A king head

I woke up with a bad headache this morning, so spent most of the morning in bed (taking paracaetamol / ibuprofen a couple of times).

In the afternoon I recovered a bit from the headache, but I had to wait in for a delivery, just so I could refuse it. (I ordered a new jacket from Sports Direct, plus a cheap shirt since I had to pay the postage costs for the jacket anyway. But then they cancelled the Jacket and just sent the shirt. When I emailed them to cancel the order, they said I should refuse the delivery, then they'll refund me when the item arrives back with them.)

When that was done, I went out to test some new IR filters I received recently. Unfortunately I didn't get to fully test them as a cloud rolled in front of the sun. Typical, as it had been sunny all the rest of the day.

After I had packed up my camera I found that actually I could have just waited for the cloud to pass. Although the sun was very low in the sky, it stayed above the horizon for quite a while after emerging from behind the cloud. Never mind, I did try out a different softening filter after the sun came out again.

Debugging in IE with Visual Web Developer: Breakpoint cannot be set in this location, the code in the document is not loaded

Today I was testing one of my websites in IE7, and had an error message popping up, saying there was a javascript error, and would I like to debug it. So I clicked Yes, but nothing happened.

I opened Visual Web Developer 2010 Express to start debugging from that, since there is no Developer Tools for debugging js in old versions of IE. I started debugging, loaded the page, and got the same message. Clicked OK to debug, but nothing happened still. In Visual Web Developer it had opened the js file where the error had occured, but it hadn't paused the script at all. I couldn't see any error at the line the error was occuring.

So I tried adding a breakpoint before where the error was occuring, but the breakpoint was a yellow outline of a circle with a small warning notice, rather than the usual filled red circle. Hovering the mouse over the breakpoint gave a tooltip that stated Breakpoint cannot be set in this location, the code in the document is not loaded. Strangely I couldn't set any breakpoints at all in this script file, they all gave the same result (and wouldn't be hit when running the page, yet the error caused by that script file was still occuring).

I found a list of suggested solutions here: ie8 javascript not running or loading. However, none of them helped. Eventually I had to try commenting out a block of js in the javascript file, refreshing and seeing if the error still occured. If not, comment out a smaller block to try and find exactly where the error was occuring.

After doing this I found what the issue was, and it was about where IE said it was (technically IE gave the correct line number, but I needed to look very carefully at the line above to spot the error). The problem was that I was declaring an object with various properties, but I had a trailing comma after the last property. So IE was being better than the other browsers by flagging this, and it was just a case of me not being able to spot the issue.

Cleaning up my eBay watch list

It's time to clean up my eBay watched items list again, so I thought I'd make a note of some of the high / low prices people paid for items:

• Canon EF 800 mm IS f/5.6 L Lens failed to sell for £3400 - this lens retails for about £10,000 new! They're not often on eBay, but I think around £5000 - £6000 is probably more the going 2nd hand price. I actually really wanted to buy this lens as it is such a good deal. But I can't really justify spending that much money on a lens I wouldn't be using constantly. It was later relisted and sold for £2,900! Condition was only used a couple of times for testing and warranty not registered. (Though I think you would need a retail receipt for the warranty, so that probably doesn't make any difference). No feedback has been left for the seller for this transaction though, so it's not possible to say if this was a real deal or not.
• Samyang 14mm f2.8 ED AS IF UMC Lens - CANON EF Fit with Filter Holder - Boxed sold for £202 - not a stunning deal, but pretty good. The lens by itself normally sells for around £200-250 2nd hand.
• A Canon FD 800mm f5.6 lens sold for £685.66. I guess that's a good price for a 800mm lens, even if it is manual focus.
• DE OUDE DELFT HOLLAND LENS Objektiv RAYXAR E65/1.0 sold for £27.85
• DE OUDE DELFT HOLLAND LENS Objektiv RAYXAR E50/0,75 sold for £83.94
• DE OUDE DELFT HOLLAND LENS Objektiv RAYXAR E65/0,75 sold for £63.54 (but was then relisted, so presumably the high bidder didn't pay. The second time it sold for £78.45.) As far as I'm aware there's no way to get 'usable' results with any of these lenses on a digital camera as they need to be positioned too close to the sensor.
• Samyang 14mm f2.8 ED AS IF UMC Lens - CANON EF Fit Boxed but no lens cap sold for £149. That's at least £50 under the normal price, maybe the lens cap costs £50? Or maybe bidders were put off by it having no lens cap, but the seller claiming it had only been used a couple of times. How could they have lost the lens cap with that amount of usage?
• CANON EF 50mm f1.0 50 1.0 with HOOD in VERY GOOD CONDITION was sold for £2,051. However, the buyer later left feedback saying Never received! Made some excuse up about breaking it!! No evidence, AVOID!!!!
• A Novoflex Castbal T-S Tilt & Shift Bellows with rail, right-angle bracket, and Nikon attachments sold for £225. This was Mint condition with original boxes and When bought as new... would cost well over £400.
• Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS II USM Lens Super telephoto sold for £5,577.35, that's right, nearly twice as much as the 800mm IS lens sold for.
• Novoflex 35mm/3.5 Noflexar Weitwinkel für Exa/Exakta sold for £44.72. Condition was D = Gebraucht und funktionsfähig. Die Linsen sind sauber, alle Ringe laufen, stark abgegriffen. (that's D = Used and functional. The lenses are clean, run all the rings, heavily worn.. It looks okay in the pictures, so I'm not sure what the problem was with the condition.
• A different copy of the Noflexar 35mm f/3.5 sold for £65.11. Yet a copy that had issues with the optics (soft images when viewed at 100%) sold for £77. Normally this lens sells for around £100.
• Canon soft focus 135mm lens hardly used (but looks like no box) sold for £81. That's pretty good for this lens, usually £100 - £150. Another lens I would really like but can't justify spending that much money on given how much I'd use it.
• Lensbaby Soft Focus Optic sold for £22. I wish I'd bid on that now. There was also another seller offering a few new ones for about £30 BIN. But I checked a few weeks ago and they'd now sold all their stock. :( Another one that was missing some of the aperture rings sold for £18 (BIN).
• tomodachi life Nintendo 3DS New and sealed sold for £31.50 despite only being £25 on Amazon at the time.
• An unusual item - CANON EF 400/2.8 L USM II mit ORIGINAL Madonna Signatur sold for £2,008.30
• Olympus OM Zuiko 18mm f3.5 sold for £485.15. That's not a really high or low price compared to the normal selling price. But it still seems a lot compared to similar modern lenses to me.
• NiSi GND8 100x150mm Square Reverse Nano Graduated Neutral Density Filter -MARKED sold for £9.50. This seems pretty good to me. The filter did have a scratch, but reverse split ND filters are pretty expensive.
• Very Rare Kuribayashi K.C Petri Orrikor 35mm f/3.5 lens - UV Transmission sold for £53

Adobe tricked me

Yesterday I was processing a pano. Then I spent quite a lot of time trying to write the description for it. There was a big building in the photo that I thought held a big float. So I spent some time researching, trying to find out what those big floats are called.

Then, after I had found the info and written it up, I found a blog post that contained an image of the park map where the pano was taken. This showed an image of a boat, not a float. So I then spent quite a while trying to figure out what it said.

The text was very small on the map photo. I could see in my pano the building had the same text on the edge of it. But in my photo the text was quite small, and some characters were partially or completely covered with leaves.

A further problem is that I'm rubbish at writing Chinese / Japanese characters, where the stroke order, direction, and number of strokes are all important for the MS IME to detect what character you're trying to write. But I did eventually manage to get a few of the characters correct, and with Google's help, managed to find the full name of the building.

When I'd finished writing the description, I went to add it to my photo, but the Adobe XMP FileInfo panel I use wasn't there, since I reinstalled Windows a week or so ago. I tried to find a backup of the panel file, but it seems I never made one.

I still had the source files for the panel, so it seemed I would need to compile it again. Looking at the Adobe website, it seems that CC 2014 uses a different method fr creating custom FileInfo panels to CC and CS6. But is Bridge CC or CC 2014? I tried installing one of the custom panels included with the CS6 XMP FileInfo SDK, but I could not get it to load.

Today I was continuing to try and solve this problem. It turned out that the issue was to with the location I was specifiying in the Flash Trust File. I had installed the panel to the already existing folder C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info\4.0\panels. But it seems that this is just a cheeky joke on Adobe's part by creating this folder. You actually have to install the panel to C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info Panels\4.0\panels.

Once I had figured this out and got the basic sample panel to load in Bridge's FileInfo, I tried to build my custom panel. But it wouldn't build. After a bit of working out what the problem was, I realised that the directory paths in the build.properties file need to use forward slashes as directory separators, not back slashes as windows uses. Quite confusing!

After solving that, the problem was now that it was Unable to locate tools.jar. It was looking for it in the jre directory, not jdk, so no wonder. The solution to this was to change the %JAVA_HOME% environment variable to explicitly point to the JDK directory. (Previously I just had it set to C:\Program Files\Java).

Well, hoo-ray my panel would build. But boo-ray, it wasn't showing up in Bridge. The answer - I needed a manifest.xml file for the panel. After doing this I could open the panel, but it would make Bridge freeze. I had to close the Bridge process from Task Manager to terminate it.

I tried building the basic sample panel to see if it was a problem with my panel. After correcting an error in the panel's code, which meant that the panel couldn't compile, I built the sample panel okay. But after adding it to the custom FileInfo panels folder, and opening Bridge, switching to the panel had the same effect - Bridge would crash and freeze.

I thought maybe this issue was the Flex project, now under Apache rather than Adobe, has had some changes made that make it incompatible with the old Adobe released Flex. So I downloaded the latest version of Flex from Adobe. After building the basic panel with that, I still got the same result.

So I tried using Flex 3 from Adobe (rather than Flex 4). And hey-ho, it worked! After some Googling, I came across this post from an Adobe employee, who does say that it needs the Flex 3 SDK to work, and won't work with Flex 4: Re: How to create a custom panel in the right way (without having an empty panel in the file info) ? A pity they couldn't be bothered to include that information in the XMP FileInfo panel SDK documentation.

With that done, all I had to do was copy over the XMP FileInfo settings (which I had backed up). Strangely these do go in a Custom File Info folder that had already been created, you don't have to create a new Custom File Info Panels folder for them. Maybe Adobe did this just to make it all as confusing as possible. Thankfully this was quite painless, and when I opened Bridge again, all my keywords were there (I also copied over the Bridge settings, which are separate to the XMP settings), and my custom FileInfo panel had all its data there too.

So, it's probably taken over a day's worth of work just to research the description and then be able to add it to my image.

Quoting something a spider makes (Websiting)

So, what have I been doing lately no-one is wondering. Well, no-one, I'll tell you:

On Sunday I wrote an article for my photo tips website.

On Monday I did some work on my pano website and made some Eccles Cakes.

On Tuesday I was mainly just working on my pano website.

Today (Wednesday) I was again working on my pano website. Quite a bit of time was spent just waiting for the various android SDK packages to download so I could test my site in the android emulator. I also made some Choux buns.

Sculping

Yesterday I was still working on the article for my photo tips website, recording some videos for it and inserting all the images, then proof-redaing it when it was finished.

I had some trouble recording the videos as at first my microphone seemed not to be working. Then I realised that actually no sound at all was working. I had to reinstall the drivers for my sound card. I'm not sure why they didn't work the first time. Possibly they did work then windows update installed some not working ones. Any way, at least it is working now.

This morning I prepared my pog website update and watched a couple of photography business related videos.

Most of the afternoon was spent checking my emails. I also updated the resizing embedded youtube videos javascript I worked on the other day. The issue was that I was firing it on the window's resize event, with no throttling. Now I've throttled it, so it will only run once every 250ms while window is resized.

In the evening I listed to Wilhelm Challenger and did some sculpey with Billy. (Well Billy actually did painting). I was working on a frog that I'll do for HAH. Making the colours took quite a long time. Then I needed to make the model. And after that I had to make another one and take photos of the process for the instruction leaflet.

Not Blogging

I think I ought to start blogging more often again. I often wonder where my time has disappeared to, and if I record what I've been doing in my blog, then at least I'll know.

Monday this week I was fixing some website stuff.

Yesterday (Tuesday) in the morning I went down town to post an ebay item (my old broken sandisk ssd) and try to get a christmas present for Mauser. In the afternoon and evening I prepared Mauser's present package, researched the postage costs, purchased and filled out all the related postage stuff, and started work on an article for my photo tips website.

The vast majority of today I was working on the article I started yesterday. In the morning I went out to try and get some photos to work on for it. I had to install Photoshop Elements trial, which took ages to download and then quite a long time to install.

In the afternoon I also made some Japanese Scotch Eggs. But I cooked the egg a bit too much so the yolk wasn't gooey, and I didn't actually like the flavour of the meat much either.

In the evening I watched an episode of Power Rangers with Billy and played a few online Mario Kart races. Then the rest of the evening was spent working on my article. I'll have to try and finish it off tomorrow.

Fixing setAttribute(...) is undefined error when setAttribute actually is defined

I was fixing up some website issues today. One of the problems was with a page that contained a youtube video. Because Youtube uses static sizing on their embed codes, the video was breaking out of the page on small screen sizes. I found a solution to this issue here: Fluid Width Video.

The site this was for uses plain js rather than jQuery, so I re-wrote the solution given in the CSS Tricks article. However, when I ran it, I recieved the following error:

TypeError: vid.setAttribute(...) is undefined

Yet I could go into the console and run vid.setAttribute (with the script paused where the error occured) with no problem. After much head scratching I finally decided to try the page in Chrome, rather than FireFox, which is what I was using. And I now saw what the real problem was - Chrome did not report that .setAttribute was undefined, but rather that .removeAttribute was not defined, which was the line below. Firefox (Firebug) was confusingly throwing the error a line early.

I was trying to use chaining, but setAttribute does not return the element you are calling it from. So you can't use chaining with it. The lesson - if the debug info in one browser doesn't make sense, try another.