Schonhose

While working on the Googlemaps addon I thought it would be useful to re-install Google Earth. Last time I removed it from my computer due to the amount of space it took on my C: drive, which is rather small. I was rather hopeful Google would provide an easy way to change the location of the cache to another drive.

Well, turns out I was wrong. But there is a way to do it, but it requires two hacks in the Windows Registry. The keys you need to change, as well as the location are displayed below:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Earth Plus]
“CachePath”=”F:\\Google Earth Cache”
“KMLPath”=”F:\\Google Earth Cache”

As you can see I moved the Google Earth Cache from the C: to my F: drive which has lots of space left. I wonder when Google will implement an easy way in the options panel of Google Earth. In the meantime this hack will work. Remember to make a copy of your registry to be on the safe side.

Recently I have moved from shooting landscapes to shooting people. Don’t worry, instead of a gun I use a camera to do all my shooting. One thing I find fascinating working with people is how to make them look their best. We all have some unflattering photographs which we rather want to hide in the back of the closet. Not only does that prevent other people actually seeing them, it appears they also scare the rodents away.

If you scrounge the internet you will find various resources detailing with tips and tricks on how to look thin in photographs. It is no secret, the camera usually adds about 10 pounds (around 5kg) mostly due to unflattering lighting. In a studio shoot you can control the lighting but outdoors this is somewhat of a challenge (although not impossible).

However, as a model you can do some things as well. Here are 5 secrets you can use to loose the 10 pounds the camera adds (courtesy of Julyne Derrick of About.com):

1. Turn partially sideways to the camera, planting one foot in front of the other. Point your toe to the camera and place your weight on your back foot.
2. Pull head forward slightly to minimize any appearance of a double chin.
3. Hold arms slightly away from your body. This keeps upper arm flab from flattening out and therefore appearing flabbier (much like thighs do when one sits on a couch).
4. Pull shoulders back, chest forward and gently suck stomach in. Be careful not to suck stomach so far in that your ribs show, thereby causing those who later see the photo to cluck to themselves in a bemused, sing-song voice, “She’s sucking i-in.”
5. If you can get away with it without looking like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Girl wannabe, try the look away trick. To do this, look away from the camera, then turn towards it, breaking into a smile just before the camera clicks. Your smile will appear fresh, not frozen. This trick takes practice behind closed, locked doors.

As mentioned yesterday I’m working on a new version of the Googlemap addon. The current version features clustered markers with an Flickr style info window. It is hard to believe I wrote that nearly 18 months ago. In internet time that is like ages ago.

Anyway, there were some bugs with that initial version, most noticeably the fact the scroller kept on scrolling while there were no images. Furthermore, the image that was supposedly the last image ended up on random places in the set. Something you’d rather not see with an image that says: “this is the last image”.

So I decided to take another approach and over the course of 18 months on the internet lots of new software was developed, far more advanced than what I have now. So I searched a bit and found an excellent example over at Woorks place. Only problem was it used Prototype as a JS framework while I really wanted to use the more lightweight kid on the block: JQuery.

I managed to rewrite the whole thing in JQuery using The JQuery Tools and decided to compare them head-to-head. So here are the charts from Yahoo! Yslow:

(The one on the left is the old situation with Prototype, while the one on the right is the new JQuery solution)

As can be seen I managed to cut down the size from 257Kb to 86Kb, a size reduction of 67%. This reduction is caused by the much smaller JQuery framework in combination with the JQuery Tools compared to Prototype. I bet I can squeeze it even more down by using GZip to send the page. However, that will probably squeeze down the Prototype based page also.

So far it works in IE8, Chrome and Firefox, while there are some minor issues in IE7 that I need to address.

The site hasn’t seen much updates lately, but as usual there is a good reason for that. I’ve been busy working on several projects. Inquisitive readers might ask what those projects are. Well, let me reveal at least some of them.

One of the projects I’m working on is the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Export Plugin,, initially developed by my buddy Jay. As not only the author but also user of both the Googlemap addon and the FTP security addon I needed to modify the Lightroom Export plugin to facilitate both GPS coordinates and the automatic opening and closing of both the image and the thumbnail folders. Currently we have a working copy which I use extensively in testing right now. Did I mention we also managed to squash some bugs while producing cleaner code?

The other project I’m working on is the aforementioned Googlemap addon. Since I began working writing code in a more OOP manner I could see how this approach could seriously limit the duplicate code currently found in the addon. I found a nice Googlemap API Class for PHP and intend to use that as a base to rewrite the addon yet again. All features of the (unpublished) third version will be retained, but it will be lean and fast thanks to the use of OOP practices.

Last but not least I’m also working on the new version of Pixelpost. Recently we added two more plugins dealing with both tags and categories. While testing and writing new things resumes we’re building the next-generation photoblog with a solid codebase.