Paul’s blog

An ingenious method of viewing flickr photos on Google earth is a little servlet was coded by Rob Roy. Below is a quote from Rob’s flickr group.

The FlickrFly servlet lets you fly in Google Earth to the location of a geotagged photo in Flickr. Optional tags let you control the viewpoint in Google Earth.

Add your geotagged and FlickrFly-linked photos to this group’s pool so we can explore the world together.

The only rule is that your photo must contain:
* the physical location where the photo was taken (either as geo:lat/geo:lon tags, or stored in the EXIF data), and
* a link to FlickrFly.

Optional but highly encouraged:
* Additional tags to control the viewpoint (ge:heading, ge:tilt and ge:range) so it matches the photo.

You can find full FlickrFly documentation at:

http://www.roblog.com/flickrfly-docs/

The only problem I have is getting it to work. There seems to be something stopping the connection on my computer but I cannot seem to track this down. With Rob’s help I tried:

In Firefox - config-file:
* Enter “about:config” in the address-line.
* Search the line “network.http.sendRefererHeader”
* Value should be set to “1″ (or possibly “2)

I have also tried whilst NIS has beed disabled, trying FF and IE. Now I am at a loss, which some might say is my usual state!

Update:This is now fixed

I got it to work! I retried something which I did ages ago and played around with NIS Privacy controls. This time I added both Flickr and Roblog, permitting everything. Tried again and it worked! Must of still been blocking the script when I disabled NIS yesterday - somewhat confused by that.

Updated this blog to WP 1.5.2 last night without a hitch, just had to remember I needed to telnet my host to change some permissions. Onwards and upwards.

Yesterday, 30 June, was my name day. Évi bought me a lovely box of chocolates from Hotel Chocolat (as pictured). Thank you sweetheart.

In Hungary they celebrate birthdays and name days. Birthdays are usually celebrated just in the immediate family while name days are celebrated in work places, amongst friends and in the family. Each acceptable first name is assigned to one or more days of the calendar, based on religious traditions, historical events, birthday of a famous person who had the same first name, or on other facts.

Pál is the Hungarian spelling of Paul. The name day is celebrated on 26 June (as well as János), 29 June (Péter is celebrated as well) and 30 June. The 30th is the main name day for Pál. Incidentally the French and Germans celebrate Paul’s name day on 29th June.

Other news: I only realised yesterday that the permalinks were not working since I moved the blog to its present host. For this I apologise, I should have tested a lot more thoroughly. It seems to be working Ok now.

Flickr is becoming very addictive. Very addictive. So much so that I have my own flickr press badge. OK this is just the latest fad floating around the flickr community but its very existence proves the dedication of the community.

Flickr enables me to post my pictures to the WWW. There is nothing special in that in itself but I can chose if these photographs are for viewing by the public, friends or family. I can post the photos in themed groups with similar pictures, and have discussions with the group members. The best part is that people can comment on individual pictures, and vice versa. I can mark my favourite photos, and vice versa. Finally I can keep a fanatical eye on what my top 100 most viewed photos are from my collection. Brilliant!

I must admit I was quite surprised to find my flickr badge was so popular with the viewing public (over 450 at the time of writing). My previous best was a pathetic 20 views. Initially I had no idea why it was so popular, then I came across the flickr blog post entitled Can I see some ID? and noticed my ugly mug on it. For this I apologise to the flickr community

It seems that ‘Broadband and Internet advisor’ is no more. I must be a bit of a Jonah as each time I subscribe to an Internet magazine that publication ceases to be within a year! Hopefully my subsription will be switched to .net which I buy anyway.

I noticed today that my site is not validating properly due to the ‘Back the Bid’ button I have put on my homepage. It shouldn’t be too much a problem to get it validating OK. If I can get Google and Flickr to talk the true language of the web, then this shouldn’t be a problem. I will endeavour to fix it tonight.