To the sea-side and back

This Sunday I went with my friend Nicola to Jesolo and during the travel I took a picture of all of the gas stations. Most of them were already inserted, so I just needed to update their prices, anyway I still had to add three of them:

• 10974 AGIP, SP Treviso Mare, Roncade
  
• 10975 AGIP, via Guglielmo Marconi, Musile di Piave
  
• 10976 ESSO, via Guglielmo Marconi, Musile di Piave

Taking a train from Padova to Bassano

As I've already done from Cornuda to Padova on Taking a train from Cornuda to Padova, I took a GPS log of the railway travel from Padova to Bassano del Grappa. This way you may understand better how the Italian railway works.

This is the speed plot of an old diesel Train, maximum speed 108 km/h. WOW!

If you have Google Earth you may want to plot this kml file at high resolution.

Taking a train from Cornuda to Padova

This is the GPS track log from Cornuda to Padova to by train.

This is the speed plot of an old diesel Train, maximum speed 124 km/h. WOW!

If you have Google Earth you may want to plot this kml file at high resolution.

PAD, let's remove some links

I was reading that Google does not like a website when its link popularity raise to quickly. This make sense, but I could have never thought that Google could actually penalize a website for doing this.
For this reason I've just removed all the link to www.pizza-a-domicilio.it from http://gallery.prezzibenzina.it and from http://poi.prezzibenzina.it.

While doing this I realized that in some sections of the gallery everybody could add comments to the pictures, thus leaving the door open to comment spam bots. In fact after disabling this option, I had to remove over 10 thousand of spam comments (which didn't take long since I have direct access to the database).

Polarizer Filter

I always wanted to show the effect of a polarizer filter, and so here a nice picture: on the bottom you can see how the window is reflecting the outside environment, while on the top the filter is turned 90° making it possible to see through the window.

Niagara Falls Panorama

I have made this picture using six 10-mega pixel shots that have been merged with Hugin.

After learning that to create a good stitch I should use the AEL Lock (Auto Exposure Lock), I was expecting to create an awesome panorama this time. Too bad that I forgot that my Sony Alpha 100 has a DR (Dynamic Range) ability that is enabled by default.

When DR is enabled, every picture has its own contrast enhanced, and this could cause problems if you are trying to stitch the photographs all together, because you will end up having darker or lighter overlapping areas.

Server Crash

And here I am, at the Venice airport, almost ready to flight to the USA and what happens?

Eighteen hours before the flight the server crashes and then trying to fix it, my system administrator changed the IP addresses of all of my domains. He said it would have been transparent. Too bad that Murphy's law doesn't know the meaning of being transparent.

Two things happened. First PAD doesn't use the main DNS, so if there is a change in the IP address, I have to modify them manually. Second, the old IP addresses have been re-assigned to somebody else, so that until the DNS changes propagates, the websites are unreachable.

At the moment only www.pizza-a-domicilio.it changes haven't been propagated. If you try to open it you get the following message:

:19638/webhost/rollout">-->

All the other domains are up and running.

PLM, adding some content

I guess I have been to busy lately, and what happened is that I completely forgot to remove the parking page and to add some content to the site www.prolocomaser.it. So I decided to upload there the panoramic pictures I've taken of the city of Maser.