garden for a bit. There didn't seem to be any new dragonflies today though.
I came back in, and the binary compare was still running. My headache had gotten worse, so I decided to go to bed for a bit again.
After lunch I updated my photo website and pano website with the panos I'd processed over the last few days. Then I also posted one of the panos to various photo sharing websites.
After that I started watching 'The Lavender Hill Mob' with Mauser, and then finished watching it after dinner. I updated my faces made from food blog, then edited a pano that I'd already processed a couple of years ago. My technique has changed since then, so I made a few changes.
When that was done I did a backup, then went to bed.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard and Salad Sandwich made with Fresh Bread-Maker-made Bread; ½ Crust of Fresh Bread-Maker-made Bread with Honey; Banana; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Afternoon Snack: Bowl of Neapolitan Ice Cream.
Dinner: Jacket Potato; Bacon; Tinned Plum Tomato; Baked Beans; Sausage. Coffee; Galaxy Chocolate.
I processed a pano then did a binary compare between my main copy of my Korea and Japan photos and another copy on My Pictures hard drive. I did this because My Pictures drive doesn't have much space on it, so I wanted to delete the Korea and Japan photos on it. But first I wanted to make sure that there aren't any photos in it that aren't corrupted but have become corrupted in my main copy of the photos.
While the binary compare was running I checked Moose Peterson's blog (and also various other photographer's blogs/websites - but they didn't have anything new on them). After that the compare was still running, so I went in the garden for a bit. There didn't seem to be any new dragonflies today though.
I came back in, and the binary compare was still running. My headache had gotten worse, so I decided to go to bed for a bit again.
After lunch I updated my photo website and pano website with the panos I'd processed over the last few days. Then I also posted one of the panos to various photo sharing websites.
After that I started watching 'The Lavender Hill Mob' with Mauser, and then finished watching it after dinner. I updated my faces made from food blog, then edited a pano that I'd already processed a couple of years ago. My technique has changed since then, so I made a few changes.
When that was done I did a backup, then went to bed.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Peppered Ham with Dijon Mustard and Salad Sandwich made with Fresh Bread-Maker-made Bread; ½ Crust of Fresh Bread-Maker-made Bread with Honey; Banana; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Afternoon Snack: Bowl of Neapolitan Ice Cream.
Dinner: Jacket Potato; Bacon; Tinned Plum Tomato; Baked Beans; Sausage. Coffee; Galaxy Chocolate.
Friday 21 May 2010
Spring clean
Last night I started copying my Korea and Japan photos to a replacement backup drive that arrived yesterday. (My main Korea and Japan photos drive stopped working properly about a couple of weeks ago, so I replaced it with one of the backup drives and sent the faulty drive off to Western Digital to get a replacement under warranty).
It was quite a hot night last night, and even hotter with my PC on. The PC was also quite noisy, so I didn't get a lot of sleep during the night. Since I wasn't asleep, I would check the progress of the backup every hour or two. At one point I found that the backup hadn't progressed any further than it had last time I had checked (and it wasn't that it was stuck on a giant file). The 'drive active' light on the drive bay wasn't lit either. So I cancelled the mirror in Beyond Compare (which I was using to do the backup).
But when I checked again later Beyond Compare still said that it was cancelling. So I shut the PC down about 5am (when it was already getting bright outside). This didn't work, so I
When I eventually got up (as opposed to woke up) about 8am, the PC was just stuck on the desktop with no taskbar or anything. The mouse was still responsive though. I
After breakfast I started the PC up again and tried to continue the backup, but I got a message that a folder was corrupted and I needed to run chkdsk. I didn't really want to be bothered running chkdsk, especially since it was a new drive, so I tried just deleting the folder it said was corrupted.
But when I tried deleting the folder, I got a message that I couldn't delete it because the folder wasn't empty. Weird message, since you can normally delete folders with stuff in them. Why didn't it just say I couldn't delete it because it was corrupted?
Anyway, I tried deleting the directory from a command prompt using rmdir with the /s switch (which deletes the directory and its contents). But I just got the same message about the folder not being empty. So I resigned to running chdsk /r.
I checked my spleen mail, then I was going to go out on a walk to try and take more photos. But I decided I might as well try and clean up my bedroom a bit first as it had bits all over the floor from my MT-24EX diffuser construction efforts.
However, I found loads of other stuff on my floor as well, and my quick tidy turned into a spring clean that took up most of the day. I decided to get rid of all my old leaves and flowers that have been waiting over a year for me to photograph them. I figured that I'm not likely to have time to photograph them any time soon, so no point having them taking up valuable room space. If I do find some time in the future and want to photograph cut flowers, I can always just buy some more from a florist.
I was surprised at quite how dusty some stuff was.
Later in the afternoon I tried opening a new bank account with Nationwide. I had a fixed term ISA with them that had matured, but the account I told them to move the money, an e-ISA, requires a 'qualifying card account'. So I checked their website to see what a 'qualifying card account' is, and tried to open one (while the e-ISA pays less interest than the rate of inflation, it is still a lot better than their other ISA offerings, so I thought it would be worth opening a qualifying card account just to get access to the e-ISA account).
But Nationwide's online form for applying for a new account is pretty rubbish. They have a space to put your account number in. Below this box it has a handy link to info on account number formats. On that page it says that if you have a bond account number like 1234/123456789, then you should enter the full number like that. But the box on the form doesn't allow you to input that many characters.
Then it was also a similar case for the email address, which they limit to 24 characters, 1 character too short for my email address. Strangely, I edited the box using Firebug so I could fit in my full email address, and it didn't complain. On the final page it displays the details you've input so you can check them, and it displayed my full email address (not cut off at 24 characters), so I'm not sure why they limit the text input for it to 24 chars.
The other funny/annoying thing with their form is that on the final page it says that they might send you marketing materials, and if you don't want these, then you need to read the info on a link. But when you click the link it doesn't have anything about opting out of receiving rubbish.
The chkdsk finished, so I started up beyond compare again and finished off the backup. After that I wrote this blog post so far and checked my email (which took quite a while).
In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and Bo, processed a pano, and watched Springwatch.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Cherry Tomatoes, Pickled Onions, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; a bit of Barbecue flavour Filipino Corn snack; Satsuma; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Barbecued Shish Kebab with Chilli Sauce and Salad in a bun; Barbecue flavour Chicken drumstick; a bit of Barbecue flavour Filipino Corn snack. Pudding was 2x Apple Pies with Ice cream. Coffee; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.
It was quite a hot night last night, and even hotter with my PC on. The PC was also quite noisy, so I didn't get a lot of sleep during the night. Since I wasn't asleep, I would check the progress of the backup every hour or two. At one point I found that the backup hadn't progressed any further than it had last time I had checked (and it wasn't that it was stuck on a giant file). The 'drive active' light on the drive bay wasn't lit either. So I cancelled the mirror in Beyond Compare (which I was using to do the backup).
But when I checked again later Beyond Compare still said that it was cancelling. So I shut the PC down about 5am (when it was already getting bright outside). This didn't work, so I
Ctrl + Alt + Del'd the PC, then chose to shut down the PC from the Vista Ctrl + Alt + Del screen.When I eventually got up (as opposed to woke up) about 8am, the PC was just stuck on the desktop with no taskbar or anything. The mouse was still responsive though. I
Ctrl + Alt + Del'd a few more times, but nothing happened. So I hard to do a 'hard shutdown' (hold the PC's power button down for a few seconds).After breakfast I started the PC up again and tried to continue the backup, but I got a message that a folder was corrupted and I needed to run chkdsk. I didn't really want to be bothered running chkdsk, especially since it was a new drive, so I tried just deleting the folder it said was corrupted.
But when I tried deleting the folder, I got a message that I couldn't delete it because the folder wasn't empty. Weird message, since you can normally delete folders with stuff in them. Why didn't it just say I couldn't delete it because it was corrupted?
Anyway, I tried deleting the directory from a command prompt using rmdir with the /s switch (which deletes the directory and its contents). But I just got the same message about the folder not being empty. So I resigned to running chdsk /r.
I checked my spleen mail, then I was going to go out on a walk to try and take more photos. But I decided I might as well try and clean up my bedroom a bit first as it had bits all over the floor from my MT-24EX diffuser construction efforts.
However, I found loads of other stuff on my floor as well, and my quick tidy turned into a spring clean that took up most of the day. I decided to get rid of all my old leaves and flowers that have been waiting over a year for me to photograph them. I figured that I'm not likely to have time to photograph them any time soon, so no point having them taking up valuable room space. If I do find some time in the future and want to photograph cut flowers, I can always just buy some more from a florist.
I was surprised at quite how dusty some stuff was.
Later in the afternoon I tried opening a new bank account with Nationwide. I had a fixed term ISA with them that had matured, but the account I told them to move the money, an e-ISA, requires a 'qualifying card account'. So I checked their website to see what a 'qualifying card account' is, and tried to open one (while the e-ISA pays less interest than the rate of inflation, it is still a lot better than their other ISA offerings, so I thought it would be worth opening a qualifying card account just to get access to the e-ISA account).
But Nationwide's online form for applying for a new account is pretty rubbish. They have a space to put your account number in. Below this box it has a handy link to info on account number formats. On that page it says that if you have a bond account number like 1234/123456789, then you should enter the full number like that. But the box on the form doesn't allow you to input that many characters.
Then it was also a similar case for the email address, which they limit to 24 characters, 1 character too short for my email address. Strangely, I edited the box using Firebug so I could fit in my full email address, and it didn't complain. On the final page it displays the details you've input so you can check them, and it displayed my full email address (not cut off at 24 characters), so I'm not sure why they limit the text input for it to 24 chars.
The other funny/annoying thing with their form is that on the final page it says that they might send you marketing materials, and if you don't want these, then you need to read the info on a link. But when you click the link it doesn't have anything about opting out of receiving rubbish.
The chkdsk finished, so I started up beyond compare again and finished off the backup. After that I wrote this blog post so far and checked my email (which took quite a while).
In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and Bo, processed a pano, and watched Springwatch.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Cherry Tomatoes, Pickled Onions, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; a bit of Barbecue flavour Filipino Corn snack; Satsuma; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Barbecued Shish Kebab with Chilli Sauce and Salad in a bun; Barbecue flavour Chicken drumstick; a bit of Barbecue flavour Filipino Corn snack. Pudding was 2x Apple Pies with Ice cream. Coffee; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.
Thursday 20 May 2010
Trying to find a shiny beetle
This morning I processed a couple of panos, then wrote yesterday's blog post. After that I went out in the garden to try and find a shiny beetle to test out my new diffusers on. Unfortunately all the beetles I found would fly/jump/run away either before I took a shot, or after I'd taken a couple of shots - so no good for comparing the diffusers.
I also found a newly emerged dragonfly that had come from our pond. There was another exuvia nearby as well.
After lunch I went back out in the garden, but still no luck in finding any static beetles. At first I thought the new dragonfly had flown away, but then I heard it flapping its wings, though I couldn't see it. Then later I heard it was still there, and I managed fo find it, being attacked by ants. Using a stick I managed to extract it (I got the stick underneath it, it clung onto the stick, then I slowly lifted the stick up).
But it was quite the worse for wear - one of its wings was bent, and its eyes were very dented. It still had a few ants on it attacking it, so I took a few photos until it lost its grip on the stick and fell off. I managed to pick it up again, then I put it on a rock at the end of the pond. I think it is pretty much dead though.
The rest of the day I mainly spent in the garden trying to find a beetle to test my diffusers on. I did find a dead (at least I'm pretty sure it was dead) ladybird, so I took it inside to take some photos of it in a controlled environment. I went back outside to bring my camera in, but found the ladybird has disappeared. I looked all around the area where I'd put it, but couldn't find it anywhere.
The weather was overcast most of the morning, then the cloud started to clear about 11am and it became a mixture of cloud and sun. The afternoon started off mainly sunny with a few clouds, and quite hot. It clouded over for a while, then the sun came out again. There was a nice sunset with a slightly hazy sky getting lit up first orange, and then slightly purple.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Iceberg Lettuce and Pickled Onions Sandwich; Satsuma; Biscuit that me and L made a few days ago; Fruit Club; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Pastie; Potato; Carrot; Broccoli; Gravy. Pudding was fresh Pineapple. Coffee.
Supper: Malted Milk; HobNob; Cup o' Tea.
I also found a newly emerged dragonfly that had come from our pond. There was another exuvia nearby as well.
After lunch I went back out in the garden, but still no luck in finding any static beetles. At first I thought the new dragonfly had flown away, but then I heard it flapping its wings, though I couldn't see it. Then later I heard it was still there, and I managed fo find it, being attacked by ants. Using a stick I managed to extract it (I got the stick underneath it, it clung onto the stick, then I slowly lifted the stick up).
But it was quite the worse for wear - one of its wings was bent, and its eyes were very dented. It still had a few ants on it attacking it, so I took a few photos until it lost its grip on the stick and fell off. I managed to pick it up again, then I put it on a rock at the end of the pond. I think it is pretty much dead though.
The rest of the day I mainly spent in the garden trying to find a beetle to test my diffusers on. I did find a dead (at least I'm pretty sure it was dead) ladybird, so I took it inside to take some photos of it in a controlled environment. I went back outside to bring my camera in, but found the ladybird has disappeared. I looked all around the area where I'd put it, but couldn't find it anywhere.
The weather was overcast most of the morning, then the cloud started to clear about 11am and it became a mixture of cloud and sun. The afternoon started off mainly sunny with a few clouds, and quite hot. It clouded over for a while, then the sun came out again. There was a nice sunset with a slightly hazy sky getting lit up first orange, and then slightly purple.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Iceberg Lettuce and Pickled Onions Sandwich; Satsuma; Biscuit that me and L made a few days ago; Fruit Club; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Pastie; Potato; Carrot; Broccoli; Gravy. Pudding was fresh Pineapple. Coffee.
Supper: Malted Milk; HobNob; Cup o' Tea.
Wednesday 19 May 2010
Walk, backup, and diffuser making
This morning I started processing a pano, then went out on a walk while my comp did its weekly virus scan.
The weather was sunny the first half of the morning, then was cloudy the rest of the morning. In the afternoon there was a mixture of sun and clouds, I'd say probably ¾ of the afternoon was cloudy and ¼ was sunny.
There still wasn't any clover around, and hardly any buttercups, however I did see Speckled Woods, Orange Tips, and various other insects and plants in flower. Near Lubenham there was a field with loads of seeding dandelions in it, which looked quite spectacular. I hope to go back there with a wider angle lens, as I only had the MP-E and 100mm Macro with me.
Also, a mat for kneeling on would have been useful, as there were some low angle shots of seeding grass I wanted to take, but couldn't because the ground was too soft to kneel down on. (Of course, I could have taken the shots anyway and got my knees covered in mud if I had really wanted).
When I got home I found the Virus check had completed. Yesterday evening I was unable to complete a backup of My Pictures as the backup drive also had a backup of my Korea and Japan photos on it. But before deleting the Korea and Japan photos from the backup drive, I wanted to make sure that it didn't include any images in good condition where the originals had become corrupted.
So I used Beyond Compare to do a binary comparison between the Korea and Japan photos on the backup drive, and the 'original' ones on my hard drive. While that was working I checked my email and went on the internet a bit.
When the comparison was done, I found that the large majority of files were different. Obviously, I didn't manually compare every single one, but I found that some were different in that the 'original' one had a later date created (but date taken and everything else appeared to be the same). Some were different in that the ones on the backup didn't have GPS data, while the 'originals' did.
And I did find a couple of 'originals' (these were ones that were in folders where they were different between the backup and 'original', but all the others in the folder were the same between the backup and 'original') were actually corrupted. Possibly there were more corrupted files, but I couldn't really open every single file that was different between the backup and 'originals' as this would take far too long. I did open one or two files from every folder marked as different though, and they were all okay.
Since I had done a binary comparison on my Korea and Japan photos before, and these corrupted images hadn't been picked up, I wondered if they had become corrupted since my last binary comparison. Admitedly, the last binary comparison I had done wasn't with this backup, and it could be that the same files were corrupted on the backup I had done the comparison with before, and that was why the differences weren't picked up (because they weren't different). Anyway, I turned off PerfectDisk from defragging my drive with the Korea and Japan photos on, just in case.
I continued my checking into the afternoon, and when that was done, I deleted the Korea and Japan photos backup folder, then did a backup of My Pictures, since there was now enough free space on the backup drive.
I then repeated this process with my other Pictures backup drive, which also had a backup of the Korea and Japan photos on it. This time I didn't find much difference between the two. While the comparison was running I worked on making SteB style flash diffusers for the MT-24EX.
In the evening I watched Lost with Mauser and Bo, then tested the new flash diffusers I'd made, which didn't seem to work very well. At 8.15pm I watched Springwatch with L, then after that I watched Monday's episode, which I'd missed (I watched both on BBC iPlayer).
The weather started of cloudy, then was a mixture of sun and cloud most of the morning. In the afternoon it started off cloudy, then was a mixture of sun and clouds for most of the afternoon. The sun set behind a large bank of cloud, so there wasn't any visible sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard, Iceberg Lettuce, and Sliced Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Banana; Satsuma; Home-made Biscuit; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Spaghetti Bolognese; Mixed Veg; Ground Black Pepper; Grated Parmesan. Pudding was Rhubarb Crumble with Custard and Ice Cream. Coffee; 4 pieces of Galaxy.
The weather was sunny the first half of the morning, then was cloudy the rest of the morning. In the afternoon there was a mixture of sun and clouds, I'd say probably ¾ of the afternoon was cloudy and ¼ was sunny.
There still wasn't any clover around, and hardly any buttercups, however I did see Speckled Woods, Orange Tips, and various other insects and plants in flower. Near Lubenham there was a field with loads of seeding dandelions in it, which looked quite spectacular. I hope to go back there with a wider angle lens, as I only had the MP-E and 100mm Macro with me.
Also, a mat for kneeling on would have been useful, as there were some low angle shots of seeding grass I wanted to take, but couldn't because the ground was too soft to kneel down on. (Of course, I could have taken the shots anyway and got my knees covered in mud if I had really wanted).
When I got home I found the Virus check had completed. Yesterday evening I was unable to complete a backup of My Pictures as the backup drive also had a backup of my Korea and Japan photos on it. But before deleting the Korea and Japan photos from the backup drive, I wanted to make sure that it didn't include any images in good condition where the originals had become corrupted.
So I used Beyond Compare to do a binary comparison between the Korea and Japan photos on the backup drive, and the 'original' ones on my hard drive. While that was working I checked my email and went on the internet a bit.
When the comparison was done, I found that the large majority of files were different. Obviously, I didn't manually compare every single one, but I found that some were different in that the 'original' one had a later date created (but date taken and everything else appeared to be the same). Some were different in that the ones on the backup didn't have GPS data, while the 'originals' did.
And I did find a couple of 'originals' (these were ones that were in folders where they were different between the backup and 'original', but all the others in the folder were the same between the backup and 'original') were actually corrupted. Possibly there were more corrupted files, but I couldn't really open every single file that was different between the backup and 'originals' as this would take far too long. I did open one or two files from every folder marked as different though, and they were all okay.
Since I had done a binary comparison on my Korea and Japan photos before, and these corrupted images hadn't been picked up, I wondered if they had become corrupted since my last binary comparison. Admitedly, the last binary comparison I had done wasn't with this backup, and it could be that the same files were corrupted on the backup I had done the comparison with before, and that was why the differences weren't picked up (because they weren't different). Anyway, I turned off PerfectDisk from defragging my drive with the Korea and Japan photos on, just in case.
I continued my checking into the afternoon, and when that was done, I deleted the Korea and Japan photos backup folder, then did a backup of My Pictures, since there was now enough free space on the backup drive.
I then repeated this process with my other Pictures backup drive, which also had a backup of the Korea and Japan photos on it. This time I didn't find much difference between the two. While the comparison was running I worked on making SteB style flash diffusers for the MT-24EX.
In the evening I watched Lost with Mauser and Bo, then tested the new flash diffusers I'd made, which didn't seem to work very well. At 8.15pm I watched Springwatch with L, then after that I watched Monday's episode, which I'd missed (I watched both on BBC iPlayer).
The weather started of cloudy, then was a mixture of sun and cloud most of the morning. In the afternoon it started off cloudy, then was a mixture of sun and clouds for most of the afternoon. The sun set behind a large bank of cloud, so there wasn't any visible sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard, Iceberg Lettuce, and Sliced Cherry Tomatoes Sandwich; Banana; Satsuma; Home-made Biscuit; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Spaghetti Bolognese; Mixed Veg; Ground Black Pepper; Grated Parmesan. Pudding was Rhubarb Crumble with Custard and Ice Cream. Coffee; 4 pieces of Galaxy.
Tuesday 18 May 2010
Pano processing
After breakfast this morning I went out in the garden to see if there were any insects around. Other than a few 'normal' flies, there didn't seem to be anything. I did see what was probably a baby blackbird (judging by its call), but it looked like a fat female adult. It was quite nice in the garden, just listening to all the different birds singing.
After a few minutes I came back in and got on with the job of preparing the low res cube faces for all the panos currently on my pano website. Some of the older panos were also using a cube face of something like 1592px, whereas my current high res cube faces are 2000px, so I also re-generated the cube faces at 2000px for those panos.
At 9.55am, I thought I was nearly done, but then I remembered there was actually a few more I hadn't done. It actually took until 11am for me to get all the work done and the website updated.
I checked my email, then had lunch.
After lunch I started processing some panos I took a couple of weeks ago when the trees between Welland Park and Welland Park Road were blossoming. Unfortunately the one of the trees blossoming didn't come out that well - when I took the photos for the pano it was overcast, resulting in a blown out white sky that doesn't contrast with the white blossoms. Also, due to the wind blowing the blossoms around, when I tried blending the multiple exposures in Photoshop to try and keep the blossoms bright without overexposing the rest of the image, this just resulted in a blurry mess.
So I ended up with grey blossoms and a white sky. And now we're having better weather (it is still mainly cloudy, but there are at least periods of sustained sunshine) all the blossoms are gone, so there's no chance to reshoot. That's just the way it goes I suppose.
I spent all afternoon and most of the evening working on the 3 panos, and also went on the internet a bit while waiting for things to save etc.
The weather was sunny the first half of the morning, then was cloudy the rest of the morning. In the afternoon there was a mixture of sun and clouds, I'd say probably ¾ of the afternoon was cloudy and ¼ was sunny.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard, Iceberg Lettuce, Sliced Cherry Tomatoes, and Sliced Raddish Sandwich; Satsuma; Home-made Biscuit; Slice of Appel Strudel with Evaporated Milk; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Bacon and Onion Quiche; Savoury Rice; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was Rhubarb Crumble with Custard. Coffee.
After a few minutes I came back in and got on with the job of preparing the low res cube faces for all the panos currently on my pano website. Some of the older panos were also using a cube face of something like 1592px, whereas my current high res cube faces are 2000px, so I also re-generated the cube faces at 2000px for those panos.
At 9.55am, I thought I was nearly done, but then I remembered there was actually a few more I hadn't done. It actually took until 11am for me to get all the work done and the website updated.
I checked my email, then had lunch.
After lunch I started processing some panos I took a couple of weeks ago when the trees between Welland Park and Welland Park Road were blossoming. Unfortunately the one of the trees blossoming didn't come out that well - when I took the photos for the pano it was overcast, resulting in a blown out white sky that doesn't contrast with the white blossoms. Also, due to the wind blowing the blossoms around, when I tried blending the multiple exposures in Photoshop to try and keep the blossoms bright without overexposing the rest of the image, this just resulted in a blurry mess.
So I ended up with grey blossoms and a white sky. And now we're having better weather (it is still mainly cloudy, but there are at least periods of sustained sunshine) all the blossoms are gone, so there's no chance to reshoot. That's just the way it goes I suppose.
I spent all afternoon and most of the evening working on the 3 panos, and also went on the internet a bit while waiting for things to save etc.
The weather was sunny the first half of the morning, then was cloudy the rest of the morning. In the afternoon there was a mixture of sun and clouds, I'd say probably ¾ of the afternoon was cloudy and ¼ was sunny.
Food
Breakfast: Lemon Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard, Iceberg Lettuce, Sliced Cherry Tomatoes, and Sliced Raddish Sandwich; Satsuma; Home-made Biscuit; Slice of Appel Strudel with Evaporated Milk; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Bacon and Onion Quiche; Savoury Rice; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was Rhubarb Crumble with Custard. Coffee.
Monday 17 May 2010
Websiting
This morning I watered the garden. After that I looked into detecting a user's bandwidth in order to serve them with a high res or low res pano automatically.
I found this thread on the jw player forum to be quite helpful. Reading the comments there, it seems that Bandwidth detection is unreliable, and also requires approx 100KB for the detection. Since my small files are only around 400KB, 100KB is quite a lot extra for a low bandwidth user to have to download.
So for the moment, I think I'll stick with buttons where the user must choose if they want high res or low res. (Of course when using bandwidth detection you still need to give the user the choice of high res or low res, its just that they don't have to make a choice).
After this I tried to make a dialog box, using jquery tools, that would pop up to give the user a choice of viewing the pano in high res or low res. Unfortunately, the background overlay that blocks out the rest of the page didn't seem to be working. So I spent a lot of time trying to debug why the background overlay wasn't showing up.
Eventually I saved a copy of my page, then cut down the HTML and javascript to the bare minimum. But still no background overlay. So next I saved the demo from the jquery tools website (which did work). I then modified this step by step, slowly changing it to make it into my cut down page. When I changed the jquery script src from the one used in the demo to the one used in my page, the overlay stopped working.
The script src I was using (where the background overlay doesn't work) is the one recommended on the jquery tools website: http://cdn.jquerytools.org/1.2.1/jquery.tools.min.js
Whereas the script src used in the jquery tools (where the background overlay does work) is: http://flowplayer.org/tools/download/combine/1.2.1/jquery.tools.min.js?select=full&debug=true
So while jquery tools might be much lighter than jqueryUI, it's no good if their live version doesn't work properly. So I think I'll try jqueryUI instead. I also prefer the jqueryUI dialog boxes since they can be moved and resized, unlike the jquerytools dialog boxes.
Actually, since I'd already done the work of writing my script to create the dialog box using jquerytools, what I did was to download the jquerytools version used in the demos (without debug=true), and then host this on my own site and point to that instead of the hosted jquerytools script. Now the overlay works, and that was less hassle than downloading jqueryUI and changing my code to work with jqueryUI instead.
In the afternoon I read a few articles about HTML5 and Flash
Basically, Flash currently performs better than in-browser technologies. And I'm pretty sure more people have browsers with Flash support than have browsers with canvas support (let alone things like 3D support that are only available 'in-browser' in the lastest webkit nightlies).
After that I spent most of the afternoon working on a perl script to rename my existing cube faces on the web server. It took so long because although I have used perl before, I don't use it enough to even remember the basic syntax. After spending ages on my script and it just giving the error "No such file or directory" when it came to renaming the file, I found a (nearly) complete solution that did what I was looking for: HOWTO: File Renaming and Directory Recursion. If only I had found that before attempting to write my own script!
My script is modified slightly to find files that start with an underscore, and end with a .jpg extension, then appends 'hd' to the start of the filename:
At the moment my pano website uses cube faces with names like _f.jpg (for the front cube face). But when I update it to have high res and low res pano versions, the current cube face names need to become hd_f.jpg (for example) and I will also need to upload the low res cube faces, which will have names like sd_f.jpg.
While it probably would have been much quicker for me to manually rename the current cube faces than spending so long trying to write a script in a language I don't know, the benefit of the scripted approach is that there is very little downtime on the website front. The website will have to be put in maintenance mode while I upload the modified PHP and javascript files, and while the existing cube faces are renamed, so using a script to rename the cube faces makes it much quicker.
In the evening I wrote a perl script that renames the cube faces produced by PTGUI to a format suitable for FPP and my pano website, and also watched 'Ambush at blood pass' with Mauser. The film was quite good, but at the end they had a couple of twists that just made it so the plot didn't make sense.
I was hoping to get all the files etc. ready for the update to my pano website by the end of today, but I haven't even started converted the small cube faces for each pano, let alone uploading them to the website.
The weather started off sunny, then was cloudy most of the morning. In the afternoon there were still a few clouds around, but it was mostly sunny. It looked like there was probably a nice sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard, Iceberg Lettuce, Sliced Cherry Tomatoes, and Sliced Raddish Sandwich; Satsuma; Home-made Biscuit; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Spicy Chicken Pizza; Potato; Peas. Pudding was a slice of Strawberry Cheesecake.
Supper: Chocolate coated Shortcake biscuit; HobNob; Cup o' Tea.
I found this thread on the jw player forum to be quite helpful. Reading the comments there, it seems that Bandwidth detection is unreliable, and also requires approx 100KB for the detection. Since my small files are only around 400KB, 100KB is quite a lot extra for a low bandwidth user to have to download.
So for the moment, I think I'll stick with buttons where the user must choose if they want high res or low res. (Of course when using bandwidth detection you still need to give the user the choice of high res or low res, its just that they don't have to make a choice).
After this I tried to make a dialog box, using jquery tools, that would pop up to give the user a choice of viewing the pano in high res or low res. Unfortunately, the background overlay that blocks out the rest of the page didn't seem to be working. So I spent a lot of time trying to debug why the background overlay wasn't showing up.
Eventually I saved a copy of my page, then cut down the HTML and javascript to the bare minimum. But still no background overlay. So next I saved the demo from the jquery tools website (which did work). I then modified this step by step, slowly changing it to make it into my cut down page. When I changed the jquery script src from the one used in the demo to the one used in my page, the overlay stopped working.
The script src I was using (where the background overlay doesn't work) is the one recommended on the jquery tools website: http://cdn.jquerytools.org/1.2.1/jquery.tools.min.js
Whereas the script src used in the jquery tools (where the background overlay does work) is: http://flowplayer.org/tools/download/combine/1.2.1/jquery.tools.min.js?select=full&debug=true
So while jquery tools might be much lighter than jqueryUI, it's no good if their live version doesn't work properly. So I think I'll try jqueryUI instead. I also prefer the jqueryUI dialog boxes since they can be moved and resized, unlike the jquerytools dialog boxes.
Actually, since I'd already done the work of writing my script to create the dialog box using jquerytools, what I did was to download the jquerytools version used in the demos (without debug=true), and then host this on my own site and point to that instead of the hosted jquerytools script. Now the overlay works, and that was less hassle than downloading jqueryUI and changing my code to work with jqueryUI instead.
In the afternoon I read a few articles about HTML5 and Flash
- Top Flash Misperceptions : Flash is a CPU Hog
- "HTML5" versus Flash: Animation Benchmarking
- GUIMark 2: The rise of HTML5
- macheist animation in flash
Basically, Flash currently performs better than in-browser technologies. And I'm pretty sure more people have browsers with Flash support than have browsers with canvas support (let alone things like 3D support that are only available 'in-browser' in the lastest webkit nightlies).
After that I spent most of the afternoon working on a perl script to rename my existing cube faces on the web server. It took so long because although I have used perl before, I don't use it enough to even remember the basic syntax. After spending ages on my script and it just giving the error "No such file or directory" when it came to renaming the file, I found a (nearly) complete solution that did what I was looking for: HOWTO: File Renaming and Directory Recursion. If only I had found that before attempting to write my own script!
My script is modified slightly to find files that start with an underscore, and end with a .jpg extension, then appends 'hd' to the start of the filename:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use File::Find;
find(\&underscores, ".");
sub underscores {
next if -d $_;
next if /^\./;
if (/^(_.*\.jpg)/){
print "Renaming ".$_." to ".$1."\n";
chdir($File::Find::dir);
rename($_, 'hd'.$1) or die $!;
}
}
At the moment my pano website uses cube faces with names like _f.jpg (for the front cube face). But when I update it to have high res and low res pano versions, the current cube face names need to become hd_f.jpg (for example) and I will also need to upload the low res cube faces, which will have names like sd_f.jpg.
While it probably would have been much quicker for me to manually rename the current cube faces than spending so long trying to write a script in a language I don't know, the benefit of the scripted approach is that there is very little downtime on the website front. The website will have to be put in maintenance mode while I upload the modified PHP and javascript files, and while the existing cube faces are renamed, so using a script to rename the cube faces makes it much quicker.
In the evening I wrote a perl script that renames the cube faces produced by PTGUI to a format suitable for FPP and my pano website, and also watched 'Ambush at blood pass' with Mauser. The film was quite good, but at the end they had a couple of twists that just made it so the plot didn't make sense.
I was hoping to get all the files etc. ready for the update to my pano website by the end of today, but I haven't even started converted the small cube faces for each pano, let alone uploading them to the website.
The weather started off sunny, then was cloudy most of the morning. In the afternoon there were still a few clouds around, but it was mostly sunny. It looked like there was probably a nice sunset.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard, Iceberg Lettuce, Sliced Cherry Tomatoes, and Sliced Raddish Sandwich; Satsuma; Home-made Biscuit; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Spicy Chicken Pizza; Potato; Peas. Pudding was a slice of Strawberry Cheesecake.
Supper: Chocolate coated Shortcake biscuit; HobNob; Cup o' Tea.
Sunday 16 May 2010
Pogging, Photo processing and sorting, pano websiting
This morning I started cutting out pogs in Photoshop, then went to church.
When I got home I continued to cut out pogs in Photoshop, and finished in the afternoon.
After updating my Pog website I sorted and processed some more photos I'd taken recently. I also bought some spider books since I only have insect books at the moment.
In the evening I downloaded Pano2VR, which (unlike Pano2QTVR) allows you to set the level of JPEG compression when converting to cube faces. I also downloaded Hugin and the perl Panotools script package, which includes a equirectangular to cube face conversion script for use with Hugin. However, the Panotools-Script-0.25 package looked difficult to install/use, so I didn't bother trying that. I checked the Hugin GUI and it didn't seem to have any facility for converting to cube faces.
I tested cube faces generated by Pano2VR against cube faces generated by PTGUI, using the same settings in both. I wanted to see if Pano2VR would generate sharper cube faces, as the QTVR I had previously produced in Pano2QTVR (Pano2VR is the sucessor of Pano2QTVR) seemed much sharper than cube faces generated in PTGUI.
However, I found that the 2000px cube faces generated by Pano2VR and PTGUI were virtually identical (the Pano2VR ones were a few KB larger in total, I didn't notice any quality difference).
So next I tried converting to a QTVR in Pano2VR, Pano2QTVR and PTGUI, all with the same settings - 460px cubefaces 1 subtile (i.e. not subtiled), and 70% quality. The Pano2VR QTVR was slightly softer (and had a smaller filesize) than the PTGUI QTVR. Then the Pano2QTVR QTVR was much sharper (but also with many more artifacts and a larger filesize) than both the Pano2VR and PTGUI QTVRs.
So at least I now know it is not that PTGUI is producing 'soft' cubefaces, it is just something to do with Pano2QTVR that it is producing excessively sharpened cubefaces. Possibly its is down to the stitching interpolater used - Pano2QTVR uses spline36 while Pano2VR uses Mitchell. PTGUI doesn't seem to specify a default interpolater or allow you to choose one when converting to cube faces.
After this I did some work on my pano website. Unfortunately someone on the jQuery website gave incorrect information about what was returned by a function, so I spent quite a while trying to debug why my code wasn't working.
I also had an email from an Amazon seller saying that the book I ordered, they don't actually have. So I ordered it from another website instead (which was more expensive, but cheaper than the now cheapest one on Amazon). I also saw that the seller of the book I was now purchasing from them had a website, so I went on their website to see if it would be cheaper to purchase directly from their website instead of through abeBooks.
But they didn't have the book on their website, so I just bought it from them through abeBooks. I did find a photography book on their website though, so I bought that as well.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken and Rice Stirfry; Noodles; Soy Sauce. Pudding was a slice of Apple Strudel with Custard and Squirty Cream.
Tea: Breaded Ham with sliced Raddish, Mustard, Mustard Cress, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Banana; Home-made biscuit (actually tasted like swiss roll crust); Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
When I got home I continued to cut out pogs in Photoshop, and finished in the afternoon.
After updating my Pog website I sorted and processed some more photos I'd taken recently. I also bought some spider books since I only have insect books at the moment.
In the evening I downloaded Pano2VR, which (unlike Pano2QTVR) allows you to set the level of JPEG compression when converting to cube faces. I also downloaded Hugin and the perl Panotools script package, which includes a equirectangular to cube face conversion script for use with Hugin. However, the Panotools-Script-0.25 package looked difficult to install/use, so I didn't bother trying that. I checked the Hugin GUI and it didn't seem to have any facility for converting to cube faces.
I tested cube faces generated by Pano2VR against cube faces generated by PTGUI, using the same settings in both. I wanted to see if Pano2VR would generate sharper cube faces, as the QTVR I had previously produced in Pano2QTVR (Pano2VR is the sucessor of Pano2QTVR) seemed much sharper than cube faces generated in PTGUI.
However, I found that the 2000px cube faces generated by Pano2VR and PTGUI were virtually identical (the Pano2VR ones were a few KB larger in total, I didn't notice any quality difference).
So next I tried converting to a QTVR in Pano2VR, Pano2QTVR and PTGUI, all with the same settings - 460px cubefaces 1 subtile (i.e. not subtiled), and 70% quality. The Pano2VR QTVR was slightly softer (and had a smaller filesize) than the PTGUI QTVR. Then the Pano2QTVR QTVR was much sharper (but also with many more artifacts and a larger filesize) than both the Pano2VR and PTGUI QTVRs.
So at least I now know it is not that PTGUI is producing 'soft' cubefaces, it is just something to do with Pano2QTVR that it is producing excessively sharpened cubefaces. Possibly its is down to the stitching interpolater used - Pano2QTVR uses spline36 while Pano2VR uses Mitchell. PTGUI doesn't seem to specify a default interpolater or allow you to choose one when converting to cube faces.
After this I did some work on my pano website. Unfortunately someone on the jQuery website gave incorrect information about what was returned by a function, so I spent quite a while trying to debug why my code wasn't working.
I also had an email from an Amazon seller saying that the book I ordered, they don't actually have. So I ordered it from another website instead (which was more expensive, but cheaper than the now cheapest one on Amazon). I also saw that the seller of the book I was now purchasing from them had a website, so I went on their website to see if it would be cheaper to purchase directly from their website instead of through abeBooks.
But they didn't have the book on their website, so I just bought it from them through abeBooks. I did find a photography book on their website though, so I bought that as well.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken and Rice Stirfry; Noodles; Soy Sauce. Pudding was a slice of Apple Strudel with Custard and Squirty Cream.
Tea: Breaded Ham with sliced Raddish, Mustard, Mustard Cress, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Banana; Home-made biscuit (actually tasted like swiss roll crust); Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Saturday 15 May 2010
Processing and sorting photos
Today I was still sorting and processing a few photos that I'd taken recently.
I also watched the FA Cup Final in the afternoon with Mauser, L and Clare, because Mauser and L had bought lots of sweets/snacks and some Dr. Pepper to have while we watched it.
In the evening I had a problem when uploading some images to my photo website. I had images with filenames like
There are two possible solutions I can think of. One would be running a
The only problem with using
Before I could do
I also found a better way of removing the thumbnail from the image - instead of just removing the thumbnail, remove all of IFD1. Also in that thread it mentions PreviewImage, so I changed my command to remove that as well.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Mature Cheddar Cheese with Red Onion, Raddish, Cherry Tomatoes, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of Home-made Swiss Roll; Caramel Wacko (Michael Jackson endorsed Caramel Rocky substitute); Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Corn Beef Fritters; Baked Beans; Chips; Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese; Brown Sauce. Pudding was a Caramel Milk Jelly. Coffee.
I also watched the FA Cup Final in the afternoon with Mauser, L and Clare, because Mauser and L had bought lots of sweets/snacks and some Dr. Pepper to have while we watched it.
In the evening I had a problem when uploading some images to my photo website. I had images with filenames like
903-Ilex-aquifolium-'Silver-Queen'-European-Holly-Flower.jpg
escapeshellcmd to escape the filename, but looking at the PHP manual, escapeshellcmd leaves paired quotation marks alone (i.e. it doesn't escape them). It seems that the shell just drops paired quotation marks, and so ImageMagick would try and resize903-Ilex-aquifolium-Silver-Queen-European-Holly-Flower.jpg
There are two possible solutions I can think of. One would be running a
preg_replace after running escapeshellcmd, to find any unescaped quote characters, and escape them. The other solution (which I chose) is to use escapeshellarg instead of escapeshellcmd.The only problem with using
escapeshellarg instead of escapeshellcmd is that escapeshellarg wraps your string in quote tags. So while before I was escaping my filename once using escapeshellcmd and storing this in a variable, then using the variable to create different sized images with different filepaths but the same filename, I now had to use escapeshellarg on each full filepath. e.g.Before I could do
$filename = escapeshellcmd($filename);
createLarge('./large/'.$filename);
createMedium('./medium/'.$filename);
createSmall('./small/'.$filename);
createLarge(escapeshellarg('./large/'.$filename));
createMedium(escapeshellarg('./medium/'.$filename));
createSmall(escapeshellarg('./small/'.$filename));
I also found a better way of removing the thumbnail from the image - instead of just removing the thumbnail, remove all of IFD1. Also in that thread it mentions PreviewImage, so I changed my command to remove that as well.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Mature Cheddar Cheese with Red Onion, Raddish, Cherry Tomatoes, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of Home-made Swiss Roll; Caramel Wacko (Michael Jackson endorsed Caramel Rocky substitute); Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Corn Beef Fritters; Baked Beans; Chips; Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese; Brown Sauce. Pudding was a Caramel Milk Jelly. Coffee.
Friday 14 May 2010
Processing and sorting photos
This morning I went out in the garden to see if there were many insects around, but there weren't, and those that were were quite active. It was quite windy as well.
I came in and checked my email, then started working on the photos I took yesterday.
After dinner I watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and Bo and also watched one of the DVD extras.
I carried on sorting/processing the photos that I took yesterday evening.
The weather started off sunny, but then had clouded over by mid morning, then was cloudy the rest of the day.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Slice of Fresh Tiger Loaf Bread; Mature Cheddar Cheese with Red Onion, Raddish, Cherry Tomatoes, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich made with fresh Tiger Loaf Bread; Satsuma; ½ Honey Sandwich made with fresh Tiger Loaf Bread; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Battered Fish Portion; Baked Beans; Potatoes; Salt; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was one of the biscuits that me and L made the other day and a caramel milk jelly.
I came in and checked my email, then started working on the photos I took yesterday.
After dinner I watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and Bo and also watched one of the DVD extras.
I carried on sorting/processing the photos that I took yesterday evening.
The weather started off sunny, but then had clouded over by mid morning, then was cloudy the rest of the day.
Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Slice of Fresh Tiger Loaf Bread; Mature Cheddar Cheese with Red Onion, Raddish, Cherry Tomatoes, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich made with fresh Tiger Loaf Bread; Satsuma; ½ Honey Sandwich made with fresh Tiger Loaf Bread; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Battered Fish Portion; Baked Beans; Potatoes; Salt; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was one of the biscuits that me and L made the other day and a caramel milk jelly.
Thursday 13 May 2010
Sorting photos
This morning I went out in the garden after breakfast to try and take some insect photos, I found a co-operative fly who let me take quite a few photos of him, and quite a large fly (probably not dipteran) who flew off as soon as I took 1 photo of it.
The rest of the morning I was mainly searching for info on some ids for the photos I took the other day. But I could only find info for one family (the image had only been id'd to family level), and not really any family or genus info for 2 images that had been id'd to genus level). I even looked on Amazon to see if there were any books available with information, but there didn't seem to be.
In the afternoon I checked my email and went on the pinternet for a bit while doing a backup. I also went in the garden and took a few photos of a couple of plants I need IDs for.
In the evening I watched 'Prince Valiant' with Mauser and L, then did some more photo sorting.
The weather was sunny most of the morning with a few clouds around, then cloudy most of the afternoon. In the evening there was a mixture of sun and clouds.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Mature Cheddar Cheese with Red Onion, Raddish, Cherry Tomatoes, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of home-made Swiss Roll; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken Pie; Peas; Sweetcorn; Gravy; Carrots; Potatoes. Pudding was Home-made Strawberry and Peach Flan. Coffee.
The rest of the morning I was mainly searching for info on some ids for the photos I took the other day. But I could only find info for one family (the image had only been id'd to family level), and not really any family or genus info for 2 images that had been id'd to genus level). I even looked on Amazon to see if there were any books available with information, but there didn't seem to be.
In the afternoon I checked my email and went on the pinternet for a bit while doing a backup. I also went in the garden and took a few photos of a couple of plants I need IDs for.
In the evening I watched 'Prince Valiant' with Mauser and L, then did some more photo sorting.
The weather was sunny most of the morning with a few clouds around, then cloudy most of the afternoon. In the evening there was a mixture of sun and clouds.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Mature Cheddar Cheese with Red Onion, Raddish, Cherry Tomatoes, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Satsuma; Slice of home-made Swiss Roll; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken Pie; Peas; Sweetcorn; Gravy; Carrots; Potatoes. Pudding was Home-made Strawberry and Peach Flan. Coffee.
Wednesday 12 May 2010
Cooking and pano websiting
This morning I went out in the garden after breakfast to try and take some insect photos, but the only insect I could find was a fly that I'm pretty sure I already have a few photos of. While I was in the kitchen I saw a sparrow pulling up some moss and then flying away with it, and it also looked like the Robin might be making a new nest in the nestbox in our garden.
I did some vacuuming, then checked my email. After this I checked some photos to make sure they had been tagged correctly. I didn't find any missing the tags I thought might not have been added properly, but did find some that included the full tags and also a partial tag, which I then removed.
I then started work on the CSS for the buttons I made for my pano website yesterday.
After lunch I finished off the CSS needed to make the buttons to display properly, then did some testing on a 640px cube face QTVR versus cube faces in FPP.
For the tests I used IE8 with Fiddler 2 set to simulate modem speed, and compared loading speed of a QTVR produced by Pano2QTVR with cube faces produced by PTGUI. For both I used 640px cube faces with 70% jpeg compression. The QTVR was 422KB, while the PTGUI cube faces were 323KB, so the QTVR was a bit larger. All times in the below table are in seconds.
The results are pretty similar to what I found when comparing large size JPEG cube faces versus QTVR - using a QTVR is much slower than using cube faces, and using streaming or not on a QTVR makes little difference to load speed.
For this test, since the file sizes are pretty small, I used Fiddler 2 to limit my download speed so I could get a better idea of how the different methods compare on a slow connection (which is what the smaller files are for, along with mobile users). With the download slowed down quite a bit, I decided to also time how long it took from requesting the pano until the loading text appeared.
When using a .mov (QTVR), FPP requires a mov decoder plugin to be used, so I wondered if this would make any difference to the speed from when the pano is requested until it starts actually loading. The movDecoder.swf plugin is only 8.12KB, but it obviously does involve another HTTP request to download it. But as you can see, there's not really any difference in the time until the pano actually starts loading.
One other thing I noticed is that the QTVR produced by Pano2QTVR appears greatly sharpened compared to the PTGUI jpeg cube faces. (Or should that be that the PTGUI cube faces are greatly blurred compared to the QTVR produced by Pano2QTVR)? I put an example comparing the two here.
Unfortunately, Pano2QTVR only allows cube face exporting at maximum jpeg quality, so I couldn't really compare Pano2QTVR cube faces with PTGUI cube faces. I did try doing a 'Save for Web' in Photoshop on a Pano2QTVR produced cube face, and increasing the blur setting, but with enough blur to make it the same quality as the PTGUI produced cube face, but the Pano2QTVR cube face resultant file size was still much greater than the same PTGUI cubeface.
The strong sharpening / lack of blur in the Pano2QTVR produced image also produces some artifacts not present in the PTGUI produced cubefaces. e.g. in my example above, if you look at the bottom left of the large building, there is a grate or window that displays what I guess is a form of very bad moiré in the PanoQTVR image, but looks okay in the PTGUI image.
In the evening I did some cooking with L - we made some Danish butter cookies (with hard marg), and a swiss roll. The Danish butter cookies don't really taste like Danish butter cookies at all, more like Christmas biscuits. The swiss roll is quite nice, though the sponge did split quite a bit. The recipie for the Danish butter cookies seemed to make loads, so we had to do a few batches in the oven, and ended up doing cooking most of the evening.
When we'd finally finished cooking all the biscuits and I'd finished washing up, me, Mauser, and L watched the latest episode of Lost, which explained where the Man in Black and Jacob came from.
The weather started off sunny, but was overcast by 9am. In the afternoon the clouds cleared up a bit, and it was a mixture of clouds and sun for the rest of the day.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on Toasts; Salad; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Posh Pork & Herb Sausages; Jacket Potato; Baked Beans; 2x Tinned Plum Tomatoes; Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese. Bit of fresh baked bread; Coffee.
Evening Snack: A couple of home-made non-butter Danish biscuits; Coffee.
Supper: Slice of home-made Swiss Roll; Cup o' Tea.
I did some vacuuming, then checked my email. After this I checked some photos to make sure they had been tagged correctly. I didn't find any missing the tags I thought might not have been added properly, but did find some that included the full tags and also a partial tag, which I then removed.
I then started work on the CSS for the buttons I made for my pano website yesterday.
After lunch I finished off the CSS needed to make the buttons to display properly, then did some testing on a 640px cube face QTVR versus cube faces in FPP.
For the tests I used IE8 with Fiddler 2 set to simulate modem speed, and compared loading speed of a QTVR produced by Pano2QTVR with cube faces produced by PTGUI. For both I used 640px cube faces with 70% jpeg compression. The QTVR was 422KB, while the PTGUI cube faces were 323KB, so the QTVR was a bit larger. All times in the below table are in seconds.
Run | Time from request until pano starts loading | time from pano starts loading until pano loaded | total |
mov, loaderStreamed=1, no cache | |||
1 | 11 | 63 | 74 |
2 | 10 | 64 | 74 |
3 | 10 | 63 | 73 |
mov, loaderStreamed=1, cache | |||
1 | 0.25 | 0.25 | 0.5 |
2 | 0.25 | 0.25 | 0.5 |
3 | 0.25 | 0.25 | 0.5 |
cube faces, no cache | |||
1 | 9 | 20 | 29 |
2 | 10 | 30 | 40 |
3 | 11 | 30 | 41 |
mov, loaderStreamed=0, no cache | |||
1 | 10 | 63 | 73 |
2 | 9 | 63 | 72 |
3 | 9 | 64 | 73 |
The results are pretty similar to what I found when comparing large size JPEG cube faces versus QTVR - using a QTVR is much slower than using cube faces, and using streaming or not on a QTVR makes little difference to load speed.
For this test, since the file sizes are pretty small, I used Fiddler 2 to limit my download speed so I could get a better idea of how the different methods compare on a slow connection (which is what the smaller files are for, along with mobile users). With the download slowed down quite a bit, I decided to also time how long it took from requesting the pano until the loading text appeared.
When using a .mov (QTVR), FPP requires a mov decoder plugin to be used, so I wondered if this would make any difference to the speed from when the pano is requested until it starts actually loading. The movDecoder.swf plugin is only 8.12KB, but it obviously does involve another HTTP request to download it. But as you can see, there's not really any difference in the time until the pano actually starts loading.
One other thing I noticed is that the QTVR produced by Pano2QTVR appears greatly sharpened compared to the PTGUI jpeg cube faces. (Or should that be that the PTGUI cube faces are greatly blurred compared to the QTVR produced by Pano2QTVR)? I put an example comparing the two here.
Unfortunately, Pano2QTVR only allows cube face exporting at maximum jpeg quality, so I couldn't really compare Pano2QTVR cube faces with PTGUI cube faces. I did try doing a 'Save for Web' in Photoshop on a Pano2QTVR produced cube face, and increasing the blur setting, but with enough blur to make it the same quality as the PTGUI produced cube face, but the Pano2QTVR cube face resultant file size was still much greater than the same PTGUI cubeface.
The strong sharpening / lack of blur in the Pano2QTVR produced image also produces some artifacts not present in the PTGUI produced cubefaces. e.g. in my example above, if you look at the bottom left of the large building, there is a grate or window that displays what I guess is a form of very bad moiré in the PanoQTVR image, but looks okay in the PTGUI image.
In the evening I did some cooking with L - we made some Danish butter cookies (with hard marg), and a swiss roll. The Danish butter cookies don't really taste like Danish butter cookies at all, more like Christmas biscuits. The swiss roll is quite nice, though the sponge did split quite a bit. The recipie for the Danish butter cookies seemed to make loads, so we had to do a few batches in the oven, and ended up doing cooking most of the evening.
When we'd finally finished cooking all the biscuits and I'd finished washing up, me, Mauser, and L watched the latest episode of Lost, which explained where the Man in Black and Jacob came from.
The weather started off sunny, but was overcast by 9am. In the afternoon the clouds cleared up a bit, and it was a mixture of clouds and sun for the rest of the day.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on Toasts; Salad; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Posh Pork & Herb Sausages; Jacket Potato; Baked Beans; 2x Tinned Plum Tomatoes; Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese. Bit of fresh baked bread; Coffee.
Evening Snack: A couple of home-made non-butter Danish biscuits; Coffee.
Supper: Slice of home-made Swiss Roll; Cup o' Tea.
Tuesday 11 May 2010
Various
This morning I finished processing the photos that I'd been working on yesterday, from a walk me and McRad went on last week. When I was done I uploaded them to my photo website (despite them all being pretty rubbish).
After that I had to return my faulty hard drive to Western Digital. I packaged it according to their instructions, then took it down to the post office. But before I left I remembered that the Post Office don't accept credit cards. So I found my debit card, which has been waiting around for quite a while for me to call my bank and get it unblocked. (One time I gave my card to Clare so she could pay some money in for me, but she accidentally used my card to try and get some money out of the wall for herself, and after she'd try putting her pin in a few times the machine said the pin would be blocked and to contact the bank).
So I phoned my bank (Alliance & Pester), but they said the card was okay. I borrowed some cash from Clare just in case the bank was giving me false info about the card being okay. When I tried to pay for the item at the Post Office I found that the card was still blocked, the machine gave me a 'PIN BLOCKED' message. As it turned out, the Post Office actually takes Credit Cards now. (I always prefer to pay by credit card than debit card since you can make a chargeback on a credit card if needs be and I also get 0.5% cashback).
I was thinking of buying a can of drink while I was in the Post Office (Mercury News Shop), since I could do with a drinks can for use in making SteB's diffusers. But the queue for the till (the Post Office counter and shop tills are separate) was really long so I didn't bother.
I phoned the bank when I got back home, but they still reckoned my debit card should be okay to use. I insisted that it wasn't, so they said they'd send me a new card.
In the afternoon I processed some photos I'd taken in the morning after breakfast, and posted them to the WAB forums to try and get some IDs.
After that I worked on some buttons for my pano website for viewing a high res or low res pano.
After dinner I watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L. Then I helped the people with the locked hotmail account. Hotmail staff hadn't replied to their message they made yesterday, and their hotmail account had been locked, so they decided to use a BT email account that they had, but had never used before. They asked me to help them import their contacts into the BT account.
We had a CSV file of the contacts exported from hotmail, but when we tried importing them into the BT Yahoo account, it said it couldn't find any contacts in the file. I did some googling, but couldn't find what format the CSV spreadsheet should be in (as in column titles and number of columns). The Yahoo help was very unhelpful, and for importing contacts from a source such as Outlook etc, gives a link that is about importing contacts from Facebook?!
So I took the CSV and removed all the columns except first name, last name, and email address, then tried again. This time it worked. But it also said that the contacts could not be imported (as well as saying that they were imported successfully). I checked the contacts list in the Yahoo Mail, and it had imported them successfully, but there were two records less than what was in the original CSV file.
So I exported the contacts from Yahoo and put them in the same spreadsheet as the original list exported from hotmail, sorted them both in alphabetical order by email address, and then visually compared the columns to see where the missing emails were. Both of them were just duplicate emails, so that was okay.
They also wanted to know if they could change who it said the emails were from, since at the moment it just had one their names. Once again, Yahoo help proved useless - it said to go to 'Options', and then 'More Options', but there was no 'More Options' under the Options menu. They said it didn't matter that much, so I didn't bother messing about with it any longer.
I came back home, and topped the pond up a bit, then wrote today's and the last few days blog posts.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Sicilian style Ham with Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; ⅔ Banana; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Deep Pan Pepperoni Pizza; Chips; Salt; Peas. Pudding was a Strawberry Mousse; Chocolate coated Shortcake Biscuit; Hobnob; Coffee.
After that I had to return my faulty hard drive to Western Digital. I packaged it according to their instructions, then took it down to the post office. But before I left I remembered that the Post Office don't accept credit cards. So I found my debit card, which has been waiting around for quite a while for me to call my bank and get it unblocked. (One time I gave my card to Clare so she could pay some money in for me, but she accidentally used my card to try and get some money out of the wall for herself, and after she'd try putting her pin in a few times the machine said the pin would be blocked and to contact the bank).
So I phoned my bank (Alliance & Pester), but they said the card was okay. I borrowed some cash from Clare just in case the bank was giving me false info about the card being okay. When I tried to pay for the item at the Post Office I found that the card was still blocked, the machine gave me a 'PIN BLOCKED' message. As it turned out, the Post Office actually takes Credit Cards now. (I always prefer to pay by credit card than debit card since you can make a chargeback on a credit card if needs be and I also get 0.5% cashback).
I was thinking of buying a can of drink while I was in the Post Office (Mercury News Shop), since I could do with a drinks can for use in making SteB's diffusers. But the queue for the till (the Post Office counter and shop tills are separate) was really long so I didn't bother.
I phoned the bank when I got back home, but they still reckoned my debit card should be okay to use. I insisted that it wasn't, so they said they'd send me a new card.
In the afternoon I processed some photos I'd taken in the morning after breakfast, and posted them to the WAB forums to try and get some IDs.
After that I worked on some buttons for my pano website for viewing a high res or low res pano.
After dinner I watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L. Then I helped the people with the locked hotmail account. Hotmail staff hadn't replied to their message they made yesterday, and their hotmail account had been locked, so they decided to use a BT email account that they had, but had never used before. They asked me to help them import their contacts into the BT account.
We had a CSV file of the contacts exported from hotmail, but when we tried importing them into the BT Yahoo account, it said it couldn't find any contacts in the file. I did some googling, but couldn't find what format the CSV spreadsheet should be in (as in column titles and number of columns). The Yahoo help was very unhelpful, and for importing contacts from a source such as Outlook etc, gives a link that is about importing contacts from Facebook?!
So I took the CSV and removed all the columns except first name, last name, and email address, then tried again. This time it worked. But it also said that the contacts could not be imported (as well as saying that they were imported successfully). I checked the contacts list in the Yahoo Mail, and it had imported them successfully, but there were two records less than what was in the original CSV file.
So I exported the contacts from Yahoo and put them in the same spreadsheet as the original list exported from hotmail, sorted them both in alphabetical order by email address, and then visually compared the columns to see where the missing emails were. Both of them were just duplicate emails, so that was okay.
They also wanted to know if they could change who it said the emails were from, since at the moment it just had one their names. Once again, Yahoo help proved useless - it said to go to 'Options', and then 'More Options', but there was no 'More Options' under the Options menu. They said it didn't matter that much, so I didn't bother messing about with it any longer.
I came back home, and topped the pond up a bit, then wrote today's and the last few days blog posts.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Sicilian style Ham with Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; ⅔ Banana; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of Deep Pan Pepperoni Pizza; Chips; Salt; Peas. Pudding was a Strawberry Mousse; Chocolate coated Shortcake Biscuit; Hobnob; Coffee.
Monday 10 May 2010
Trying to restore access to a hotmail account
This morning I checked my hard drive format that had been running overnight, and it was only at 17%. So I think the WD Data Lifeguard program didn't fix the drive properly, and it is faulty.
I applied for an RMA for the disk on the Western Digital website, and read quite a bit about how you have to package the drive for sending it back to them (essentially in the same packaging as new drives come in). So I emailed Mauser to ask him if he could get me a box and bag from a hard drive they've used at his work.
After that I cut out some Pogs in Photoshop, since I couldn't do it yesterday, and then updated my Pog website.
Most of the rest of the day I spent adding metadata to and then processing the photos from a walk I went on with McRad a few days ago.
I also tried to help someone out who had their hotmail account blocked, but unfortunately it didn't seem like there was a lot you could do about it. Hotmail said that the number of tries to access the account was too many, and had one option, which was something like 'try again' and another option that was to reset the password.
On the try again (or whatever it was) option, it asked you to put your password in again and complete a CAPTCHA. But on completing this, all you'd get is the same screen telling you that you'd tried to log in too many times.
So we tried the option to reset your password. This then gave you two options - complete some information to reset the password, or have instructions on how to reset the password emailed to you. First we tried the completing information to reset the password, but it had one of those 'Who was your childhood best friend' style questions, and their son had set up the email for him, so they didn't know this (and they couldn't get hold of him on the phone at the time).
So we tried the second option to reset the password, which was to email it. This then gave you an option of having it emailed to yourself (so having it emailed to the account you can't access!) or to an alternate email address. As it happened, they had their hotmail account open on another computer, so we tried emailing the password reset instructions to their own hotmail account.
But then when we tried to check the email on the open hotmail account, it said they'd been logged out. Not that surprising I guess.
So next we tried the alternate email option, but that just said something like 'An email has been sent to your alternate email address' when you chose it. It must have been an alternate email address that was specified when the account was set up, and since they didn't set up the account themselves, that too was useless.
I asked them to try logging in from our house, in case it was just their IP address that was being blocked by hotmail as they'd tried to log in too many times. But it was the same from our house. So we posted a message on the Windows live help forum, which rather strangely requires a Windows live account for you to be able to post.
So you can't get help on not being able to access your account unless you can access your account to be able to login. Stupid! "Luckily" they had accidentally set up an @hotmail.co.uk account (their actual email was an @hotmail.com account), s they did have an account to login and post on the message board. The message board is kind of strange, it seems that Hotmail use a message board format instead of a contact form for any support requests, and they require you to post your email address in your message.
It is generally a bad idea to post your email address on the internet since then spambots will pick it up. But in Hotmail's case, the Hotmail staff remove your email address from the message after they have looked at it. It still seems strange though to require you to post your email address on a public message board, even if it is removed promptly.
After doing this, they decided that actually they need email access quite urgently, and didn't really want to be waiting an indefinite amount of time waiting (and hoping) for a hotmail staff member to unlock their account for them. So they decided to switch to the hotmail.co.uk account they had accidentally set up earlier. But when they tried to log in, this account was now blocked as well.
When we posted the message on the hotmail support board, we had ticked the checkbox to email any replies to their email address (i.e. the hotmail.co.uk email account that they'd set up accidentally). But now Hotmail had blocked that account, they couldn't see any replies. They tried logging in to their original hotmail.com account, but that was still blocked.
So I went back on the hotmail support message boards, and had to trawl through about 12 pages of new threads that had been started in the last half an hour from other people with similar problems until I found the post we'd made. The email address had been removed from the post, so I told them that someone from hotmail was most likely looking into it, and that was why their new hotmail.co.uk account had been blocked as well, while they re-instate the old hotmail.com account. But all they could do now was wait and see if the Hotmail staff do re-instate the old hotmail.com account or not.
I came back home and processed a couple more photos, did a backup, then went to bed.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Curry flavour Chicken Slice with Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Cheese Scone with Utterly Bullerly; Banana; Apple; Slice of Chocolate Cake that me and L made the other day; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Toad in the Hole; Mustard; Gravy; Green Beans; Carrots; Potatoes. Pudding was 2x Apple Pies heated in the Oven with Squirty Cream. Coffee.
I applied for an RMA for the disk on the Western Digital website, and read quite a bit about how you have to package the drive for sending it back to them (essentially in the same packaging as new drives come in). So I emailed Mauser to ask him if he could get me a box and bag from a hard drive they've used at his work.
After that I cut out some Pogs in Photoshop, since I couldn't do it yesterday, and then updated my Pog website.
Most of the rest of the day I spent adding metadata to and then processing the photos from a walk I went on with McRad a few days ago.
I also tried to help someone out who had their hotmail account blocked, but unfortunately it didn't seem like there was a lot you could do about it. Hotmail said that the number of tries to access the account was too many, and had one option, which was something like 'try again' and another option that was to reset the password.
On the try again (or whatever it was) option, it asked you to put your password in again and complete a CAPTCHA. But on completing this, all you'd get is the same screen telling you that you'd tried to log in too many times.
So we tried the option to reset your password. This then gave you two options - complete some information to reset the password, or have instructions on how to reset the password emailed to you. First we tried the completing information to reset the password, but it had one of those 'Who was your childhood best friend' style questions, and their son had set up the email for him, so they didn't know this (and they couldn't get hold of him on the phone at the time).
So we tried the second option to reset the password, which was to email it. This then gave you an option of having it emailed to yourself (so having it emailed to the account you can't access!) or to an alternate email address. As it happened, they had their hotmail account open on another computer, so we tried emailing the password reset instructions to their own hotmail account.
But then when we tried to check the email on the open hotmail account, it said they'd been logged out. Not that surprising I guess.
So next we tried the alternate email option, but that just said something like 'An email has been sent to your alternate email address' when you chose it. It must have been an alternate email address that was specified when the account was set up, and since they didn't set up the account themselves, that too was useless.
I asked them to try logging in from our house, in case it was just their IP address that was being blocked by hotmail as they'd tried to log in too many times. But it was the same from our house. So we posted a message on the Windows live help forum, which rather strangely requires a Windows live account for you to be able to post.
So you can't get help on not being able to access your account unless you can access your account to be able to login. Stupid! "Luckily" they had accidentally set up an @hotmail.co.uk account (their actual email was an @hotmail.com account), s they did have an account to login and post on the message board. The message board is kind of strange, it seems that Hotmail use a message board format instead of a contact form for any support requests, and they require you to post your email address in your message.
It is generally a bad idea to post your email address on the internet since then spambots will pick it up. But in Hotmail's case, the Hotmail staff remove your email address from the message after they have looked at it. It still seems strange though to require you to post your email address on a public message board, even if it is removed promptly.
After doing this, they decided that actually they need email access quite urgently, and didn't really want to be waiting an indefinite amount of time waiting (and hoping) for a hotmail staff member to unlock their account for them. So they decided to switch to the hotmail.co.uk account they had accidentally set up earlier. But when they tried to log in, this account was now blocked as well.
When we posted the message on the hotmail support board, we had ticked the checkbox to email any replies to their email address (i.e. the hotmail.co.uk email account that they'd set up accidentally). But now Hotmail had blocked that account, they couldn't see any replies. They tried logging in to their original hotmail.com account, but that was still blocked.
So I went back on the hotmail support message boards, and had to trawl through about 12 pages of new threads that had been started in the last half an hour from other people with similar problems until I found the post we'd made. The email address had been removed from the post, so I told them that someone from hotmail was most likely looking into it, and that was why their new hotmail.co.uk account had been blocked as well, while they re-instate the old hotmail.com account. But all they could do now was wait and see if the Hotmail staff do re-instate the old hotmail.com account or not.
I came back home and processed a couple more photos, did a backup, then went to bed.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Curry flavour Chicken Slice with Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Cheese Scone with Utterly Bullerly; Banana; Apple; Slice of Chocolate Cake that me and L made the other day; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Toad in the Hole; Mustard; Gravy; Green Beans; Carrots; Potatoes. Pudding was 2x Apple Pies heated in the Oven with Squirty Cream. Coffee.
Sunday 9 May 2010
Watching Films
Today my comp was just doing a scan of my not-working-properly hard drive. Since it was doing that, it meant that I couldn't go on my comp. So as well as going to Church, I just spent the rest of the day watching films with Mauser and Bo. We watched an episode of Star Trek TNG, Qvo Vadis (a bit long and boring really, but an alright story), Where is my friend's house (boring and not very good story really), and Soul Power (decent documentary with good music - I noticed that one of the cinematographers was one of the Maysles brothers).
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken Curry; Mixed Veg; Rice; Chapati. Pudding was some Ice Cream and a slice of Chocolate Cake that me and L made yesterday. Coffee.
Tea: 2x Cheese Scones with Utterly Bullerly; Satsuma; Slice of Chocolate Cake that me and L made yesterday.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken Curry; Mixed Veg; Rice; Chapati. Pudding was some Ice Cream and a slice of Chocolate Cake that me and L made yesterday. Coffee.
Tea: 2x Cheese Scones with Utterly Bullerly; Satsuma; Slice of Chocolate Cake that me and L made yesterday.
Saturday 8 May 2010
Metadataring and processing a few photos
Today I was mainly processing and sorting some photos that I'd taken recently. In the evening I also made some Chocolate Cake with L.
Friday 7 May 2010
Photo Processing
This morning I checked my comp, and the chkdsk on my broken disk had finished, and said it had corrected a few errors. So I restarted into normal windows (as I had been running chkdsk on the disk in safe mode), but then the disk still wasn't working (Windows Explorer would hang when I tried to access the disk).
So I switched the PC off to swap the disk with a working one. But when I came to swap the disks I noticed the PC was a bit dusty, so I cleaned it up a bit, which took quite a long time. I would use my rocket blower (for cleaning my camera) to blow the dust off / out of the various components, then mop the dust up with a duster. Then I'd use the blower again, and it would blow another load of dust off / out of the various components. So I just repeated this process many times until eventually not much dust was getting blown off / out of the components.
After swapping out the bad drive, I checked my email until lunch time. I'll probably set the bad drive to do a full format overnight, then try using it as a backup drive, to see if there is actually a physical problem with the drive or not (SMART showed okay, but SMART isn't very reliable). If it breaks again after formatting it, I'll know there's probably a problem with the actual drive.
After lunch I finished checking my email, then went down town to get some deodorant caps suitable for making steB style diffusers.
After that I checked my email again and wrote yesterday's blog post and today's blog post so far.
Someone wanted to download the full version of one of my photos, so I started working on a way to do it. First I had to add two tables to my database - one to store user details, and another to store what photos each user is allowed to download. I created the tables in MySQL Workbench, then exported the SQL for them.
But when I tried to enter the SQL into phpMyAdmin, I got an error 150. Googling this, I found this thread on the MySQL forums: ERROR 1005: Can't create table (errno: 150). Most of the replies are just people with the same problem, but the answer is in there - the error occurs when you have a type mismatch between the columns you are 'linking' with a foreign key. In my case I was using INT for both columns, but on my new table I had forgotten to set the column as UNSIGNED.
So I corrected the table structure in MySQL workbench, exported the SQL, then ran it in PHPMyAdmin again. But it still didn't work. I checked what had happened, and the problem was that one of the new tables had been created the first time I ran the query (before I changed the column to UNSIGNED). So I dropped that table and ran the query again, and now it worked okay.
Time was getting on, so I decided to just email the guy the photo, and quit working on a login system for the moment. There's not much point me working on my own login system if I can just use the Wordpress one instead.
In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and Mousetrap user "Bo".
Then I did more processing and metadataring of photos.
The weather was mostly overcast, though the clouds did break for a bit in the afternoon.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard and Seasonal Salad Mix Sandwich; 2x Satsumas; Exploded Chocolate Cup Cake with Chocolate Cake Covering in the crater; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: ½ Salmon Fishcake with Tomato Ketchup; Breaded Fish Portion; Salt; Ground Black Pepper; Mashed Potato; Peas. Pudding was an sliced Pear with Tinned Mandarin Segments and Coffee Custard. Exploded Chocolate Cup Cake with Chocolate Cake Covering in the crater; Coffee.
So I switched the PC off to swap the disk with a working one. But when I came to swap the disks I noticed the PC was a bit dusty, so I cleaned it up a bit, which took quite a long time. I would use my rocket blower (for cleaning my camera) to blow the dust off / out of the various components, then mop the dust up with a duster. Then I'd use the blower again, and it would blow another load of dust off / out of the various components. So I just repeated this process many times until eventually not much dust was getting blown off / out of the components.
After swapping out the bad drive, I checked my email until lunch time. I'll probably set the bad drive to do a full format overnight, then try using it as a backup drive, to see if there is actually a physical problem with the drive or not (SMART showed okay, but SMART isn't very reliable). If it breaks again after formatting it, I'll know there's probably a problem with the actual drive.
After lunch I finished checking my email, then went down town to get some deodorant caps suitable for making steB style diffusers.
After that I checked my email again and wrote yesterday's blog post and today's blog post so far.
Someone wanted to download the full version of one of my photos, so I started working on a way to do it. First I had to add two tables to my database - one to store user details, and another to store what photos each user is allowed to download. I created the tables in MySQL Workbench, then exported the SQL for them.
But when I tried to enter the SQL into phpMyAdmin, I got an error 150. Googling this, I found this thread on the MySQL forums: ERROR 1005: Can't create table (errno: 150). Most of the replies are just people with the same problem, but the answer is in there - the error occurs when you have a type mismatch between the columns you are 'linking' with a foreign key. In my case I was using INT for both columns, but on my new table I had forgotten to set the column as UNSIGNED.
So I corrected the table structure in MySQL workbench, exported the SQL, then ran it in PHPMyAdmin again. But it still didn't work. I checked what had happened, and the problem was that one of the new tables had been created the first time I ran the query (before I changed the column to UNSIGNED). So I dropped that table and ran the query again, and now it worked okay.
Time was getting on, so I decided to just email the guy the photo, and quit working on a login system for the moment. There's not much point me working on my own login system if I can just use the Wordpress one instead.
In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and Mousetrap user "Bo".
Then I did more processing and metadataring of photos.
The weather was mostly overcast, though the clouds did break for a bit in the afternoon.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard and Seasonal Salad Mix Sandwich; 2x Satsumas; Exploded Chocolate Cup Cake with Chocolate Cake Covering in the crater; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: ½ Salmon Fishcake with Tomato Ketchup; Breaded Fish Portion; Salt; Ground Black Pepper; Mashed Potato; Peas. Pudding was an sliced Pear with Tinned Mandarin Segments and Coffee Custard. Exploded Chocolate Cup Cake with Chocolate Cake Covering in the crater; Coffee.
Thursday 6 May 2010
Photo Processing and metadataring
This morning I disconnected my hard drive with all my Korea and Japan photos on, and it made my comp work okay again. So I tested my backup drives of the Korea and Japan photos. One seemed to be a bit slow at generating the thumbnails in Windows Explorer and the other one was okay.
So I put aside the one that didn't have any problems to replace the drive in the PC that was trashed.
The rest of the day I sorted and processed some photos I'd taken recently. In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L.
Before I went to bed I re-connected my broke hard drive, booted into safe mode, and started running
The weather was overcast in the morning, then brightened up in the evening. There were still some clouds around, they didn't get lit up that nicely from what I could see, but I suspect that the sunset was probably quite good if you could see the horizon where the sun set.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Maple and Pecan Crunch oat Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on Toasts; Alfresco style Salad; Seasonal Salad Mix; Satsuma; Coconut Macaroon; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: Slice of Bacon Quiche; Baked Beans; Chips; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was an exploded Chocolate Cup Cake with Melted Chocolate Cake Covering. Coffee.
So I put aside the one that didn't have any problems to replace the drive in the PC that was trashed.
The rest of the day I sorted and processed some photos I'd taken recently. In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L.
Before I went to bed I re-connected my broke hard drive, booted into safe mode, and started running
chkdsk /R on it.The weather was overcast in the morning, then brightened up in the evening. There were still some clouds around, they didn't get lit up that nicely from what I could see, but I suspect that the sunset was probably quite good if you could see the horizon where the sun set.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Maple and Pecan Crunch oat Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on Toasts; Alfresco style Salad; Seasonal Salad Mix; Satsuma; Coconut Macaroon; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: Slice of Bacon Quiche; Baked Beans; Chips; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was an exploded Chocolate Cup Cake with Melted Chocolate Cake Covering. Coffee.
Wednesday 5 May 2010
Walk and Photo website blogging
This morning I was going to go out on a walk with McRad, but then we had to wait for Clare to come back before we could leave, otherwise she wouldn't be able to get back in the house if she didn't have a key with her. While we were waiting I did some more work on writing a post for my photo website blog.
Unfortunately by the time Clare got back home the sky had started to cloud over, and by the time we got to where we were walking from, the sky had completely clouded over. I still took some photos on the walk, but they won't be very good with plain grey skies.
We had lunch when we got back, and then I did more work on the posts for my photo website blog for the rest of the day. In the evening I also watched Lost with Masuer and L. It's getting near the end now, so they killed off loads of main characters!
I also had some trouble with my computer, and I think that possibly there is something wrong with the drive that I've stored all my Korea and Japan photos on.
The weather started off overcast, then the clouds cleared a bit. It came over overcast again, and then was overcast the rest of the day.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Maple and Pecan Crunch oat Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard and Alfresco style Salad Sandwich; Cherry Tomato; Satsuma; Chocolate Caramel Wafer Biscuit; Cup o' tea; Smarties.
Dinner: Spaghetti; Bolognese sauce; Meatballs; Ground Black Pepper; Grated Parmesan Cheese. Pudding was a slice of Toffee Cheesecake. Coffee.
Unfortunately by the time Clare got back home the sky had started to cloud over, and by the time we got to where we were walking from, the sky had completely clouded over. I still took some photos on the walk, but they won't be very good with plain grey skies.
We had lunch when we got back, and then I did more work on the posts for my photo website blog for the rest of the day. In the evening I also watched Lost with Masuer and L. It's getting near the end now, so they killed off loads of main characters!
I also had some trouble with my computer, and I think that possibly there is something wrong with the drive that I've stored all my Korea and Japan photos on.
The weather started off overcast, then the clouds cleared a bit. It came over overcast again, and then was overcast the rest of the day.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Maple and Pecan Crunch oat Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham with Dijon Mustard and Alfresco style Salad Sandwich; Cherry Tomato; Satsuma; Chocolate Caramel Wafer Biscuit; Cup o' tea; Smarties.
Dinner: Spaghetti; Bolognese sauce; Meatballs; Ground Black Pepper; Grated Parmesan Cheese. Pudding was a slice of Toffee Cheesecake. Coffee.
Tuesday 4 May 2010
Photo Website Blogging
This morning I was doing a backup, but it was very slooow. It's weird, but it seems like when I backup my Korea and Japan photos drive, it goes really slow. I have two backup drives, and it is slow backing up to both of them. The backups used to be okay, and it seems unlikely that both drives would suddenly develop a fault at the same time, so I don't know why the backups have started being slow. Backup of my other drives still work okay.
My computer was also really slow while the backup was running, even though task manager didn't show high CPU or RAM usage. So while I was waiting for the backup to finish I read a bit more of John Shaw's Close-ups in Nature, and got up to date on The Luminous Landscape and Moose Peterson's blog.
I spent the rest of the day writing blog posts about our 2nd day in Korea, back in October last year, for my photo website.
In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and L. Jonathan Frakes suddenly has a beard (and no explanation is given as to why), Gates McFadden has been replaced with a new doctor (but for how long?), Michael Dorn now wears a golden shirt, Levar Burton has been promoted to chief engineer, and Colm Meaney was in it! There was also a bloke with a moustache where the camera zoomed into his skill face.
The weather was mostly sunny, though it clouded over later in the afternoon. It was pretty windy again.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Maple and Pecan Crunch oat Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Sliced Cumberland Sausage with Mayonnaise, Sliced Cherry Tomatoes, Shredded Carrot, Sliced Pepper, and Lettuce Sandwich; Apple; Slice of Chocolate Cereal Cake that Clare made a few days ago; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken & Mushroom Slice; Potatoes; Carrots; Peas; Sweetcorn. Pudding was a slice of Golden Syrup Cake with Golden Syrup and Custard. Coffee.
My computer was also really slow while the backup was running, even though task manager didn't show high CPU or RAM usage. So while I was waiting for the backup to finish I read a bit more of John Shaw's Close-ups in Nature, and got up to date on The Luminous Landscape and Moose Peterson's blog.
I spent the rest of the day writing blog posts about our 2nd day in Korea, back in October last year, for my photo website.
In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and L. Jonathan Frakes suddenly has a beard (and no explanation is given as to why), Gates McFadden has been replaced with a new doctor (but for how long?), Michael Dorn now wears a golden shirt, Levar Burton has been promoted to chief engineer, and Colm Meaney was in it! There was also a bloke with a moustache where the camera zoomed into his skill face.
The weather was mostly sunny, though it clouded over later in the afternoon. It was pretty windy again.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Maple and Pecan Crunch oat Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Sliced Cumberland Sausage with Mayonnaise, Sliced Cherry Tomatoes, Shredded Carrot, Sliced Pepper, and Lettuce Sandwich; Apple; Slice of Chocolate Cereal Cake that Clare made a few days ago; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken & Mushroom Slice; Potatoes; Carrots; Peas; Sweetcorn. Pudding was a slice of Golden Syrup Cake with Golden Syrup and Custard. Coffee.
Monday 3 May 2010
Photo Website Blogging
Today I just worked on the blog for my photo website.
In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek TNG. Unfortunately it was back to its boring old self.
The weather was mainly cloudy, with a bit of sun. It was very windy, with the wind also being quite cold. There were also a couple of short but very sharp showers, one of which was comprised mainly of hail.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: ½ Packet of Chilli flavour Doritos; Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich; Banana; Piece of Tiramisu; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Cumberland style Sausages; Mashed Potato; Baked Beans; Sliced Mushroom. Pudding was Rhubarb Crumble with Custard and Cream. Coffee.
In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek TNG. Unfortunately it was back to its boring old self.
The weather was mainly cloudy, with a bit of sun. It was very windy, with the wind also being quite cold. There were also a couple of short but very sharp showers, one of which was comprised mainly of hail.
Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: ½ Packet of Chilli flavour Doritos; Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich; Banana; Piece of Tiramisu; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 2x Cumberland style Sausages; Mashed Potato; Baked Beans; Sliced Mushroom. Pudding was Rhubarb Crumble with Custard and Cream. Coffee.
Sunday 2 May 2010
Poggin'
This morning I went to church as usual for a Sunday, and started cutting out pogs in Photoshop when I got back, as usual for a Sunday.
After dinner me, Mauser, L, and Clare watched an episode of Star Trek TNG and it was actually really good! It had Ray Harryhausen style Claymation and also a skill Alien style alien inside a bloke. The blokes head exploded in a comiclly skill style as well.
After that we watched some 1900's short films. I carried on cutting out Pogs in Photoshop, then I updated my Pog website.
After tea I watched Dezertir with Mauser, a communist propaganda film, and the first one with sound I think. I thought the sound was very well done - parts are often silent (save for the scratchy vinyl style background noise) then something happens, and the sudden loud noise enhances the impact. The close-ups and quick alternating cuts I also thought were well done, and certainly make a change from many other films. There was one part where the cuts were seizure inducing fast though.
One part I thought was done particularly well was where there is a policeman directing the traffic, and music is put to his movements, making it look like he is dancing.
The film was confusing in part though, with everybody speaking Russian, you start off thinking the film is set in Russia, until the workers start talking about how great the Soviet Union (which they are not part of) is. When some of the workers travel to Russia, they then start speaking German (and can no longer speak Russian), making it obvious that they are actually from Germany.
There is also a bit where someone gets run over, and someone else commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, but it is confusing who these characters are, and why they die (the one who gets run over appears to jump in front of the car as if he is commiting suicide either).
One thing I found interesting is that the workers in the Soviet Union have large spacious accommodation, a well decked out dining hall, and plenty of good food. Obviously this is propaganda, especially when compared to the conditions the film shows for the German workers, but since the film is in Russian, surely it was intended for Russians, who would know what their real working and living conditions are like?
The main problem with the film was that it was far too long and not much happens really (workers go on strike, police kill workers, worker who wasn't commited to the communist cause travels to the USSR, worker becomes commited to communsim, comes back to Germany, gets killed, the end). Most of the bit where the soviet workers are trying to produce diesel engines could be cut, and smaller cuts could also have been made elsewhere.
I also find it strange how many of these communist propaganda films end with all the communists being killed. I would have thought it would be better to have the communists killed near the start, then they could re-group and rally the people to the communist cause. Then the united people could beat the authorities and break free of oppression. This would show that by uniting under communisim revolution is possible.
Maybe since the films were made when the revolution had already occurred they didn't want to encourage the people to unite in case they decided to have a new revolution, against their communist leaders.
I also did a bit of work on my photo website blog posts in the evening.
The weather was mainly cloudy, with a bit of sun. It was very windy, with the wind also being quite cold.
Food
Breakfast: Tangerine Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 1½ Tortillas; Chicken with spicy sauce stuff; Sliced Mushroom; Sliced Pepper; Rice; Mediterranean style Salad. Pudding was a cake that Ben made (decorated) at Church and a slice of Chocolate Cereal Cake that Clare made the other day. Coffee.
Tea: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich; Slice of Fruit Cake that Helen Mills from Church made; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
After dinner me, Mauser, L, and Clare watched an episode of Star Trek TNG and it was actually really good! It had Ray Harryhausen style Claymation and also a skill Alien style alien inside a bloke. The blokes head exploded in a comiclly skill style as well.
After that we watched some 1900's short films. I carried on cutting out Pogs in Photoshop, then I updated my Pog website.
After tea I watched Dezertir with Mauser, a communist propaganda film, and the first one with sound I think. I thought the sound was very well done - parts are often silent (save for the scratchy vinyl style background noise) then something happens, and the sudden loud noise enhances the impact. The close-ups and quick alternating cuts I also thought were well done, and certainly make a change from many other films. There was one part where the cuts were seizure inducing fast though.
One part I thought was done particularly well was where there is a policeman directing the traffic, and music is put to his movements, making it look like he is dancing.
The film was confusing in part though, with everybody speaking Russian, you start off thinking the film is set in Russia, until the workers start talking about how great the Soviet Union (which they are not part of) is. When some of the workers travel to Russia, they then start speaking German (and can no longer speak Russian), making it obvious that they are actually from Germany.
There is also a bit where someone gets run over, and someone else commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, but it is confusing who these characters are, and why they die (the one who gets run over appears to jump in front of the car as if he is commiting suicide either).
One thing I found interesting is that the workers in the Soviet Union have large spacious accommodation, a well decked out dining hall, and plenty of good food. Obviously this is propaganda, especially when compared to the conditions the film shows for the German workers, but since the film is in Russian, surely it was intended for Russians, who would know what their real working and living conditions are like?
The main problem with the film was that it was far too long and not much happens really (workers go on strike, police kill workers, worker who wasn't commited to the communist cause travels to the USSR, worker becomes commited to communsim, comes back to Germany, gets killed, the end). Most of the bit where the soviet workers are trying to produce diesel engines could be cut, and smaller cuts could also have been made elsewhere.
I also find it strange how many of these communist propaganda films end with all the communists being killed. I would have thought it would be better to have the communists killed near the start, then they could re-group and rally the people to the communist cause. Then the united people could beat the authorities and break free of oppression. This would show that by uniting under communisim revolution is possible.
Maybe since the films were made when the revolution had already occurred they didn't want to encourage the people to unite in case they decided to have a new revolution, against their communist leaders.
I also did a bit of work on my photo website blog posts in the evening.
The weather was mainly cloudy, with a bit of sun. It was very windy, with the wind also being quite cold.
Food
Breakfast: Tangerine Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: 1½ Tortillas; Chicken with spicy sauce stuff; Sliced Mushroom; Sliced Pepper; Rice; Mediterranean style Salad. Pudding was a cake that Ben made (decorated) at Church and a slice of Chocolate Cereal Cake that Clare made the other day. Coffee.
Tea: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich; Slice of Fruit Cake that Helen Mills from Church made; Satsuma; Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Saturday 1 May 2010
Blah
This morning I checked my thread I had started yesterday on the FPP forums, and found I had two replies.
Hans suggested I could use mov files with loaderStreamed=1 in to display the tiles as they are loaded, while Harry suggested I could use a small preview image while the full tiles are loaded.
I checked both their examples, and liked Hans' best as it allows the user to navigate the pano even when it's only part loaded. Also I thought it might be possible that users would get confused if you use a preview image, and not realise its only the preview (so they might close the pano before the full version has loaded). I don't really have any basis for this assumption - the loading text (which counts up the % loaded) is still visible when you use a preview image, so it should be obvious that the full pano hasn't loaded yet, but you never can tell what users will do.
Anyway, I tried using a mov with 3x3 cube faces (generated in Pano2QTVR since PTGUI doesn't seem to support subtiling in movs), and with streaming enabled in FPP, and it worked quite well. It did load a bit slower than the plain cube faces, but the visual feedback being able to see the pano display as it loaded and being able to navigate it while it loaded, I thought outweighed the extra load time.
So I spent the morning and first bit of the afternoon converting all my panos that were already on the site into movs, and uploading these to the site. I went out on a walk with Mauser and L, just across the fields towards East Farndon, and then back down the road. We stopped in the field nearest Welland Park Road, and me and Mauser drank shots of tea while L swigged apple juice from a hip flask. I wonder if anyone else has ever found themselves in that situation before?
When we got back I added a couple more panos to the website.
After dinner I watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L, then watched 'Key Largo' with Mauser. It was alright, but a bit boring really.
Then I did some testing on displaying panos using a .mov file compared to jpeg cube faces. Although Hans' panos and the first one I tried on my site both loaded pretty fast using a .mov file with streaming enabled in FPP, I found that my latest panos seemed to be loading extremely slowly. The panos are quite large, so I wanted to check if it was just our internet connection being slow or if there was actually a problem with using .movs compared to separate cube faces.
I did 3 tests, for each test I ran the .mov version, then cleared the browser's cache, then ran the cube faces version, and cleared the cache again. I repeated this test 3 times altogether for each variation. The cube faces were 2000px and the .mov file used 1999px cube faces subdivided 3x3, both were using the same amount of JPEG compression - 75%. The mov weighed in at 3.34MB, while the cube faces at 3.35MB.
For timing I used a downloaded SWF stopwatch, which I just clicked start on after pressing enter in the browser's url bar to start loading the pano (I loaded the pano.swf file directly in the browser, no HTML). I stopped timing when the pano said it was 100% loaded.
First I compared a .mov pano using the movDecoder plugin with loaderStreamed=1 to one just using cube faces.
Next I did the same test, except I didn't clear the browser's cache (I send long expires headers for everything, so it should all be loaded from the browsers cache)
And lastly I tried removing loaderStreamed=1 from the .mov file
My guess is that using .movs only works well for smaller panos, it seemed quite often to get up to about 50% relatively quickly (though still slower than cube faces) and then really drag from there until 100%. I was surprised that removing the streaming didn't make much difference to the load time of the .mov.
So for the moment I have decided to go back to cube faces. I'm not sure how Hans gets his panos to load so well. My guess would be that he uses a smaller cube face size. The panos on his site still look great though.
The weather today was actually good in the morning, despite HFM saying that it was going to rain. It was sunny with nice cumulus clouds. In the afternoon it clouded over a bit more, then was overcast the rest of the day. It didn't rain at all though.
Food
Breakfast: Tangerine Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: ½ Ham with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich made with Bakery Bread; ½ Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich made with Bakery Bread; Honey Sandwich made with Bakery Bread; Grapes; Piece of Chocolate Cereal Cake; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Battered Fish Portion; Potatoes; Peas; Salt; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was 2x Oven heated Apple Pies with Cream. Coffee; Creme Egg.
Hans suggested I could use mov files with loaderStreamed=1 in to display the tiles as they are loaded, while Harry suggested I could use a small preview image while the full tiles are loaded.
I checked both their examples, and liked Hans' best as it allows the user to navigate the pano even when it's only part loaded. Also I thought it might be possible that users would get confused if you use a preview image, and not realise its only the preview (so they might close the pano before the full version has loaded). I don't really have any basis for this assumption - the loading text (which counts up the % loaded) is still visible when you use a preview image, so it should be obvious that the full pano hasn't loaded yet, but you never can tell what users will do.
Anyway, I tried using a mov with 3x3 cube faces (generated in Pano2QTVR since PTGUI doesn't seem to support subtiling in movs), and with streaming enabled in FPP, and it worked quite well. It did load a bit slower than the plain cube faces, but the visual feedback being able to see the pano display as it loaded and being able to navigate it while it loaded, I thought outweighed the extra load time.
So I spent the morning and first bit of the afternoon converting all my panos that were already on the site into movs, and uploading these to the site. I went out on a walk with Mauser and L, just across the fields towards East Farndon, and then back down the road. We stopped in the field nearest Welland Park Road, and me and Mauser drank shots of tea while L swigged apple juice from a hip flask. I wonder if anyone else has ever found themselves in that situation before?
When we got back I added a couple more panos to the website.
After dinner I watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L, then watched 'Key Largo' with Mauser. It was alright, but a bit boring really.
Then I did some testing on displaying panos using a .mov file compared to jpeg cube faces. Although Hans' panos and the first one I tried on my site both loaded pretty fast using a .mov file with streaming enabled in FPP, I found that my latest panos seemed to be loading extremely slowly. The panos are quite large, so I wanted to check if it was just our internet connection being slow or if there was actually a problem with using .movs compared to separate cube faces.
I did 3 tests, for each test I ran the .mov version, then cleared the browser's cache, then ran the cube faces version, and cleared the cache again. I repeated this test 3 times altogether for each variation. The cube faces were 2000px and the .mov file used 1999px cube faces subdivided 3x3, both were using the same amount of JPEG compression - 75%. The mov weighed in at 3.34MB, while the cube faces at 3.35MB.
For timing I used a downloaded SWF stopwatch, which I just clicked start on after pressing enter in the browser's url bar to start loading the pano (I loaded the pano.swf file directly in the browser, no HTML). I stopped timing when the pano said it was 100% loaded.
First I compared a .mov pano using the movDecoder plugin with loaderStreamed=1 to one just using cube faces.
| Mov | 1:34 | 1:16 | 01:38 |
|---|---|---|---|
| cube | 0:25 | 0:16 | 0:19 |
Next I did the same test, except I didn't clear the browser's cache (I send long expires headers for everything, so it should all be loaded from the browsers cache)
| Mov | 0:03 | 0:04 | 0:03 |
|---|---|---|---|
| cube | 0:01 | 0:01 | 0:01 |
And lastly I tried removing loaderStreamed=1 from the .mov file
| Mov | 0:56 | 1:40 | 1:22 |
|---|---|---|---|
| cube | 0:23 | 0:22 | 0:32 |
My guess is that using .movs only works well for smaller panos, it seemed quite often to get up to about 50% relatively quickly (though still slower than cube faces) and then really drag from there until 100%. I was surprised that removing the streaming didn't make much difference to the load time of the .mov.
So for the moment I have decided to go back to cube faces. I'm not sure how Hans gets his panos to load so well. My guess would be that he uses a smaller cube face size. The panos on his site still look great though.
The weather today was actually good in the morning, despite HFM saying that it was going to rain. It was sunny with nice cumulus clouds. In the afternoon it clouded over a bit more, then was overcast the rest of the day. It didn't rain at all though.
Food
Breakfast: Tangerine Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: ½ Ham with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich made with Bakery Bread; ½ Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Mediterranean style Salad Sandwich made with Bakery Bread; Honey Sandwich made with Bakery Bread; Grapes; Piece of Chocolate Cereal Cake; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Battered Fish Portion; Potatoes; Peas; Salt; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was 2x Oven heated Apple Pies with Cream. Coffee; Creme Egg.
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