I have had quite a few PHP project lately, and have been working hard on them. That would be fine except for the fact that I spent 5 hours today trying to figure out one thing and got nowhere. It is long and complicated, but basically gdimage is creating corupt image files. So I am taking a break from PHP volentarily, some which I have never done. Anyway, I found this funny map on how people from CA see the states. I can say that it is mostly correct, except for them being awesome, but at least I can agree with them on something.

I have been working on some time lapse photography and trying to come up with ways to build a good intervalometer. I found a site which used a microcontroler to control the camera. Of course they used a experimental board which requiered almost no circut building. While I was intrigued I also assumed that this option would require an expensiv prototyping system. However I looked at the board and found it only cost 30 dollars, and has great documentation and easy programing and setup. I was also concerned I was going to have to break out my assembally code skills (which almost do not exist). However the board comes with its own little functions and looks pretty easy to learn. If it works out I will be using many of these boards. The board is called Arduino and can be found here.It also has great functions for stepper motor control, which is very exciting.

I did some work to my photo page, particularly the panoramic image section. I was using Photoshop CS3 and noticed an export option called zoomify. Despite its cheesy name it is a pretty cool feature. It breaks large images down into smaller titles which go in a directory on my webserver. Those images are then requested on demand by a flash applet as they are needed. This saves bandwidth and allows me to put large images into a a normal size website template. It is also similar to what google maps uses. To check it out go HERE!