Just a quick note to describe some recent changes to this site.

I’ve changed the template from the attractive but not easily configurable “Feather” theme to Chris Pearson’s “Cutline 3 column” one. The initial advantage of this was it was easy to set up my own header images to be my own photos rather than someone else’s. All the headers are my own.

While it was nice to have each individual page type (posts, archives, pages, about etc) have their own header image, Chris posted a simple mod to the header PHP file that randomly selects an image from a set. Every time you visit the site or refresh a page you’ll get a different header. I intend updating the image set as often as I can. If you read further down this post I have described the header images currently in use.

But there have been more changes than this.

I have also updated to the latest 2.5.1 version of Wordpress - I was at 2.2 previously. The update was easy to do, so kudos to the authors of the program to make it idiot proof.

The cool new feature of 2.5.1 that I could use was widgets - the bits you see on the side panels. While they did exist in 2.2, they are much better and easier to set up with the newer version. I may have gone a bit widget mad, though. Here’s what you can currently see:

• Flickr sidebar - I’m turning into a massive fan of Flickr, and this widget lets me show an image selection.
• PicLens Slideshow - The Piclens plugin is worthy of a whole post of its own. It is simply a stunningly good plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox that provides a fantastic way of browsing image libraries. The dynamic mini-slideshow adds a nice touch to any blog, and by default just cycles through all the images in the blog. It should let you point it at a Flickr feed too, but I can’t get this working. There’s a support query in with the authors, but nothing back yet. Once this is fixed, though, then I can get rid of the Flickr sidebar.
• Site Vistor Cluster maps - not actually a dedicated widget, but rather simply a bit of HTML in a generic text widget. This shows a map of where in the world people are who have been reading this blog. See the Cluster Map homepage for more information. It’s really easy to set up.

The plugins I have currently installed are:

• Akismet comment anti-spam - I wish I had this earlier. The most popular post on this blog is the one about streamlining your PC for games, but it keeps getting spammed. Since installing Akismet, however, I’ve not had to deal with idiotic comments advertising various unsavoury products.
• Flickr Photo Gallery - provides a neat link between images on Flickr and blog posts.
• Google Maps for Wordpress - already described in an earlier post.
• WP Piclens - Provides a direct link to the Piclens image browser from any picture on the blog

Header Images - updated 24th May 2008

Here is the current set of header images along with descriptions of where they are from. Click on any of them to see bigger versions in Flickr - or just keep hitting different pages in this site until they get randomly selected:

	No prizes for guessing! A scan of a photo taken in 2003 while on holiday in Australia.
	Harbour of Roscoff in Brittany, France. Taken in 2007.
	Photo-stitch of 4 images taken from the top of Mount Stinson in New Hampshire, USA in 2004.
	Ribblesdale viaduct in the Yorkshire Peaks.
	View from a walk in Yorksire Peaks near Ribblesdale viaduct, on the way down from Whernside.
	View of, I think, rapeseed field. Taken near Darley Abbey in Notts.
	Photo-stich of four images, taken from Mount Major in New Hampshire.
	Pebbles on a beach in Sidmouth, Devon.
	Canal Lock, converted to black & white as a post process.
	Darling Harbour, Sidney Australia.

All these images are also geo-tagged in Flickr, so if you do click on them to see in Flickr you can access a map of the exact location they were taken. This is a neat example of the integration of online albums, blogs, and mapping - all for free!

To fit nicely with the Cutline theme, these images have to be long and thin at 970×140 pixels. Luckily this is easy to do in Photoshop - just set the custom crop size to 970×140, and interactively select the area wanted. The challenge is in finding sections of images of this aspect ratio that are good and/or interesting in some way. I make no claims to being successful in either of these aims for all of the images. But, as mentioned earlier, I will periodically update the image set.

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I’ve been scratching around for a while experimenting with various ways of sharing these maps, and embedding within a Wordpress blog seems a good thing to do.

For blogs that you host yourself and can upload new plugins too, there is Inline Google Maps, which gives results like this:

And lets see!

Oh….the damned thing doesn’t work…..Back to the drawing board….

Here’s an attempt with Google Maps for Wordpress :

This works really nicely - lots of control over the map, and you get immediate navigation. And it just worked. But the problem with this is that apparently I can only use place names for the map. What I really want to do is to embed my own custom maps. For example, this one for the 3 Peaks challenge.

I’ve left a query with the author of the plugin, but in the meantime it’s back to the drawing board again for GM plugins.

Update (23rd May): The author - Aaron Campbell - said in this comment saying that at present he has no plans to update the plugin to take user specified maps. This is a great shame - customised Google maps are incredibly useful, and being able to embed these in a posting would be great. So, maybe I’ll write my own plugin. It’s only software - how hard can it be? :)  Don’t hold your breath though, I’m a busy chap…

While out walking one chilly morning in Attenborough nature reserve I spotted this Robin. Luckily for me he was in posing mood and I managed to get pretty close with my 200mm lens. The image is uncropped - I got within just a few feet of him.

I got some nice comments on the image from the people over at Flickr.com, and thought it worthwhile to post here too (see the links panel for more of my pictures on Flickr). I’ve also recently been getting into Flickr a lot, and this was an opportunity to link my gallery straight to this blog for a bit of a test. Regular readers will have noticed that at long last I have chosen a different theme - the header images are all mine, although I plan on randomising the set to add a bit of variety.

Hopefully this hooking together of online galleries and Wordpress means I can keep my earlier promise of updating this site more frequently.

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It’s hard to believe that six months have gone by without a single new posting, which is rather poor of me. My only excuse is that I have a life, and finding time to write some coherent thoughts on things, at the expense of other activities, is often too hard to justify.

And yet there is lots I would like to chuck out there, and lots of things I have been experimenting with or starting to use. For example Fogbugz (a software management tool), how do you choose an online gallery, and DIY desktop mixed reality. So here’s hoping I get the chance.

The picture introducing this post is a Long Tailed Tit I spotted while walking in Attenborough nature reserve, using my new Canon 80-300mm IS (Image Stabilised) lens. It was pretty much a reaction shot - the bird did not sit still for more than a few seconds, and I have several pictures showing empty twigs with just the blur of a tail feather exiting the frame. Click on the image to see a bigger version via Flickr (since this was originally written I’ve been getting to grips with this online gallery).

I’m pretty impressed with the lens so far, even after just a single brief outing. I got it for wildlife and sports/action photography. I still need to experiment with the image stabilisation feature to get the best out of it.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about using Panoramio to publish and view images from around the world in Google Earth and Google Maps. At the time I posted just a single beach scene from Hamilton Island in Australia as a test image and noted that it takes a while for these images to appear to any user of Google Earth. At long last these have now appeared!

After I wrote the article I added a few more images I had lying around. After a few weeks, they started being flagged by the Panoramio reviewers as having been accepted by Google Earth.

However, when I looked at Google Earth I found that not all of the pictures were there. But a quick look at Google Maps showed that they were all present for anyone on the web to look at:

There appears to be a lag of around a couple of weeks between the image being flagged in Panoramio as being accepted and it appearing to other users of Google Earth despite it appearing in Google Maps much sooner. While I still really like Panoramio and will continue to add photos to it, I must admit to being frustrated by the long wait between submission and publishing of images. For my beach image it was a period of nearly two months, which I think will put a lot of people off.

Despite this there is a bit of a thrill in seeing your own photos in Google Earth. I’ve taken a screen shot to show the images as they appear from the Panoramio link. Since I can only see one side of the globe only a few images are visible - I’ve ringed them in red. Although looking at the image again, perhaps I should have drawn a nose somewhere mid-Atlantic and a smile somewhere near Ascension Island!

One improvement I would like to see is an optional email notification when an image has been accepted, and again when it is available in the various online applications.

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I was fortunate enough to go to Siggraph this year in San Diego, which is the premier conference for new research relating to computer graphics. While the technology I’m going to write about in this article was not presented there this year, it another example of one of an increasing number of research projects to use the vast array of photos available through online communities such as Flickr.

Microsoft have recently released a techology preview of a stunning new piece of technology called “Photosynth”. The aim is to create three dimensional “spaces” of real places and buildings by analysing and processing photos taken from differing viewpoints. The idea of creating spaces is subtly different from creating models. The former places the emphasis on something that is navigable and in which you feel immersed. Model reconstruction, on the other hand, is the creation of a 3D representation that can be places within a virtual environment, perhaps as part of a larger scene.

It is incredibly cool stuff. This article introduces the ideas and shows where to go for more information.

The technology to create a 3D model from a set of photos is not all that new. Indeed, I worked on a project with Real3D Inc a few years ago that was all about creating 3D models of people’s faces from two or more photos. But many of these approaches depend on a photographer setting up his shots in a certain way, and explicitely defining the relationships between images. What Photosynth does, however, is use the millions of images available in online photo communities to assemble a 3D space of a real place using a montage of pictures taken by many different people at different times. This montage could consist of thousands of individual source images.

A great way to see this in action is to watch the demo video on the excellent TED site. It is only about seven or eight minutes long. If you are interested in technology and want to feel inspired by some great thinkers, then a browse around TED will be time worth spending.

If you fancy having a go yourself, then you can access an online prototype at the Photosynth research homepage. It is free, and just requires you to download a small plugin that works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Here’s a screenshot from my PC:

The scene is of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The main image is a combination of one or more photos from an online collection placed within a 3D scene represented by a pointcloud that Photosynth generated from processing the photos. The strip along the bottom shows the primary contributing image to the scene, and also related images that are spatially close. Remember that these pictures could have been taken by hundreds of different people, and many are just holiday snaps. You can navigate around the Piazza in 3D using the controls on the image or the mouse.

At the moment the creation of spaces can only be done by the authors using their own specially processed database of images derived from a public photo community. But imagine the possibilities if you combined this with the Panoramio geotagged image database? Of course there is a small issue of corporate politics that would prevent this, unless Google and Microsoft merge. Yeah, right….

Expect to see more and more applications that exploit vast online image libaries for various uses. In upcoming articles I will describe a couple of recent research projects presented at Siggraph.

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Something I came across recently was the ability to share your own photos of places around the globe using Google Earth. A Spanish company called Panoramio have created a very easy way of selecting locations on the globe and adding your own pictures. Other users of Google Earth can then see these photos by clicking on the camera symbols that get overlaid onto the map.

At first sight Panoramio looks just like yet another website that hosts online galleries. You can store upto 2Gb of pictures for free. Other users of the site can browse your pictures. But the big difference here is that you can do this by clicking on a Google Map window, and have the images appear to other people via Google Earth. A two way link between an image browser list and the map window means selecting an image in either window will select it in the other so you can see in a very dynamic way where pictures were taken. It is much easier to try than describe - go to the Panoramio Map and have a play.

And then the really smart thing is link into 3D with Google Earth. Read on…

When you upload a photo to Panoramia you get the option of picking the place in the world where it was taken. This will not instantly appear to other web users - the company has an approval process that takes around a month, which I guess is to insure against unsuitable content and just plain wrong locations.

While awaiting approval, however, you can still see the images on your own local Google Earth, and also send the links to other users. For example, the following image shows one of mine:

This is a screenshot from Google Earth that shows a small thumbnail of a beach shot I took when in Australia a few years ago. It is just a test image I uploaded to Panoramia.

Note that if you zoom in using Google Earth, then all the small blue balls change to the camera symbols mentioned earlier and shown in the next image:

Finally, if you click on either the thumbnail or one of the camera symbols you will get a Panoramia window popping up that shows a bigger version of the image along with a few other options.

In my case, clicking on the beach scene shows a much larger version of the image wrapped in the Panoramia pop window. You can see this below.

At the moment I have only put this single file on Panoramio. I want to look through some of the pictures I’ve taken over the years and put them on the map. I think the standard tourist places have been done to death, so I’ll look to find some locations that either do not have many existing images, or that are significantly different from the ones already posted. If you want to keep up with my images, then look at my Panoramia page, or just search for user “gwhitfield”.

It is worth mentioning that even if you never intend to post any of your own photos the site is worth a browse - there are some simply stunning images. Looking at pictures of places you are familiar provides some interesting perspectives, not to mention a little envy at how good other people are with their cameras! For any keen photographer or happy snapper, the Panoramia stuff is well worth a browse. But for the best experience do it via Google Earth as described earlier.

Panoramia was recently acquired by Google so expect to see much more innovation coming out.

In my dreams….

What I would really like to see is a link up between Panoramia and the geolocation feature in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5. For those not familiar with Elements, it provides a way you can tag the location photos were taken. But it uses flat Yahoo Maps, and there is no uploading involved - it is all local to your PC which makes sharing difficult. What would be great is the ability to upload and link directly to Google Earth via Panoramia.

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It’s finally happened - I have at last changed my faithful petrol engined Lexus IS200 to a diesel Honda Civic.

And it sounds like a tractor.

I’ve had the Lexus for 4 years now and it has been a genuinely great car - never missed a beat in 60k miles, looks the biz:

It also drives like a dream. Six speed gearbox on a straight six cylinder engine, rear wheel drive, and all the gadgets in the cabin. Here’s another view after a bit of photoshopping (hey, I’ve got to bring photography in here somewhere!).

So why get rid? It comes down to running costs. The IS200 is not exactly known for it’s frugal use of petrol - you do well to get 30mpg out of it. I’m doing 90 miles per day with about 2/3 of those being on the motorway. It was also knocking on a bit, and would probably start to need things like new tires, exhaust, and more frequent service intervals.

So, I’ve been sensible and switched to a diesel. In choosing the new Honda Civic ES 2.2 CTDi I went for practicality in a Battlestar Galactica wrapper. All it’s missing now is Number Six draped over the bonnet…

Only had it a couple of days, but I’m averaging 50mpg to and from work.

Truth be told, it is not as nice to drive as the Lexus. The seating position is hard to get used to - or maybe it’s just my dodgy leg. But the damn thing flies when you stick your foot down - it’s actually quicker than the Lexus. It also looks great, and has a good equipment level. If I could just transplant my Lexus seat and the six CD autochanger to this car…

But changing cars is always an excuse to get the camera out - firstly to take snaps of the old one, and secondly to record what the new car looks like when it is clean. Most of the pictures here are straight snaps, and not very interesting. The two exceptions are the black & white background image of the Lexus, and the background-blurred Civic.

The first of these was done by simply masking out the car in Photoshop Elements, taking care to keep the straight-through windows unmasked. And then a saturation adjustment layer took the colour out of the unmasked area. It’s not brilliant - I was just playing with technique rather than spending time getting the mask pixel-perfect.

The blur on the Civic is a simple trick. First separate the car into a new layer. Then apply a radius-blur filter to the background, and then blend in the car again. I’ve probably not softened the mask enough on the roof, and so that looks a bit poor. Originally I had a crystaline pattern to break up the number plate, but this looked very odd with the blur and so I replaced it with a low noise fill. Still could do with some work on that area though.

The image showing the rear view of the Civic has suffered aliasing problems on scaling the picture for the web. It’s not a very well balanced picture either in terms of both composition and light levels.

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It also reflects what I want to concentrate my writing on - computing, digital imaging, and computer graphics.

I also aim to find a snazzier template, rather than the default Wordpress one. Not that there’s anything wrong with it - just that for a site talking about imagery there is a remarkable lack of any pictures here! Of course, you could always click on the Gallery link on one of the widgets at the side of the page.

Update 19th July - Changed to “Feather” theme for a while. Looks quite nice, but the heading styles don’t go deep enough for me so I’ll probably change again soon.
Update 5th April - Or not!

Another Update - Inspired by Parny, blog name changed to “Pushing Pixels”. Thanks Steve!

Having been responsible for some pretty heavyweight Perforce installations in my working life, I did not want to forget the golden rule of checkpointing and backing up. While it would not be a disaster if my Perforce data got lost or messed up, it would be an inconvenience. The scripts published on Perforce user forums, however, tend to be focussed on industrial installations and can be quite complex. For the home it is nice to have something more simple.

So the script here is really aimed at the home user. I don’t use Perforce everyday at home, and so a nightly checkpoint and backup is a waste of time. I tend to run it every two to four weeks. My environment is that I have my main home PC running Perforce, and hanging off this on a USB-2 link is a Western-Digital MyBook external drive that shows itself as D: . Sitting in the Perforce root folder (where the P4 db.* files are, and defined by the P4ROOT environment variable), I have a simple batch file called “backup.bat” (see code below).

The basic backup mechanism is this:

1. Stop the Perforce server
2. Take a checkpoint
3. Copy checkpoint to a location on the MyBook external disk
4. Copy checkpoints to a location on the main PC - just duplication for safety
5. Delete checkpoints from P4ROOT
6. Use Robocopy to incrementally backup all depot files for each depot
7. Restart Perforce server

Here’s the script. Just copy it into a .bat file put it into the P4ROOT folder. To run it, either do as a scheduled task or - as I do - just run it manually at whatever frequency you are happy with.

span style="color: #808080; font-style: italic;">
REM  *** Backs up Perforce
p4 admin stop
p4d -jc -z
copy *.gz d:\Perforce\checkpoints
copy *.gz old_checkpoints
del /Q /F *.gz
rem *** now backup depot files. See following text for explanation 
robocopy depot d:\perforce\depotfiles\depot /S /E /MIR /R:1 /W:5 >robolog-depot.txt
robocopy perforce d:\perforce\depotfiles\perforce /S /E /MIR /R:1 /W:5 >>robolog-p4.txt
robocopy work d:\perforce\depotfiles\work /S /E /MIR /R:1 /W:5 >>robolog-work.txt
rem *** Restart server
net start Perforce

The three robocopy lines reflect that I have three depots on my server - ‘depot’, ‘perforce’, and ‘work’. Change these to reflect your own depots.

Robocopy is a free utility that runs under Windows that provides extremely flexible folder copy functionality. See the Wikipedia entry for more details. Just make sure it is either on your search path, or place the EXE in the P4ROOT folder.

The options given to Robocopy just tell it to only copy files that are different to those that already exist. In otherwords, it synchronises one folder structure to another. I pipe the output into a log file so I can see exactly what new files have been copied if I need to.

And that’s it. Dead simple - will take you two minutes to set up, but could save you hours of hassle should something go awry in the future.