Researching shrines

I spent most of today researching descriptions for two Japan photos that I processed yesterday.

I also made a carrot cake with L, watched an episode of Digger Rangers and Kamen rider black with L, went to see KK on animal crossing, and cut out some pogs in photoshop.

Mapping

Mauser wanted to go to Japan again, but the satellite imagery on Google Earth / maps wasn't very good, so I tried to find some better imagery. Unfortunately Yahoo maps is even worse than google! I also tried Naver, which is a big Korean internet portal and has good Korean maps. Apparently they are making in-roads into the Japanese internet market, so I thought maybe they had a good Japan map. But their Japanese website seems to use google maps.

Googling for Japan satellite map or Japan GPS, Japan satellite imagery etc. didn't bring up anything useful. Mostly just google maps imagery of the tsunami areas and forums posts asking whether a GPS would work in Japan.

Looking at garmin maps, I found they have something called Birdseye satellite imagery. I followed their instructions for downloading the demo of the imagery, but my GPS wasn't supported so I couldn't even preview what the coverage is like on the PC. I found a website that had some info about the Garmin Birdseye satellite imagery, and the comments from users mostly said that the coverage wasn't very good, and this was in the US, which you would expect to have been given the best coverage by Garmin.

That same website also mentioned a similar satellite imagery subscription service from a company called DeLorme. On their website they say their data comes from DigitalGlobe. I couldn't see any way to preview the coverage on the DeLorme website, so I checked the DigitalGlobe website.

The digital globe website does give preview images, but it isn't that easy to use. Go to the map page at http://browse.digitalglobe.com/imagefinder/catalogMapDisplay.do then zoom in on the map to the location you want to check imagery of.
Click the Search button in the Search Filter Box.
Now on the menu near the top of the page you need to go to 'Catalog' and then choose 'View List'
This opens in a new page so make sure your pop-up blocker is disabled. You can then preview the different satellite imagery they have of that area. Each image in the list shows what area on the map it shows, and you can choose maximum size to view the imagery at full size.

Unfortunately for the area of Japan I was looking at, their imagery was still worse than that of Google Maps / Earth.

Useless

Well, HFM gave the weather forecast for today as starting rainy and clearing up with a sunny afternoon. But actually it was mainly cloudy (overcast all day) with just a few peeks of sunshine in the afternoon, and no rain.

Weather Clock Face by sean_carney on flickr

Breaking my website

Had a load of problems upgrading one of my sites to the latest version of wordpress. The problem wasn't with wordpress itself, but rather some modifications I'd made to the theme I was using's functions.php and also my javascript file.

One of the problems is that wordpress 3.2 requires v1.6 of jquery, but the jquery tools I was using includes jquery as part of a single file, and uses v1.4. I found the solution here: http://flowplayer.org/tools/forum/20/68683

Basically, only load jquery tools outside of the admin area, otherwise use the bundled jquery 1.6 inside the admin area.

After fixing this I was getting an error about "$ is not a function". After some googling I found that $ wasn't a global jquery variable in wordpress js and was reserved for the prototype js framework.

Now $ was only referred to in functions, and all my functions were called through

jQuery(
 function($){
  pano.init();
 }
);

So I'm not sure why it didn't work. I'm guess that it's something to do with pano being a global variable.

Anyway, to fix it I moved

jQuery(
 function($){

right up to the start of the javascript file (and left

pano.init();
 }
);

at the bottom of the file), so all the functions and variables were enclosed within the scope of the jQuery function (and no longer global).

I also had other problems with mistakes in urls etc. I made and it took me quite a bit of trying different things and googling to work out what the problems were. Anyway, fingers crossed, it seems to be working now.

Various

For some of today I was looking at backtesting something by exporting M15 data from Alpari to CSV and then using forumlas in a spreadsheet, since I don't have an EA to test my idea. I also thought that you could use javascript or php to loop through the data and do a backtest that way.

I wondered which would be fastest (PHP or javascript), and it seems that javascript is generally faster than php (though the last few tests there are much better using php).

Brian, Mauser, and Bo came back from holiday as well, so I looked at Mauser's Wales photos on his TV, and also his prints of photos from his other trips that had arrived.

I went to bed for a bit part-way through the day as I had a bad headache, so that was annoying.

I started uploading some of the last day's photos from Korea to my website, and also started cutting out some pogs in Photoshop for tomorrow's pog website update. And of course, went to see K.K. Slider play a song.

Photoshopping

Today I went to Church and updated my pog website. Clare, Brian, Mauser, and Bo went on holiday to Wales early in the morning.

In the late afternoon and evening I worked on a concept image for the idea of a detective / mystery style film called Dr Robotnik And The Case Of The Missing Tea Bag:



Image credits:

• Miss Singh
• T-Bag
• tea bag
• Arms
• Dr Robotnik
• Kitchen
• Tea box
• Stethoscope
• Sherlock Holmes hat
• Pipe
• Suitcase
• Legs

Also I found a guy on youtube who does great remakes / remixes of pop songs. A few of them seem to be death metal remakes, a genre of music I'm not a big fan of, but still better than the original versions and good fun. This was the favourite video of the ones I watched, a polka version of a Busta Rhymes and Chris Brown song:

Normal stuff

Today I wrote some more Korea photo descriptions and cut out some tazos in Photoshop while listening to Moldovan pop music. I made a farmhouse fruit cake and watched an episode of Star Trek TNG as well.