Finally I have started tagging my blog and photos. which gives me the ability to offer better searches and display nice tagclouds.

For the blog I have used the plugin Simple Tags which offers a huge range of features.

I found that the things I like most is

1. Auto tagging

The blog already had a lot of articles, well more than I wanted to go through and tag one by one. So Simple Tags‘s auto tagging, was crucial. It will look at the contents of an article and select tags that seems to fit, from your current list of tags. It seems like it has done a good job, I didn’t find any tags that seemed out of order.

2. Suggest tags

Simple tags has a feature where it will suggest tags from yahoo and tag the net based on the content of the article. This is a huge help to get som useful tags. And having a nice collection of tags fits nicely with the auto tagging feature.

3. Meta keywords

Most people find their way  to this blog using a search engine, so why not give them a helping hand? simple tags will generate meta keywords from the tags.

The tagcloud that simple tags generates is more pleasing to the eye than the standard WordPress tagcloud. It varies the color as well as the size. Furthermore it is possible to customize it.

I have toyed a bit with the ability to only display tags from a specific category. This can be seen on the category pages ( ie weird ), where I display the tags for a category.I really would have liked to somehow use that to further specify what to look at. For example I want everything from the category “weird” tagged with “fun”. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out to go about that. I really don’t want to get my hands dirty fiddling with to much WordPress php, but it seems that it somehow has to be the only way to go?

Another of Simple Tags features can be seen below, the related posts is generated based on the tags. Just as auto tagging, it seems to work quite nicely.

I really like the contrast between the decaying plants from the last season and the new growth. Since the the sun is hanging low, but shining brightly, there also is some very nice shadows.

The growth is still in its infancy, but in a couple of weeks everything will explode in green.

[zenphotopress sort=random number=5 album=2]

In order to show the images I installed Zenphoto and zenphotopress. It seems cleaner than coppermine, both to look at and to work with. And at the same time I changed the theme for the blog, and added a widget to show random images from the gallery.

Some of the images are high-dynamic-range(HDR) images.

I use a point and shoot camera, so I’m limited in the range and do not have access to raw images. But this is how i do it

Use autobracket

This takes 3 images. One with the default settings, two with respectively +/- 1 ev

Use a tripod and self-timer

This makes sure that the images are aligned in the best possible way.

Combine images

I use Qtpfsgui and i finally managed to compile and use hugins align_image_stack. Its necessary to align the images even though i use the tripod, as just a slight vibration will move the images a couple of pixels, and this results in fuzzy images. The align_image_stack is quite powerful, so handheld images is a possibility

Tonemap

I usually use the Mantiuk algorithm, but i tweak it so the colors become more vivid/surreal.

]]> http://rotand.dk/2009/03/12/spring-is-in-the-air/feed/ 1 http://rotand.dk/2008/04/03/new-server/ http://rotand.dk/2008/04/03/new-server/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:49:10 +0000 http://rotand.dk/blog/2008/04/03/new-server/ The time has come and I’m moving to a new server.

Its a virtual private server, which mean root access via ssh, and a lot more managing. At the moment I’m fiddling with testing and moving data. Though very soon I will be moving, which probably will give some weirdness here, until everything is settled.

I am looking forward to be able to do all the fun stuff on the new server, ie jsp. In the meantime its just annoying to configure DNS, take backup’s, fixing stuff.

Lessons learned so far :

Its kool to be able to ssh in to the new server and just move everything with ftp and not download and upload.

iconv is a nifty unix command for converting: iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 file > newFile

DNS is a nightmare at least for me so far.

Its easy to move wordpress: Export everything, install a new wordpress and import the file. (which incidental also means upgrading).

pmwiki is also easy to move.

I have a mediawiki, that I don’t use any more and i couldn’t find an easy way to convert it to static html, so i think ill just have to live without it. Which is a bit annoying since I wikisquatted at it to show of some povray stuff and that will be lost.

I have a lot of old junk files from various experiments.

There are more in the gallery

I have been using gnome-blog for posting the last couple of blogpost. And Its quite neat, its an panel applet and it makes posting so much easier since its integrated into gnome. I feel that its missing some features like multiple drafts and the ability to insert images. Inserting images should be possible, with the most recent version, if the blog supports it. But well i do not know if wordpress supports it or if the version in the ubuntu repositories is the most recent. I tried getting the tarball but there was some dependency issues.

Speaking of panel applets i highly recommend bubblemon. It shows cpu, bandwith and memory usage as a “bubbling aquarium”.

The first flash assignment were to create a picture slide show, with captions and a soundtrack. Using the Adobe flash gui its very easy, drag and drop “programming”.

But as Richard Stallman says “its not a matter of convenience, but of ethics”. So I went looking for replacements. In another course I had no problems using octave instead of matlab, so should this be any different? Yes, unfortunately it seems that its very difficult to get the needed features in free software, well at least in the given timeframe.

HaXe is able to compile to swf, as well as doing a lot of other nifty stuff. I just learnt about it recently from this video.

I didn’t manage to make the entire assignment, (yet?) in haxe, but i did make this :
flash presentation(5MB+)

UPDATE

I did manage to add sound and captions.

So how did I do it?

Well first of all i installed haxe and swfmill. Haxe is able to use the actionsscript api and swfmill can create resources so your are able to refference them in you haxe code.Here is the recipe i used to create this slideshow.

1. create a xml file for swfmill, in order to create a resources for the haxe code.This i something like

 <movie width="480" height="480" framerate="25">

   <frame>

      <library><clip id="img1" import="library/newton001Slide_.png"/>

unfortunately swfmill isn’t able to add sound to a library, so that had to be loaded directly from a file. I had some trouble getting it to function on the server but i think that adding “-D network-sandbox” to the haxe compilation might have done something. ???

2. run swfmill, thats swfmill simple slides.xml slides.swf

now i had linkage names for the image files, and could add them to the movieClip.

3. Create file SlideShow.hx

The main part. The basic haxe syntax is pretty straightforward, but since it uses the actionscript api it were mostly a question of getting a hang of actionscript. I did however strugle a bit with making a anonymous function, for the sounds onLoad. I used “static inline function sndStart(succes){…}” , its a wee bit diffrent than what i would do in java. but it works.

3. compile.

make a “make file” for haxe, compile.hxml

-swf test.swf

-main SlideShow

-swf-lib slides.swf

-swf-header 480:480:25:FFFFFF

-D network-sandbox

The last part -D is a conditional flag and as far as i can tell it shouldn’t do anything, but a saw it in Fmp3PlayerHx and when i added it the sound seemed to work from the server, using a URL :s :s

4. run haxe compile.hxml

5. display the pretty result. (try not to go crazy when wordpress decides to help you format the html code….), at first i tried embedding the flash in this post, but wordpress kept on changing the code, apparently if you add code and have newlines between the tags it throws in a couple og <p> tags …..

Now its on a separate page, then you don’t have to download the 5 mb flash file just to view the page, and I can use wordpress with out getting too frustrated.

sourcecode slideShow.hx

The music is “the free software song” this version is by Jono Bacon , and I personally prefer it to the version by Richard Stallman

‘Pale blue dot’ on YouTubeFound this on youtube. Its great. It certainly puts things in perspective. Eventhough its the “harsh reality” its uplifting and beautiful. It spoken words from Carl Sagan, there seems to be several different versions with different images. I found this one to be particular good.

As a sidenote posting youtube clips on wordpress is a PITA, it seems that the editor is a bit to active.

The answer : since you don’t have a business solution, you will experience lag at peak-hours. Apparently there are more peak than non-peak hours in a day…

The solution : upgrade to business ( which is triple the price ) or

• backup and delete all databases
• wait until their controlpanel restart
• create a new database, which now will be on the database-server with least load
• restore backup

I did it, and it seems to work better. But I think its bad service and i immediately went looking for other hosting. I have prepaid so I’ll probably stay the year out – but if you know of a good an reliable host (and reasonably priced host ) please let me know.

the annoying host is surftown

The transistion went faily well, meaning i got to restore my blog – before their main controlpanel went down for maintenance?!

After restoring Tinymce wouldn’t show popups ( tinymce – is the visual editor for WordPress). It shouldn’t be related. But anyways i had to add a line to a tiny_mce_popup.js stating the domain. Something about FireFox blocking javascript, i found this fix
edit: which wasn’t a solution after all, something is “bugging” me…