Rusty's blog

Working on an article

2012-02-17T22:52:00.001Z

I spent most of today working an article for my photo tips website.

Before lunch I also cleaned the bird feeders. After lunch I topped up the pond.

In the evening I watched Once Upon A Time in China 2 with Mauser and Bo. It was quite good, and surprisingly Communist propaganda-fied. I had thought that the communists would have been anti the revolution, since it put in place the government they fought against. But after reading wikipedia, it seems that actually the revolution was done with good intentions, and the main leader seems quite communist. But the revolutionaries agreed to allow an ex-Qing general to be president if he forced the emperor to abdicate, and things went downhill from there.

The film was both pro-revolution and anti religion, which were the things that made it seem like communist propaganda to me. It is much more an entertainment film than a propaganda film though.

Smashing

2012-02-16T22:23:00.001Z

This morning and for the first part of the afternoon I was trying to do some product photos for a review for my photo website blog. For one of the shots, I was trying to photograph the item on glass with a light on the background behind it. (The positioning of the object meant you could photograph it standing up on a surface like you would with a normal product photo).

Unfortunately, the glass slipped off the stools I had it balanced between, smashed, and also damaged the mount board I was using as the background. So I had spend a while clearing the mess up.

From Rusty's blog

For the rest of the afternoon I made a couple of cakes with L. We had two egg yolks in the fridge left over from making a Lemon cake a few days ago. So I had been looking for recipes that use egg yolks, and found one that needed three egg yolks. But when I got the egg yolks out of the fridge, they didn't look that great.

So rather than risk it, we threw them away and used yolks from three new eggs. But then that meant that we now had three egg whites. So L found a recipe that used egg whites. I think it was meant to come out similar to angel cake. But actually it came out very flat, so we decided to change it to a giant Jaffa Cake recipe.

But we don't have any orange marmalade, so actually it will be a giant Strawberry cake.

In the evening I watched The Soviet Story. It was quite good, but the way it was filmed, and especially how it was narrated, made it seem like some badly done propaganda. After that I watched the last part of Everything is a remix:

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Various

2012-02-14T22:37:00.001Z

The other day I copied the GPS tracklog for a walk I'd done to my PC, and saw there was another tracklog saved on the GPS as well. It was from when I'd put my GPS on and then decided not to go out. But I forgot to switch the GPS off, and just left it in my bag. Despite being still all the time it was switched on, the tracklog shows quite a bit of movement. Here's a close-up of some of the tracklog:

This morning I was working on an article for my photo tips website. I wrote the main points for the article yesterday evening, but it still took me all morning to flesh them out to a full article.

In the afternoon I did a bit more work on my ebay wordpress plugin, and on recipes for my recipe website. After that I tried to find if an image was causing Windows Movie Maker to crash.

In the evening I watched the last episode of season 1 of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. After that I finished off my flash stencil thing. Then I started writing a blog post for my photo website.

Making a cake and watching football

2012-02-12T22:51:00.001Z

This morning I started preparing my pog website update, then went to Church.

After Church I cooked dinner, then me, Mauser, and Bo watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise. I updated my pog website, then me and L made a cake.

In the evening I watched the African Cup final, which was quite a good match. It was Zambia vs. Cote d'Ivoire, and Zambia ended up winning 8-7 on penalties (the match finished 0-0 after extra time).

Annoyingly I didn't get to finish the descriptions or upload my panos today. So although I'd finished processing them yesterday, they will now have to wait until at least tomorrow before I can put them on the web.

Pano processing

2012-02-11T22:12:00.002Z

This morning there was a really nice hoar frost covering everything. But I got up quite late (about 8am), and by the time I'd had my breakfast, done the washing, taken a few photos in the garden, and put food out for the birds, the frost had started to melt.

So I decided that rather go out and take photos of trees covered in half melted frost, I'd stay in and work on processing the panos I took yesterday. It's kind of annoying because the same panos I took yesterday would look a lot better if I'd taken them this morning. As well as the hoar frost making the trees look much nicer today, the sun was also clearer rather than shining through hazy clouds. (Sun shining through hazy clouds usually just results in a large lump of sky being blown out white in the photo).

In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo and played on Secret of Mana with them.

I managed to finish processing the panos I took yesterday, but I haven't finished doing the descriptions for them all.

Going on a snowy walk

2012-02-10T22:16:00.001Z

It snowed a couple of inches overnight, so before breakfast I went out in the garden to feed the birds. Mrs blackbird swooped down, first landing on top of the bird table roof, and then moving to the washing line, squawking like GIMME SOME FOOD!. I did throw some food towards her, but she wouldn't actually eat anything until I went back inside.

I put out some general bird seed, and also some mealworms and sultanas. I think the blackbirds prefer the mealworms and sultanas, while the sparrows prefer the seed.

The weather was sunny (well sunny and cloudy) this morning, so I went out on a walk. On part of the walk I saw there was a manure pile with lots of birds on it. There must have been about 20 robins, 5 dunnocks, and a few black birds.

I got as close as I could (it was on the other side of a fence. Unfortunately the longest lens I had with me was my canon 100mm macro, which was too short. So I didn't get any good photos, but I did enjoy watching the birds for a bit.

Just as I was taking a photo of a Robin, he jumped away. Despite the camera using a shutter speed of 1/400s, the Robin is still quite visibly blurred in the photo. So they must jump pretty fast. This is an extremely heavy crop:

This Robin (on the left) had an interesting breast, much whiter than the other Robins, and with dark streaks:

And here is a Dunnock:

The birds were eating insects from the manure. I did wait around for quite a while hoping that a bird would land on a post next to where I was standing, but they never got very near me. A 500mm lens might have been okay to get some reasonable shots.

In the afternoon I sorted and geo-coded the morning's photos.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. I read some photo websites and started processing one of today's panos.

Pano processing

2012-02-09T21:36:00.001Z

This morning I did some recipe website work. Then I checked my flickr and found someone has added me as a contact. I checked their photostream / profile and they have plenty of good photos and seem to be interested in the same things as me, so I added them as a contact as well.

Looking at their photos, I found this Extension tube hack for reversed lenses. I had seen such a hack previously and was hoping to do the same someday so I could have an MP-E equivalent in Nikon mount. (Reversed 18-55 lens with extension tube hack).

But reading the comments on that page, they pointed out that the aperture is mechanically controlled in Nikon lenses. I had forgotten that, and that fact would make doing the extension hack pointless for me. The only reason I wanted to do it was so that I could shoot with the lens wide open for focusing, and then the camera automatically stops it down when taking the photo.

The hack would probably work with aperture control for canon lenses, but since I already have the MP-E and don't have any canon extension tubes, I'm in no hurry to try it.

The rest of the day I processed a couple of Scotland panos.

Here's a rubbish picture I drew to check the pressure sensitivity of my wacom tablet was working. (Often it doesn't work in Photoshop when I first plug it in and I have to restart Photoshop, and sometimes even then it doesn't work. So I always test it before opening large files rather than opening the file only to find I have to close it again because the pressure sensitivity isn't working.)

Trying to make a video

2012-02-07T21:20:00.001Z

This morning I was happy to find that Photoshop had finally finished exporting the animation / video it had been processing for much of yesterday and overnight. Unfortunately, there was no video file on the Desktop (where I had told it to save), so I assumed that it had just given up / broken.

So I tried Adobe Premiere to see if that would work. It took ages to import the images, then after that there didn't seem to be any easy way to add all the images to the timeline and change the total speed of the whole thing.

Next I tried Windows Movie Maker. This loaded all the files, let me choose the duration of each image, and wasn't super slow! But when it came to exporting the clip, I clicked to change the export settings, and it crashed. The 'More Information' link brought me to a Windows Live Movie Maker support forum thread, which requested that people include certain logs and reply with them as a private message.

Then, when I was preparing all the logs needed for the Windows Live Movie Maker error report, I found that actually Photoshop had saved the video okay afterall. For some reason the file was not visible on the Desktop, but was visible if you browsed to the Desktop in Windows Explorer.

By this time I'd already all the necessary crash report logs for Windows Live Movie Maker, so I thought I should post them to the forum. But, there didn't seem to actually be any way to send a private message, so I just posted asking how to send a private message.

I did some more work on the article I was doing the video for, and found that I needed another video, this time a screen capture video. So I shot the video using Wondershare Demo Creator and used my Olympus LS-5 to record the sound. But when I reviewed the video, the cursor appeared as an hourglass whenever I was in Windows Explorer, which was no good.

I have had this problem with Wondershare Demo Creator before, when recording a video of me using Photoshop. The problem then was only existent in Photoshop x64, in the 32 bit version the cursor appeared properly in the video. So I thought that maybe Wondershare Demo Creator just always shows the cursor as an hourglass when recording activity in any 64 bit program.

I tried finding a 32 bit version of Explorer. Instructions I found on the web said that the 64 bit version is C:/Windows/explorer.exe, while the 32 bit version is C:\Windows\SysWOW64\explorer.exe. It doesn't make sense to me that a 32 bit version would be in the SysWOW64 folder, but that's what the instructions said. Unfortunately, neither one made any difference, and Wondershare Demo Creator would still record the mouse cursor as an hourglass when using them.

I did try searching windows for files names explor, there are quite a few explorer.exe files stored there. The explorer.exe files stored in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ and C:/Windows/ were both different sizes. And all the other explorer.exes the search found were the same size as one or the other. So probably one is a 32 bit version and one is a 64 bit version. It's just that Wondershare Demo Creator didn't like either of them.

So I tried finding a different screen recording program. I found one recommended called screencast, which I have used before and not found much good. However, I thought it might be improved, and so might as well give it a try.

I downloaded it, and on first try it played back the recording really fast. After a couple more tries I got the speed recording at real time. I tried putting the recorded clip into Adobe Premiere, but it got really messed up and full of strange artefacts.

So I tried a few more different settings in screencast, one became really strange colours when put into Premiere, and another resulted in footage that kept jumping back and repeating itself every second or so. In the end I did get some reasonable footage out of it by recording at 50fps and using the Cinepak codec. Even at 50fps though, the footage seems quite jumpy, more like 10fps or something.

All this recording and testing took most of the afternoon.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mausre and Bo, then wrote this blog post.

The rest of the evening I looked at places to visit in Ukraine.

Waiting

2012-02-06T21:47:00.001Z

Most of today I have just been waiting for my computer to process a video. Very annoying as it makes the computer slow I can't seem to copy / paste files from the desktop while it is working.

In the morning I also made an orange and cinnamon fruit cake. in the evening I watched an episode of Trek and a Western called Ride Lonesome with Mauser and Bo.

Finally getting some snow

2012-02-04T22:25:00.000Z

This morning I was just getting my pog website update ready for tomorrow.

In the afternoon I wrote a blog post comparing some image resize programs for my photo website.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. After that I did some flash stencil making with Bo while Mauser did some painting.

In the afternoon it started snowing here, though only very lightly. We hadn't really had any snow so far this winter. Then later in the evening it started to snow more heavily.

At about 10pm it looked like this outside:

Setting a set amount of time for each task trial

2012-02-02T21:59:00.000Z

Today I decided to try making a set list of tasks and times to do them for the day. I didn't think it would make me any more productive than usual, but I have seen it suggested in a lot of places. So thought I should at least give it a try.

I can't say that it made me any more productive than usual, but possibly it did. Most of the tasks took longer than I had anticipated. I didn't over-run the time limit I had set, but rather left them unfinished and took a break / went on to the next task.

I will try the same thing again tomorrow, and since I didn't finish most of the tasks, tomorrow's list looks much like today's. I think that doing different tasks throughout the day rather than doing one single task for a long time until you finish it helps to alleviate boredom somewhat.

I used a kitchen timer for timing each task. I think the loud ticking sound does help to keep you concentrating on the task at hand, rather than letting your mind wander. But when you are trying to think, the sound can be distracting.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. Then I tried setting up Blog Content Buddy (yes, that's an affiliate link) on one of my domains.

It took me ages just to get the wordpress site active. The problem was that when I tried to login, it would just return me to the login screen. Eventually I found the problem was that the new blog domain name needed adding to a domain mapping table in the wordpress database.

On the front page of the Blog Content Buddy website it says:

Got a few WordPress blogs or domain names that you've been neglecting?
Our plug-in posts well optimized, highly-unique content (not the usual garbage) to your blogs.
Search engines love our unique content - which includes your affiliate links that turn clicks into cash!

But when I had signed up to the system, I got through to their training, which indicates that you actually need to write quite a few blog posts and do quite a bit of work yourself. So it's not actually something you can just quickly throw up on a spare domain you have.

Various

2012-01-29T22:31:00.000Z

This morning I updated my pog website, then went to Church.

In the afternoon I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. We did some laminatating and started to make some new flash stencil things.

In the evening we played on Secret of Mana and watched Jurassic Park.

Here are some pics of the Yoshi Electron and Yoshi models I made a week or so ago:

Various

2012-01-28T22:41:00.001Z

This morning I prepared the images for updating my pog website tomorrow. I also tried some more to find detailed boundary data for civil parishes or towns and villages in Scotland, but couldn't find anything. I finished writing the descriptions for the two Scotland panos I processed yesterday, and started uploading some older panos to 360cities.net as well.

In the afternoon I uploaded the panos to my websites, went on a walk with McRad, Mauser, and Bo, and made some Parkin. I finished my image of Bruno Mars as well:

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Biddle Bertie and Digital Bertie. The 360cities panos had all uploaded, so I had to do the descriptions etc. for them.

Waiting

2012-01-27T23:09:00.002Z

This morning I put together the video of Yoshi Electron taking away Sir Fred Goodwin's Knight hood. I did the photos a couple of days ago, but made them into the video with titles etc. today.

In the afternoon I processed a couple of Scotland panos.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo, then did Sculpey with them. I also looked to try and get boundary info for Scottish Civil Parishes. Unfortunately the OS Civil Parishes boundary shape files only seem to cover England.

Article writing

2012-01-25T22:37:00.001Z

I spent most of today writing a blog post for my photo tips website.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. Then the rest of the evening I did photos of YE and Yoshi.

Windows batch scripting

2012-01-24T22:05:00.001Z

I spent most of today trying to write a windows batch file to work with ImageMagick to create the process the images for the slit scan style turntable photo.

I found a reasonably good tutorial on Windows batch script writing here: Win32 Shell Scripting Tutorial. However, it didn't cover everything I needed. One of the things was that a command line variable was always quoted, so when I used it in a string, the string looked like this for example:

echo Hello %1 Bye
Hello "This is the contents of a variable that was set on the command line" Bye

I found a solution here: Remove quotes from named environement variables in Windows scripts, but then found that actually when passing the variable to a command, it didn't mind that the variable was enclosed in quotes anyway, e.g.

convert "%%i" -quiet -crop 0x%i%+0+!offset! %1/files/%%~nxi

Worked fine

Next I found that my %offset% variable wasn't updating in a loop. Eventually I found the answer to that here: Why That Batch For Loop Isn’t Working. It turns out that if you want to get the current value of a variable updated in a loop, you need to specify setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion before the loop, and then access the variable using ! exclamation marks instead of % percent signs, e.g. !offset! instead of %offset%.

Another thing was how to store the output of a command in a variable. In bash, you do this using backticks. For windows batch scripting, I found the answer here: Batch equivalent of Bash backticks. So for getting the height of an image into a variable, I had to do this:

FOR /F %%x IN ('identify -quiet -format "%%h" "%%i"') DO SET /A height=%%x

There were numerous other problems I had, but I can't specify them all here.

Slit scan turntabling

2012-01-23T22:36:00.003Z

This morning I was getting ready to try some slit scan style turntable photography, but then my memory card wouldn't work. The camera said it had a write error, so I switched it off and on again. Then it said that the card was write protected.

I tried moving the write protect tab on the card, doing a full format and quick format on the PC, etc. but nothing seemed to work. So I checked the manufacturer's website, which had an RMA form, but the form was in French with a French address.

I tried to find the original packaging for the memory card, in case it had an English RMA address on it, or anyway it may be needed to return the packaging for an RMA. But I couldn't find the packing, I think I must have thrown it away.

Doing some googling, I came across some advice SD reader (disk write protected), which says to place tape over the write protect switch area on the card. Before doing this, I thought I better check a different SD card before putting tape on the card and possibly voiding the warranty.

So I tried a different SD card in the camera, but the camera said this card was write protected as well. I hadn't tried a different card earlier as the problem card would come up with 'format couldn't be completed' (or similar) message when I formatted it in Windows, indicating the problem was with the card.

However, with this new information that the camera may actually be at fault, I googled for info on this problem. I found a suggestion in this thread: card write protected on new canon eos 450d

I've not experienced this problem myself but I know someone who has and they were able to fix it very easily and this is what they did.
If you look inside the slot for the SD card you should see a little micro switch which is what detects the position of the write protect slot on the card itself. His was stuck in the on position the whole time but he found that with the use of a small screwdriver he could just tap the micro switch and it pinged back into the off position where it should be normally and from then on it worked perfectly and has never caused him a problem since. Essentially it had just got temporarily stuck and just needed a little tap to free itself.
Now obviously you do this at your own risk and you may very well not want to stick anything inside the SD slot of your new camera and I dare say that if you did and the company found out that this is what you had done that they wouldn't give you a refund so I'll leave it up to you to decide if it's worth the risk or not.

My 450D is out of warranty, so I took the battery out for a few minutes, and also tried poking (with a wire) the side of the SD card slot where a write protect slot detector would be located. I didn't hear or see any micro switch pinging back into place, but after replacing the battery the camera now works again.

Most of the rest of the day I worked on doing the slit scan style turntable photography.

In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo, then made a Knight hood for Fred Goodwin and did nothing for most of the evening.

Various

2012-01-22T22:24:00.000Z

This morning I went to Church, it was a churches together service at St. Dionysius. Near the start of the service someone fainted (I think), then there was a paramedic there most of the service. I don't know what happened, but it seemed a bit strange how you couldn't see the person (presumably they were lying on the floor or the pew), but they didn't take them out to an ambulance or anything.

I also updated my pog website in the morning.

In the afternoon I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo, then read byThom and the Luminous Landscape. I made a Google plus page for my pog website, and added a link for it to the website.

In the evening I watched an episode of NHK Let's Learn Japanese with Mauser and Bo, it was the final episode of series 1. After that I started looking into why my wordpress ebay plugin wasn't getting links based on the correct locale from the visitor's IP address. I didn't get very far with that, then did some more sculpey / plasticine with L and Mauser.

I finished Yoshi, so now I need to do some better photos of Yoshi and Yoshi Electron, and then try and make Yoshi Electron sit on Yoshi.

Various

2012-01-21T22:42:00.001Z

I spent most of this morning trying to get some text to print out in a specific place on an A6 card for Clare. Unfortunately, while the Lexmark printer software would let you choose A6 or a custom paper size for printing, when you pressed OK it would go back to A4. Very annoying.

McRad suggested trying making an A4 document with the printing bit in the correct place, and then putting the A6 card on the right of the paper feed tray set to A4. But this didn't work as the card was only gripped by one roller, and so twisted as it went through the printer, so the printing was all messed up.

I also cut out some pogs in Photoshop for my website update tomorrow.

Most of the afternoon I wrote a blog post for my photo website about the LS-5 Clare and McMauser got me for my birthday.

In the evening I watched an episode of Bouken Rangers with Belly, then watched David Robots (NHK Let's Learn Japanese) with Mauser and Bo. After that we did sculpey / plasticine and I started work on my Yoshi plasticine model. So far I've done most of the body, but no feet, hands, saddle bit, neck spikes, or eye whites.

various

2012-01-20T23:14:00.001Z

Today I spent quite a while uploading a photo to various photo sharing websites. It's amazing how long it takes. The problem is that different sites use different formatting for specifying links, and I like to always include a link back to my website(s). Also, most don't pull the image description and keywords from the exif, so I have to copy and paste them manually. Some websites also use different formatting for keywords e.g. space separated instead of comma separated, which also makes more work.

In the evening I watched the rest of A.I. with Mauser and Bo, did some sculpey with them (I just made an armature for Yoshi), and took some more photos of my sound recorder.

This is Mauser's Michael Rosen, the original Lenin body, and a capitalist pig that L made with a swan that I think Clare made on his back.

Here is Yoshi Electron leaning back on the sculpey box, on the table you can see a bit of wire for the Yoshi armature I was making today.

I probably did some other stuff today as well, but I can't remember now.

Website health checking

2012-01-12T22:34:00.001Z

Yesterday and the morning I was checking awstats, google webmaster tools, and bing webmaster tools for my websites, to see if there were any issues that needing addressing (there was). Unfortunately I still haven't finished this yet.

In the afternoon today I went into town to test my Olympus LS-5, then went on a walk through Farndon fields on my way back home. Farndon fields looked like there were quite a few places that might be good to take a pano and document the development there, so I went back out at 3pm hoping for a warmer light near sunset.

Unfortunately, the sun was behind some clouds, and the clouds didn't really get lit up nicely. They just filtered and diffused the light so there was no shadows. Good for portrait photography, but not what I wanted. I had checked the weather.co.uk website, which said sunset was at 4.15pm, and I knew that the other day the sunset reached peak about 4.25pm. So I walked really slowly around a field, and kept stopping, to at least wait until 4.25pm in the hope the sunset might improve.

About 4.20pm I arrived back at some puddles I thought would look nice with a reflection of a good sunset in them, but the sunset still wasn't great. There was a nice purple cloud in a Z shape near the horizon, but you would really have needed a longer lens e.g. 50mm+ probably to enlarge it enough to make a meaningful photo. And I only had my fisheye lens.

To the east though, there were thinnish clouds on the horizon that were purple, again they didn't go up very high from the horizon though. I thought that I might as well take a pano by some trees there anyway. Then when I had finished that, the sunset got a lot better, with the sky around the horizon becoming more of a purple colour. So I took a pano by the puddle, though my boots made lots of marks in the mud there.

Then the clouds by the horizon became a much deeper purple. Again, it would have been best with a longer lens, and probably also in landscape orientation. I'll have to remember to bring my 50mm lens and a ball head next time, though of course today it would have meant having to carry more weight around for an hour while I was just waiting for the sunset to get nice.

In the evening I made some Eccles cakes, then finished watching the film 'Shane' with Mauser, Bo, and Clare.

Article writing

2012-01-10T23:01:00.001Z

Yesterday and today I have been mostly writing an article for my photo tips website (and finding relevant images to illustrate it).

Also today I watched this cool video from DigitalRev where they get Chase Jarvis to do a shoot with a lego camera:

I thought the Oly m4/3 Pen photos he took looked pretty good for such a small camera.

Then I found out that Canon has announced the G1X large sensor compact, and Fuji has also announced their interchangeable lens mirrorless camera. I have to say that the G1X looks a bit bulky, and 28mm starting point of the lens puts me off. The Fuji also looks quite bulky, but mainly the price would put me off that model, around $1700, with lenses in the $650 region.

In the evening I watched another episode of NHK Let's learn Japanese with Mauser and Bo, then made an armature for Yoshi Electron. I spent most of the rest of the evening looking for train prices to London and shops in London that sell Newplast as Mauser said we should go to London. In the end he changed his mind, so I just bought it online. We also need some more milliput, Mauser put a bid in on an auction for 5 packs, so we will have to wait and see if he is outbid, and if so then just buy a single pack.

For the rest of the evening I was looking at autumn photos to try and plan when to take our Ukraine holiday.

Task listing

2012-01-08T22:33:00.002Z

This morning I updated my pog website, started going through a backlog of emails I hadn't read yet, and went to Church.

In the afternoon I finished going through my emails, and one of them said that people who set goals do much better. This is an old thing I've heard many times before, but this time they said a study had been done whose results backed this up (and disproved some other theories).

I already have a task list and To do lists for a couple of my websites, each task is essentially the same as a 'goal', so I took most of the tasks in my task list, and split them up for each website / thing to do. So I still have just as many tasks to do, but my task list looks much cleaner as I just put a 'link' to the text file containing the subtasks for that thing.

I don't set dates to have things done by as often things seem to take ages when you think they won't take long, or something else pops up that you have to do that prevents you from completing a task on time. Also, rather than spending a set amount of time on one task, and then moving onto the next, I think that if you are 'on a roll', it is better to keep on with what you're doing.

E.g. If I was debugging something, it's generally best to continue until you find the problem. If I stopped after a set period of time, moved onto something else, and then picked it up again the next day, I probably would have forgotten the different things I'd tried and where I'd got to in the debugging process.

In the late afternoon and evening I started writing another article for my photo tips website. In the evening I also watched a learn Japanese program, 'NHK Let's Learn Japanese' I think it was. It was even more maniacal than Yan Sama! I guess it goes to show that 80s language learning programs are the best (I mean the best out of all TV programs, not just language learning programs).

After that we did a Chinese lesson, but we couldn't pause it, so didn't learn anything. And while we were doing that (and for a good while after it had finished), we did sculpey. I made a Yoshi Electron head, I had to use the handle of a paintbrush for tooling it as I didn't have any other tools available, so it was quite difficult.

Article writing

2012-01-07T22:39:00.003Z

Today I was mainly writing an article for my photo tips website. Amazingly, I managed to get it finished by the afternoon. After that I went out on a short walk with McRad, Mauser, and Bo. I checked a few emails, then it was dinner time.

After dinner I checked a few more emails, then made a fimo owl using the instructions in L's Polymer techniques book. It is one of the things to do at the Holiday at Home thing I will be doing.

Me, Masuer, and L went to see K.K., I typed this blog post, then I'm going to bed in a few minutes.

Adding sound to a pano

2012-01-06T22:58:00.001Z

Yesterday evening I took a pano, and then processed it the same evening, including adding all necessary metadata, which I think must be a record for me. However, this was my first pano where I recorded sound for it, so despite having the pano ready to upload yesterday, I had to spend most of today trying to work out how to get the audio for the pano to work.

The first problem was that the audio had some stutters (I need to look into why, I think maybe auto levelling was switched on), and it also needed converting into a loop. I created a new multi track file in Adobe Soundbooth, then cut the audio at the points where the stutters were. I then arranged the sections for a small overlap between each, spreading them over two tracks, fading one clip out while the other faded in.

I split the clip shortly after the start as well, and then moved the start to the end, again doing a fade between the clips. Doing this made the file so it would loop correctly. However, when I saved it as an mp3, it no longer looped correctly. Trying various things, I came across this page: Gapless looping MP3 tracks. Unfortunately I had numerous problems trying to get the software to work. I think it was mostly because my filepaths / filenames had spaces in them, and while quoting the filepath would pass it to the program okay, the program would then pass it on to LAME without quoting it, so it would fail.

Anyway, I did eventually get it to work, though it gave an error message about there being 1056 frames when it expected 0 or something, I can't remember the exact error. I did google for my LAME version, and couldn't really find much info, but I think it has the same encoder delay value as the default setting for the program. So I'm not sure what the issue was or how to fix it. Anyway, the resultant mp3 file was much better than a normally exported mp3 file, though still not as good as the .wav.

Then I spent ages trying to get the mp3 loading okay in the flash panorama player. I do have it working now, but it's a bit of a kludge. I have one pano.swf, one pano.xml file, and then each pano has its own directory with the cube faces in it. The pano directory name in passed to pano.swf via the panoName parameter, e.g. http://static.domain.com/pano.swf?xml_file=http://static.domain.com/pano.xml&panoName=http://static.domain.com/some-panorama/

Now, the problem is, I can't modify pano.xml to point to the sound file since pano.xml is loaded for all panos, but the sound file will be different (or non existent) for each pano. There doesn't appear to be any way to use variables in the xml file e.g.

<mp3player>
 file=$panoName/mySong.mp3
 volume=1
 repeat=1000
</mp3player>

If $panoName was parsed by the swf as a variable equivalent to the value of the url parameter panoName, that would work okay. But you can't use variables in the xml (as far as I could find).

Likewise, if the value could be set as a url parameter, e.g. http://static.domain.com/pano.swf?xml_file=http://static.domain.com/pano.xml&panoName=http://static.domain.com/some-panorama/&mp3player.file=http://static.domain.com/some-panorama/mySong.mp3 that would be good. But again, this doesn't seem possible. The mp3player.swf is a plugin, and everything I read only stated using plugin parameters in the xml file (or possibly from as3).

So in the end I created a separate pano.xml file for this specific pano with sound, and I will have to do the same for any other panos I create with sound. Of course, the pano.xml file could be generated dynamically, but this is not an ideal situation. The pano.xml file is exactly the same for every pano, except the filename of the sound file. Having to have a separate pano.xml file for each pano means that the user's browser has to make an extra HTTP request and download an extra file. Having said that, that is only if the user is viewing more than one pano, for the first view they will always need to download the pano.xml file.

And after all that work, using the mp3player.swf, the mp3 file doesn't loop properly! (It loops but not seamlessly). Still, I don't think it's too bad though.

I also got my North Korea 2012 Centenary of the birth of Kim Il-Sung calendar today. There's a bit of a faux-pas on January though, obviously the calendars were produced before the Great Leader's death. If they produced lots for consumption in North Korea, I'd guess they'd all have to be destroyed. I'm not sure if it is for consumption in North Korea though, given that it has writing in English. (How could they bring themselves to use the devil's language?!)

Anyway, the calendar has lots of nice big colour photos of North Korea, each taken in (or at least representing) the month it is for. I like it.

Blog writing

2012-01-04T22:36:00.001Z

Today I was mostly writing / looking for photos to illustrate a blog post for my photo tips website. As part of the blog writing I spent quite a bit of time reading differing opinions on how the HTML <abbr> markup should be used. In the evening I also looked a bit more for places to visit in Ukraine and Transnistria.

Holiday planning

2012-01-03T21:46:00.002Z

This morning I finished off my article I was writing yesterday evening for my photo tips website. Considering that I had most of the article written in 1-2hrs yesterday, it seems quite amazing how finishing it off took most of the morning. The time was mostly taken up finding relevant CC licensed images on Flickr to illustrate the article, and then there was also getting / checking links and html, spell checking, and proof reading.

In the afternoon I read the instructions for my Olympus LS-5 sound recorder, I didn't read all the instructions, but enough to work it. I did think of going out before dinner to photograph the Christmas tree in the town centre (assuming it's still there), and also using the recorder to record the sounds there. But it was so windy I thought the wind would blow the tree about too much, so wouldn't be great for a photo / pano.

When setting up the recorder, one of the things I was wondering about was what sound quality option to choose. I found this article here: 16 Bit vs. 24 Bit Audio - Discussion of the mysteries behind bit-depth, sample rates and sound quality, which suggests that 44.1Khz 16bit should be good enough for most purposes. It does advise to use 24bit quality if you have it available (the LS-5 goes up to 96Khz 24bit), but considering I am only recording natural sounds, not music, I think 16 bit will suit me fine. In fact, I may well go for MP3.

Then the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening I was looking at possible locations to visit on a holiday to Ukraine / Transnistria / Moldova later in the year. So far I only looked at Ukraine places. Probably we will visit Kiev, south to a central industrial area, south to Crimea, along the coast, then up to Odessa, on to Transnistria and Moldova, back into Ukraine to Chernobyl, then to Kiev for the flight back home. Lots of places in Ukraine look nice, so I'm not sure exactly where we'll stop or how long we'll stay for.

Walking

2012-01-02T22:15:00.001Z

This morning I went out on a walk with the rest of the family, then we got back home shortly after 2pm. In the afternoon I geo-coded the photos from the morning's trip, did some washing up, and tried to think of some ideas for a new photo tips article.

In the evening I watched the last episode of Life on Earth and then a program about the making of it. The cameraman they had in the studio to talk about it had a nice jumper and a beard. I started working on my photo tips article as well.

I also received another email about SEO services, very similar to the two I received before, and again their website is very similar with just one page, and one contact link.

Hi,

Firstly I would like to introduce myself my name is Helen and
I'm a SEO specialist managing PolePositionSerp.com among other sites.

In my portfolio you'll be able to see quality websites that
can fit domain.com perfectly in SEO terms such as topic, content,
page rank & more.

As a SEO expert I managed to bring excellent results to my
partners in all major search engines such as Google, Bing & Yahoo!

I hope you are interested in hearing more about my proposal
so don't hesitate to contact me and we can take it on from there.

Thanks a lot,

Helen Murray
helen@polepositionserp.com
polepositionserp.com

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/helencmurray

Various

2012-01-01T22:25:00.001Z

This morning I updated my pog website and went to Church. After dinner I watched an episode of The Life Collection (David Attenborough) with Mauser and Bo. The rest of the afternoon and part of the evening I processed, metadatared, and uploaded some photos.

Also in the evening I got my 2012 shirt from Tortimer, and played a couple of games of Cluedo with Mauser, Bo, and Clare.

New year's eve excitement

2011-12-31T22:57:00.000Z

Today I was mostly sorting and processing photos. I also went to bed for a bit during the day because I had a headache. With Mauser and Bo I watched Tron, played Goldeneye multiplayer, and went to see K.K.

Various

2011-12-30T12:59:00.000Z

This morning I worked on a testcase for a Google Chrome bug where images aren't shown in ATOM feeds where the content is xhtml. I submitted the bug report, then played on Rayman Origins on the xbox with Mauser for a bit before lunch.

In the afternoon I received my latest credit card statement in the post. I noticed that I was charged £1 interest, and the same on my previous statement. I have a direct debit set up to pay off the full amount each month, so I wondered what this £1 interest charge was. I looked on the MBNA website, but couldn't see anything there, so phoned them.

After being on hold for a while I spoke to someone, and they explained that any cash transactions accrue interest on them from the date they are made until they are paid off, with a minimum charge of £1 per month. So as well as charging a cash advance fee on any cash transactions, there is also this monthly cash transaction charge. I just need to make sure that I don't use my credit card to pay for anything that can be considered cash.

I uploaded some photos to my photo website.

For the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening I did some sculpey as McRad wanted me to do sculpey at the holiday at home thing. I decided that the standard coloured sculpey would be too tough for most of the people, but the soft sculpey should be OK. Since we only had 1 pack green Studio sculpey and about 1/3 pack yellow Studio sculpey, I bought a 6 pack of coloured soft fimo from ebay. I also bought 2 packs of super sculpey since we've run out (and it is also soft enough for most people to use), and a pack of sculpey firm for our own use and to see what it's like.

I hope 6 packs of soft fimo will be enough as the packs are only small (56g each). I thought I could probably photocopy some pages from L's polymer clay book for ideas of things for people to do. We'll also need knifes for being able to cut the clay as well. I made a caterpillar from the book today with the Studio sculpey, and it came out okay.

Camera system comparison

2011-12-27T19:29:00.000Z

This morning I was doing some more work on my photo website. I noticed that the contact form for the website was throwing up a lot of errors. But when I looked into it, the problem was actually with the PEAR Mail class I was using. I was using the class correctly, but the class seems to be written for PHP4 rather than PHP5, and is missing the keyword 'static' in front of methods that are meant to be called statically.

I downloaded the latest version of the class, but this still had the same problem. To be honest, I think I might just leave these errors. Correcting the errors in PEAR seems a bit much to me.

I spent most of the day trying to get Mailpress set up, however it didn't seem to work properly. When you subscribed, it would add you to the database as a 'subscriber', but not actually subscribe you to the Newsletter. So I posted to the support group for Mailpress to see if I could get any help.

Here is the camera comparison I was doing yesterday, trying to decide what camera to get next:

Since for some options I listed two or more lenses that could fulfil the same job, I used an orange colour in the spreadsheet to indicate the rows that were added to get the total costs below each option. Lenses priced at £0 are ones I already own, so there would be no cost for me.

The comparison is done looking for the things I want in a camera system. All the cameras have good image quality, so I didn't compare that. I want to be able to shoot from wide angle (sometimes known as super-wide angle) up to low-end telephoto (100-200mm). I also want a full frame fisheye for decent resolution panos in 6 +2 shots, and a wider fisheye for 3-4 shot lower resolution panos, which are better for those with lots of people / moving objects.

The reason I want a new camera / lenses is that my Nikon 18-70mm lens seems to be a bit soft on one side, and I am not convinced that my Nikon D200 camera is autofocusing correctly. I did try adjusting the autofocus, but it is quite difficult, and despite looking to autofocus correctly when doing the adjustment tests, it seems to backfocus in actual use.

My Canon 450D is even worse when it comes to autofocus, and I don't know how to adjust that. It has been to Canon, who certified it within expected tolerances. The Canon does AF correctly in contrast detect (Live view) mode, which is how I used it in Scotland, but I found this too slow and missed some shots.

So with both my current cameras the problem is autofocus. I have tried manual focusing with them, but for anything other than macro, I can't get the focus correct manually. Manual focusing in liveview with the 450D is possible, but it doesn't feature picture-in-picture magnification. So you have to magnify where you want to focus, focus, then unmagnify and make sure the composition is correct. This is nearly impossible if the subject you want to focus on is moving.

I have included manual lenses for the NEX and Canon 5D Mk II in my options to purchase though. The NEX features focus peaking, and the 5D Mk II has a split prism viewfinder available (at extra cost) to aid in manual focus, as well as the larger viewfinder naturally making manual focus easier.

I didn't include the 17-40mm L lens for the Canon 5D Mk II as the wide-angle option, but instead looked at some prime lenses. From what I've read in forums the 17-40 L lens isn't sharp in the corners until f/8 - f/11. A good selection of primes offers the best quality and light gathering ability, but is more expensive, heavy, and large. The 5D Mk II also doesn't have an adjustable LCD screen.

Although I've never used a camera with an adjustable LCD, I imagine they are useful for more discreet street shooting, to enable better shooting from the hip. It should also be good for low angle (e.g. macro), high angle, and any other strange angle shots.

Exposure Bracketing is also important to me, with my D200 I often find the camera doesn't have enough dynamic range to capture a scene in one shot. New cameras are probably better, but I still think there would be situations where exposure blending or HDR would be needed.

The NEX fails in this regard, with no exposure bracketing available. It also doesn't have a viewfinder, though I understand one can be purchased at an extra cost.

The Canon and Nikon options are both pretty similar, however I prefer the Nikon as I already have more Nikon lenses and accessories than Canon. I will also want to be taking my Fuji IS-Pro with me, which is Nikon mount, so the Nikon option allows sharing lenses etc. with the Fuji cam.

The Micro four thirds option is lacking in that I couldn't find any wide fisheyes available for m4/3, only full frame fishes. Also, both the Nex and micro four thirds cameras don't seem to have any macros available. You can use old manual lenses on both, but this would entail either shooting with the lens stopped down (bad in low-light), or having to manually stop the lens down as you come to take the shot (bad for keeping focus when hand holding).

My current preference would probably be either for the m4/3 option (due to low weight and size) or the Nikon option (due to my existing Nikon gear). I don't intend on purchasing anything right now anyway, so will be interested to see what stuff is released over the coming year (but before I go on holiday again and need some new photo gear). I think I should be okay with my current gear until I go on holiday.

Websiting and playing boulder dash

2011-12-26T22:41:00.002Z

Checking my emails this morning I had two very similar emails promoting SEO services:

Hi,

My name is Monica and I'm the webmaster of SerpSynergy.com

I work on many projects for my partners websites and by doing so
I came across website-name.com and I immediately wanted to contact you.

As you might aware, getting links from good quality sites would definitely
help you in terms of Page Rank, traffic and higher ranking in major search
engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

If you're interested in more details, please get back to me
and I will suggest you all my tips, tricks & knowledge I've gained
with years of experience in the SEO field.

Hope to hear from you soon and have a great day :)

Thanks,

Monica Banyard
monica@serpsynergy.com
Serpsynergy.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/monicabanyard

and:

Hi,

I would like to introduce myself my name is Marian, webmaster of SocialSEOMaster.com
among other sites that I personally maintain.

While working on a project for my partners website I've found website-name.com
and I decided to contact you to tell you little bit more about what I do.

I'm a SEO expert with vast experience over the years in the SEO field
placing my partner's websites on Google's 1st results page for the
keywords they're after.

I would like to elaborate more and send you more information, to share
my thoughts, tips & tricks.

Please let me know if you're interested and we'll take it from there.

Thanks a lot,

Marian Dolan
marian@socialseomaster.com
SocialSEOMaster.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariansdolan

I checked their websites, and while the design is very different, the concept is quite similar - a single page with a bit of text, lots of graphics, and only one link, to the contact page.

My guess is that they're either both the same person, or maybe two people who have bought into a 'become an SEO expert course' or something similar, which gives a general template of the email to send and website to create.

This morning I did some more work on my website. First I looked into if the addThis wordpress plugin could be modified to just link to a new page with a list of all the different social networks / bookmark sites supported by AddThis. This is what the plugin already does in Google Chrome for me, just it doesn't work in IE.

But the code didn't seem that simple to change, and this functionality is not actually that great anyway - the list of sites on the AddThis page is so long it takes a while to find the correct button. Also, it involves two clicks - one click on the AddThis button to bring up the list of supported sites, then a second click on the site you want to bookmark / share the link on.

So I decided to look at other social bookmarking plugins again. One I already had installed was WP Socializer. This plugin spews up a lot of PHP errors, all seemed to be to do with undefined variables. I thought it would be worth at least attempting to fix the plugin, so did this. Most of the errors were due to concatenating to a variable that had not been set, or accessing the value of an array key that did not exist.

After getting rid of the errors on the client facing side (the plugin still had lots of similar errors on the admin side I didn't bother fixing), I looked to integrating the plugin's js and css with my combined js and css files. Strangely, the plugin didn't seem to be including its js file. I checked the file and it had a addBookmark function, which just alerted a message to press Ctrl + D to bookmark the page.

In my combined js file I already had an add to favourites function from sociable (which I had been using previously), so I modified this instead of using the WP Socializer javascript. But when I tested it in Google Chrome, it wasn't working. After doing some googling it seemed like some browsers don't support adding a bookmark via javascript, and instead it is recommended to just tell the user how to bookmark the site. This is exactly what the WP Socializer js function does, so I just copied that across and deleted my modified sociable js addBookmark function.

After getting that sorted I installed the Mailpress plugin for my photo website. I wanted to use the same email template that I use for my photography tips website, however I spent quite a long time trying to find the template, and couldn't find it anyway. When I checked the Mailpress theme settings on my photo tips website it said there was a problem with the selected theme, and was using the default theme instead.

I think that I must have upgraded the Mailpress plugin and this resulted in my customized theme being deleted or overwritten. Doh! So now I'll have to spend quite a while again testing to try and get a reasonable looking template again.

Sarah and Mark came to stay for a couple of days in the afternoon. We all had Christmas dinner together in the evening (Pheasant and Guinea fowl), then played boulderdash afterwards.

I also looked at different camera upgrade options for me, maybe I will post my thoughts tomorrow as I am sleepy and going to bed now. Bye!

Christmas

2011-12-25T23:22:00.000Z

Today I went to church in the morning and then updated my pog website. In the afternoon I helped Ben make some cookies and did the washing up.

In the evening I watched a Laurel & Hardy film with the family and tried debugging the AddThis plugin for wordpress. Unfortunately I think the plugin (actually it's the AddThis javascript, not the plugin itself) is broken in too many places for me to fix.

The problem is only appearing in IE9 for me. I think that probably the js is doing some browser sniffing and doing things differently for IE than the other browsers, and because I serve the site as XHTML (XML) this is breaking the js. So I am going to have and try another different social bookmarking plugin.

I was thinking of giving the sparrows "Lil' Maniac" badges for a Christmas present, but

I don't think they'd let me get close enough to give them the badges
If I pinned badges on them it would likely hurt or even kill them

So the sparrows didn't get any Christmas presents, but probably had their best Christmas ever anyway as it was relatively warm today.

Websiting

2011-12-22T22:05:00.002Z

This morning I thought about how my wordpress blog feed sent a 304 Not modified header if there hadn't been any new posts since the feed was last requested. For my photo website feed I hadn't implemented this, but it seemed like it would be a good idea. Otherwise a feed reader would have to download the whole feed each time it wanted to check for new items.

However, when I looked for tutorials about creating a feed using PHP, none of them seemed to mention this. However, I did find a tutorial on dealing with sending Last-Modified headers here: Using HTTP IF MODIFIED SINCE with PHP.

I read the W3C info on the Last-Modified header, which states that HTTP/1.1 servers SHOULD send Last-Modified whenever feasible. I haven't been doing this on any of my dynamic pages, however I can't see how I'd be able to implement it, other than on pages where the images are sorted by date.

If I have 20 pages sorted by rating, and a new image is added today that gets inserted to page 10, pages 1-9 would still be the same, while pages 10-20 would be last updated today. The only solution I can think of would be to create a new database table with a record for every single page that could exist. Then whenever a new image is added, calculate the pages that would be changed and update the pages table with the new last modified date.

The work required to write this logic, the size of the new db table, and the extra processing work required for the server means it is not worth implementing a Last-Modified date for me. It is okay for the feed though, since there the images are sorted in date order, so you can just get the date of the most recently added image.

I did what I was hoping to be my final run with the IIS Site Analyser, but then still found some more things that needed to be corrected. I found that as well as the RSS feed, Wordpress also had an ATOM feed. I realised that you could have ATOM and RSS feeds in wordpress, but I didn't think that both of them were linked to from the blog. I thought wrong obviously.

So I did the same for the ATOM feed as I did the other day for the RSS feed. But then I found some more problems. The ATOM feed had an id specified like so:

<id><?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?></id>

This seems to be quite incorrect, since it means that all feeds for the blog would have the same id. In a similar way, the alternate link (link to the HTML page that the feed is for) was the same for all feeds:

<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="<?php self_link(); ?>" />

For fixing the id issue, you can just use self_link(), which gives the URL of the current feed. For fixing the alternate link, I took Wordpress' self_link() function and modified it slightly to remove '/feed' or '/feed/atom'. This gives the url of the page the feed is for. I put this function in my theme's functions.php file:

/**
 * Display the link for the currently displayed feed in a XSS safe way.
 *
 * Generate a correct link for the rss link or atom alternate link element.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage Feed
 * @since 2.5
 */
function get_self_alt_link() {
 $host = @parse_url(home_url());
 $host = $host['host'];
 return esc_url(
  'http'
  . ( (isset($_SERVER['https']) && $_SERVER['https'] == 'on') ? 's' : '' ) . '://'
  . $host
  . preg_replace('/blog(\/)?(.*)?\/feed(\/atom)?(\?.*)?/', 'blog/$2$4', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])
  );
}

The alternate link issue is relevant for RSS feeds as well as ATOM feeds, just I missed the issue before when I was modifying the RSS feed template.

I spent most of the rest of the day trying to fix some issues with my google maps page. I was sure I had it working okay before!

Various

2011-12-21T19:01:00.000Z

This morning I wrote up yesterday's blog post and also put the Goodwill Season song on youtube:

I was also thinking about adding the Christmas Orphan Boy song onto youtube. I thought it sounded like it was by the guy who did the Austin Ambassador Y-reg song, and sure enough I was right - his name is John Shuttleworth. What I didn't know is that John Shuttleworth is actually just a character played by comedian Graham Fellows. When I saw him many years ago playing Austin Ambassador Y-reg on the Tonight show on Yorkshire TV, I thought he was a genuine guy with a sense of humour about his music. When actually he's an ungenuine guy with a sense of humour about his music.

Anyway, the song in question was already on youtube, albeit as part of a Vic and Bob sketch with about 3 minutes of useless babbling from Vic & Bob before the actual song. Since the song is available on itunes, lastfm, and on CD from Amazon etc. I didn't bother adding it to youtube.

I ran the IIS Site Analyzer a couple more times on my site, each time finding some things I'd missed that needed correcting. It takes quite a long time to run each time, and also quite a long time to delete old reports. While I was waiting I read dpreview's Mirrorless Roundup 2011

Later in the afternoon and for part of the evening I made a Lemon and Coconut cake with L. Only problem was, we didn't have any coconut.

For birthday presents I got an A3 laminator from McRad, Chocolate from L, and an Olympus LS-5 sound recorder from Clare and Mauser. I went on eBay and bought a wind muffler for the sound recorder as from the reviews I have previously read it seems like this is quite important.

I also bought a North Korean calendar that has nice photos of North Korea. Hopefully it will arrive before 2012, but it is being shipped from Russia I think, and post is quite slow at this time of year, especially with all the bank holidays coming up.

Fixing wordpress

2011-12-20T09:59:00.000Z

Today I was still clearing up errors on my photo website discovered by the IIS Site Analyzer. Mostly I was trying to fix wordpress errors.

The problem is that the url of my blog is /blog/, but wordpress doesn't let you specify that the url ends in a trailing slash. So often when wordpress generates a link back to the blog homepage, it will use a url of /blog, which then creates an unneeded redirect to the correct address of /blog/.

The urls of tags and categories are /blog/tag/tag-name or /blog/category/category-name and again, there is no way to change this (that I know of) to force them to end in a trailing slash. The problem here is the opposite, that often when wordpress generates a link to the tag or category, it will end with a trailing slash e.g. /blog/tag/tag-name/. So this then creates an unneeded redirect to the correct address of /blog/tag/tag-name.

After trying various things and much research I ended up with the following in my theme's functions.php file:

//Wordpess won't save the site/blog URL with the needed trailing slash, so we have to add it manually here
add_filter( 'index_rel_link', 'fix_index_rel_link' );
function fix_index_rel_link(){
 return '<link rel="index" title="David Kennard Photography" href="'.get_bloginfo('url').'/" />';
}
//In the opposite way, Wordpress adds trailing slashes to URLs that don't need them, so we have to remove it manually here
add_filter('get_pagenum_link', 'fix_get_pagenum_link');
function fix_get_pagenum_link($w){
 //match an ending slash or slash followed by query string, so long as the slash isn't immediately preceded by /blog
 return preg_replace('/(?<!blog)(\/$|\/(\?))/', '$2', $w);
}

Next I found that the feed had similar problems, and also was using the same description for every category and tag. However I couldn't find a way to filter the info used in the feed. The feed uses bloginfo_rss() to get the various info. While it is possible to filter this, it didn't seem possible to get the type of info that had been requested. So if I created a filter, the same filter would be run on bloginfo_rss('url'), bloginfo_rss("description"), and bloginfo_rss('name'), and there is no way to tell in the filter function whether you are filtering a url, description, or name.

So, what I had to do instead is to add a custom feed template to my theme. I copied the default feed-rss2.php file into my theme directory. In functions.php I added:

//Default wordpress feed doesn't give correct title on tag pages etc. so use a custom feed
remove_all_actions( 'do_feed_rss2' );
add_action( 'do_feed_rss2', 'dkphoto_feed_rss2', 10, 1 );
function dkphoto_feed_rss2( $for_comments ) {
    $rss_template = get_template_directory() . '/feed-rss2.php';
    load_template( $rss_template );
}

For the custom feed I wanted to use the same titles, descriptions etc. that I used for the non feed page equivalents. So I removed the logic that pulled these from my theme's header.php file and put it into a separate file, which I named header_pageTypeDetect.php. Googling to find how to include the new file, I found the function get_template_part(). However, this didn't work as the variables created in header_pageTypeDetect.php were scoped within the get_template_part() call. Since the variables created in header_pageTypeDetect.php needed to be accessed by header.php and feed-rss2.php, this was no good.

The solution is instead to use a standard include with get_template_directory() to get the correct path. e.g. include(get_template_directory().'/header_pageTypeDetect.php');.

After getting this set up, I found that while the feed was working for most pages, it wasn't working for /blog/feed. The reason was that I was using is_home() to detect the front page of the blog, but this doesn't work for the feed of the blog home. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any functions available to detect if you are at the feed of the blog homepage.

So what I did instead was to do my standard checks, setting the title and description etc. appropriately, then at the bottom I added

//If this is the main feed page /blog/feed
elseif(is_feed() && !is_archive()){
   //set the title, description etc. here
}

Since I had already done a check for single posts and pages, I knew that if the check got this far, and it was a feed and not an archive (tags, categories etc.), then it must be the feed for the home page.

While working on this I found that some of my blog pages had extremely long meta keywords tags. This is because I was including all the keywords for all posts on a page. Doing some googling, it seemed to be generally recommended to stick to only about 10 keywords: Google Webmaster Central: Max length of Meta Tags ?. So it looked like I should only include the 10 most common keywords from the posts on the page rather than all the keywords.

For figuring out the keyword popularity, I thought that the keyword cloud widget must already do something along these lines. However, I couldn't see any code easily borrowable from the keyword cloud widget, so I just wrote my own logic:

if(have_posts()){
 $metaKeywords = array();
 //var_dump($wp_query); exit();
 //get all the tags for posts on this page
 while (have_posts()){
  the_post();
  $tags = get_the_tags($post->ID);
  if($tags){
   foreach($tags as $tag){
    if(isset($metaKeywords[$tag->name])){
     $metaKeywords[$tag->name]+= 1;
    }
    else{
     $metaKeywords[$tag->name] = 1;
    }
   }
   unset($tags, $tag);
  }
 }
 //Sort the keywords by most used and select only the top 10
 if(count($metaKeywords)>10){
  arsort($metaKeywords);
  $metaKeywords = array_slice($metaKeywords,0,10,true);
 }
 $metaKeywords = array_keys($metaKeywords);
}

Another thing that the IIS Site Analyzer brought to my attention today is that I was serving some pages with text/xml, while others were being served with application/xml. I read What's the difference between text/xml vs application/xml for webservice response, and it seems that it doesn't make much difference what one you use (text/xml means easily readable by humans, application/xml means not easily readable by humans).

Along other lines today, DPS had a special offer of all 35 ebooks from Craft & Vision for $99 (40% off). After looking at some of the book pages and customer comments on the Craft and Vision site, it did look like a great deal. However, in the end I decided against it. I already have tons of stuff I've bought and not had time to read or use yet. If I bought the e-books they'd probably just be added to that 'pile'. Better to save the money for spending on a new camera or lens.

I also had a message from Red Bubble that they were offering 20% off gift vouchers. I thought this sounded quite good as you could buy the voucher then use it to buy a T-shirt for yourself. Most of the T-shirts on the site seemed quite expensive, so I wondered how much it costs to make you own shirt. Checking their prices, it costs £12.40 for a White Unisex S-XL Tee. This is excluding VAT at 20%. Since the voucher is 20% discount, £12.40 would essentially be the price you pay (I couldn't see anything about there being additional shipping charges). I checked Zazzle, and they were charging about £15.50 for the same, so seems quite a good deal to me.

Websiting

2011-12-19T23:11:00.001Z

Today I did some more KML / Google Earth debugging. I found that my KML was working correctly on my live website, but not my local dev website. So I performed the same actions on both the local and live KML, using Fiddler to record the HTTP requests. Then I used Beyond Compare to compare each request between the Live and dev versions. There were a few differences, but the main one was that the Live website used target="_blank" on the links, which worked, while the dev site didn't use target, and the links didn't work.

So I added target="_blank" to the dev site, and now that works as well. Phew!

Later, I checked the Google KML Reference, and it does actually say:

Targets are ignored when included in HTML written directly into the KML; all such links are opened as if the target is set to _blank. Any specified targets are ignored.
HTML that is contained in an iFrame, however, or dynamically generated with JavaScript or DHTML, will use target="_self" as the default. Other targets can be specified and are supported.

However, what it does not say is that target must be set to _blank for links to KML to work. Still, if I had read that earlier it probably would have given me enough of a prompt to discover that the target property was the problem, which would have saved me hours of work discovering that myself.

After sorting that out, I ran the IIS Site Analysis on my dev site. One of the errors it came up with was that the wordpress author link went to a 404 not found error page. I did some googling and found a few posts on the wordpress forums where people were having the same problem, but no solutions were given. Then I found this page: WordPress Authors Page 404 Page Not Found Error.

I did what the author suggested (altering the value of wp_users.user_nicename in the database to have no spaces), and it worked nicely. Now the author link works and no more 404. Interestingly, I noted that all the other users (subscribers) already had user_nicename so that it contained dashes instead of spaces, my author nicename was the only one with spaces.

Another thing I found from the Site Analysis, was that it had a 404 error for the cite attribute of a blockquote. I had just put the name of the person who the quote came from as the cite, it wasn't a URL, so no wonder it 404'd. Looking it up (Quotations: The BLOCKQUOTE and Q elements), I found that what I'd done is incorrect, and it should be a URI.

I had quite a few links on my blog where I had just used the link text 'here', e.g.

This is tenth post in my series on how to be a boring blogger, you can read the first post <a href="/link/to/post" title="How to be a boring blogger part 1 - blah blah blah">here</a>

However, the IIS Site analysis report flagged these for having non-relevant link text. I had always thought that so long as you used the title text to explain what the link was, then it didn't matter that you used non-relevant anchor text. But investigating this, I found that the purpose of the title attribute is to convey extra information about the link: W3C - The title attribute, and is not really given much relevance by search engines: SEOmoz - Link Title Attribute and its SEO Benefit. Another useful link I found on link titles was this one, linked to from the SEOMoz article: RNIB Web Access Centre - TITLE attributes.

So I started to change my link text to be more like:

This is tenth post in my series on how to be a boring blogger, you can read the first post here: <a href="/link/to/post">How to be a boring blogger part 1 - blah blah blah</a>

I only left the title attribute in if it gave more info than the anchor text.

When doing this, I noticed that some posts seemed to be duplicated. I thought I had turned off post revision in Wordpress, but when I checked, I couldn't even find a setting for it. I think that probably I used to have a posts revision plugin installed, and turned it off in the plugin. But then subsequently I must have uninstalled the plugin.

So I found some info on how to turn the posts revision off - add define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false); to wp-config.php. And I also found a plugin that removes all post revisions from the database: Better Delete Revision. So I installed and ran that, then deactivated it. It removed a load of post revisions, reducing the database size by quite a bit. Nice!

With that done, I finished off my job of replacing all the links with the anchor text 'here'. I did this by exporting the wp_posts table using phpMyAdmin, then opening the saved sql file in gedit text editor. Then I just did a find '>here<' to find any links that needed changing.

I still have a lot more things brought up by the IIS Site Analyzer that I need to fix, but they will have to wait until tomorrow now.

In other news, it was revealed today that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il died a couple of days ago. I checked the Juche Songun blog, and they have a post where you can leave your condolences: Сообщение о кончине товарища Ким Чен Ира. It seems strange that people would leave messages of condolence to Kim Jong-il, but when you consider people leaving messages there have an image of Stalin for an avatar, I guess it's not so weird.

On the news they had someone saying that the North Koreans are much smaller and weigh much less than South Koreans due to malnutrition. I wonder how they got this information? Did they go into North Korea and measure lots of Koreans? If they had done this government consent, I certainly doubt they would have got an accurate sample. If they did it without government consent I certainly doubt their sample was of a reasonable size and spread over a reasonable area.

I wonder if they also considered whether South Koreans were taller and heavier due to eating foods full of growth hormones and artificial additives. It would also be interesting to know how Chinese Koreans compared in weight and height to those living in North and South Korea.

For the moment I hope that the North, South, and America don't try provoking each other, as they seem prone to do. Just leave North Korea alone while it settles down with Kim Jong-eun as leader, and hopefully he will be a better (for the people) leader than his father. I'm not sure if he will ever live up to titles of his father though, such as World’s Best Ideal Leader with Versatile Talents, Humankind’s Greatest Musical Genius, and Master of the Computer Who Surprised the World (list of titles used to refer to Kim Jong-il by North Korean state television).

Google earth debugging

2011-12-18T22:44:00.000Z

Today I updated my pog website and went to Church. I did more work on my test case for a couple of Google Earth bugs, and then posted them to the Google Earth bug tracker. Unfortunately one of the bugs is very serious for my KML, and given that my previous bug reports posted over a year ago are still 'New', it is unlikely the new bugs will be fixed anytime soon. So I will just have to put up with my KML that I spent probably hundreds of hours working on being broken.

In the evening I also watched 'Gunfight at the O.K. Corral' with Mauser and Bo.

Debugging kml & js in google earth

2011-12-16T22:35:00.000Z

Today I was mainly trying to create a test case of a jquery AJAX request failing from a Google Earth info window bubble. I found that actually the problem didn't seem to be with jquery, but Google Earth. The status of the XMLHttpRequest object was returning 0 on the server's response, when the actual HTTP status code returned by the server was 200. Since jquery checks the status, and sees that it isn't 200, it thinks the request failed and fires the error handler.

I also tried using jsonp in case it was a cross domain issue (I'm not sure whether contacting your server from a Google Earth info window bubble counts as cross domain or not). Anyway, this didn't make any difference, and I still got a status of 0, causing jquery to fire the error handler and not the success handler.

Here's a funny email I got from DXO today, it seems they are having a special offer throughout December where they have increased the price of DXO Optics Pro from £89 to £135:

Link to the email here, though they might correct the image on the link. I'm guessing that it is meant to be the other way round (normally £135, special offer £89).

And here's another weird thing, searching for help on the jquery forum told me there were lots of results, but wouldn't let me see any of them:

Eventually I worked out how to get AJAX working properly in Google Earth Info Window bubbles - add an error handler that checks everything okay, and the error is just GE being buggy, then parses the JSON response and fires the success handler, e.g.

$.ajax({ "url": dk.WWW+'/AJAXandDBFuncs.xhtml?getImgData='+img_id+'&format=json',
                    "dataType": "json",
                    "success": dk.ge.createImgInfoWindow, 
                    //hack to get around GE intermittently reporting status as 0 when is actually 200 OK
                    "error" : function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown){
                        if(!errorThrown && jqXHR.status === 0 && jqXHR.responseText){
                            dk.ge.createImgInfoWindow($.parseJSON(jqXHR.responseText));
                        }
                    }
                }
            );

The other alternative would be to use the "complete" property of the object you pass to jquery's ajax method. complete fires when the request has completed, regardless of whether the result was an error or success.

After getting that working though, I found that image links weren't working (they are meant to zoom into where the image is and load its info bubble). I saw that the request was returning kml, that looked okay. I tried to validate the KML, but didn't get very far with that.

I downloaded the feedvalidator software from feedvalidator.org, but when I ran it, it just seemed to get stuck in the background.

So next I tried to find something for Komodo Edit. After some googling and testing I found the following command to validate an xml file against an xsd schema. (The KML schema is here). In Komodo Edit I went to Tools > Run Command... and ran

xmllint %F --noout --schema /home/djeyewater/Desktop/kml21.xsd

That gave me

/home/djeyewater/Desktop/Text-1.txt:3: element kml: Schemas validity error : Element '{http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0}kml': No matching global declaration available for the validation root.

Hmm... no idea what that means.

Then, when I was writing the above, I realised that the reason the feedvalidator program probably went into the background and didn't work was because it works on a specified URL, and the URL I input had an & in it. So I retried with the URL quoted, which gave me the error

line 25, column 49: Invalid altitudeMode

I checked it up, and I had clampedToGround, when it should be clampToGround. I don't think that will be the problem causing my links not to work, but at least I can correct it. the feedvalidator program is also better than using the xmllint command in Komodo Edit as it works on URLs rather than files. So I can point the feedvalidator program to my KML generating script rather than having to run the KML generating script manually and saving the results in a file.

Rather annoyingly, the image links work on a static KML file, even though they are exactly the same as the ones that don't work on the dynamic file. Also, the links do work on the dynamic file on my live website (which is the same as my testing website)! So I am going to have leave debugging this problem until tomorrow I think.

article photo finding

2011-12-15T18:56:00.001Z

This morning and some of the afternoon I was mostly checking my emails and finding relevant CC licensed photos on Flickr to illustrate a couple of photo tips articles. You'd think that using article directories to source articles for your website would make the process of getting a new article up extremely quick.

But actually you have to wade through loads of rubbish articles before you find a good one. Then you have to find relevant CC licensed photos of flickr to illustrate the article, which can also take quite a long time. Still, I find it quite a bit faster than writing an article myself. I would say it takes me about one day to write an article myself.

Also this afternoon, I finished off my Christmas video for this year. This one is just done on the computer, no photo taking for animation.

Credits:

In the evening I watched Wing Chun and read camera websites while waiting for stuff to copy / move / delete on Mauser's hard drives.

Traumatic experience with Hostgator support

2011-12-13T22:27:00.002Z

Wow, I just have spent a week trying to get favicons working on my wordpress multisite installation! Getting them working in my dev environment was quite easy (after getting apache set up okay), just had to read up about rewrite maps in apache and nginx. The problem was with my webhost, Hostgator.

First problem was after I had got favicons working correctly in dev site, I messaged Hostgator and asked them to set up a rewrite map. I had read here: Question regarding rewritemaps and shared hosting (I can modrewrite) that Hostgator said they did support rewrite maps. However, when I sent my request to them, they said they didn't support rewrite maps.

Not too much of a problem, I just re-wrote the map using SetEnvIf. A bit more work for the server on every request though. This worked, but I found that requests for favicon.ico were being replied to with no content. After doing some debugging, I could only conclude that this was a problem with Hostgator's server setup.

So I contacted them again, they said there was no problem or configuration issue with their server, the problem must be with my .htaccess. They don't offer a service of customising .htaccess files, so I'd have to find out what the problem was myself.

So I made a test case and sent the info to them. The rewrite rule I was using was

RewriteRule ^/files/ wp-content/favicon.ico [L]

They replied to say

I believe you'll need to rework the rule to direct files to wp-content and not a full path.

So, according to Hostgator it is only possible to rewrite to a directory, not a file?!?

I rewrote the rule as follows:

RewriteRule ^files/(.*) wp-content/$1 [L]

It's still a full path, but this time they seemed to see sense and actually investigated the issue. It turns out that they have a rewrite rule that rewrites any request for a non-existent favicon.ico file to an empty one. Since their rewrite rule is evaluated before mine, it sees that /files/favicon.ico does not exist, and rewrites it to the blank file.

Hostgator then said that they could solve this using symlinks. I replied that I didn't think that was possible due to the way the site was structured (and gave them the details). They said they could do it anyway, so I asked them to go ahead. Then, of course, they replied to say actually they can't do it due to the structure of the site.

Eventually I managed to get from them the directive they are using to rewrite the favicon.ico requests. It took me two requests though. It seems that the Hostgator support team is full of Linux sysadmins rather than anyone who's ever used apache before. With the details of the directive they were using it was immediately obvious what a simple work-around would be.

However, I first tried to add their favicon rewriting directive to my own apache config. I spent quite a bit of this morning trying to get it work, but just couldn't. It seems that either I am doing something wrong, or my apache is buggy / misconfigured so that rewrites are always relative to the document root, even when using an absolute path. So I posted on the Ubuntu forums to try and get some help with that.

Despite not getting Hostgator's favicon rewrite rule working on my dev site, I made the quick fix on the live server, and the favicons are now working properly there. The simple fix was just to create files/favicon.ico. Hostgator's rule will see the file exists, and so not rewrite it. Then my rewrite rule will see that the url matches ^/files/ and rewrite it to the correct location for that blog - the actual files/favicon.ico is never served.

Also today I made a cake, played with making custom apertures, and wrote a bit of a photo tips article.

Setting up wordpress mu under apache

2011-12-07T11:16:00.001Z

This morning I was still trying to get my wordpress multisite setup in my local dev environment on apache. The first problem I had was that I am using two variations of each domain - domain.con for nginx and domain.can for acessing the same site through apache. Because wordpress gets the domain name from the db (and wp_config) and checks it against the request, this meant I needed to have a separate db for .can and .con and also make some modifications to wp_config.

Otherwise if the db was for .con domains and I requested domain.can, wordpress would redirect me to .con. After getting this setup, I tried logging into the wp-admin area via the .con (nginx served) domain, but just got a couple of error messages about missing indexes in arrays etc. from some plugins. Doing some debugging I eventually tracked the problem down to wp_redirect. The function sends a redirect header, but this header wasn't being received according to the Web Developer toolbar in Firefox.

I scratched my head for a while, then tried turning off WP_DEBUG in wp_config. (I needed it switched on yesterday as otherwise wordpress just displayed a blank page instead of giving an error message about the mysql extension being missing). With WP_DEBUG set to false, the admin area now loaded successfully. Of course, now I thought about it, it was obvious why the header wasn't working - PHP had already sent output in the form of the error messages to do with the badly written plugins, and so couldn't send any headers.

It's a shame that PHP didn't also give the standard error message of 'Headers already sent' as that would have made debugging the issue much easier and quicker. Maybe that error message needs a stricter error reporting setting than wordpress uses with WP_DEBUG switched on.

The next job was to figure out why w3totalcache was correctly serving images from a static subdomain for the .con nginx site but not the .can apache site. I found the problem was that it loads the configuration settings from a file (rather than, or maybe as well as the database). After some debugging, I found the configuration file is stored as '/wp-content/w3-total-cache-config-domain.con.php' (I spent quite a while looking in the plugin directory as I thought it would save its files in there). So I just copied that file, renamed it to '/wp-content/w3-total-cache-config-domain.can.php and replaced the references in it to domain.con with domain.can.

websiting

2011-12-06T17:32:00.001Z

This morning I wrote a blog post for my web development blog about using .htaccess to make a browser download an image from a link instead of just opening the image in the browser.

I noticed that the favicon for the blog was the same as the one for my photo tips website, so I thought I'd better change that. Looking into that, I found that I didn't have a full copy of my wordpress multisite in my dev (virtual) machine. So I downloaded the files that looked to be missing from the server, and updated the local database with a copy from the server.

Then I found that my recipes website wasn't working properly on my local machine. I checked up what the problem was, and I was missing a rewrite rule. The webserver my wordpress multisite is on uses apache, while my local dev environment uses nginx, so I had to have a few tries before I got the rule working properly. Then I thought about what the rule was doing, and it was sending requests for static images to a PHP page that would then serve the image file. Not good!

To do some testing on getting it working properly I really needed to get apache working in my local setup, so I spent quite a bit of time working on this.

Most of the evening I was trying to work out why PHP wasn't loading any extensions. In the end I worked out the problem was that my php.ini file has [HOST] and [PATH] sections in it. After loading my php.ini file PHP would then go onto load other configuration .ini files that loaded mysql and the other extensions. But because they were below a [HOST] section, the directives in the other .ini files were only being applied for that host, and not globally. The fix was at the bottom of my php.ini file to put [PHP]. That switched it back to the global section, so directives in the other .ini files to load the extensions were treated globally (or at least not ignored).

I still have quite a bit of work to do to get PHP and apache working properly together and my wordpress multisite running it looks like though.

Various

2011-12-05T11:52:00.001Z

This morning I was going through some old emails that I hadn't had time to check properly, and one was from 7dayshop for an interesting gadget - Capture Camera Clip Strap/Belt System by Peak Design (affiliate link). It's basically a quick release system that you can attach to your belt or bag strap. Initially I thought this wouldn't be that great since if you wanted to mount the camera on a tripod or monopod, you'd have to remove the proprietary quick release plate and then attach a QR plate compatible with your tripod / monopod head. This would be a hassle and take too long.

But actually, according to their video, the proprietary QR plate they use is arca-swiss compatible. Since I use arca-swiss compatible QR clamps on all my tripod heads, this would mean the camera could be used on a tripod or monopod with no hassle at all. However, £50 seems extremely expensive to me, I might consider one if they were £20, and would probably buy one if it was £10. Having my camera on a strap as I do now is not much inconvenience compared to putting it on a belt clip, so not worth the price for me.

Most of the afternoon and some of the evening I worked on an article for my photo tips website. Also in the evening I played on Kirby Wii with L and Mauser, and did some work trying to make a file download prompt in .htaccess

Various

2011-12-04T15:49:00.001Z

This morning I started cutting out some pogs in Photoshop, then went to Church. After church I started updating my pog website, then had dinner. After dinner I finished updating the pog website.I made a cake in the afternoon and also played on Kirby Wii with L and Mauser a bit.In the evening I copied all the transcripts of Widmore talking from Lostopedia.

Walking

2011-12-03T09:32:00.001Z

I forgot to post a pic of these Intel sweets Mauser got from work a few weeks ago:

After copying those pics across to my comp, and writing yesterday's blog post, I went out for walk as it was nice weather. I stopped to take some test shots not too far from the house, and then realised that I needed another adapter ring to be able to some of my srew-in filters with my Cokin P filters as well.

So I went back home, then as it was only about 1½ hrs until lunch, I decided to make some cake. But I remembered that actually I needed to leave the fruit soaking overnight, so I couldn't make the cake now. So I made some cheese straws instead.

After lunch I went out for another walk, this time making sure I brought the other adapter ring I needed. Part of the walk was a bit scary as I had to walk through a field of bulls. The bulls ran up behind me, and when the lead one tried to stop he just carried on skidding forwards across the muddy field towards me. But luckily he stopped before he got me.

The main annoying thing about the walk was that the footpath ended up at a road, and then there wasn't any way to get back to the town except walking back along the side of the road, or going all the way back down the footpath I'd walked across. Also, the path wasn't very well sign posted when it got into Northamptonshire.

When I got back home I geo-coded and sorted the photos, then had dinner.

After dinner I played on Kirby Wii with Belly and Mauser, then we all went to see KK in animal crossing. After that I went to bed about 9pm as I felt really sleepy and had a headache.

Various stuff

2011-12-02T09:06:00.000Z

This morning I helped someone with their wireless printer / internet not working properly. I spent quite a while trying to figure out why their laptop couldn't connect to the printer. Then when I tried to go on the internet to google for info, I found that actually the problem was that the laptop wasn't connected to the router. Doh! The problem actually seemed to be with the BT wireless connection software they had installed.

The BT software said that it was connected OK, but the internet and printer wouldn't work. If you went into Windows Wireless settings and selected something like 'Use Windows to configure my wirless settings', then the wireless would work OK. But upon restarting the computer, the BT software would take over again, and it would stop working. So I went into msconfig and disabled a couple of startup programs that looked like they might be the BT software. After restarting, it worked okay, and could now connect to the printer. Yay!

I spent most of the afternoon writing an article for my photo tips website.

In the evening I played on Kirby Wii with Mauser and Bo for a bit, and then photoshopped some Boglins of them:

Site Analysing

2011-12-01T21:03:00.001Z

Someone had replied to my question on the jquery forums about debugging why an AJAX request failed, and they asked me to post exactly what is in the responseText. I did try printing out responseText as part of my debugging yesterday, but as it contained HTML, it was being converted to HTML rather than printed as plain text. I remembered this morning about textNodes, and decided to try printing the responseText as a textNode. I used jquery's text() method, and this worked fine.

The only difference between the responseText printed by jquery and the content body of the server's response was that text() collapsed multiple whitespace to a single space. I posted the responseText to the thread as had been requested, though haven't received any reply yet. I am actually quite surprised I got a reply at all, I don't seem to have much luck getting replies (particularly helpful replies) on forums.

I would say sitepoint is probably the best forum, out of the 24 threads I've started there, I got helpful replies on 12 of them. Usually I get replies from people trying to be helpful as well, I only have a few threads there with no replies. For this jquery issue I get the feeling I'm going to have to spend many hours whittling my code down and constant testing until it either starts working or I have a test case suitable for filing a bug report.

I also processed a pano today, and ran the ISS Site Analyser a couple of times on my site. It did find lots of stuff wrong with my site, so still lots to fix.

Just Buggin'

2011-11-30T19:49:00.000Z

Yesterday evening I thought that I had finished making the needed changes to my photo website and could run it through the Microsoft Site Analyser tool just to make sure everything was okay this morning. But then, even before I did that, I found a problem, and then some more problems.

One thing I did do was to add <link>s to my pages for self, next, prev, last, first, and up. I hadn't heard about rel="up" before, but found out about it on this page: The WHATWG Blog — The Road to HTML 5: Link Relations - rel=first, last, prev, next, and up. Up means the category page the current page is a direct descendant of.

I spent most of the afternoon trying to debug why the javascript in my KML wasn't working properly in Google Earth. Unfortunately the lack of any debugger in Google Earth makes debugging very difficult. What I had to do was to delete the KML from the 'Temporary Places' folder in Google earth, then clear the memory and disk cache. I would make a small change in the javascript, then reload the KML file and see what difference it made. Then repeat.

Any debugging messages had to be output to the HTML of the infoBubble window, you can't do Alerts in Google Earth. Despite spending all afternoon on it, I still couldn't work out why my javascript wasn't working properly. The problem was with an AJAX request made by jquery, when it got the response it would fire the error handler rather than the success handler. But I couldn't get any info on what the error was, so I posted to the jquery forums in hope that someone there can help me.

One thing I came across while trying to solve this problem was that my server was sending a Content-Type header of text/html for the JSON response. This is because the JSON is generated by PHP, and I wasn't setting an explicit Content-Type header with PHP. So I did some research and found the correct Content-Type header for JSON is application/json. I wondered if I should also put charset=utf-8, however according to this article: Setting the HTTP charset parameter, you only need to do that for Mime types of text/x, not application/x.

In the evening I moved all the stuff (except my bed) out of my bedroom and into L's bedroom as we are currently having all the bedrooms re-carpeted, and mine is next.

URL encoding

2011-11-29T21:45:00.001Z

Today I was doing more work on my photo website.

I wanted to try and find the regex that wordpress uses for converting page / post titles into permalinks (also known as 'slugs'). However despite much googling and searching through the source code (wordpress codebase is too large to search properly), I didn't find anything.

So instead I made my own:

/**
 *Replace ' with nothing e.g. don't becomes dont, other punctuation replaced with a - with max one dash between words
 *@param $str The string to be encoded
 *@return $str The encoded string
*/
function myurlencode($url){
    return preg_replace('/[!"#$%&\'()*+,\/:;<=>\-?@\\\[\]^`{|}\s]+/', '-', str_replace("'", '', $url));
}

Unless I've made a mistake (quite possible), this should replace any punctuation or space with a dash, with multiples being collapsed to a single dash, e.g. 'hel!o - there' should become 'hel-o-there'. I also elected to change words like don't to dont rather than don-t or don%27t. So this should allow me to use RFC3987 compatible IRIs/URLs without using any percent encoding at all (since all characters that need percent encoding are removed or converted to dashes).

Because &, <, >, ", and ' are removed / converted to dashes this also means that the url doesn't need to be run through htmlspecialchars before printing as part of a webpage / xml doc either. The function doesn't deal with all characters not allowed in URLs per RFC3987, but these are control characters or reserved blocks that there is virtually 0% chance will be in any string I run through the function.

After some help on the sitepoint forums, I managed to get a regex that should work to encode a URL per RFC3987 correctly. I tested it against a more simplistic str_replace function and another regex that don't bother trying to encode later blocks (which tend to be reserved / not used). So these functions all encode control chars and should be good enough (I think) to make a url comply with RFC3987, similar to how rawurlencode works for RFC3986.

function iriencode($url){
 $notiunreserved = array("\x25","\x0","\x1","\x2","\x3","\x4","\x5","\x6","\x7","\x8","\x9","\x0a","\x0b","\x0c","\x0d","\x0e","\x0f","\x10","\x11","\x12","\x13","\x14","\x15","\x16","\x17","\x18","\x19","\x1a","\x1b","\x1c","\x1d","\x1e","\x1f","\x20","\x21","\x22","\x23","\x24","\x26","\x27","\x28","\x29","\x2a","\x2b","\x2c","\x2f","\x3a","\x3b","\x3c","\x3d","\x3e","\x3f","\x40","\x5b","\x5c","\x5d","\x5e","\x60","\x7b","\x7c","\x7d","\x7f","\xc2\x80","\xc2\x81","\xc2\x82","\xc2\x83","\xc2\x84","\xc2\x85","\xc2\x86","\xc2\x87","\xc2\x88","\xc2\x89","\xc2\x8a","\xc2\x8b","\xc2\x8c","\xc2\x8d","\xc2\x8e","\xc2\x8f","\xc2\x90","\xc2\x91","\xc2\x92","\xc2\x93","\xc2\x94","\xc2\x95","\xc2\x96","\xc2\x97","\xc2\x98","\xc2\x99","\xc2\x9a","\xc2\x9b","\xc2\x9c","\xc2\x9d","\xc2\x9e","\xc2\x9f","\xef\xbf\xb0","\xef\xbf\xb1","\xef\xbf\xb2","\xef\xbf\xb3","\xef\xbf\xb4","\xef\xbf\xb5","\xef\xbf\xb6","\xef\xbf\xb7","\xef\xbf\xb8","\xef\xbf\xb9","\xef\xbf\xba","\xef\xbf\xbb","\xef\xbf\xbc","\xef\xbf\xbd");
 $notiunreservedEncoded = array('%25','','%01','%02','%03','%04','%05','%06','%07','%08','%09','%0A','%0B','%0C','%0D','%0E','%0F','%10','%11','%12','%13','%14','%15','%16','%17','%18','%19','%1A','%1B','%1C','%1D','%1E','%1F','%20','%21','%22','%23','%24','%26','%27','%28','%29','%2A','%2B','%2C','%2F','%3A','%3B','%3C','%3D','%3E','%3F','%40','%5B','%5C','%5D','%5E','%60','%7B','%7C','%7D','%7F','%C2%80','%C2%81','%C2%82','%C2%83','%C2%84','%C2%85','%C2%86','%C2%87','%C2%88','%C2%89','%C2%8A','%C2%8B','%C2%8C','%C2%8D','%C2%8E','%C2%8F','%C2%90','%C2%91','%C2%92','%C2%93','%C2%94','%C2%95','%C2%96','%C2%97','%C2%98','%C2%99','%C2%9A','%C2%9B','%C2%9C','%C2%9D','%C2%9E','%C2%9F','%EF%BF%B0','%EF%BF%B1','%EF%BF%B2','%EF%BF%B3','%EF%BF%B4','%EF%BF%B5','%EF%BF%B6','%EF%BF%B7','%EF%BF%B8','%EF%BF%B9','%EF%BF%BA','%EF%BF%BB','%EF%BF%BC','%EF%BF%BD');
 return str_replace($notiunreserved, $notiunreservedEncoded, $url);
}
function preg_iriencode($url){
 return preg_replace('/[^0-9a-zA-Z\-._~\x{00A0}-\x{D7FF}\x{F900}-\x{FDCF}\x{FDF0}-\x{FFEF}\x{10000}-\x{1FFFD}\x{20000}-\x{2FFFD}\x{30000}-\x{3FFFD}\x{40000}-\x{4FFFD}\x{50000}-\x{5FFFD}\x{60000}-\x{6FFFD}\x{70000}-\x{7FFFD}\x{80000}-\x{8FFFD}\x{90000}-\x{9FFFD}\x{A0000}-\x{AFFFD}\x{B0000}-\x{BFFFD}\x{C0000}-\x{CFFFD}\x{D0000}-\x{DFFFD}\x{E1000}-\x{EFFFD}]+/eu', 'rawurlencode("$0")', $url);
}
function preg_iriencode_basic($url){
    return preg_replace('/[\x{0000}-\x{009F}]+/eu', 'rawurlencode("$0")', $url);
}
$i=0;
$url = 'Exclamation!Question?NBSP Newline
Atsign@Tab Hyphen-Plus+Tilde~好';
$iriencode = 0;
$preg_iriencode = 0;
$preg_iriencode_basic = 0;
$methods = array('iriencode','preg_iriencode','preg_iriencode_basic');
while($i<500){
    shuffle($methods);
    foreach($methods as $method){
        $start = microtime(true);
        $method($url);
        $end=microtime(true);
        $$method+=($end-$start);
    }
    $i++;
}
foreach($methods as $method){
    echo $method.number_format($$method/500, 30);
}

Example results:

preg_iriencode 0.000042529106140136717665797828
preg_iriencode_basic 0.000018751144409179686578428153
iriencode 0.000083773136138916016709202172

I did try a 50,000 run loop but the str_replace function decreased in performance a lot. At 500 loop performance is similar to a single loop. I will be sticking to my myurlencode function though, at least until I find some problem with it.

RFC3987

2011-11-28T13:19:00.001Z

This morning I was doing some work on my photo website, and then did a bit of work on my christmas list. While I was searching for things to put on my christmas list, I came across this page where someone has made a DIY CNC miller! I wouldn't have thought many people would build something like that, though it seems quite popular: http://www.instructables.com/id/Easy-to-Build-Desk-Top-3-Axis-CNC-Milling-Machine/.

Most of the afternoon and evening I spent looking into RFC3987 and how to implement it. It is similar to RFC3986 for encoding urls, but allows many unicode characters like Chinese etc. Sadly it doesn't allow many characters like '(' and ',', which are reserved under both schemes. So I will still get messed up looking URLs with it, but I can't complain too much.

Debugging errors that don't exist

2011-11-26T10:37:00.001Z

This morning I was still trying to debug my problematic google maps page. In Firefox on Ubuntu, I was getting tons of errors, so I tried cutting the page down bit by bit, making it more and more basic. The idea being that when I remove a bit and then the page starts working properly, I know that it must have been something in the bit of code I just removed that was causing the errors.

However, I cut the page down to almost as basic as you can get, and was still getting the same errors. Then I tried the Google Maps tutorial map, and found that had the same issue. I thought I should post on the Google Groups maps API v3 about the issue, but first should check if the issue only occurs in Firefox on Ubuntu.

After opening the page in IE6, I found that all the layout of the images in the info bubble was all messed up. I used the Web Developer Tools to check the properties of the <span> that was meant to make the images display correctly in IE6, and it looked like it didn't have any style set by stylesheets.

So I Ctrl-clicked on a link on the page to open in a new window the main photos area of my website. This uses the same html and stylesheets for displaying images as I have inside the info bubble in Google maps, so I wanted to see if the image display was messed up there as well. But rather than opening the page in a new window, it opened it in the same window. So I clicked the back button to get back to the map, and opened up the info window again, but this time the images were all displayed correctly. I checked the <span> using Web Developer Tools, and now it had the correct styles applied to it. It makes it very difficult to debug real problems when browsers change their behaviour on each page load.

When testing in Google Chrome, I had erratic behaviour with that as well. For example, one time the map loaded up blank so I checked the developer tools, and the first part of the page was shown to be:






















                       <script>
$.ajaxSetup(("async" : true});

i.e. the first 21 lines of the html were blank, and the 22^nd line is missing it's type="text/javascript" attribute. I refreshed the page, and still got a blank screen, but now the HTML code was showing correctly in the Developer tools.

After this I had a problem with the text inside a noscript tag not being styled correctly. I found this forum thread: NoScript - css background? and if you scroll about half way down the page, you can find a post by penders that lists the way different browsers deal with styling content inside noscript tags. Some browsers ignore rules applied to a noscript element in css, but will honour rules if you instead apply them to a containing element, such as a div, within the noscript tag. Seems very strange behaviour to me.

After finishing testing on the different browsers, I wrote a post to put on the Google Maps API v3 group:

I am having the same issue as detailed in this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3/browse_thread/thread/9fce9c1a493b3413?pli=1
But, only on Firefox in Ubuntu. The other browsers I have tested (Chrome Win7, IE6 Win XP, IE7 Win XP, IE8 Win XP, IE9 Win7, Firefox Win7, Safari Win7, Opera Win7, K-Meleon Win7) do not have this problem.
The errors happen on any google map, including the example tutorial map: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/map-simple.html
Both when the map is loading and when the cursor is moved over the map, thousands of errors will occur, e.g.
Warning: reference to undefined property a[oo] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 68 Warning: reference to undefined property this[a] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 26 Warning: reference to undefined property this[a] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 26 Warning: reference to undefined property a[pc] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 53 Warning: reference to undefined property a[oo] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 68 Warning: reference to undefined property this[a] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 26 Warning: reference to undefined property this[a] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 26 Warning: reference to undefined property a[pc] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 53 Warning: reference to undefined property a[oo] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 68 Warning: reference to undefined property this[a] Source File: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_gb/mapfiles/api-3/7/2/main.js Line: 26
The version number of Firefox for Ubuntu is 3.6.24. I have disabled all extensions and add-ons and still have the same problem.

However, after writing this, but thankfully before I posted it, I found out what the problem was. I had javascript strict error checking set to true in Firefox on Ubuntu, but not on any of the other browsers. Sure enough, I turned strict error checking off (type about:config into the address bar to get to the settings), and now didn't get any errors other than one mismatched mime type error. Likewise, I set strict error checking to true on Firefox in Win7, and started to get the stream of near constant errors.

I am unsure if I originally turned strict error checking on, whether Ubuntu Firefox comes with it turned on by default, or if one the extensions e.g. firebug turned it on. But at least with it turned off I now won't get a constant stream of error messages and can hopefully debug why my page isn't working correctly in Ubuntu Firefox.

I also tried to see if I could turn strict error checking on in Chrome. I found this post Re: [chromium-dev] Re: enabling javascript strict warnings and errors?, which suggested using --strict when starting chrome to turn on strict error checking. Unfortunately that didn't seem to make any difference.

Interestingly, after turning off strict error checking in Firefox, I found that my Google Maps page now worked correctly. So all of my work yesterday and today has been mostly debugging errors that don't exist.

The rest of the afternoon and first part of the evening I made a lemon & coconut cake with Belly. Then most of the evening I spent listing my communist santa hats on ebay. I also went to see KK on Animal Crossing as well.

Trying to debug problems with google maps page

2011-11-25T15:23:00.001Z

I spent quite a while trying to debug why a page on my site wasn't working properly in FF on Ubuntu. However, when I opened firebug I found that it was too slow to do anything. Checking the CPU usage for my VM, I found that the VM was using between 20-50% CPU (40-100% of one core), usually it is 0-3%. So I tried to figure what it was on my webpage that was causing CPU usage to spike so high.

Eventually, after a few hours and much trial and error, I discovered the problem was actually a different site I had open in a different tab:http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/how-to-create-a-better-wordpress-options-panel/

It gave a constant stream of the following error message:

Warning: reference to undefined property window.Dialog
Source File: http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/y6/r/naNy-PS2iP8.js
Line: 54

I had always thought that when you opened firebug, it would attach itself to the current tab, and only report errors etc. from that tab. It seems I was wrong.

Now I finally have that sorted, I can get down to the job of figuring out why my site isn't working properly!

I'm having a lot of trouble debugging the problem with my site, specifically the problem is with a Google Maps page. At first the info window would open when you clicked on a marker (correct behaviour), but then immediately close (incorrect behaviour). Then when trying to debug that, it happened that the marker window wouldn't open at all. Trying to debug that, the markers stopped showing up. And trying to debug that, now the map doesn't even load and I just get a grey page.

And annoyingly, the original problem is only showing in Firefox on Ubuntu (well at least it's not showing in Chrome and Firefox on Win 7), so I can't try debugging the problem in a different browser.

It also seems like Firebug might be having trouble, as later doing some debugging I got error messages like

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: file:///home/djeyewater/.mozilla/firefox/f8kz0h7v.default/extensions/firebug@software.joehewitt.com/modules/firebug-service.js:266

and the VM started using 50% of CPU (100% of one core).

I noticed that whenever I ran the mouse cursor over the map, the error console would fill up with errors like

reference to undefined property a[pc]
 (53 out of range 43)
main.js (line 53)
reference to undefined property a[oo]
 (68 out of range 43)
main.js (line 68)
reference to undefined property this[a]
 var tf=sf(-fa,-fa,fa,fa),uf=sf(0,0,0,0...his.set(b,c)}};I.setOptions=V[C][Eb];
main.js (line 26)
reference to undefined property this[a]
 var tf=sf(-fa,-fa,fa,fa),uf=sf(0,0,0,0...his.set(b,c)}};I.setOptions=V[C][Eb];
main.js (line 26)

In the end, I still haven't worked out what the problem is yet. Maybe tomorrow...

How to update multiple rows in mysql and rant against rfc3986

2011-11-23T13:37:00.001Z

Today I was doing some work on my photo website and needed to update all the records in a table, but each row needed to be updated to a different value. So I looked for ways to do this, and it seems there are a few:

Do a separate query for each row
Use a prepared statement to do a separate query for each row
Do an INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
Use CASE (same as switch in php I think - I'm not convinced that it would efficient)
Insert the new values and old keys into a temporary table, then use that in a JOIN to do the update

If I get a minute (unlikely) I will test the different methods to see which is most efficient.

I was working on creating a feed for my site, and reading this tutorial on ATOM feeds, I liked the source of the comment they use to get around browser's not applying XSL stylesheets:

I employ an excerpt in Esperanto translation from the first chapter of a Polish novel about ancient Egypt.

As part of my work on creating a feed for the site, I have had to change the url structure to be encoded as per rfc3986. I don't agree with the restrictive ASCII only nature of rfc3986, in my opinion we should have moved beyond that by now and chinese characters etc. should be valid in URLs. rfc3986 to me comes across like so long as we don't have to encode characters in english it's okay, the rest of the world will just have to put up with encoding their characters as we don't care about them. That's probably not actually the case, but just the way it seems to me.

As well as this, some web browsers display unencoded urls correctly in the address bar, but display encoded urls in their encoded form e.g.

If I link to a page as http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/中文 it will display as http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/中文 in the address bar.
However, if I link to the url encoded as per rfc3986 http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87, it will display in the address bar as http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87

Now I know which looks much nicer to me as a url, especially if my native language was Chinese. It should be noted that for the unencoded url, the browser will encode the url itself when it makes the page request, but will display the unencoded url in the address bar. So by using unencoded urls, you do not avoid rfc3986, but rather the encoding responsibility for requests is put on the browser's shoulders.

I believe Google Chrome is much better in this aspect than IE (what a surprise!) and displays the unencoded url in the address bar even if the page was loaded from an encoded link. Unfortunately IE is the most popular browser, so it is important how things appear in it.

There is also an issue of filesize - an encoded url will take up more space than an unencoded url. Not a big issue, but another reason against encoding urls. (For the above example the encoded url is 51 bytes while the unencoded url is 39 bytes when both are saved as UTF-8, and that's with only two of the 35 characters being encoded).

Anyway, despite my disagreement with rfc3986 I still need to implement it to make the feed valid. Plus my not using it has probably made some pages on my site not discoverable by Google or accessible by some strange web browsers / bots.

So while I was looking at converting my urls to be compliant with rfc3986, I wondered about how I was structuring my URLs with regard to pagination and SEO. I found quite a bit of info on this subject: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=344378292ff91e8d&hl=en&start=40#fid_344378292ff91e8d0004af9f4a5efbe7.

I have still got quite a bit of reading to do, but what I gather so far is:

Use rel=next and prev links in the <head> for paginated pages
Use query string parameters for the page (and other parameters) rather than including them as part of the URL (which I am doing at the moment - oops):
@katty22: One thing I’d like to mention is that for interchangeable/filterable options, it’s more search engine friendly to keep the options as parameters, not as subdirectories. For example, we’d prefer this URL:
http://www.example.com/item?story=abc&price=up&page=1
rather than:
http://www.example.com/story=abc/price=up/page=1
Unlike some articles suggest, if you have four pages that are the same, except for a url parameter, and each 'page' has a single link to it, this will not be any worse SEO-wise than having one page with four links to it. Google will automatically identify the pages as being the same as group them into a cluster:
When Google detects duplicate content, such as variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster and select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL. Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.
source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687
I was interested about this suggestion on pagination. The article suggests that you shouldn't have more than 100 links on a page, and that comment suggests only linking certain pages using logarithmic pagination.
I haven't read any guidance from Google on this yet. At the moment I have all pages linked and then use js to reduce this for the user, e.g. for page 45 js would reduce the links to look like
1, 2, [...] 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, [...], 120, 121
And the user can expand back to showing all linked pages by clicking on the [...]
So this is something I need to look at more closely.

I hope to do some more research and reading on this aspect of SEO tomorrow.

Blah de blah blah blah blah

2011-11-22T17:08:00.001Z

Yesterday I was checking the dpreview forums and came across this thread about slit scan photography. Investigating a bit more I found this long list of Slit scan photography. The list is so long that I only finished reading it today. One of the photographers listed on there I think I have seen the work of before, and he has a couple of other nice projects as well: Adam Magyar.

After doing quite a bit of reading on the subject, it seems that digital slit scanning requires a video camera, then taking a slit from each frame and blending the slits together on the computer. Streak photography on the other hand is used with a static subject. So you can use a still camera and move the subject or camera a very small amount between each frame. Then, just as with the video you need to extract a slit from each image and blend them into a single image.

Also today and yesterday I was working on a couple of articles for my photo tips website. In the evening both days I have gone on Civ IV. Today I won a domination victory on it, so for the rest of the evening I checked Google Webmaster Tools and Bing webmaster tools stats for my websites.

On Bing I noticed that a Google gadgets page had lots of links (in different languages) to a KML file on my photo website. So I checked it and it was one of my static KML files that I must have submitted quite a while ago. I couldn't see any way to submit KML files from the KML gallery, but found the submit page by googling for it. So I submitted my dynamic kml file for my photo website.

I also checked out the KML from a guy who spent 30 months touring Asia, lots of nice places and photos.

Reading emails

2011-11-18T12:20:00.001Z

This morning I was reading articles on The Luminous Landscape, then checked my email and found I had an email to say my website was down.

So I spent a while fixing that and trying to work out what had gone wrong.

Then I had an email about Google+ pages, so I set one up for my photography tips website. It seems you can't get a 'vanity' url, so I followed the recommendation here: HOW TO: Get Your Own Google+ Vanity URL. It's not a hack to actually get a custom url, rather just using a service similar to bit.ly so you can give people an easy to read url that will then redirect to the Google+ page.

I also followed the procedure here: Add Google+ Profile Buttons On Your Blog to add a button on my site that links to my google plus page.

A link I forgot to post yesterday was Alternatives to illegal
or
within

tags> on a hover? I wasn't sure whether you were allowed to include block elements such as and

inside an

(was getting some weird behaviour on a blog post where I had), but according to that post this is perfectly okay. In the end I found the problem with my blog post was that the list was using custom CSS bullets via

li:before{
content 'some unicode code point';
}

This inserted an inline element as the bullet, but since this was followed by a block element (
) in my page, this meant there would be a line break between the bullet and the paragraph e.g.

>
Some text in a paragraph here

To fix this I changed:

li:before{
content 'some unicode code point';
display: block;
float: left;
}

and this seemed to fix it.

Most of the afternoon today I was checking my email. I also tried out an RSS feed submitter called Traffic Launchpad.

In the evening I watched The Woman In The Window with Mauser and Bo, then watched Autumn watch with Belly & McRad.

Walking and photoing

2011-11-17T22:37:00.001Z

This morning I was mostly checking my emails. For part of the morning and afternoon I also did some work on a blog post for my photo website. For most of the afternoon I went out on a walk because it was sunny.

In the evening I sorted some of the photos from the afternoon's walk and also went out to take some star photos. Unfortunately there seems to be too much light pollution here, even out in the a field. This isn't a densely populated area, there is the town in one direction, then various villages dotted around in other directions. I guess you have to be really far from civilization to get good night sky photos.

Websiting

2011-11-05T23:24:00.001Z

This morning I made a tea loaf using fruit soaked in some of the whisky tea we got from Scotland. I cleaned the bird feeders, cut out pogs in Photoshop, and did some work on a script to fill some tables for a website with dummy data.

In the afternoon I did more work on the database script and uploaded some more panos to 360cities.net. Most of the time I spent on the database script trying to figure out why I was getting a blank page with no error messages.

In the evening I did more work on the database script and played on Civ IV. Unfortunately Civ IV seemed to be impossible as one of my neighbours would always make war with me. Even when I reloaded and gave them loads of technologies and converted to their religion, so they were pleased and said we would be friends for many years, the next turn (or two) they would still make war on me! And my cities just weren't well defended enough to put back their attacks.

Uploading panos

2011-11-04T22:45:00.000Z

I spent most of today reading through my unread emails, and also uploading panos to 360cities.net.

I always like reading the Money Morning emails, the writers have a good sense of humour and tell it like it is. One I read today made me laugh:

The Efficient Market Hypothesis is the theory that stands behind the way that most economists and institutional investors view the market.
It sees the market as a sort-of-hyper-efficient supercomputer. All knowable information and perceptions about past, present and future are fed in at one end. Out of the other end pops a perfectly-formed price.
…
It’s no supercomputer. It’s more like a bemused toddler, wondering where the trillion-euro note that nice Dr Merkel pulled out of funny little Mr Sarkozy’s ear has got to now...

Sarah and Mark came to visit today, and in the evening we spent some time looking at their wedding photos.

Geocoding

2011-11-03T22:48:00.000Z

Today I was mostly geo-coding photos from our Scotland holiday. Thankfully I had the GPS tracklog switched on for most of them, though some needed the position correcting slightly when taking a number of shots close together in trees. There were also some where the GPS was switched off, and one lot where I had it switched on, but left it in the car (doh!)

I noticed that there weren't actually any panos on Cairngorm, which is actually quite surprising since you can get up most of it easily using the funicular railway. However, I can't regret not taking my tripod (to do panos) too much considering how windy it was up there.

I also managed to read through some of my more wordy emails that I hadn't read yet. Still got quite a few left to read though.

One of the emails I read mentioned affiliate link hijacking, so I wondered what this was. After looking it up, I found this helpful post, which explains what it is: All about Link Cloaking/Hijacking. Basically, the only way for another person to hijack your affiliate links is if they have some malware installed on the user's computer, or if they hack your webserver.

Both of these seem quite unlikely to me, and I don't know how 'cloaking' affiliate links would prevent either problem. So I will just keep on using standard links and not worry about it.

In the evening (afternoon) I went out for a walk hoping for a nice sunset. It was a nice sunset, but unfortunately it only lit up a small part of the sky, so not very good for photography really.

Geo-coding

2011-11-02T22:04:00.002Z

Since yesterday afternoon (possibly before, but I didn't notice), MySQL on my hostgator account has kept being off and on. I contacted HostGator support when it first happened yesterday, and at first they said MySQL was up, then they said someone was looking into it.

Since it was still bad this morning I contacted them again to see if there was any update. Unfortunately there wasn't, other than that they were still trying to fix it. They said that when it was fixed this thread would be updated. Eventually the thread was updated to say the issue has been resolved, but it took over 24hrs since I first noticed the problem. For all I know the problem could have been happening all week while I was away.

When the problem was eventually fixed, I updated my photo tips website with the posts I'd got ready over the last couple of days.

I also started geo-coding some of the Scotland photos, and did the first two days from Edinburgh. It took quite a long time as I didn't have the GPS switched on for all the shots. Since the photos were of the city I had to look up shop names on Google and use Google Streetview to try and get the correct locations for photos that were taken when the GPS was off. Some of the ones taken while the GPS was on were quite a bit off, presumably due to being inside / near buildings, so they needed correcting as well.

Getting annoyed by the bank

2011-11-01T21:26:00.000Z

Today I found a couple of articles on articlesbase to add to my photo tips website, then had to find photos on flickr to illustrate them. I also did various odd-jobs - gluing rubber back on tripod leg locks, filling up the bird feeder, filling up the pond, putting the washing out, tidying up the Halloween figures, vacuuming.

Although I had gone out specially to buy lots of bird seed before we went away, it seems no-one could be bothered to feed the birds. Likewise, the pond was quite empty, with the water level gone down part-way in the deep hole in the middle of the pond. I guess it does go to show that it's a good thing I do these tasks normally, otherwise they'd never get done.

I went to the bank in the morning to close some ISAs with the Nationwide as they were only paying 0.25% interest. Because they were old Portman accounts they said it would take some time. So I had to go back in the afternoon to collect the cheques and pay them into Alliance & Leicester / Santander, which is just a couple of shops down the road from Nationwide.

In Santander the bloke annoyingly was trying to get me to take out a savings account to put the money into. They can never let you just pay money into or take money out of an account, always have to try and sell you a mortgage or something. When I got home I checked the share prices of Santander, and found they have fallen by 35% over the past year.

So if you had put your money in a Santander savings account, you would probably have got something like 0 - 3% interest paid over the past year. But if instead you'd shorted their shares, you would have got 35%. Of course, you could also loose quite a bit of money by shorting their shares if instead the price went up. So while 35% is a great return, I think I'll just keep the money in cash for the moment.

I also managed to finish checking through all my emails, though there are still about 50 I haven't read (but I know they're not urgent).

Article writing

2011-10-31T21:12:00.000Z

Most of today I was writing an article for my photo tips website about geotagging.

I also started going through my emails, I have a big backlog due to not being able to check them while away.

Billy had finished the Communist Halloween video while we were away, so a good job it was finished in time for Halloween:

Scotland Day 9 - Travel back home

2011-10-30T20:38:00.000Z

Today I got up at 6.15am, then we had breakfast at 7.30am. I had Scottish breakfast Sausage, Bacon, Tomato, Mushrooms, Fried Bread, Scottish Potato bread, Baked Beans, and some toast, along with a cup o' tea. Mauser had the same, except without any mushrooms or fried bread.

After breakfast we left the hotel and went into Inverness. Mauser had to get some petrol in Inverness as the car rental company charge you extra if the car isn't returned with a full tank.

We found the bus station, which is near the train station car park where we had to leave the car. Since we had about 20-30 minutes before our bus was due, I went off for a very quick walk to see if I could find any souvenir shops. We hadn't bought any souvenirs other than a Cairngorms pencil and Edinburgh Castle notepad for laddie, so wanted to get some 'proper' souvenirs.

Unfortunately I could only find one souvenir shop nearby, and that was closed (actually nearly all the shops were closed - it was before 9am and on a Sunday).

We got the bus to Edinburgh at 9.10am, which arrived in Edinburgh at 12.40. Partway through the journey we thought the bus was going to be very late as the clock in the bus showed 12.40 when it was still quite a way from Edinburgh. But actually it was just that the clock in the bus hadn't been put back an hour.

In Edinburgh we struggled for a bit to find a way to the station, as it is located underneath a bridge. We stopped to the south of the bridge, and Mauser saw some stairs that we could use to get down to the station. Before going down to the station, Mauser waited with the bags, and I went off to try and buy some souvenirs.

Unfortunately I only had £10, and I couldn't remember the PIN for my credit card. I had meant to check the PIN before we left for Scotland, but the credit card company's website was down for maintenance >:[

The shop sold a range of teas: Scottish Breakfast Tea; Thistle Tea; Heather Tea; Whisky Tea; and maybe some others I can't remember. They had a packet of Whisky Coffee in the window, but I couldn't see this for sale in the shop. Ideally I would have liked to get a nice quality scarf, Whisky coffee, a collection of the teas, some Walkers Shortbread, and a Nessie plush. But since I only had £10 I had to get a £5 scarf, £5 whisky tea (I thought this seemed more Scottish than the other tea varieties), and I also got some cheaper non-walkers shortbread with a spare £1.10 I had.

I went back to Mauser, and we made our way down the steps to the station, which was quite difficult with my heavy suitcase. Then we went through the station (and down more steps) to find the train we wanted and the platform it was leaving from.

We caught a train heading to Reading that stopped in Sheffield, but a large number of seats were reserved. We managed to find two seats that were free until York. Then when the train got to York we had to vacate our seats and stand out in the area by the doors. There were some other passengers there as well who must not have reserved seats, and then an old drunk woman came in and started babbling on about how a man had said she kicked him when she hadn't.

We got off at Sheffield as planned, then had to go up and down more steps with the heavy suitcase to find the correct platform for the train to Leicester. We caught the train to Leicester, and didn't have any problems with seats being reserved on that train. Then we changed at Leicester for Harborough. Putting the big suitcase in the luggage compartment and then retrieving it when you get off is quite a do, so we just stood in the doorway area with our bags since it was only one stop.

It was about 7.00pm by the time we arrived back at Harborough station. McRad picked us up from the station, and gave us a lift home. Pulling the heavy suitcase with no handle all the way home would have been very annoying otherwise.

We had some tea and I unpacked the case, then went to bed about 9.30pm.

Scotland Day 8 - Inverness & The falls of Foyers

2011-10-29T20:38:00.000+01:00

Before breakfast today we were trying to see if you could get down to the shore of Loch Ness anywhere. I found a walk for Foyer Falls mentioned a path that goes down to the shore. I also found mentions that you could access the shore in Fort Augustus, but no actual directions on where in Fort Augustus to go to get to the shore. At breakfast we asked the B&B owner if she knew of anywhere, and she said she didn't know of anywhere nearby, but since we were going to Inverness, there's a pub nearby called the Dores Inn where you can access the shore.

After breakfast, we went off to Inverness and did a walk along the River Ness. We stopped to eat our lunch (a slice of yesterday evening's Jalepeno and minced lamb pizza) in a picnic area by the bay. A man came up to us and pointed out a dolphin in the river, so we looked and saw the dolphin surfacing a few more times.

Only a little further on, a woman called us over to point out a seal (or it might have been a sealion, I can't remember now) in the river. It was quite far away, and just looked like a small brown blob. She said that there was often an otter that bobs up and down, and also the dolphins swim along the river, further into Inverness.

Carrying on our walk, we went further into Inverness, and took a detour to see the castle. One part of it looked like it had builders working inside it, and the other part was a court. As we walked up the river we could hear loud bagpipe music, singing, and a Scottish bloke announcing. We never saw what it was, but it appeared to be a large and well attended event in a stadium that was equivalent to a non-league football team stadium.

Going across the islands in the river, there were various tents and things set up. Near the end we saw a poster saying it was for Halloween on the Ness Islands, and it looked to be organized by the Scottish Highland Council.

We finished the walk by soon after 2pm, so went off to see the Foyer Falls. It was a really nice area, with great autumn colours and great falls. Unfortunately it was raining quite a bit, so I only took a few photos and my camera got quite wet. There was a building with a plastic wallet on the side that had local maps in it you could buy for 10p. These appeared to have been printed and helpfully marked up by hand, so we bought one of these, just leaving 10p in a smaller plastic wallet that was there.

Using the map we saw how to get down to the shore of Loch Ness, which is something that is not possible around most of the Loch. We followed the map and got down to the shore, and took some misty rainy photos looking down the Loch towards Inverness.

After our walk we went to the Dores Inn, which was very popular. All the tables in the restaurant area were already reserved, but we managed to get a table in the bar area. After some more people without reservations had filled up the rest of the tables in the bar area, some people who arrived later had to be turned away.

I had a vennison loin with sweet sauce stuff, and Mauser had a red wine marinaded lamb shank. For pudding we both had Apple and cinnamon with custard (though we ordered it with ice cream). I had a drink of Ale (Farr I think it was called), that had a nice fruity flavour. Mauser had a pint of Coke since he was driving. The food took a while to arrive, but was good sized portions (especially the puddings), and very nice. Although the price was quite good by restaurant standards, £20 each for a main course, pudding, and drink still seems a bit much to me.

We went back to the B&B and then watched a film called Loch Ness. It was very predictable and cheesey, and we didn't recognise any of the locations. I think that most of it (apart from being filmed in a studio) was probably filmed at Fort Augustus, which we didn't explore very much when we were there.

I sorted today's photos and wrote this blog post, then went to bed at 00.00 BST (today time) or 23.00 GMT (tomorrow time).

Scotland Day 7 - Abriachan Forest & River Beauly

2011-10-28T20:37:00.000+01:00

Today we weren't going to get up early, but we did mean to be up in plenty of time for 8.30 breakfast, but neither me nor Mauser were woken up by my watch alarm. I woke up at 8am, so we were up in time for breakfast, but I didn't have enough time to have a shower.

After breakfast we went out to the Abriachan Forest trails, and did a walk there. Unfortunately the first bit of the walk there was a sign saying No admittance due to forest work. So we were stuck for a bit wondering what to do. After spending some time looking at the trails map in the car park, it looked like one of the trails went down to the same place as the other one that was blocked off. So we went down there, and it did. It actually turned out that quite a bit of the start of the walk was just going to see things near the car park, before you got onto the real walk.

The walk went through the forest for a bit, then came out on an open hill, where it was very windy. Then a lot of the walk was just down a trail used by Forestry commission vehicles, which wasn't as nice as a proper footpath going through the forest. We also went down to see a Whisky still, but it was just a small wooden building cut into the hillside, with nothing inside it other than some seating, so quite boring.

After completing the walk, we went off for our next walk along part of the River Beauly. To get there we had to down single track roads from the Abriachan forest trails car park, and Google navigate wasn't very good at giving correct directions. I think that probably we could have actually just gone along single track road a small part of the way and then gone along an A road if we had planned the route ourselves instead of using Google Navigate.

The river Beauly walk was nice as well. It was lucky that Mauser had his phone with multimap on as the walk directions said to turn off right down a boggy track into a wood, when actually you needed to turn off right through part of a field and then follow the path along the edge of the wood and the field.

There was a nice sunset on the drive back to the B&B, Mauser did try to stop so I could get some photos, but all of the parking spots are unmarked and you only see them when it is too late to stop. The only one Mauser did manage to see in time to stop at turned out not to be a parking place, but actually a road to a farm. So I didn't get any sunset photos.

The rest of the evening I copied and sorted today's photos, then wrote yesterday's and today's blog posts. Mauser went out to the takeaway and bought a 'Mexicano' pizza. It had lots of Jalapeno pepper slices on it, and was really hot. It also had a lot of nice stringy cheese.

Scotland Day 6 - Cairngorm

2011-10-27T20:36:00.000+01:00

Today we got up early and had breakfast at 7.30am, which is the earliest you can have breakfast at the B&B, and normally they only do breakfast from 8.30am.

After breakfast we headed out to Cairngorm mountain, via Tesco in Inverness. There was a really nice sunrise with golden coloured clouds, but I couldn't take any photos as we were driving through Inverness at the time. When we got to Tesco we bought some food, but when it was time to pay they said it was more than we thought it should be.

We had 2 packets of Walkers Sensations crisps, which were meant to be 2 for £3, but one of the packets Mauser had chosen wasn't going through like that. So I went back to get a replacement packet, which was at the opposite end of the shop. I checked, and the packet Mauser had got was the only one that wasn't in the promotion, all the rest were. So I got a different packet and went back to the tills.

Then when I got there I found a member of staff had taken the other packet (which was in the promotion) away, so we then had to wait for them to come back before we could pay and take our shopping away. So although it was meant to be a quick stop, it actually took quite a while.

Mauser then drove us to the car park on the Cairngorm mountain. As soon as we got out of the car, it was really windy, and the wind was quite cold. At Mauser's behest I didn't take my tripod or most of my other photography stuff because it obviously makes hill climbing easier the less stuff you carry. I pulled most of the dividers out of my bag, to make room for storing my coat etc. in my bag when I got too hot.

But as it turned out, the wind was so strong that I didn't need to take any of my clothes off at all. I wore Jeans, T-shirt, a fleece, a thin waterproof jacket, a scarf, gloves, and one of my Russian ushanka hats. This kept me not too hot and not too cold, apart from it was quite cold when standing still in the wind and not moving.

The wind was really strong, around 60mph according to the person in the base station that Mauser spoke to. It made it really hard going, even on the flat bits, and I nearly fell over a few times when caught by a strong gust.

We detoured off our intended route by about a mile because the route we were meant to take was not a marked footpath. So we had to just walk across part of the mountain to get to where we were meant to be. Thankfully for this bit the wind was more at our backs, pushing us along, which made it easier.

If it wasn't windy most of the route we took would have been quite easy going. We didn't see anyone else along most of the route, though saw one group, and one person along the cliff edge area. When we got to the top, there wasn't anyone else there. We ate some crisps, then started down the mountain as the wind was too cold to do much eating.

Going back down, we walked past a line of cairns from the top, and then came to a cobbled path, which led down to the top funicular railway station. This route was probably easier than clambering up the side we went up, though it was reasonably steep and would have still been a hard workout for the thighs I suspect.

When we got to the funicular railway station, we decided that rather than pay £7.20 each for the railway back down, we'd just walk it as it looked on the map like it was only a couple of miles. So we walked down, probably the easy route up. It was a large track, it seemed a lot shorter than the route we had come up, and there was comparitively little wind (though it was still windy). Since it was downhill with no obstacles (like rocks) it was easy going for us back down to the car park.

Back at the bottom, we went into the shop, Mauser bought some postcards, and I bought a pencil for Laddie. We went into the cafe, and Mauser asked if they did tea and coffee to go, as we wanted 2 large teas to take away. But the woman answered Mauser's question by going off and making a (small) tea and a (small) coffee to go. So I had a tea and Mauser had a coffee.

We took the drinks back to the car, then Mauser drove back along the road and we stopped at a nearby Loch. Someone leaving the car park gave us their parking ticket, which was lucky as we didn't even realise it was a pay & display car park. We had our drinks and the rest of our crisps sitting on some tree roots on the edge of the beach around the loch, which was very nice. We also had some Boosts, which we had eaten a bit of on the mountain. It was quite strange as even though the Boosts were in Mauser's bag, they seemed to have become frozen while we were on the mountain. The caramel was really hard to bite through, and it would crack rather than being soft. The normally soft biscuit stuff was also solid as well. Very strange and different to eating a normal Boost.

The sun was setting at the Loch, so we didn't spend too much time there, but rather started back to the B&B while it was still light.

We got back to the B&B, and then checked out what the weather was like and the route for Ben Nevis, which we were planning to walk tomorrow. Amazingly, there is a website specifically for what the weather on Ben Nevis is like. The wind there was listed as something like 55 / 75 mph, so stronger than it was on Cairngorm mountain. The route also was about the same length as the Cairngorm one, but was described as being one long steep route, which sounded like it would be very difficult in the wind.

So we decided not to go up Ben Nevis, and spent quite a bit of the evening trying to decide what other walk(s) to do instead. I also looked up Urquart castle, which is nearby, to see if was worth visiting. From what we had seen from the car park when we checked it out before, it didn't look like there was much to it really. Most of the reviews were very positive, but only mentioned that the opening video was really good and informative. The positive reviews didn't seem to say much about the actual ruins. There was also one negative review, and they did talk about the ruins, and said they weren't that great really, and there are better castles in Scotland you can visit for free. So we decided not to visit there.

After sorting out a couple of walks to do tomorrow (problem is there is too much choice), I went on Civ IV for the rest of the evening.

Scotland Day 5 - Meall Fuar-mhonaidh

2011-10-26T20:35:00.000+01:00

This morning we had a full Scottish breakfast again, except that I had fried bread instead of Bacon, and Mauser had the same as yesterday except without Fried bread, Haggis, or Black Pudding.

We went out in the car to a walk, but Google navigation led us the wrong way. It did take us to a car park, but then wanted us to continue up a gated track. Instead of going back the correct way, we decided to just walk from there. We followed the google instructions to where it had suggested we drive to get to the proper car park at the start of the walk. This took us down an unused track that had bits of tree going across it, so stupid instructions. Mauser checked his multimap map, and it was clear on that what the correct route was, so he was annoyed he didn't check multimap before following the Google navigate instructions.

After a bit we came to the start of the walk proper, which was up Meall Fuar-mhonaidh. The ground was quite wet and muddy, but when we got further up the mountain, it became really boggy. You had to keep deviating from the path quite a bit to try and get round the larger / deeper patches of bog. It was also quite a trixy walk as you kept thinking you were nearly at the top, then you'd see there was actually another higher peak further on ahead.

Most of the walk up was cloudy, and it rained for a bit. But when we eventually reached the top at 1pm (we started about 9.30am), the weather changed to more sunny with cloudy spells.

On the way back down I slipped over on some of the wet boggy grass, so that was annoying. Thankfully I got bits of fine moss (moss spores?) on me rather than mud, and by the time we reached the bottom the wet patches had mostly dried out.

We reached the car at about 4pm, then went to the takeaway at Drumnadrochit to get some fish and chips. We went back to the hotel next so I could go to the loo. We had been trying to decide where to eat our dinner, and eventually decided on some picnic tables that aren't very far from the B&B. So we walked there and ate our fish & chips. We had a nice view of the hillside with horses on it, and also the river running next to us.

After eating our dinner we walked along the road and track a bit, which goes along the Great Glen Way. After a bit we came to an area where you could see the river better (no trees in the way), then we went back to the B&B as we didn't want to do too long of a walk, especially since we didn't know where the track actually went to.

At the B&B I copied and sorted today's photos, then wrote yesterday's and today's blog posts.

Scotland Day 4 - Drumnadrochit and Fort Augustus

2011-10-25T20:32:00.000+01:00

This morning we got up about 7am, and had a full Scottish breakfast of toast with butter, Haggis, Scottish potato cake, Baked Beans, Tomato, Mushrooms, Bacon, and Scottish Breakfast Sausage. Mauser also had fried egg, fried bread, and black pudding as well. For drinks we had a couple of cups of tea each, and Mauser had an orange juice as well.

After breakfast we set out on a walk, which was nearby so we didn't need to drive anywhere. The walk was very nice with lots of autumny trees and a large waterfall, though the instructions we had for the walk were very confusing and made us go the wrong way and have to backtrack a few times. The instructions kept talking about different coloured markers, but had the marker colours down wrong in a few different places. If we'd followed the instructions but ignored the bits about coloured markers we probably would have done the walk okay without ever going the wrong way. The only other problem with the walk is that the weather was quite dreary for most of it.

We came back to the hotel from the walk and had a short rest while I copied the photos to the laptop. After that Mauser drove us out to a woodland walk near Fort Augustus. The walk was nice, but again it wasn't sunny. It rained for a bit, but there was a nice view of the sunset light coming through the valley below, like sunbeams, except horizontal purple sunbeams.

When we'd finished the walk it was getting dark. We went to Fort Augustus, which is meant to be a small village worth visiting. In the Scotland book it said there was a reasonably priced restaurant there, but when we found it, it was closed. It looked they were only open during the day and didn't serve evening meals, though there were no open times displayed.

We had a walk round Fort Augustus in the rain, and there was a nice set of locks there, a bit like Foxton Locks, though larger, not as many, and not as steep. There were a few food places, but all the reasonably priced places seemed to be closed, and the places that were open were quite expensive. So we went to a mini-market there, which was also very expensive. We bought some fudge and pain au chocolats. Then when we were going back to the car we saw another mini-market, so we went in there, and they were much cheaper. Doh! Also, they sold the same pain au chocolats and the previous shop didn't give a receipt, so it could have looked like we were nicking them from that shop.

We went back to the hotel and just had a pot noodle and the last of some Raspberry sponge cake we bought from Tescos in Edinburgh. I copied and sorted the photos from the walk near Fort Augustus, then for the rest of the evening I wrote the blog posts for our trip so far (excluding today's).

Scotland Day 3 - Travel to Loch Ness

2011-10-24T20:32:00.000+01:00

This morning we didn't bother getting up early. I had a shower, but then someone else went in the bathroom after me, so Mauser couldn't use it (we didn't have an en-suite). We packed our bags, hung around doing nothing for a bit, then caught the bus towards the city centre.

We then walked to the bus station, which thankfully wasn't too far, with my annoying rolling case. We made sure we had plenty of time as we thought we might as well get there early since otherwise we would just be waiting at the hotel doing nothing. We caught the bus okay, and there were some really nice views on the way to Inverness. Big hills covered in colourful autumn trees and rivers winding their way through the hills. There was also one bit where there were a few fields of haybales with loads of pheasants in, and a few of the haybales had pheasants sitting on top of them. Unfortunately my camera 450D doesn't autofocus accurately enough for me, it always seems to front focus quite a bit. So I have been using liveview with contrast detect autofocus. But this didn't work either when shooting through the bus windows (the weather was dark and dreary, which probably didn't help either). So I didn't get any photos from the bus trip.

At Inverness we walked to the trains station, then waited round for ages for the car rental person. After a bit Mauser phoned them, and then they said they would come, as if they were waiting for us to phone them. But Mauser said it didn't say anything about needing to phone them on the booking email with all the details that they had sent him.

After getting the rental car, Mauser drove us to our B&B near Loch Ness. After meeting the lady who owned the guesthouse and getting all the info, we went out on a walk towards Urquart Castle, which the lady said would be nice for photos at sunrise or sunset.

But when we got to the castle, we found the hill was blocking the sun from lighting the castle (though the hill on the opposite side of the loch was lit). Also, there seemed to be no way to get to the castle except down a track that said no access. Looking inside the visitor centre (which was closed), Mauser saw there was some stairs inside the visitor centre that went down, so it must be that you have go down through a tunnel from underneath the visitor centre to get to the castle. Since the castle only opens at 9am, and closes at 4.30pm, I'm not sure how you'd get any nice sunset or sunrise photos of it? You can photograph it from above, but it's not a particularly great view in my opinion.

We then walked along the road for a bit, trying to find a footpath on Mauser's phone that looked like it went to the top of the hill. But we couldn't find it, so had to go back.

We went back towards the B&B, then carried on walking downwards as the B&B lady had said that there was a restaurant with decent food on the right. We didn't see the restaurant, but there was a walk around some woods at the bottom, so we did that. It was quite dark now though so we couldn't appreciate the autumn colour of the trees. On a post it had said there was no formal access to Loch Ness from the footpath, we found the informal access was by a fallen over tree that crosses a river. Mauser suggested we not try it as it wasn't worth me falling in trashing up my camera stuff or him falling in and trashing his phone. So we just carried on round the circular walk.

After walking through the forest we walked along the road a bit more to see if the restaurant was down there. Eventually we came out near the main village of Drumnadrochit. Walking up the road there was a pub called the Fiddler's Inn, but it was quite busy and looked like it only sold drinks, particularly Whisky. At the top of the road, I went left to see if there were any restaurants / pubs around there, while Mauser went to the right. I didn't find anything, only the entrance to Nessieland. Mauser found a restaurant in a hotel, but it was empty, and quite expensive. So we went back down the road and came to a take away, so we bought some Burgers and chips. Then we carried on down the road to the part of the village where our B&B was located. On the way we passed the restaurant the lady had said about, we thought she had meant it was right from the B&B, but she must have meant right from the south end of the road.

We managed to get back to the B&B before 8pm, and fill out our breakfast slips so we could have a nice cooked breakfast in the morning. We ate our dinner, Mauser had a Cheeseburger and I had a Chilli burger with Cheese. But my burger was exactly the same as Mauser, except that it had chilli sauce. Mauser said that he normally asks for Chilli sauce on his burgers, so a good thing he didn't, or it would have confused the bloke if he ordered a cheese burger, then said he wanted to make it into a chilli burger.

I copied the evening's photos to the laptop, then we went to bed quite early.

Scotland Day 2 - Edinburgh

2011-10-23T20:30:00.000+01:00

Today we got up at about 6.45am and then went out about 7am. We walked out to Holyrood park, and did the walk up to the peak. The first bit was very hard with a lot of steep stone steps, and they were a bit slippy as it had rained.

We went back down the other side of the hill and saw the ruins of an old chapel, then went down to a large pond / small lake at the bottom. There were lots of pigeons in one area all having a wash, but the swans would come and annoy them.

Next we walked to the palace of Holyrood, but didn't go in. We walked along the Royal Mile from the palace to the Castle. We spent quite a while in the castle, then walked down to Hanover Street to catch a bus to the Royal Botanic Gardens. We should have been able to catch a bus before that but Ramsay Lane and The Mound (where the bus route was meant to go) were both closed to traffic.

At the Royal Botanic Gardens it was free to get in but we had an expensive cup of tea, £1.80 each. It was a good cup of tea and well needed though. We looked round the Royal Botanic Gardens for a while, then left at 5.45pm as it closed at 6pm. We got the bus back towards North Bridge, then walked along North Bridge / South Bridge to find the cheap Cheeseburger and pie shop we'd seen the other day.

Unfortunately they had sold out of Cheeseburgers, and didn't have any Haggis pies left either :( . So we both bought a Scotch Pie instead, though Mauser probably would have bought a Scotch pie anyway. They were 95p each. We also went to Tesco, but this time the larger one, and bought a pot noodle and some croissants.

Further on Mauser thought it might be better to have chips with the Scotch Pies than the Pot Noodles, so we bought some chips for £1.80, though after that we saw another shop selling chips for £1.50. We walked back to the B&B and were very glad about having the hot chips to go with the pies, which were only warm.

After eating and copying all the photos to the laptop we went out again in the evening. We got the bus partway down the street, then walked to Greyfriars to see the Greyfriars Bobby statue. I took a pano there, though it took quite a long time as a drunk New Zealander was talking into the camera like he was on TV, and then hung around for ages trying to talk to Mauser.

I tried to take a photo of Greyfriars Church, but it wasn't lit at all, and I couldn't get my camera to focus correctly. The 18-55 IS lens I was using has no manual focus distance markings, liveview was black even at ISO1600 with a 30s shutter speed, and the viewfinder isn't good enough for manual focusing, especially in light so dim. When I was just giving up a tour came round to the front of the church, talking about the story of Greyfriars Bobby.

We walked down various streets and along behind Edinburgh Castle, and saw a couple of Churches off Lothian Road. Then we walked round Charlotte square, which reminded me of the large posh squares they have in London, with a small park in the centre. We then walked back along Prince's Street, and finally caught a bus from North Bridge back towards the B&B. I copied the rest of the photos, then went to bed about 12pm. I didn't feel too well, and was sick a tiny little bit in the room's sink. But after that I felt better.

Scotland Day 1 - Travel to Edinburgh

2011-10-22T20:29:00.000+01:00

I got up at 6.15am and then Clare gave us a lift to the train station at 7.15am. Unfortunately I didn't have time to pack properly, but thought I'd got everything I needed.

The sun was rising as we left, and was a nice purple colour, though the sun didn't actually start to rise above the horizon until we had left on the train. The train journey was quite nice, going through some interesting looking places. The East Midlands Parkway station had a power station next to it, and later on we saw power stations further away on both sides of the trainline.

There was also a place in Yorkshire, which I can't remember its name, but had a large Victorian station, when I didn't think it was a major town.

We switched trains at York, and got the train to Edinburgh. Durham had a nice looking cathedral. Going through Newcastle it had some nice bridges going over the Tyne. Berwick upon Tweed looked a very nice picturesque seaside town as well.

When we got to Edinburgh station we had to try and figure out which exit was nearest the way we wanted to go. Then we went to our hotel, using Mauser's phone's GPS for navigation, though most of it was all along one long road.

I had brought a wheel suitcase but the pull-out handle at the top was broken. It had a cloth handle at the top, so I thought this would be okay. But actually it was very awkward and I kept hitting the case into my legs. My arms also got worn out quite quickly. My slingbag would keep sliding off to the right if I was pulling the case with my right hand since I had to lean down to hold the case handle. So this was another problem.

Eventually we reached the B&B, so I was very relieved. The woman at the B&B showed us some info about the buses and where nearby attractions were. After putting our stuff in our room we then walked all the way back to the city centre.

We walked up Callow Hill where there were a couple of large monuments and good views over the city. Next we walked down and went along Prince's Street, which is the main shopping street. The street was currently closed and covered with roadworks as they are installing a tram system. We walked up The Mound, which goes to the Royal Mile, and saw the way to Edinburgh Castle, and a large church, which is now 'The Hub'.

We walked along the Royal Mile to the long street around where the street changes from being North Bridge to being South Bridge. We walked along the street and saw a takeaway on the other side of the street offering Cheeseburgers for £1.30, so crossed over to have a look at it since it was about 6pm and we were hungry. But before we got back down to the pie shop (we had to walk up a bit past it to get to a crossing), we saw a restaurant that did oriental meals for reasonable prices. Since it is always difficult to buy from foreign restuarants in foreign countries (since the staff don't always speak English), it seemed sensible to eat at a foreign restaurant here as the staff would speak English. So we had a meal there, they did Japanese, Chinese, Cantonese, and various other asian dishes. I had a cantonese dish that was Pork, with a sauce that was meant to be spicy (but wasn't very hot actually), vegetables, and rice. Mauser had one that was Pork, Chicken and Prawns, along with vegetables and rice. We got a free pot of green tea with the meal, and it cost £6 each including a £1 tip. The staff all seemed to be Chinese, but spoke good English. I don't think that there would be any advantage food-wise in eating at a restaurant in China.

After our meal we walked back down the street, and then carried on along the Royal Mile, until we got to the Scottish Parliament, which is a modern architechturaly styled building. Nearby was Holyrood Palace, but this was closed, and wasn't even lit up at night. We walked part-way up Abbey Hill, and saw the 'bath house' of Queen Mary.

Then we went back along the Royal Mile until we reached North Bridge / South Bridge, and then went back up there towards the guesthouse. On the way we popped into Tesco to buy some breakfast for tomorrow morning. We had decided not to have breakfast at the B&B as it was an extra £5 per person, and we weren't sure whether we were going to be around at breakfast time or get up too early for it.

Carrying on up the road towards the Hotel, we found there was also a Lidl, and another Tesco, which looked a bit larger than the one we had bought our food from. When we got to the B&B I copied across the day's photos and sorted the panos using Lightroom (trial) as Mauser's laptop doesn't have RAW preview support in Windows Explorer. Then we went to bed.

Urgently trying to finish Halloween video

2011-10-21T22:23:00.000+01:00

Today I was taking the photos for the communist Halloween video, then urgently processing them. Then laddie can put the photos together into a video before Halloween while me and Mauser are away in Scotland (leaving tomorrow).

It was quite difficult taking the photos as we are using real grass for the graveyard, and the models kept falling over. It was very difficult to get them to stand up on the grass. If I did it again I think I'd just order lots of green plasticine, and use that as 'rubbish looking but easier to pose models on' grass.

That took all day so I only had enough time to pack the essentials for our holiday tomorrow, and didn't have time to check I had everything I needed / wanted for the holiday.

These photos are from the 20th when I was finishing the figures off:

Karl Marx and hands for the different models that didn't have hands made yet

The completed crew - Karl Marx tramp body, Karl Marx, Donald Rumsfeld, Lenin, Chairman Mao, Maggie Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Ronald McDonald, Sir Fred Goodwin, Adam Smith

Plasticine modelling

2011-10-19T22:49:00.001+01:00

I spent most of today doing plasticine modelling. I need to try and get all the models finished and the story photographed before Saturday when me and Mauser go off to Scotland. I managed to finish off tramp Karl Marx, and also do normal Karl Marx and the boy today.

Quite a few of the models don't have hands, so I've still got that to do before I can photograph them.

Photo processing

2011-10-18T21:53:00.001+01:00

I spent most of today processing some photos. For some of them they looked very drab compared to what I remembered capturing, so I spent quite a while trying to improve them. Then I found that the camera had been set to auto white balance (I reset it recently), and this is what was causing the problem. Doh!

I also spent quite a while messing around with some of the infrared photos to try and change their colours a bit. I can get the sky to turn blue by swapping the blue and red channels in the channel mixer, but it didn't give the foliage the orange tint that you see in so many false colour IR photos. I think that maybe the orange tint effect occurs if you use a filter that also lets through some visible light.

I did some gardening work as well, filling up the pond, and removing some of the compost from the compost bin.

I did some more modelling, working on Karl Marx' tramp body. Since I needed to put rips in his trousers I had to make him some legs first, and then put the trousers on top of the legs. Here he is with one leg trousered up:

In the evening I watched 'Bend of The River' with Mauser and Bo, which was quite good. After that I spent ages checking my emails.

Not enough time / stuff takes too much time

2011-10-17T22:40:00.000+01:00

Today I wrote 2 articles for my photo tips website, and that took all morning and most of the afternoon. For a small part of the afternoon and most of the evening I did sculpey / plasticine modelling. In the evening I also watched an episode of Boukengers with Belly.

I had wanted to process some photos and sort out a website / mysql issue as well today, but didn't have enough time.

This is the two armatures (middle and left) I made yesterday, and today I added the fimo shoes to them. The middle is for Karl Marx as a tramp, and the left is for Karl Marx in a suit.

This is some of the figures made so far over the last month or so. The boy on the left is actually an old Lenin body that doesn't have an armature, the boy's real body isn't made yet (you can see his armature in the above photo).

And this is some more, on the right is Lenin's body that I was doing some more work on today.

Photo description researching and writing

2011-10-15T22:35:00.000+01:00

Today I processed some photos from a few days ago, added descriptions to the photos I took yesterday (still need keywording and processing though), went on Animal Crossing and saw KK, and made a couple more armatures for plasticine models.

Going on a walk and unbranded battery is rubbish

2011-10-14T22:52:00.001+01:00

Today was nice weather so I went out on a walk.

I received the £2 part-refund for my cheapo canon LP-E5 battery today, so I charged it up and then tried to put in the camera. But it wouldn't go all the way down into the battery slot. The battery has 3 little slots that 3 metal pins in the camera slot into. On either side of the slot the battery has a metal contact, and I found that one of these contacts was bent into the middle of the slot, which was why it wouldn't fit into the camera properly. I tried bending the contact back into place using a pen knife, but it would always get bent again when you tried to put it in the camera. Strange that it worked okay in the charger though.

So it looks like I wasted £4 on a rubbish battery. I ordered an official canon one from Amazon for £22 this evening, shouldn't be any problems with that.

I also saw an ad in the latest edition of Pop Photo (which I get through Zinio) for a device called Professor Kobré's Lightscoop. The images in the ad showed what a great difference it made, so this intrigued me. I checked online and found this review: Professor Kobre’s Lightscoop Review. This review also shows before and after photos with a pretty amazing difference.

The lightscoop is just a mirror that bounces your camera's pop-up flash onto the ceiling to give a much more natural and diffuse light. This is a pretty standard way of shooting with a speedlight / flash when indoors. So I was quite amazed by the photos in that review that show a comparison between a speedight that looks to have been bounced from the ceiling and the lightscoop. The lightscoop photo is far superior.

Since both the lightscoop and the bounced speedlight should be essentially doing the same thing, I wondered how this could be. After reading about how the lightscoop requires you to use camera settings of a large aperture e.g. f/2.8, ISO800, and the shutter set the max flash sync speed (1/200s - 1/250s usually), the only thing I can think of is that different camera settings were used for the bounced speedlight photo. If the speedlight photo was taken using a smaller aperture or lower ISO value, then it could be that ambient light is contributing more to the lightscoop photo, and giving it the better look.

When I looked at the photos on the lightscoop website, I noticed most of them seem to have quite nice warm skintones. So I think the secret of the lightscoop might be something to do with allowing more ambient light to effect the exposure (thanks to the shallow aperture and high ISO). It certainly seems to give great results though.

Working all day on something and then getting results that don't make sense

2011-10-13T22:15:00.002+01:00

Today I received my 16GB Dane-elec SD card from 7dayshop. My first thought when I got it out the packet and looked at the back of the card was that it looked very much like a Toshiba card. And it turns out that it is: Toshiba appoints Dane-Elec to distribute memory products. When I formatted the card in my 450D, it only registered the card as being 14.8GB.

I thought there was some reason for this but couldn't remember why, so did a quick google to find out. Apparently manufacturers use 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, when actually 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. So this what accounts for the difference.

I formatted the new memory card in my 450D, and noticed that there was a 'low level' format option on the card formatting menu. So I tried to find out what this does, and as far as I can see it is supposed to be used if your computer has some problems reading the memory card. Apparently the folder structure on the card can get messed up or something and a low level format solves this.

Anyway, while searching for info on what the low level format option did, I found this post, which covers how someone fixed autofocus issues with their 450D by doing a full reset of the camera. So I thought I would try that since my 450D still doesn't autofocus correctly.

I also received the Kingston memory card reader from 7dayshop today. The design seems to be pretty rubbish, it has a large plastic outer casing with the actual card reader bit inside being retractable. Possibly this makes it less likely that the card slots would get dirt and dust in. But it makes the reader much larger than it needs to be, and I never had any trouble with dust in the card slots on my old reader.

As well as this it has a really short (1 inch) usb cable, though will probably be suitable for use with a laptop. It comes with a USB extension cable to allow use with PCs. But it would be better in my opinion if it just used a standard mini USB jack and came with a mini USB to USB cable. This would allow cable sharing (though not at the same time) with other devices that also use the standrd mini usb connector.

Now I need to have the card reader with its built-in 1 inch USB cable, the longer USB extension cable, and a mini USB to USB cable (for connecting my GPS) on my desk. Whereas before with my old card reader I only needed the mini USB to USB cable as I could use the same cable for connecting both the GPS and the card reader.

Yesterday I received the new LP-E5 compatible battery for my 450D, but it was only 1600mAh when the photos for the product on Amazon showed 2000mAh. I contacted the seller and they offered to refund £2 of the price. Though I haven't actually received any confirmation from amazon about the part refund yet.

Most of today I was working on trying to compare some different ways of storing and displaying filenames for my photo website, but my tests seemed to give weird results, so I posted on Sitepoint forums hoping for some guidance.

In the evening I did some more sculpey / plasticine. I still have quite a bit more to do though.

Various

2011-10-12T23:05:00.002+01:00

This morning the weather started off overcast, but then cleared up to a blue sky so I went out for a walk. Then it became overcast again so I came back home in time for lunch.

In the afternoon I worked on writing up the cinnamon whirls recipe. I also searched ebay and amazon for a piping bag and some spoon and cup measures. Searching for the cup measures took a long time as there are lots of different makes and how sturdy they are seems to be an issue. The main issue though was that Clare (who wanted the cup measures most) wanted US size cup measures (1 cup = 240 ml) whereas a lot of the product listings seemed to be for UK size (250 ml) or didn't say the size at all.

In the evening I watched Boukengers with L and did some more plasticine / sculpey with L.

Being undecided

2011-10-11T22:19:00.000+01:00

Today I was finishing off a photography article. Then I wondered what site was best to post it to. So I spent quite a while checking the different sites I'm signed up with, and my own site, and trying to see how likely people are to see the article depending on which site I put it on.

In the end I decided to put it on Snipsly, which has a PR of 4.

In the evening I watched an episode of Boukengers with L and also did some more plasticine.

Blogging

2011-10-10T22:06:00.003+01:00

Today I was mainly writing some photography related blog posts. I also topped the pond up, cleaned up some leaves in the garden, and cut all the dead flower heads off the Buddleia.

In the evening I watched Wild Style with Mauser. It had a really rubbish story and acting, really they should have just made it into a documentary. It was still quite good though as the story was only a small part of the film.

Buying more photo stuff

2011-10-09T22:18:00.000+01:00

I was looking today for a spare camera battery, SD card, and a new multi card reader (my old one can't read SDHC cards) for when we go on holiday to Scotland in a couple of weeks.

For memory cards I opted for a Dane-elec Pro-line 16GB SDHC card, for £14. An 8GB card was £9 and a 32GB card was £21. So the 32GB card is cheapest per GB, but I didn't think I'd ever make use of the full 32GB, and if the card got corrupted or lost, loosing 32GB of photos would be quite painful.

On the holiday I will probably shoot using my existing Sandisk 4GB card first, then switch to the new 16GB card when the 4GB card is full. I'll be taking a laptop and hard drives for copying / backing up the photos each day, so that will give me 20GB worth of space each day, rather than for the whole trip.

Before deciding on the Dane-elec branded card, I did some research and found this handy guide to branded SD card speeds compared. I also checked reviews, 7dayshop Professional branded SD cards didn't seem to be very reliable, but the Dane-elec cards have a good rep as far as I could see.

Likewise, many of the cheap card readers seemed to be unreliable. There were plenty of reviews on one of the ones I looked at on Amazon saying that they had to contact the seller, who sent them out another one because the first one they had was faulty. So I thought it was better to pay a bit more and went with a Kingston branded one.

For the camera battery, there are a few unofficial batteries listed on Amazon. The official battery was listed at £20, and has a capacity of 1080mAh. There is also an energizer branded battery listed at about £13, also with a capacity of 1080mAh. Then there is a Neweer (Chinese) branded battery for about £4, which, according to the back of the battery in the product photo, has a capacity of 2000mAh.

So I went for that one, it actually ended up about £5 including postage as it was from an Amazon seller rather than Amazon themselves. Will be interesting to see what it's like, unless it blows up the camera.

In the afternoon today I also played on the two player latest downloadable levels for Portal 2 with L. In the evening I did some sculpey painting / plasticine model making.

Photoing

2011-10-08T22:14:00.000+01:00

Lately I have been processing, describing, and uploading some recent photos. I have also done a bit more work on getting a feed working for my photo website.

Today I made some Cinnamon Whirls with L, went on Animal Crossing to see KK, and did most of the weekly update for my pog website. (It still remains to publish the update and update the facebook page and twitter accounts tomorrow).

various

2011-10-03T23:10:00.000+01:00

This morning I tried to see if I could improve my mysql query for retrieving the info needed to build a feed for my photo website. I thought that maybe I could do a sort and limit on the subquery, but when I tried this I got an error message
#1235 - This version of MySQL doesn't yet support 'LIMIT & IN/ALL/ANY/SOME subquery'
(this is with MySQL 5.4, while I think most webhosts are still using 5.1).

Trying to find if there was any disadvantage to running DISTINCT on a query (or sub query) you are then going to GROUP BY the same column, I found this helpful article at Stack Overflow: What's faster, SELECT DISTINCT or GROUP BY in MySQL? In short, the answer is that if your column has an index on they will both be the same, otherwise DISTINCT will be faster.

After modifying my feed to include the image as HTML in the content tag, I found the image wasn't showing up. I did some testing, and found that on Firefox at least, if you include a summary tag, then the html in the content tag isn't included.

Flickr, RedBubble, and Picasa don't include a summary tag (possibly for this reason), so I just removed the summary tag. Next I looked at what size the images should be. Picasa uses a max width/height of 288px. Flickr uses 240px, and RedBubble uses 550px. Since my existing thumbs are 150px, and my small size is 500px, I think I will go with with the larger 500px size images.

After lunch I went out to help someone with their computer. For the rest of the afternoon I processed a few photos.

In the evening I watched Point Break with Mauser.

Cooking and feeding

2011-10-02T23:00:00.000+01:00

This morning I updated my pog website. After church I cooked dinner.
In the afternoon I was doing various stuff on my comp. One of them was making sure my VMs I use for testing websites on the different IE versions were all up to date. But strangely when it came to running Windows Update, I got a message that I needed to add various domains to the trusted sites options in IE:

To continue, you must first add this website to your trusted sites in Internet Explorer.
The site cannot determine which updates apply to your computer or display those updates unless you change your security settings to allow ActiveX controls and active scripting. The best way to do this without lowering your security settings is to make this site a trusted website. Your security settings will continue to block potentially harmful ActiveX controls and scripting from other sites but you will be able to get updates.
To make this site a trusted website:
In Internet Explorer, click Tools, and then click Internet Options.
On the Security tab, click the Trusted Sites icon.
Click Sites and under Add this website to the zone, copy and paste these website addresses.You can only add one address at a time and you must click Add after each one. Note that you may need to uncheck "Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone."
http://update.microsoft.com
https://update.microsoft.com
http://*.update.microsoft.com
https://*.update.microsoft.com
http://download.windowsupdate.com
Note: The asterisks and different addresses allow your computer to work with the site, no matter how you try to access it from your computer or the Web.

However, even after adding these sites to the trusted sites list, and restarting the machine, I still got the same message. It seems a bit strange that microsoft have decided to make it difficult to check for updates - I'd have thought they would want people to keep windows up to date.
After this I looked at feeds on some different photo galleries, and they seem to take quite a different approach to that suggested in the IBM article An overview of the Atom 1.0 Syndication Format. Rather than using

<summary>A picture of my new car</summary>
<content src="/mypng2.png" type="image/png" />

for the content (which doesn't display the image in FF and IE), the sites I looked at include the the image and summary as HTML for the content. The sites I looked at were Flickr (example feed), Red Bubble (example feed), and Picasa (example feed).

I also noticed that they use category elements for tags, and use encoded HTML e.g.
<div>converted to <div> rather than wrapping the HTML in CDATA tags.

After that I started making some more chocolate horns, but this time using an English recipe that uses pastry instead of bread.

I looked at using <category> tags for my feed, and found this article: Representing tags in Atom, which while good, doesn't come to any actual conclusions about a standard recommendation.Studying the same feeds as earlier, Red Bubble uses:

<category term="photography"/>

Flickr uses:

<category term="road" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />

Picasa doesn't use the category for tags, just specifying that it is a photo.
Wordpress uses:

<category><![CDATA[Photography]]></category>

Personally I like suggestion #1 from the aforementioned article best (e.g.

<category scheme="http://edward.oconnor.cx/tags/"
          term="foo" label="Foo" />

But I don't currently have any way for people to view a list of tags or photos with a certain tag on my website. So although I could use the above representation, the scheme URL would either lead to a 404, or I could put up a blank page there, which would be just as useful.

So I think what I am going to do for the moment is use RedBubble's method. Then if or when I add the ability to browse photos by tags, I can add in the scheme url, ala Flickr and Edward O’Connor's suggestion 1.

Now I knew how I wanted the tags formatted, I just had to look at how to extract them from the database and format them appropriately. With MySQL you can only have scalar values, so you can't select each image record with the keywords as an array. Instead you can:

Select the keywords as an array by doing a separate query for each record you want keywords for

Select the keywords and the record ids in a single query, then use the record ids as array keys when pulling out the rows e.g.

$result = query('SELECT img_keywords.img_id, keywords.Subject
FROM keywords
LEFT JOIN img_keywords ON keywords.id = img_keywords.keywords_id
WHERE img_keywords.img_id IN (list of ids you want records for or a subquery to select records here)'
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()){
$images[$img_id]['keywords'][] = $row['Subject'];
}

Select the keywords for each record as a comma separated string (using GROUP_CONCAT), then explode this into an array in PHP.
Don't try to get the keywords in an array, and just get them formatted how you want in the query (using GROUP_CONCAT)

There may be other methods you could use as well, but I think in theory that the last option above should be the most efficient, though I don't really like it as it is mixing data with presentation/markup.

Anyway, when I added the code for that last method to my query, the query was taking about 1s!!! So I spent quite a while trying to find out what was wrong. I looked at suggested keyword table structures and indexes, but it was actually the way my query was structured that was slowing it down.

This was the original query (before adding in anything to do with keywords / tabs, this took 0.056s to run:

SELECT images.id, images.Headline, images.filename, images.Rating, images.url_name,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(imageData.ImageDescription, '\n', 1) AS summary, imageData.GPSLatitude, imageData.GPSLongitude, imageData.GPSAltitude, DATE_FORMAT(imageData.Last_updated,'%Y-%m-%dT%TZ') AS Last_updated
FROM images
LEFT JOIN imageData ON images.id = imageData.id
LEFT JOIN img_categories ON img_categories.img_id = images.id
LEFT JOIN categories AS node ON node.id = img_categories.categories_id,
categories AS parent
WHERE node.lft BETWEEN parent.lft AND parent.rgt
AND parent.id = 14
GROUP BY images.id
ORDER BY images.id DESC
LIMIT 0,25

By moving the part of the query that selects all matching image ids into a subquery, the time was dramatically cut to around 0.0025s.

SELECT images.id, images.Headline, images.filename, images.Rating, images.url_name,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(imageData.ImageDescription, '\n', 1) AS summary, imageData.GPSLatitude, imageData.GPSLongitude, imageData.GPSAltitude, DATE_FORMAT(imageData.Last_updated,'%Y-%m-%dT%TZ') AS Last_updated
FROM images
LEFT JOIN imageData ON images.id = imageData.id
WHERE images.id IN(SELECT DISTINCT img_categories.img_id
FROM img_categories
LEFT JOIN categories AS node ON node.id = img_categories.categories_id,
categories AS parent
WHERE node.lft BETWEEN parent.lft AND parent.rgt
AND parent.id = 14)
GROUP BY images.id
ORDER BY images.id DESC
LIMIT 0,25

Finally, I also tried using the subquery just to select the category ids we wanted to show images for, and then selecting the image ids that match these in the main query, but this didn't seem to have any benefit over the above, with the run time still around 0.0025s.

SELECT images.id, images.Headline, images.filename, images.Rating, images.url_name,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(imageData.ImageDescription, '\n', 1) AS summary, imageData.GPSLatitude, imageData.GPSLongitude, imageData.GPSAltitude, DATE_FORMAT(imageData.Last_updated,'%Y-%m-%dT%TZ') AS Last_updated
FROM images
LEFT JOIN imageData ON images.id = imageData.id
LEFT JOIN img_categories ON img_categories.img_id = images.id
WHERE img_categories.categories_id IN(SELECT DISTINCT node.id
FROM categories AS node,
categories AS parent
WHERE node.lft BETWEEN parent.lft AND parent.rgt
AND parent.id = 14)
GROUP BY images.id
ORDER BY images.id DESC
LIMIT 0,25

Now when I add in the code to get the keywords, the query is much faster than the 1s it was taking previously - 0.0035s, a massive difference from a simple change.

#0.0035

SELECT images.id, images.Headline, images.filename, images.Rating, images.url_name,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(imageData.ImageDescription, '\n', 1) AS summary, imageData.GPSLatitude, imageData.GPSLongitude, imageData.GPSAltitude, DATE_FORMAT(imageData.Last_updated,'%Y-%m-%dT%TZ') AS Last_updated,
CONCAT('\n') AS tags
FROM images
LEFT JOIN imageData ON images.id = imageData.id
LEFT JOIN img_keywords ON images.id = img_keywords.img_id
LEFT JOIN keywords ON keywords.id = img_keywords.keywords_id
WHERE images.id IN(SELECT DISTINCT img_categories.img_id
FROM img_categories
LEFT JOIN categories AS node ON node.id = img_categories.categories_id,
categories AS parent
WHERE node.lft BETWEEN parent.lft AND parent.rgt
AND parent.id = 14)
GROUP BY images.id
ORDER BY images.id DESC
LIMIT 0,25

If you're good with MySQL, then the above may come as no surprise, but I had been under the general impression that it's more efficient to keep everything in one query than to have to use separate queries or subqueries. I will probably see if there's anything else I can do to improve it a bit more tomorrow.

Going on a walk and cooking

2011-10-01T21:10:00.001+01:00

This morning we all went out on a family walk. It was really hot!

Most of the afternoon and a bit of the evening I was making Chocolate Cornets with L
In the evening I also watched Bouken Rangers with L, cut out some pogs in Photoshop, and went on Animal Crossing.

Feeding

2011-09-30T22:36:00.000+01:00

This morning I was trying to work out if the timezone tables in MySQL needed to be filled, and after checking some more websites, it looks like they probably do need filling. I also checked the current timezone in MySQL, which still said 'SYSTEM'. So I checked the system time in a normal terminal by typing 'date', which printed the date and said UTC. So it looks like I should have MySQL working using UTC as the timezone now.

I spent the rest of the day working on my feed. So far I have the feed, but it doesn't validate, a major reason of which is because the urls aren't url encoded (I'm not a fan of ASCII only). I already had making URLs properly encoded according to standards on my 'to do' list, so looks like I'll have to do that next.

I also started work on the XSL to style the feed like the rest of the site. XSL is something I very rarely use, so I've just been doing lots of googling on it (and on xpath). A problem I had was that the feed was displaying without the XSL being applied. Apparently most browsers (well FF and IE at least) apply their own stylesheets to feeds and ignore any stylesheets specified in the feed. According to one of the commentors on the Firefox bug report for this behaviour, this is because in the large majority of cases a stylesheet is only specified to catch users who try to view the feed in a browser that doesn't support feeds:

Personally, I know of quite literally tens of millions of feeds which are styled for one and only one reason: to keep browsers from showing either raw XML or a helper app dialog to puzzled users

The fix is to apply 512 bytes of padding before the feed root node as the browsers only check the first 512 bytes to see if it is a feed.

For my site I am basing the feed on an example of a photo gallery feed in this IBM article An overview of the Atom 1.0 Syndication Format. When I view the feed without a stylesheet in a browser, it doesn't render any of the content (images), just the textual summary. So for a photo gallery, it does seem that using a stylesheet would be the best way to present a feed to users.

Not getting anything done

2011-09-29T09:29:00.000+01:00

As so often seems to happen, events conspired against me to stop me getting any work done today. I checked one of my websites, and it wasn't working. So then I had to try and figure out why, and fix it. It turned out that although the php process was still running, it wasn't responding, so I had to restart PHP and then my websites came back to life.

There was also a config problem with one of the sites where I had managed to upload a copy of the config for that site that I use for local testing, instead of the live site config.

Then I had to try and find out why PHP had stopped responding. Unfortunately the PHP logs and Nginx logs weren't any help there. I found a thread on the Nginx forums where someone else seemed to be having the same problem: php-fpm randomly becomes unresponsive, segfaults and they suggest there that the problem may be due to MySQL.

As far as I'm aware this is the first time I have had php become unresponsive in about 6 months. And last time I tried installing the latest version of MySQL, it was a real pain. I think I would probably need to rebuild PHP as well to get it to use the latest MySQL driver. So although I will get round to upgrading them some day, what I really want is a method to email me when nginx starts generating 502s because php is unresponsive.

First I looked whether Nginx could send an email when it generated a 502. Although Nginx can act as a mailserver, I couldn't see any directives to do with making it send an email though.

I then spent quite a while trying to see if I could write a shell script that connects to the php socket, sends it some data, and then checks if there is a response. This could then be run on a cron job and send an email if there was no response. Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work, all the examples I found seemed to be about tcp sockets rather than unix sockets. Even if I could have made it connect to the socket, I'm not sure my idea would have worked anyway.

Next I looked at using a shell script on a cronjob to parse the last 10 lines of one of the website error log files. The script could then look for unresponsive upstream errors and send an email if there was one. If there were multiple errors, the script could restart php. Googling, it looked like awk and/or sed or maybe grep could be used to do this. I didn't try to write this script though, but sent my hosting provider a ticket to see if they had any better suggestions.

And they did, they suggested using a website monitoring service. So I signed up with mon.itor.us, who are free and looked quite good.

After getting that sorted, I did actually get some work done. I wanted to write a blog post for my photo website with some recent photos. But currently the website only lists photos in order of rating, not by date. So I thought I would write an RSS feed for it. I spent quite a while researching, and it seems that RSS doesn't support a paginated feed, so it only has the last X items. But there is another feed system called ATOM that seems virtually the same as RSS except it does support pagination.

While working on my feed, I found that I needed to format the timestamp stored in the database for use as the last updated date in the feed. The date format required by ATOM includes a timezone, so I wondered what timezone MySQL was using.

So I did some research on that, and how to set MySQL to use UTC. MySQL Server Time Zone Support gives a number of different ways of setting the timezone. It also states that you should use the mysql_tzinfo_to_sql program to fill MySQL's timezone tables. However, I was a bit confused at this as many other websites include info about how to set the timezone in MySQL, but don't mention mysql_tzinfo_to_sql or filling the timezone tables at all.

So I am not sure if all the other websites are giving info that won't work because the timezone tables won't be filled, or the MySQL manual is saying you need to fill the timezone tables when you don't actually need to?

Walking

2011-09-28T22:42:00.001+01:00

This morning the weather was nice and sunny so I went out on a walk at 10am to see how autumny it was and get some photos. I followed footpath signs, but unfortunately there were a few places where the track split off in various directions and there wasn't any sign to say which way the footpath was, so I had to go down one route until it reached an end and see if there were any footpath signs at the end or on any points of entry e.g. gates along that route. Then if there weren't any footpath signs down that route I would have to go back and try the other route, doing the same thing. I had to do this a couple of times at different points.

I also spent quite a while in a field photographing a cow pat, part of the time lying down in the field to photograph it. If anyone else had came past they would have thought I was a bit strange. Eventually I got back home about 3.15pm. I was very thirsty as I hadn't taken any water with me. I didn't think I was going to be quite so long.

I copied all the photos to my PC, geo-coded them, and started checking my emails.

After dinner I went out to take a sunset panorama, but the sky was bare and the sunlight wasn't particularly orange, so it wasn't that great.

In the evening I watched Flash Gordon with Mauser and Bo. It was quite good, thanks mainly to Brian Blessed. After that I checked a few more emails, geo-coded this evening's photos, and wrote this post.

Trying to find and get software to work to do something I've already done

2011-09-27T22:12:00.000+01:00

I spent most of today writing a photography article.

Then in the evening Billy said he had accidentally deleted all the Animal Crossing photos off the SD card, but he pulled the card out of the wii as soon as he realised so could I check if the card was corrupted or the photos still there. First my PC didn't seem to recognise the card at all, even after removing it from the card reader and removing the card reader from the PC and then re-inserting them again. So I checked Windows Device Manager, which showed the device as a USB Mass Storage Device, but said that the device had been marked for safe removal, but hadn't been removed yet. It said to use the device remove it and then re-insert it again (or something similar).

I didn't think that would work since that was exactly what we'd already done, but I did it and it worked. Hmm... strange. I checked the card and it worked okay, but all the Animal Crossing photos had been deleted, so obviously the Wii was quicker at deleting the photos than Billy thought.

I tried Handy Recovery, some old recovery software I have. This recovered some of the files, but the large majority that it recovered displayed no thumbnails in Windows Explorer, and said the file was corrupted or a type that:

Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because the file appears to be damaged, corrupted, or is too large

I thought that maybe specialist image recovery software might work better at recovering the the photos. After doing some googling I remembered that Sandisk Memory cards come with free photo recovery software. I found the website online, and downloaded a demo of the SanDisk RescuePro software. This seemed to show all the photos okay, indicating they could be recovered, but it cost about $60-70 for the full non-demo version that could actually recover the files. So rather than pay $70 for a piece of software that comes free with a memory card, I thought I might as well try and find one of my Sandisk memory card boxes that included the RescuePro software.

I got the 2 boxes of photo stuff boxes out of the garage, then Billy had a look and managed to find a 4GB Sandisk Compact Flash card box, which was the first CF card I bought with my Nikon D200, quite a few years ago. I checked the back of box, and was surprised to find that the RescuePro software was included with the card. But when I took the plastic packaging out of the box, there didn't seem to be any serial number or CD. Then after checking the pamphlet and stuff that was inside the plastic interior packaging, I gave up and decided to put it back in the box. After all, I still had two other newer Sandisk memory card boxes somewhere I could check.

But when I was putting the plastic interior packing back in the box, I found that actually the (mini) CD was in the box, rather than in the plastic packaging. So I installed the software, but when it came to start it, it wanted a serial number. I couldn't see one on the mini CD wallet, or the main box, or anywhere in any of the stuff that was in the box. I checked and checked, and tried a couple serial numbers that were on the bottom of the box, but they didn't work and I couldn't see the correct serial number anywhere. So I had to give up on that.

Doing some more searching through the big boxes of photo stuff, I found a SanDisk 4GB SD card box. This included the RescuePro software as well, and the serial number was printed on the back of a sticker on the mini CD wallet. Woohoo! First I tried entering the serial number in the prompt of the RescuePro software I'd installed from the Compact Flash card's CD. But this didn't work. So I uninstalled both the previous version (3) of RescuePro and the Demo version (3.5), and then installed the version that came with the SD card (3.3).

After entering the serial number, the program started up, but said it couldn't read the SD card!?!

I decided to check how much of the photos Handy Recovery had recovered, and thought that maybe it wasn't very good at recovering them all in one go but might do it if I only selected a few at a time. But when I checked, I found that actually it had recovered all the same photos that the Demo of the latest version of RescuePro had been able to show it could recover, So after spending all evening on this, Handy Recovery had actually worked fine. It was just that it had also 'recovered' hundreds of additional photos that couldn't be recovered fully and so were corrupted. These were probably photos that had been deleted from the card before, while the ones deleted this evening were able to be recovered.

Now I knew I had the files recovered okay, it was just a case of moving them to the correct directory for permanent storage. In hindsight I didn't need to do this, but at the time I thought that I needed to rename the files, as the recovered files all had filenames like _UU_00001.JPG while the existing files had filenames like RUU_00001.JPG. So I thought I needed to replace the starting underscore with an R to match the correct file naming system for Animal Crossing photos. Of course, once the photos are stored on your PC, it doesn't really matter what their filename is actually.

Anyway, I thought it did matter for some reason, so I tried to see how to batch rename the files. Unfortunately I couldn't find any info other than pay for software. If I was using Linux I'd probably try and write a shell script, but since I'm on Windows I thought I'd try and write a perl script instead. I'm probably equally useless at perl and bash scripting anyway. After some more googling I got the script written, but it didn't work. After doing some debugging I found the problem was that the filename held in the variable started with a './', which I wasn't expecting (though now I look at the script, it's obvious). So I adjusted my script and got it running okay.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my @files = <./*.JPG>;
my $file;
foreach $file (@files) {
  if( rename($file, 'R'.substr($file, 3)) )
  {
    print "$file renamed\n";
  }
  else
  {
    print "Problem renaming $file\n";
  }
}

print "Operation Complete";

I just saved that as rename.pl, put it in the directory of photos, and then double clicked it to run it. With a bit of googling I'm sure it could be changed to use a regex replacement and do more complex batch renames.

And since I had to clear some photos off my memory card today, here is one from a few days ago showing some armatures in varied state of dress:

Setting up account with ping.fm

2011-09-26T22:16:00.000+01:00

This morning and part of this afternoon I was signing up for social networking sites to use with ping.fm.
As part of this I wondered if I could change my Google Profile for the website I was doing this for to use the website name instead of my name. I tried this, and got a message that it didn't look like a valid name, along with a link to Google's policy on your name. This says:

Google+ does not support profiles for couples or groups of people. Additionally, you cannot create a profile for a non-person entity such as a pet or business.

So it seems that you cannot create a Google profile for a website or business, and yet it seems that somehow some people have, e.g. Fodder Network and TechCrunch. I'm guessing that probably Google used to allow businesses to register, but has since changed their rules, while still keeping previous business accounts active.

In the evening I watched Empire of the Sun with Mauser and Bo, which was alright, but a bit boring and cheesy.

Although I still had a bit of a runny nose and cough today, I'm feeling a lot better than yesterday.

Having a cold

2011-09-25T22:52:00.000+01:00

The last few days I been brooding a cold, and the symptoms have been quite bad yesterday and today so I have spent most of my time sitting down watching films or in bed. Annoyingly, the symptoms also include a headache, so I am both mentally and physically incapacitated.

Article writing

2011-09-20T22:31:00.001+01:00

Last few days I have just been writing photography related articles during the day and watching the Star Wars films with Ben, Mauser, and Clare in the evenings.

I was thinking of going out on a walk today, but then it was overcast all day and rained for quite a bit of it.

Various

2011-09-16T23:40:00.000+01:00

This morning and part of the afternoon I was sorting out the formatting and adding photos to my how to photograph butterflies mini e-book.

In the afternoon I went out on a walk to see if there were any butterflies around down the old railway line, as I had found that I don't actually seem to have many good butterfly photos. I only saw a couple of speckled woods, and a few whites though, and none of them wanted to get into positions that would make for a good photo. It was a nice walk though, and I collected some seeds from some of the wild flowers, and took photos of other stuff.

When I got back home I spent quite a while in the back garden trying to get a good photo of a butterfly on the Buddleia, but again didn't have much luck.

In the evening I watched Star Wars Episode 2 Attack of The Clones with Mauser, Bo, and Clare. I thought it was quite good, about as good as the Phantom Menace. While it doesn't have much Jar-jar Binks, it does have incredibly cheesy dialogue between the characters of Anakin and Padme. I didn't notice Warrick Davies in there (not sure if he was or not), and Padme's house looked like Porco Rosso's (or maybe it was Porco Rosso's girlfriend's) house.

For the rest of the evening I plasticined up a body for Adam Smith, though I didn't finish it yet.

Article writing and Phantom Menace watching

2011-09-15T21:04:00.001+01:00

Today I was mostly writing an article about butterfly photography. It was only meant to be a standard article size, but then it ended up quite long (2250 words), so I will make it into a mini e-book.

In the evening I watched Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace with Mauser, Bo, and Clare. It's quite good really, but the non-main characters all seemed to be played by rubbish actors, or were told to speak strangely so it sounds like they can't act.

Article writing

2011-09-14T22:54:00.000+01:00

This morning I was mostly checking my emails and also went through a couple more SSSEO videos. Then the SSSEO website stopped working so I put into practice some of the stuff the videos I'd watched so far had said to do. I did that for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. I also cleaned the bird feeders in the afternoon.

In the evening I did some more armature making for plasticine models.

Various

2011-09-13T22:41:00.000+01:00

This morning I was mainly finishing setting up the w3 total cache plugin for wordpress on my photo tips website. In the afternoon I was watching some of the stupidly simple SEO videos.

In the evening I watched Boukengers with Billy and then did some model painting and armature making. I painted Ronald's shoes red and made two adult armatures and one child armature. You can see them in the photo below along with two already done armatures, as well as Lenin and Karl Marx (who are lacking armatures), and Sir Fred Goodwin (who is the only finished model so far with an armature). I might re-make Lenin and Karl Marx's bodies with armatures.

Also, since it was on my camera's memory card, here is a photo from a few days ago. On the right are trees and on the left is a jack o' lantern and some electrics to make it light up.

Sarah's Wedding

2011-09-11T21:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we all had to get up early and went off to Sarah's wedding in Sussex. We had to wait around for about an hour or two at the Torch Trust for the Blind, where we were going to be staying overnight. Then we went down to the church. The Wedding ceremony was really good, with a live band.

After the ceremony was more waiting around before we went off to the place where the reception was being held. Then more waiting around until the meal. During the meal there was a good Jazz band playing live.

After the meal we just sat down doing nothing for a few hours. Luckily there was a good live band who were playing for quite a bit of the time.

As you can see from the photo of Laddie above, we got rather bored. If I'd had an ipad or something so I could get some work done while I was there I wouldn't have minded waiting around so much. I had a pin held in a mini clothes peg on top of my head, but Clare thought there was someone at the wedding that wanted to kill me and was going to push the pin into my head?!?

I felt sorry for the Wedding photographer as he was taking photos all the time from the start of the ceremony at around 2pm, and was still at the reception when we left around 11pm. I expect he was also taking photos of Sarah getting ready, etc. before the ceremony started as well. And then after such a long day he would have hundreds, possibly thousands, of photos to sort through and process the best ones.

A couple of things I noticed about the photographer was that during the ceremony he was shooting with no flash, and seemed to be using some quite slow shutter speeds while shooting handheld (you can tell by the shutter sound). Then for group photos at the reception he was using two speedlights with an SU-800 on the camera, one on a light stand to the right, and one held by a human light stand to the left. The flashes were pointed directly at the people being photographed rather than bounced off the white ceiling of the marquee.

Considering there was a white wall right behind the people, I would have thought this method of direct lighting would be quite harsh with strong shadows. But I think the results will probably be quite good, he certainly seemed to know what he was doing.

On Sunday (today) we came back home. I updated my pog website and made a farmhouse fruitcake.