Mon Jun 30 17:10:21 PDT 2003

This weekend I managed to actually get the camera timer circuitry built and into the cheep $30 EZ Cam that I intend to use for some aerial kite photography. The design that James Gentles had up on his website over at:

http://www.gentles.milestonenet.co.uk/KAP/Pencam/pencam.htm

Was very helpful, except I couldn’t get it working with the diode in place. Fortuantely it works fine without it. I’ve got some photos from part of the construction and I’ll do a nice writeup on it sometime in the near future along with (hopefully) some really cool photos from the camera.

We got Laurie’s dad’s kite out and managed to get it into the air once or twice in a small field by the house on Sunday, but we couldn’t keep it in the air because of unreliable wind. But we did learn basically how to control it and how it sits in the air, so I’m fairly confident that we can attach the camera and give it a lift sometime when we can get some decent wind.

Another side effect of upgrading gallery to 1.3.4 was loosing a previous hack I had created that worked around a "Apache/PHP" bug that caused multiple copies of photos to be uploaded when doing the bulk uploads from a local directory. Fortunately with a little thinking I was able to put together a bit of code to work around the problem. Basically I create a hash of the filenames that have been processed and if an identically named file shows up, I skip processing it. Here’s the section of code that I modified slightly in save_photos.php to make it happy.

>?php $didFileHash = Array(); while (sizeof($userfile)) {

$name = array_shift($userfile_name);
$file = array_shift($userfile);
if (!empty($usercaption) && is_array($usercaption)) {
$caption = removeTags(array_shift($usercaption));
}

$tag = ereg_replace(".*.([^.]*)$", "1", $name);
$tag = strtolower($tag);

if (($name) && ($didFileHash[$name] != 1)) {
processNewImage($file, $tag, $name, $caption, $setCaption);
}
$didFileHash[$name] = 1; }