First try using combineZP

Last night when I went to bed I kept hearing my pet moth flying around so I kept switching my light on and looking for it. Eventually I did find it, I caught it in a jar. Then I had to go downstairs and get the insect tank, then put the milk bottle lids with honey and sugary water in the tank, then put the jar with the moth in in the tank.

After breakfast I checked my spleenmail, I tried to add a sender to my safe senders list, but hotmail said my safe senders list was full, so I spent a long time editing my safe senders list, removing indivdual email addresses and just adding domains instead. However when I went back to checking my email, it was saying email from sender's wasn't safe, even though their domain was in my safe sender's list. Hopefully Hotmail is just slow to update their lists and it will work tomorrow, otherwise there doesn't seem to be any point to adding a domain to your safe senders list.

This morning I took some macro photos of a blue crystal, I was trying to get it so I could light up the background behind the crystal in a sort of circle shape, kind of like how Jill Greenberg does. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work, I tried using a pen lid on the flash to make the area lit by the flash very small, but it still didn't work.

After that I took some photos of my pet moth. When doing a 5x shot of its face I noticed it had some nice nostrils, but couldn't get them in focus as well as the eyes so I tried shooting a stack. Composition was very difficult and for shooting the stack I just had to adjust the 'zoom' on the lens, which of course moves the whole camera a little bit. Really I could do with a focus rail for shooting static subjects from a tripod.

After that I looked through the dpreview canon lens forum to see if I could find any posts recommending focus stacking software (I knew there was one called CombineZM but I thought there was a newer (and better version) called CombineZ(some other letter). I looked for a bit, then it was lunch time.

After lunch I played on Animal for a bit. Then I carried on reading through the dpreview canon lens forum. After a while I'd read quite a bit but hadn't found the info I was looking for, so I just did a search for CombineZM, then on the CombineZM page it said there was a new version called CombineZP. So I did a google search for 'CombineZP', and that found the thread on dpreview that I had been trying to find. Indeed, CombineZP was the new version that was recommended there.

So I downloaded CombineZP and tried it out. It was very simple to use, and after doing the combine (which takes quite a while when doing all the different combine methods) I saved the combined images and had a look at them. Unfortunately, it looked like the focus was on the moth's nose rather than the eyes, because I hadn't started the stack with the focus far enough back.

So I took the moth out again and took some more photos, starting with the focus further back. Then I copied these to the PC and did a focus stack using CombineZP. I didn't include the first the 2 photos as I thought the focus was too far back, but when I looked at the combined images when CombineZP was finished combining, I realised that actually I did need those images.

So I re-processed again using those images as well. The resulting images (I used all methods again since I don't know what method works best) looked pretty good, especially considering that the moth moved a little bit between shots and the camera/lens must have moved a bit between shots as well. There were a few artefacts though. I put all the combined images CombineZP had just produced into Photoshop and started doing a bit of post procesing, then I put the moth back in the insect tank as I didn't think I would need/want to take any more photos of it at the moment.

I finished processing the image in photoshop. I don't know if CombineZP already does processing on the images, or if it does if you can turn it off. Also the files it produces don't have a color space and are 8bit (I used 16bit TIFFs as the input files for it). I guess if I do any more stacks I will have to try and look and see wheat options are available in CombineZP. Anyway, I was quite impressed with the image it produced considering the images weren't aligned exactly.

I posted a web size version of the final image to deviantart and got like 3 comments on it, which is my most commented deviation ever I think. Normally I get 0 comments. I guess people just saw it on the front page of deviantart, since it shows the last 15 or so submitted deviations on there. I don't expect to get any more comments on it because so many deviations are submitted that it would have got pushed off the front page after a few seconds.

I checked my deviantart messages and new images from people I'm watching as well. After that I think I read something on the internet, can't remember what it was. Maybe it was an article about MySQL and scalability. In a sitepoint email I got the author said they wanted to learn CouchDB and Python in 2009. From the MySQL scalability article I was reading, it sounded like CouchDB might be a good thing to learn (and I'm sure Python would be good to learn as I think Google use it a lot).

Before dinner Clare found my book people delivery by the side gate (wonder why they left it there since I was in all day today and yesterday), the box was rather damp and also torn along one of the bottom sides. Ben opened it up for me (he likes openng parcels) and thankfully both the books were in good condition. They were both hardback books as well, and bigger than I thought they would be. I got 'Birds: The definitive visual guide' and 'Ray Mears and some other bloke: Wild Food' for £9 total.

After dinner I watched s04e01 of Lost, as Maccy got the Blu-ray of season 4 today. Then after that we watched Planet Earth: ice. Then I tidied up my room a bit as it had photo stuff lying around and on my bed. I think I did sumat on my comp (cannae remember what) and then went to bed.

The weather was overcast all day today and most of the snow melted.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Frosties; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; satsuma; slice of home-made jam victoria sponge cake; caramel Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Totally delee Asda (I Tom Hink) fajita kit chicken fajitas (although they were slightly too hot); rice. Pudding was Neapolitan ice cream with wafers (nice to cool your mouth off after the hot chili chicken. Coffee; Bailey's chocolate truffle (my last one [:(] ); piece of Sainsbury's caramel chocolate.

Getting virtual hosts and suPHP on Ubuntu working

This morning I looked in my fishtank and the moth wasn't there. I took all the stuff off the top of the fishtank, and it wasn't sitting up near the top of the tank either. Somehow it had managed to escape despite the top of the fishtank being blocked off with a folder and picture frame covering it. I've no idea where it is now. I looked round my room, but couldn't see it anywhere. It must be around my room somewhere.

After that I tried to help Rad with his external hard drive that isn't working properly. I also carried on trying to get virtualhosts working in Ubuntu. Eventually I got it working, with much trial and error, and following this tutorial: Ubuntu Feisty - Apache Virtual Hosts, only the virtualhost block needed to be *:80 rather than just *.

Probably after getting that working I had lunch, but I cannae remember exactly when it was.

After getting that sorted I moved on to checking if suPHP worked. It did, but apache gave an error when I added in suPHP_UserGroup user group to the virtual host configuration.

So after some googling I uninstalled suPHP, and then followed this guide: How To Set Up suPHP With PHP4 And PHP5. I did come a bit unstuck at one point when my make didn't work, but after a bit I realised that I needed g++ (GNU C++ complier) installed (had to read the error message to see I needed it, duh!). After installing that I followed the rest of the guide (well not about setting up php4 and php5) and it all went smoothly. The latest version of suPHP (0.7.0) that I downloaded didn't need the changes making to the code either.

I had to chmod the php file I wanted to run as I had created it as root rather than the user I specified in the virtual host configuration settings. After this, I could access the page okay, and display the phpinfo() file I'd made.

When Ben came home from school we went in the garden to see how thick the ice was, we could actually walk on the pond without falling in!

After this I checked my email and read a bit about using Ubuntu since I'm new to Linux. One of the things I read was that you can press Alt + Print Screen to take a screenshot of just the window you have in focus at the moment. I tried it on windows Vista, and it worked too. I never knew about that.

Most of the day I was also trying to get Rad's external harddrive to work, but gave up about 5pm when it still didn't work even after deleting the partition table. Whenever you try and format a partition, windows will format it, then when it's finished say an error occurred and the partition could not be formatted properly. Rad also tried a program create and format the partitions, but that didn't work either. Seatools didn't recognise the drive as a Maxtor/Seagate drive, and couldn't run any tests on it, so I think the drive must be trashed.

The weather today was cold all day (probably at or below zero in the shade), and the snow on the road/pavement that got sun on it didn't melt much (probably just reflected most of the heat from the sun). The snow on the grass across the road did melt though. The snow in the back garden didn't melt, but that hardly got any sun on it. I don't know if I said about the snow before. It snowed a bit yesterday, not enough to make a snowman with or anything, the grass is still easily visible through the snow. The sky was clear with a few clouds and the sun shone all day, plus there was a really nice sunset.

In the evening I watched Lost Missing Pieces with Mac and Ben, went on Animal, then watched an episode of Planet Earth.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps; clementine; slice of home-made jam victoria sponge cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Shepherd's pie; peas; carrots; tomato ketchup. Pudding was spotted dick with the sponge being lemon flavoured & custard. Coffee; Cadbury's chocolate buttons; Werther's original.

Trying to get virtual hosts setup on Ubuntu

Last night when I was trying to get to sleep I heard a loud fluttering noise, like a really big moth in the corner above my bed or a bird trying to get in the window. After a bit I switched the light on to see what it was, and there was a moth in the spanish caterpillar tank. Wierd how it sounded so loud and near my head (the tank was actually on top of the fishtank at the end of my bed.

Clare was just going to bed so I told her and she had a look at it and said that Ben had prayed that the Spanish caterpillar would be alright or hatch earlier this evening, so obviously his prayer worked! I guess my room must have been too warm since I don't think the moth should have hatched until Spring. I put the tank out on the landing for the night so it wouldn't fly around and keep me awake, though it still took me ages to get to sleep as normal.

This morning I took some photos of the moth, it was very good and sat on some paper and didn't fly away. Unfortunately it was just sat on the edge of some paper, and I couldn't get it to move further in on the paper, so most of the photos have the dge of the paper in them. After a bit the batteries in the flash wore out, so I put the moth in my fishtank along with a milk bottle lid with a bit of honey in it and a milk bottle lid with some water mixed with icing sugar in it.

After that I went on my comp and did some reading about setting up Ubuntu as a web server. I carried on doing this after lunch, and into the evening, but didn't have much luck, apache kept giving me an error saying no virtualHosts were defined for NameVirtualHost *:80, even though they were.

Later in the evening I watched some Lost extras with Mac. I bid on a Canon 500mm/4 IS lens + case, luckily I was outbid. It went for about £2,400, which is very cheap, although it was a new seller with 0 feedback selling it. They said they wanted payment by paypal (I checked the paypal buyer protection guarantee and although on the item listing it only says you're protected up to £150 when paying by paypal, apparently you're protected for the full item cost, but only protected up to £150 if you're not in the UK), so seemed legit. They were also in Northampton, so possibly I could have gone and collected it, though they were offering free postage if the auction went over £1600 anyway.

Why I'm glad I got outbid was is although very cheap, £2,400 is still a lot of money to me (I bid just over £2000, though I did think of bidding £2500 since they normally sell for around £3,500-£4,000 on ebay). Also I might not use it that much since I am busy doing lots of other stuff and still have lots of stuff I could be shooting with my current cameras and lenses.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; apple; slice of flapjack; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pasta; sauce stuff; mixed veg; chicken nuggets. Pudding was 2x home-made biscuits. Coffee.

Setting up Ubuntu on VMWare Server as Web dev env

This morning got up about 8.50am, so just had time for breakfast, then had to go to church.

After church I went on Animal for a bit, but Ben had a mardy because Mac was going on his PC so Ben wanted to go on the Wii, so I let Ben use the Wii. I had got a bit of a headache so I just lay on the sofa bed and floor for a few minutes until Jin the Pinner thyme.

After dinner I went on my comp and tried a few more times to get Ubuntu (installed on a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine) to work at a decent resolution, but still couldn't do it. I gave up and downloaded VMWare Server 2.

After installing VMWare Server 2, I started it up, it opened Firefox but had an error about an invalid security certificate. So I googled about this, and found a troubleshooting page on the VMWare website, that says to add an exception. But there wasn't an option to add exception, just an okay button on the alert box to tick.

So next I tried it in Opera. This time it just said it couldn't find the page. I looked at the VMWare troubleshooting page again, and changed the url it was trying to connect to to 127.0.0.1 (local loopback address) instead of my PC's name. That got me into the VMWare Server.

The first problem I had was that it wanted a username and password to login, but it hadn't given me a choice of setting any when installing. I read some of the VMWare Server User's Guide about how to set up a machine, install an OS etc and found it was just my username and password for the host OS.

Next I tried setting up a virtual machine. I wanted to use an ISO file for the CD drive, but when I went to locate the ISO file it wouldn't let me browse my computer, and just had a datastore called 'standard'. What I had to do was exit the create a new VM procedure, then on the right hand side of the screen in the 'Commands' box, I needed to 'Add Datastore', then select the directory where the Ubuntu ISO was saved. After that I could create a new Virtual Machine and choose the ISO file from the new datastore I'd just created.

While VMWare Server 2.0 can handle 64 bit OSes (unlike Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 it seems), I decided to just install the 32 bit of Ubuntu as I figured it might have more compatible programs than the x64 version.

When my virtual machine was set up, I booted it up, but nothing happened (other than the machine showing as being switched on in the browser). I read the user guide a bit more, then tried it in IE7. It needed to install a plugin, but then it worked and loaded up the Virtual Machine okay. First thing I tried after it had loaded the live version of Ubuntu, was to change the resolution. There was a large choice of resolution options, I chose the same one that I currently have Vista (the host OS) set at (1280x960) and it worked fine. I guess I should have just installed VMWare Server yesterday and saved myself all the trouble trying to mess around getting it to display at a decent resolution in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.

I had set the networking option on the Virtual Machine to bridged, which should make the machine appear on the network. When I was using VMWare before (Workstation/player I think) bridged networking didn't allow me to connect to the internet (from Win XP anyway), but I tried the internet and it worked. I installed Ubuntu, and then had to install the updates, which takes quite a while.

While Ubuntu was updating itself and I was installing some other programs I checked Luminous Landscape, Moose News Blog and Andy Rouse's blog.

The other programs I installed were:

• Konqueror (sudo apt-get install konqueror)
• Java 6 JDK (sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk)
• Netbeans 6.5 IDE PHP (download from http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/, then right click on file and on permissions tick execute, then okay and open the file.)
• Apache2, PHP5, MySQL (sudo aptitude install apache2 php5 php5-gd mysql-server php5-mysql)

I was following the Netbeans guide to Installing and configuring PHP, Apache, and MySQL for PHP development in Ubuntu. As soon as I finished installing those programs, I checked http://127.0.0.1 in Ubuntu, and it came up with a message saying 'It works!'. So that was good. The next thing I needed to check was that it would be accessible from my host machine, as there's not much point going to the hassle of developing my site in Ubuntu on a virtual machine if I can't test how the site's working in Internet Explorer.

So I got the IP address of the virtual machine by ifconfig in the terminal. I typed the IP in from my host machine, and got the same 'It works!' message, so looking good. What I would like to do is get a web development environment setup in Ubuntu the same as my web server, then this should make developing my site easier, since it should work the same in my local environment as it does on the webserver.

After tea I played on Animal for a bit, and caught a string fish. I also made another good snowman, and caught 2 Football fishes in a row.

After that I installed VMWare tools to the Ubuntu guest OS, then when that was installed I added a drawer to my taskbar and put Konqueror and a fish inside it:


I checked ebay for Lowepro bags, but couldn't see any at a decent price that would hold the 450d + 100mm/2.8 macro or MP-E 65mm/2.8 macro + MT-24EX attached, ready to take out and shoot. I installed Vista SP1, but haven't checked if it's broken anything yet. Ben and Mac went to bed a while ago, so I think I'll go to bed now and see what Vista SP1's broken tomorrow.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Ham quiche; half a sausage; potatoes; peas; butter. Pudding was: flapjack; dried tropical fruit pieces. Coffee; Belgian milk chocolate.
Tea: Beef Pastrami with mustard sandwich; apple; slice of victoria sponge cake with jam; small bag of milk chocolate buttons; cup o' tea.

Trying to get a decent resolution in Ubuntu

This morning I did a bit of work on my website.

In the afternoon I went on Animal for quite a while and paid off my mortgage again, so I think I get a basement now.

In the evening I tried to get Ubuntu to work in a higher resolution, but couldn't do it. I think the problem is due to it running in a virtual machine in Microsoft virtualPC97, so the monitor is running at the resolution and refresh rate set in Vista, rather than Ubuntu, and if the 2 conflict then Ubuntu looks messed up.

The process of setting up the resolutions in Ubuntu also seems rather complicated (at least to someone with no virtually no Linux knowledge like me). And is further compunded by monitor giving me different details to what windows has the resolution set at.

The weather today was overcast all day.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: Chocolate cream biscuit; coffee.
Lunch: Sliced pickled beetroot sandwich; packet of Chilli flavour Doritos; grapes; slice of chocolate swiss roll; chocolate waver bar; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Lasagne; potato; green beans. Pudding was a slice of Mint Vienetta.
Supper: Chocolate cream biscuit; cup o' tea.

Lost, Goldeneye and buying stuff

This morning I watched Lost with Mac, Ben and Luke, then we played on Goldeneye for a bit until lunch time.

After lunch we watched more Lost, played a bit of Snowbow, and then me and Ben went on a walk about 3.30pm. We got back home about 4.30pm and then I checked my email then watched more Lost with Mac, Luke and Ben. After dinner we finished watching Lost, then played Goldeneye (timed mines was surprisingly good) and Mario Kart Wii.

After that I went on the internet a bit, bought a couple of Kaiser adjustable hot shoes from Morris Photographic, and looked for places that sell the Bogen Diffusion filter pack. Unfortunately I could only find about 3 online shops, one didn't have it in stock and no indication of shipping, B&H Photo was $50 shipping! And MPEX said to email them for shipping cost (which I did).

The weather today was mostly overcast, although there was a bit of sun for about ½ hour in the morning and about 2 hours after lunch.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; grapes; Chocolate waver bar; chubby sweet; coffee toffee sweet (cannae remember what it was called).
Dinner: Hot dog sausage; baked beans; brown sauce; chips; hot dog sausage in bread roll; tomato ketchup. Pudding was chocolate swiss roll with chocolate custard. Coffee; Celebration.

Looking at stuff for sale & watching Lost

The weather today was overcast all day.

This morning I looked at stuff on deal extreme, and played Goldeneye with Mac, Luke and Ben. In the afternoon I checked my email and deviantart. I read this thread and watched the videos about making a DIY ring flash.

In the evening I watched Lost with Mac, Luke and Ben. Then after Ben went to bed I looked for the parts needed for the ringflash. The nearest thing I could find to the clamp light reflector at a reasonable price was this. There seemed to be a couple of places selling vent reducers, here (plastic) and here (galvanised steel). Although they use a stainless steel vent reducer in their project, I think a plastic one would work just as well since they cover it in reflective tape anyway. You might also be able to use a bowl covered in silver paint or foil rather than the lamp reflector as well.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x cheese on toasts; clementine; grapes; Chocolate waver bar; cup o' tea; Bailey's chocolate truffle.
Dinner: Slice of pepperoni pizza; peas; chips; potato wedges. Pudding was Christmas pud with custard. Coffee.
Supper: Malted milk cream (like a custard cream but with malted milks); cup o' tea.