Wordpress, the publishing platform I use to write and host this website/blog released a new version yesterday.

Upgrading from version 2.6.5 was a piece of cake and the administration interface is brilliant – Modern and Clean.

A screen grab of the new admin screen

You can download wordpress from http://wordpress.org/download/.

If you go to http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/ you will find the Wordpress blog about all of the changes in this version.

For a web designer, IE6 is a real prick of a browser. You are constantly having to use hacks on CSS to make it work for just one browser, which is now over seven years old.

I was having problems with the following code (inline styles used for simplicity):

<div style="height: 1px; background-color: #000000;"></div>

In most of the “real” browsers (Opera, Safari, Camino, Firefox and even IE7) this showed up perfectly as a one pixel high black line. In IE6, it comes up as a line around 16 pixels high.

To make it render correctly in IE6 (And still work in the “real” browsers) you need to add a non breaking space inside the DIV and supply the line-height style.
Here is the fix:

<div style="height: 1px; line-height: 1px;
background-color: #000000;">&nbsp;</div>

I’ve had a couple of requests from readers to supply the 3D photos from my post a week or so ago in side by side configuration.

Although anaglyphs are convenient for web posting and viewable by almost anyone, you do require the red/blue glasses to see them. One of the most useful formats for web distribution is the side by side format either in cross eyed or parallel format.

The only difference between the cross eyed and parallel view images is that the cross eye images are supplied with the Right image on the left and the Left image on the Right. I personally find Parallel viewing easier on my eyes so sorry but the following images are all supplied as Parallel view.

To view these images, relax your eyes and try to focus behind your computer monitor. I’ve added dots to the tops of the images which when viewed correctly, you will see a “centre” image with the two dots overlaid on top of each other. This centre image should be in 3D. If you have trouble, make sure your head is level relative to the images.

Give it a go, no special equipment is required (except for two eyes), the only downside is that the images should be on the small side to assist with correct viewing at a normal sitting distance.

Here are all 10 images from my previous post in a side by side format.

In the next few days you have the opportunity to take one of the photos of the moon to make a montage just like this one:

Source: Wikipedia

Unfortunately, good things take time so you’ll have to wait until 7th July 2009 take the other one.

The moon is in an elliptical orbit around earth. Because of this, the distance between earth and the moon differs by approximately 50,000 Km (31,000 miles).

The point farthest from earth is called Apogee and is around 406,000 Km and the point closest, called Perigee is around 358,000 Km away.

At lunar perigee the moon will appear to be around 12% larger compared with lunar apogee.

You can get a list of dates for the Lunar apogee and perigee for a given year from http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html. You should see that the 12th December this year is a full moon at perigee.

Lets jump to the chase…

Take a photo of the full moon this Friday (12th December) at a known zoom and put the photo to the side somewhere safe, then on the 7th July 2009 you should take the other one.

Both of these dates are full moons. This friday will result in the larger of the two images while the one in July 2009 will be the smaller one.

Enjoy.

Following on from yesterdays post with my photograph of the moon…

I wrote about a full moon appearing flat and featureless. To illustrate this, I’ve taken a full moon image from Wikipedia and rotated it by approximately 86 degrees to match the photo I took yesterday. Although the wikipedia image is of far superior quality than mine, this comparison clearly illustrates the lack of detail when lit directly from the front (ie: A full moon).

Here are the images…

My image again...

Source: Wikipedia (Arrow shows UP before rotating)

Tonight was a nice clear night (for London) and after catching a glimpse of a +3.3 magnitude satellite, I decided I should get out my camera gear and experiment photographing the moon.

There are a couple of interesting points to keep in mind when photographing the moon:

The Moon isn’t as big as it appears (You need lots of zoom!)
My camera, a Canon EOS40D is 10.1 megapixels, outputting an image of 3888 x 2592 pixels. Using a 300mm zoom lens the moon will only take up 500×500 pixels, or 1/4 megapixels.

The Moon is surprisingly bright
It should be fairly easy with consumer equipment to get shutter speeds of around 1/200th of a second at F8 at a relatively low ISO speed (100 – 400). Remember if you are hand holding the camera at 300mm you really should have 1/400th of a second or faster to eliminate any shake.

A full moon is flat and boring
Forget all those romantic ideas you have about a full moon – It’s a particularly boring photography subject. A full moon is a full moon because it is lit front on from the sun. Craters will have no shadows and the moon will appear flat. The gibbous phases are particularly interesting due to strong side lighting showing the depth of craters in more detail.

I took around 80 photos of which only three were kept.

Here is my favourite:

275mm ISO400 1/400sec F8.0

This photo is a full size crop from the 10.1 megapixel image. Best results are achieved when using a lens of 600mm or greater.

In the tope right corner of Safari is a search box that says Google. Anything you type into this box is searched from google.com (At least on my macbook).

There is no way using normal user options to change this from google.com. Back in the good old days ™ you could edit the Safari binary file with vi and change the link, but as of current versions, this cannot be done.

I’m sure Apple have their reasons for forcing the search engine to Google. It sends safari as an extra field in the querystring so I can only guess that Apple make money for every search made using that box. Furthermore, if you try and change your homepage to google, Safari will pop up with the following friendly message.

Dammit Apple, I just want to use google.co.uk from my toolbar – I don’t care how much money you make from it, surely you make the same money if I use google.com or google.co.uk. If anything, Google’s adverts are more geographically targeted when I use the UK alternative.

After a lot of searching to fix/hack the result I want, it seems no-one has been successful.

Enter Inquisitor…

Inquisitor replaces the Safari Google search box with a new one.

The search box returns suitable results while you type and offers autocomplete. Hitting enter will always forward you to the selected search engine.

A new settings tab appears in Safari Preferences allowing you to customise the search box.

More than anything, I can now search direct on google.co.uk from the safari toolbar.

Thanks for nothing Apple.

As part of the transition process from a PC to a Mac, I needed to move all my emails from the Outlook pst file to the folder/file format used in Mac Mail.

I came across an incredibly useful tool from little machines. The tool is called O2M (Outlook to Mail) and for only US$10, it’s a steal.

It also moves your contacts and calendar entries too so is very flexible.

I don’t know of a free or open source tool to do this. If someone knows of one, please contact me.

Note: I have to relationship whatsoever with Little Machines apart from being a happy (registered) user of their software.

I’ve just sat and passed my first Microsoft certification exam making me a MCTS: SQL Server.

I spent the best part of two weeks studying for it.

My main study guide was the Microsoft Press book:

ISBN-10: 073562271X | ISBN-13: 978-0735622715

If you can answer all of the review questions in the book, all the sample examination questions on the CD and have experience using SQL Server Management Studio, you should be fine. You must agree to a Non Disclosure Agreement before sitting the exam so please don’t contact me asking for a “Brain Dump”.

I wrote back in May about a car on a tree stump. Google recently released street view for New Zealand which shows this treestump in it’s full glory.

Here again is the photo I took…

And here is a screen grab from google maps.

Click on the image to open it in google maps

Isn’t technology grand?