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!

Simple Trac and Subversion hosting

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 12th August 2009 | Comments (0)

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 :)

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Star trails in the trailer park

Posted in Photo of the Week, Photographs on Friday 7th August 2009 | Comments (0)
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:

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Where did your disk space go? Space Disk Analyser

Posted in Gadgets, Web Technology on Thursday 6th August 2009 | Comments (0)

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

**Note that this pro­gram has now been dis­con­tin­ued**

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Skyscapers — Mirrored skyscrapers in San Diego

Posted in Photo of the Week, Photographs on Friday 31st July 2009 | Comments (0)
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.

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ClickHeat for webpage click heatmaps

Posted in Web Technology on Thursday 30th July 2009 | Comments (1)

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.

How Crazyegg improved our website overnight

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Webpage click heatmaps

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 29th July 2009 | Comments (0)

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.

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Birthday wishlist 2009

Posted in Random on Monday 27th July 2009 | Comments (4)

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 :)

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Tokyo Capsule Hotel

Posted in Photographs, Random on Sunday 26th July 2009 | Comments (0)

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.

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Sigma 30mm f1.4 EX DC HSM Lens Focusing Problem / High Pitched Noise

Posted in Photographs on Thursday 23rd July 2009 | Comments (5)

My favourite lens, my Sigma 30mm f1.4, has devel­oped a prob­lem. Fre­quently it does not respond to auto-focusing, and it makes a high-pitched sound almost like it is strug­gling to focus.

The Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens is my ‘work­horse’ lens, mean­ing the one I use the most. When I was using a 35mm cam­era (Pen­tax MZ-S!), my favourite lens was a 50mm lens. I found a prime/fixed lens encour­aged me to move around and exper­i­ment with view­points rather than be lazy and zoom from a sin­gle point.

With a dig­i­tal APS-C sen­sor with a 1.6x mul­ti­plier, a 30mm lens deliv­ers approx­i­mately the same as a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera.

Public pay telephone in Santa Monica, California

Pub­lic pay tele­phone in Santa Mon­ica, California

I have been very pleased with the results, being the sharpest out of any lens I have, and the lens hood makes it look for­mi­da­ble. The chro­matic aber­ra­tion was very low, and if any­thing was vis­i­ble it has always been easy to remove with Adobe Lightroom’s chro­matic aber­ra­tion correction.

It also works great when tak­ing long-exposure pho­tographs at night. It cre­ates pleas­ing star effects through its 8 blade octag­o­nal diaphragm:

Street scene at night in Santa Monica, California

Street scene at night in Santa Mon­ica, California

The large max­i­mum aper­ture of f1.4 is great for low-light and sit­u­a­tions requir­ing high shut­ter speeds. F-stopping writes about this. I took this pho­to­graph as the pas­sen­ger of a car trav­el­ling around 60mph on a dull Eng­lish day, and it still came out very usable:

Hunters gathering at side of a road in rural Nottinghamshire. Crop of a picture taken at 60mph

Hunters gath­er­ing at side of a road in rural Not­ting­hamshire. Crop of a pic­ture taken at 60mph

A pho­to­graph using avail­able light in a bar also came out well:

People at Bar Eleven

Peo­ple at Bar Eleven

And finally I found the full-time man­ual focus very use­ful. This allowed me to refo­cus even if aut­o­fo­cus was switched on. Usu­ally if aut­o­fo­cus is acti­vated, a lens doesn’t allow you to man­ual focus and you can feel the focussing motors giv­ing resistance.

You can find an in-depth review of the Sigma 30mm f1.4 EX DC HSM at Ken Rockwell’s web site.

I’m going to con­tact Sigma Imag­ing UK sup­port, and fin­gers crossed they will be able to resolve the issue as I would like to get pho­tograph­ing again :)

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New ‘Blog Launched

Posted in Web Technology on Thursday 23rd July 2009 | Comments (0)

I have suc­cess­fully con­verted my blog from my own ‘home­grown’ soft­ware to the ubiq­ui­tous Word­Press. I think my time can be bet­ter spent than rein­vent­ing the wheel, espe­cially when it is avail­able free and eas­ily amended in open source form.

I have diverted old URL links includ­ing the RSS feeds using Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Here is an exam­ple of the code I used, placed in an htac­cess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog_rss.php$ /articles/feed/ [R=301,L]

This code rewrites any requests to blog_rss.php to /articles/feed so that any requests from the old feed are now redi­rected with a HTTP 301 response header to the new feed. The ‘L’ indi­cates that this is the last change the RewriteRule should make, effec­tively ignor­ing any rules that may come after this.

RFC2616 from W3 spec­i­fies HTTP 301 as ‘Moved Per­ma­nently.’ Using this code should help search engines like Google, Ask and Yahoo to update their indexes. I’ve done my part by fol­low­ing the pub­lished standards.

Word­Press also links nicely to Microsoft Word 2007, so I can take advan­tage of its gram­mar and spelling check­ers, and the use­ful fea­ture of hold­ing down Alt and click­ing on a word to access research tools such as dic­tio­nar­ies and a the­saurus. Skat­ter Tech’s arti­cle describes how to con­nect Word 2007’s Blog fea­ture to Word­Press.

I’d like to see Word­Press sup­port­ing SQLite, but it looks like this isn’t on the cards for some time.

With the bur­den of mak­ing my own blog­ging soft­ware removed, I intend to be post­ing more inter­est­ing arti­cles in the future. I hope to be post­ing on more var­ied sub­jects than just web tech­nol­ogy. If there is any­thing you’d like to hear about, please leave a com­ment. You’ll also get a funny avatar mon­ster made for you if you com­ment :)

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New ‘blog coming soon

Posted in Random on Monday 20th July 2009 | Comments (0)

I’m cur­rently work­ing on con­vert­ing my ‘blog’ from my home­spun blog soft­ware to Word­Press. I have decided to do this as there was lit­tle point rein­vent­ing the wheel, and when­ever I find a miss­ing fea­ture I’ll have the oppor­tu­nity to make one and share it and give some­thing back to this open source community.

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360 HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photograph

Posted in 360 Photography on Friday 17th July 2009 | Comments (0)

I have com­pleted a high-quality HDR (High Dynamic Range) panorama of a gar­den, and it can be viewed here (requires Flash Player 10):

I have completed a high-quality HDR (High Dynamic Range) panorama of a garden, and it can be viewed here (requires Flash Player 10):

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Competition win

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 1st July 2009 | Comments (1)

My entry for Dreamhost’s API com­pe­ti­tion won! I cre­ated a web appli­ca­tion that shows vis­i­tors on a world map in real time.

I used PHP, CURL, SQLite, AJAX and Google Maps.

If you are a Dreamhost cus­tomer, you can use the Dreamhost Real-Time Hit World Map here.

Screen­shot:

Hitmap screenshot

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VirtualMin

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 1st July 2009 | Comments (0)

I installed a new Vir­tual Pri­vate Server, and tried out Vir­tualmin, the lat­est incar­na­tion of the Usermin/Webmin fam­ily. I’ve found it to be very sta­ble, and great for Linux admin­is­tra­tors that are used to con­fig­ur­ing servers via con­fig­u­ra­tion files and com­mand line, but wish to save time. It remains as flex­i­ble as man­ual con­fig­u­ra­tion, but offers many graph­i­cal inter­faces and time-saving fea­tures. So far, so good.

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