jonhassall.com
The personal site of Jon Hassall
Photographs that I have taken A place to post interesting snippets and thoughts A place for me to show you some of the projects I am working on A brief summary of my skills, education, and experience Get in touch!

Why a Heads Up Display on a car may not be so great

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Backup your Facebook photos and friends list

This is a use­ful appli­ca­tion that will back up your Face­book pho­tographs and friends list. It doesn’t require any instal­la­tion (I don’t like installing soft­ware as it can slow your com­puter down). It worked very well when I used it.

Face­book, a social net­work with over 250 mil­lion users, con­tains a mas­sive amount of pho­tographs (esti­mated at 10 bil­lion in 2008), and I’m sure many users take their pho­tographs for granted.

Many events can lead to the loss of a Face­book account, includ­ing hack­ing, loss of an email address and deac­ti­va­tion of accounts by overzeal­ous spam­bot detec­tors. Using this appli­ca­tion gives you a copy of all your pho­tographs so you need not lose your pre­cious memories.

It also stores a copy of pho­tographs taken by other peo­ple that have you tagged (i.e. you are in the pho­to­graph) help­ing you to add to your pho­to­graph collection.

External link icon Face­book Backup (obvi­ously requires a Face­book account).

Backup your Facebook photographs and friends list

River through the desert from Yuma Territorial Prison

River through the desert from Yuma Ter­ri­to­r­ial Prison, Yuma, Arizona.

Smiley face in ketchup

A smi­ley face in ketchup from Johnny Rock­ets in Hol­ly­wood, California.

Desert road on the way back from Willow Beach, Arizona

Desert road on the way back from Willow Beach, Arizona

Desert road on the way back from Wil­low Beach, Arizona

I took this pho­to­graph on a road trip in the USA on a quiet lit­tle road lead­ing to Wil­low Beach in Arizona.

Movie producers on the set

Movie producers on the set

Movie pro­duc­ers on the set

I took this pho­to­graph on a movie set out­doors in Hol­ly­wood. I was Pro­duc­tion Designer on a short film called ‘ASK Amer­i­can Ser­ial Killers.’

I like how both the Pro­ducer and Direc­tor in this shot are deep in thought while look­ing at what is hap­pen­ing on the set.

You can find out more about the movie ‘Amer­i­can Ser­ial Killers’ at the mini-site here.

You can find plenty more pho­tographs here:

Movie Stills Pho­tog­ra­phy [More]

The cast and crew list included:

http://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/173.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/174.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/175.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/176.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/177.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/178.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/179.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/180.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/181.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/182.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/183.jpghttp://www.jonhassall.com/gallery/preview/h60/184.jpg

Simple Trac and Subversion hosting

DreamHost now offers one-click Trac and Sub­ver­sion host­ing. Trac is a web-based revi­sion and bug track­ing sys­tem allow­ing you to roll back and share your source code in a team and as an indi­vid­ual, track bugs and devel­op­ment goals, and much more.

You can read why you should always use a source con­trol sys­tem like Trac/Subversion in Ronald Widha’s post.

For a cheap and easy to set up hosted Trac solu­tion, all you need is a DreamHost host­ing plan. It is extremely cheap (I have a dis­count code for you). You also get some other notable ben­e­fits including:

•    Vir­tu­ally unlim­ited band­width
•    Vir­tu­ally unlim­ited disk space
•    Links eas­ily to Amazon’s Cloud­Front con­tent deliv­ery net­work so you can have your con­tent mir­rored at servers all around the world (blog exam­ple)
•    Free Google Adsense credit (usu­ally $50)
•    Option to have a vir­tu­alised server with root access, with mem­ory con­fig­urable to the megabyte instantly, and Railscrapetc
•    97-day refund guar­an­tee
•    One free domain name reg­is­tra­tion
•    Option to host your email and doc­u­ments with Gmail and Google Docs for free (this is usu­ally charge­able for businesses)

I’ve hosted my per­sonal sites and projects with DreamHost for years, and found them to be reli­able. There have been some down­times here and there but noth­ing seri­ous. For the price I pay and the amount of resources I use (I use over 1TB of band­width a month) it is a fan­tas­tic deal. Ed Eliot agrees. I have also found the sup­port to be very friendly and gen­er­ally quick, and there is an option to have tele­phone con­tact (often unavail­able with cheaper web hosts).

I also designed an appli­ca­tion using DreamHost’s API and won their com­pe­ti­tion (prize money $$$ :) ).

You can get $10 off an already cheap host­ing plan using the code JONH10. You’ll also get one free domain name reg­is­tra­tion. There is a 97-day refund period so you don’t risk any­thing giv­ing it a go. Click here to sign up.

In sum­mary, the cheap­est DreamHost account will give you a one-click Trac and Sub­ver­sion hosted solution.

And yes, I do get a reward if you sign up :)

Star trails in the trailer park

Star trails in the trailer park - long exposure

Star trails in the trailer park — long exposure

This pho­to­graph was taken in a trailer park in Yuma, Ari­zona.

Canon TC-80N3 remote control

You can see that the stars in the sky have made trails as the earth moves rel­a­tive to them.

I kept the shut­ter of the cam­era open for a rel­a­tively long period (about 10 min­utes) using a Canon TC-80N3 remote con­trol. This unit has var­i­ous set­tings, such as self-timer, inter­val timer, long-exposure timer, and exposure-count. In this pho­to­graph I used long-exposure timer.

I also made a sequence of pho­tographs that I intend to turn into a time­lapse video soon.

If you have a cam­era such as a Canon 350D, 400D, 450D or 500D, you can get a con­ver­sion cable to use the Canon TC-80N3 here.

You can sub­scribe to this blog using the links at the top to stay updated, by email or an RSS reader.

You can find more star trail pho­tographs on these sites:

Where did your disk space go? Space Disk Analyser

If you’ve ever run out of disk space and faced the dif­fi­cult deci­sion of what files to delete or offload to DVDs or an exter­nal hard drive, this pro­gram may help you.

Space from AndyH Software

This soft­ware cre­ates a visu­al­i­sa­tion of your hard drive so you can see how much space files and fold­ers are using. Click on the screen­shot to view an example.

For exam­ple, you may find that your tem­po­rary files are very large and delet­ing them would free up space. Or per­haps your photo gallery is so large that it is time to archive last year’s pho­tographs to DVDs or an exter­nal hard drive.

Space showing block mode with treeIt works with hard dri­ves, CD/DVD dri­ves, mapped net­work dri­ves and FTP accounts.

You can try it out in full by down­load­ing it from here. After 30 days you can decide to pur­chase it. The instal­la­tion is very min­i­mal and not bloated.

Download Space disk space visualisation software for free Down­load for Windows


Skyscapers — Mirrored skyscrapers in San Diego

Mirrored skyscrapers in San Diego

Mir­rored sky­scrap­ers in San Diego

I took this pho­to­graph on a drive from Yuma, Ari­zona to San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia. I think these build­ings are quite close the cen­tre of San Diego. I like the dif­fer­ent types of mir­rored win­dows on the build­ing reflect the blue sky — the squares, the seem­ingly per­fectly smooth, and an inter­ac­tion of two squared sets of win­dows mak­ing a zig-zag.

The pic­ture was taken from a mov­ing truck with­out look­ing through the viewfinder. I believe that pic­tures don’t have to be planned; if point­ing a cam­era out a win­dow and ran­domly press­ing the shut­ter can make some­thing pleas­ing, then some­thing good has hap­pened and the cam­era has added value to my lit­tle world.

ClickHeat for webpage click heatmaps

I recently posted that I was try­ing out Click­Heat, and that I would write an instal­la­tion guide to help oth­ers install it.

How­ever, the instal­la­tion was so sim­ple that I have noth­ing do add to the instal­la­tion notes from the offi­cial site.

I have been using Click­Heat on my per­sonal site and a few high traf­fic web sites. It has already proved use­ful on this per­sonal site, as I noticed peo­ple had been click­ing the graph­i­cal header at the top of the page expect­ing to be returned to the home page. How­ever I had neglected to set this up, so I quickly made the change. Here is the heatmap that indi­cated this to me:

Screenshot of ClickHeat heatmap on my personal web site

Here is a heatmap from a friend’s rel­a­tively high traf­fic social net­work­ing web site:

Social networking web site heatmap

From this heatmap we noticed that most clicks were for open­ing mes­sage threads (as expected), but were sur­prised by the num­ber of clicks to some of the more obscure options placed at the edges of the web site. As a result, the site is going to be redesigned so that these fea­tures are in the main left nav­i­ga­tion bar to make the web site eas­ier to use.

The sys­tem uses a tiny 6KB JavaScript library, and record­ing clicks only used a few bytes of band­width. The admin­is­tra­tion web site works quickly and doesn’t seem to be a resource hog at all.

You can down­load Click­Heat from the offi­cial web site here. It requires PHP and the GD graph­ics library, and is a sim­ple install requir­ing no data­base. This UNIX per­mis­sion cal­cu­la­tor may come in handy when set­ting up direc­tory per­mis­sions so Click­Heat can write its log files.

I have noticed a prob­lem with the heatmap being aligned with the web site, and a sep­a­rate issue with elas­tic lay­outs cre­at­ing prob­lems with heatmap dis­play. There are already bugs raised for these issues on the project home­page, so they should be resolved in time.

Here are some rel­e­vant articles:

Tape­fail­ure and Robot­Re­play alter­na­tives
CrazyEgg and Robot­Re­play
CrazyEgg — Learn Your Vis­i­tors Habits
How Crazyegg improved our web­site overnight
Crazy Egg Launches Con­fetti
Crazy egg Review. Find out what peo­ple are doing on your website

A pop­u­lar com­mer­cial alter­na­tive is CrazyEgg. The arti­cles I have linked to will have much more infor­ma­tion on the wealth of extra fea­tures that it has.

If you have any suc­cess sto­ries from using heatmaps, I’d love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Paul Olyslager has sent me this arti­cle which gives a great overview of heatmaps and some of the alter­na­tives to Click­heat.

Webpage click heatmaps

I am tri­al­ing Click­Heat. Click­Heat is an open source project licenced under GPL. It records the posi­tion of the user’s mouse on web pages, and cre­ates a heatmap.

ClickHeat heatmap screenshot

Click­Heat heatmap screenshot

I pre­vi­ously tried a few dif­fer­ent free tri­als of com­mer­cial heatmap sys­tems. I dis­missed a few as unre­li­able, and many were more than ade­quate. How­ever, I’d like to have an open source project on my side like Click­Heat, as I could use the results as I wish rather than be tied down to a com­mer­cial supplier’s sys­tem. Also, Click­Heat will be free to use, although there will be time costs involved in imple­ment­ing and main­tain­ing it.

Heatmaps are a use­ful tool in user inter­face design and test­ing. While watch­ing users use your web site or appli­ca­tion in real life and real-time is ideal, heatmap­ping is auto­mated and results from thou­sands of users can be analysed. Com­bined with met­rics such as goal track­ing with web ana­lyt­ics track­ing such as Google Adsense, heatmaps allow you to com­pare dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a user inter­face and find the best to deploy.

I’ll update my weblog when I have some results from Click­Heat, and I also intend to write a brief guide on how to install and imple­ment it.

You can visit the Click­Heat offi­cial web site here.

You can sub­scribe to my weblog using the sub­scrip­tion links near the top of this page.

Update: Fur­ther post avail­able here.

Birthday wishlist 2009

Here is my Ama­zon birth­day wish list… worth a try:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/registry.html/ref=w_h_em-si-html_viewall?id=1K3Y9X1PADP8A

Includes:

That’s the end of my birth­day wish list. Well, that’s all the items that Ama­zon sell that I want :)

Tokyo Capsule Hotel

I found these sites about Tokyo Cap­sule Hotels interesting:

They look very interesting!

Here is the pho­to­graph from Charles Tyack (click on it to visit his Flickr page):

Capsule Hotel - Links to Charles Tyack's Flickr pages

Cap­sule Hotel — Links to Charles Tyack’s Flickr pages

I’m going to be pub­lish­ing a pho­to­graph every week. You’ll be able to view this here, and if you are sub­scribed by email you will receive it automatically.