As you already know I have installed a photoblog on my site. I use Pixelpost for that. It is a pretty nice and simple system having nearly everything you need.

The problem is that this software is very crappy written. I installed it and tried to upload an image. Everything went ok only that the thumbnail has not been created for the image. I spent one hour debugging only to find out that it is failing because I have no jpeg support in gd2 php plugin. I do really not understand why people are not doing right error handling. At least the install script could have checked that! The calls to these functions are muted (not yelding anything on an error). I really could kill someone for that.

Spending another two hours on bugfixing the code I finally acheved that I do not get 20 error entries in my apache logs on a link click. I will try to collect all my fixes and post them to the pixelpost developers in the next days. But for that I have to spend another evening getting the code really clean because my fixes are pretty hacky for now. I really wanted that thing running.

I also added another WordPress plugin to integrate the latest and one random thumbnail image on my blog site. You find the plugin here. It worked without any hacks or tweaks. That is how I like a software to be. ;)

Yesterday I was at home in Ingolstadt visiting my parents. My mother was so nice to borrow me her SLR camera. It is a pretty old Praktica super TL. It is a Eastgerman production and even has a fan community. You can find the documentation of that camera here. More info can also be found here.

The camera has a Carl Zeiss Jena, Tessar 2,8/50 lens. It is a very good lens. The design is 100 years old but it was remade many times. Zeiss is producing the lens till today. Even if the lens is pretty dark 2,8f. The positive side of the lens is that it draws very sharp and is very light. It as also called Eagle Eye of your camera. You can read more about it here.

As you can imagine it is not a digital camera so it takes some time till there will be sample images. I took today 18 images and in the next days I should finish the film. Taking that images the camera got stuck three times and messed up three images. That happens when you use old mechanics that are not used often. But nevertheless it is a lot of fun taking images with it. It is loud like hell and heavy. Just like firing some kind of weapon.

I am really asking myself if there is a photoblog somewhere where someone is shooting photos with such an “ancient” technology.

After two months of traveling and visiting three countries I am back in germany. As you may know I was in Holland and Poland what you may not know is that I also was in Bulgaria for two weeks. I had a very nice time with some friends from Rosenheim there.

I really miss the warmth of the climate there. It is really cold and unfriendly in Germany now when you compare 12 degrees here with 24 degrees that we had there.

But everything that is nice has to end some time.

Tomorrow semester begins and I have to go back to university. Somehow I am sad about vacation ending but otherwise I am very happy to see my friends here and that I had such nice time the last two months.

Being back home means also that I will restart regular posting in my blog and coding. Hopefully I will find enough time between lectures to do that. I whish everyone who goes back to University in the next days a good semester and lots of interesting stuff to learn.

I added a Photoblog to my site. You can find it here. I hope you will like the images I will post there. Currently there is only one image that I already posted here in the blog. Tomorrow when I got some sleep I will add first really fresh image. Uwe outrun me with adding a photoblog just by a day. I started setting it up on friday but had some technical problems. More about them tomorrow.