Schonhose

Today I got confirmation the Dutch trains ride on a track, never on time.

Let’s just leave it at that.

“I realize, you know, it is good to go out and accomplish individual accolades. I’ve done that in my career but my ultimate goal is to win a championship. Your ultimate goal should be to win the state championship. In order for y’all to do that, you can’t do it by yourself. I don’t care how good you are, if you don’t have a team, you ain’t going nowhere. Everbody has to have two feet in the circle man. I’m all about the team, you dig?”

Tracy McGrady at the Brotherhood Adidas Camp

Since my photoblog layout is based upon a very old Mootools version I decided to redesign and reprogram the layout, switching from Moo to jQuery. The initial sliding sidebar along with some other options were quickly established and proved to be ok in Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Enter the dreaded Internet Explorer, currently at version 8. After having the luxury to debug my JS using Firebug I have to say JS debugging on IE still pretty much sucks. Sure, it will give you errors, but these are so cryptic I couldn’t understand them if my life depended on them. Luckily we have Google at our disposal, so a quick search around the net showed several people having similar issues. So that is a good thing, it means we’re not alone in this.

But after reading several threads it just boiled down to one thing: trail and error. Shape and reshape the code until it finally starts working. It took me several hours, but now the code is working on all browsers, including IE 7 and IE 8. Looking back 1/5th of the time was used to created the page so it worked and the other 4/5th of the time was spend debugging IE specific issues (a fact well known as illustrated by the image below).

Today I managed to get to the root of a problem I have been trying to eliminate for some time now. It all has to do with the “use the EXIF coordinates” feature of the GoogleMap addon for Pixelpost. It seemed when using this feature the location magically shifted a few meters or even more.

When using reverse geocoding for latitude and longitude values Google Maps focuses on nearby (and sometimes not so near by) “points of interest” or the closest address it can find. This behavior can be changed by changing the following Javascript function function showLocationLatLng().

Change the code of that function to:
function showLocationLatLng() {
var latlng = new GLatLng(document.forms['view-latlng'].lat.value,document.forms['view-latlng'].lng.value);
editMap.addOverlay(new GMarker(latlng));
editMap.setCenter(latlng, 16);
}

This will force the addon to use the exact location of the image provided in the EXIF.

Seems justice has prevailed. Buma/Stemra has decided not to go through with the collection of money for embedded content from YouTube.

Good riddance!