RavenPlus Version 1.0.507 - Picture Uploads To PicasaWeb Via OAuth2

I know some of you have been waiting for this. So here it is: RavenPlus version 1.0.507, which contains the fix for uploading pictures to PicasaWeb via the Google OAuth2 protocol.

I have been testing this version out for over the last couple of weeks and I believe I have a stable version that is fit for release. Pictures in my last 3 blog postings (totalling 17 in all) were uploaded to PicasaWeb with this version and I did not notice anything out of the ordinary. They all went through smoothly as far as I could tell. Even my edited pictures were detected by RavenPlus and they got updated on PicasaWeb when I subsequently republish my blog post.

Not tested though is video uploads to PicasaWeb - simply because I do not have the bandwidth nor any videos to share.

If you do not upload pictures to PicasaWeb, you can safely ignore this version.

Version 1.0.507 only works for existing users of Raven and RavenPlus. New users will have to wait a little while as I haven't started work on making a clean import of blogs hosted on Google's Blogger/Blogspot yet. That's next on the to-do list.

Getting Sharp Macro Butterfly Pictures

I was taken aback by the 2 photos above when I first viewed it on my computer. I was not expecting to see such sharp images, clear enough to see the finer details on the butterfly (do click on the pictures to enlarge). And the colours, they are just spectacular - totally unanticipated. The only editing that I did on these two photos was to crop and resize them, nothing else.

Previous Attempts

Compare the 2 pictures above with the one below, a picture that I took about a year ago. I think you will agree that this photo is less striking. A little over exposed, I think.

Tiny Mushrooms

If there is no moisture, there will be no mushroom. With the onset of the year-end North-East monsoon, where it rains almost every day, little tiny mushrooms started to appear here and there around my front garden. The top part of these mushrooms, its cap, measures about an inch across; its height, no more than three inches. These mushrooms will start to dry up after about 24 hours. I don't think these mushrooms are edible - there's not much to chew on even if it is.

Here are some macros (closeups) that I have taken one fine morning towards the end of October. If you enjoy looking at the finer details, like I do, just click on the pictures to enlarge.

Spotted Doves Fighting

I suppose this must be a yearly affair. I remember there was one last year, if I am not mistaken. I theorise that this is to determine the pecking order of the Spotted Dove community. There were 5 of them within the boundaries of my house on my last count just the other day.

I initially thought that this was the courtship ritual of Spotted Doves. But on closer observation (I recorded a couple of videos, by the way), it appears more like a pair of, presumably male, Spotted Doves fighting. The first encounter was on 20th November 2015. Two more encounters were to follow after that, spanning over a total of three days. They clashed on the ground, on the roof of my front porch and also within the branches of my mango tree. I particularly like the encounter within the mango tree, with all that branch to branch jumping and all. I am unsure if there were the same pair over those three days though.

The objective it seems is for the Doves to attempt to stand on the opponent's back. If that fails, then, to wrap its wing over the opponents body. I don't think there was any pecking involved. I didn't see any in my recorded videos.

Mounting an attack could be either head-on, broadside or from behind if one is at such positioning following an earlier attack. There is a lot of wing fluttering during the fight. Lots of jumping with the help of their wings too to gain some extra height. A feather or two may be lost during an attack.

The fight ends when one bird walks calmly away from the confrontation with the other bird (the victor?) following behind, head bowing and cooing at the same time at the retreating bird as if to taunt it. In one of my videos, the two birds actually perched together, separated by about 6 inches between them, after the fight. No bird appears to be injured nor were any bloodied either. Very civilised I think.

Some Additional Pictures

Below are some pictures that I have taken on the first day of this encounter mentioned above. The pictures were all taken within 5 minutes with my Nikon compact camera set to 'Sports' mode. All I did was to focus and hold the shutter-release button down with my forefinger for a couple of seconds to capture a sequence of continuous shots (not really continuous actually as at 16 MP each shot takes about 0.7 or 0.8 of a second to complete).

This fight ended, by the way, when I was too close for the birds' comfort. They just flew away.

Windows XP - Intermittent ntfs Error

One of my nightmares over the last couple of years - it happened again yesterday. This was what greeted me when I started my Windows XP yesterday:

"One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency"

This only occurs on the C: drive. Windows will 'fix' this problem alright, via a 'CHKDSK', but always will some files deleted. The only thing I could do is to restore the deleted files from backups; which is a laborious task since Windows doesn't actually tell me the directories/folders the deleted files were from. At the back of my mind, I always have this feeling that one of these days, some essential system file will get messed up real bad rendering my PC unbootable.

Googling didn't help much as I could not find anything specific to this problem.

A Lead?

It's only a hunch, but my suspicion has always been on the Avira Free Antivirus software for it is the only application that modifies my C: drive regularly via its automatic updates. But I have never had any concrete indications ... until yesterday (well, at least I believe it is so).

A Brief Update On Picasa And RavenPlus

Just a quick note to say that I am still working on the Picasa upload function (via the OAuth2 authentication) in RavenPlus.

To say the least, I am struggling; struggling with XML processing in Python. All this while, I have been avoiding this subject area as it looks complicating. After spending a couple of days on this, it still is. I am not at all familiar with XML processing in Python or in any other computer programming language. There is a 357 pages book written on this topic, but this is something that is not easily digestible in a short time. Hands-on work through the examples in the book is required.

The Google Picasa API part is easy, thanks to an example Python script that found off the Internet. In fact, I managed to upload a few pictures to Picasa web via my own customised Python script with OAuth2 authentication. The problem now is in saving the uploaded picture file's meta-data (the information that is returned from Picasa web) into RavenPlus. Not getting this meta-data into the RavenPlus' Picasa registry means RavenPlus is unaware of the successful picture upload.

A Golden Tree Snake

My Wish Granted

Ever since my first encounter some 3 years back, I have always wanted to know the identity of this snake. Now I do; it is a Golden Tree Snake - much appreciation to Google Image search for helping me.

Ever since I took this rather uninspiring picture some 14 months back, I have always wanted to redeem myself. Now I have, as my luck would have it one fine morning in the month of June 2015.

Customizing Google API Python Client Version 1.2 For Python 2.4

I extended RavenPlus to support Google OAuth2 authentication for Blogger/Blogspot with the help of the Google API Client Library for Python version 1.2. Out of the box, this library does not support Python version 2.4, the version in which RavenPlus (and Raven) was built. Below are the modifications, in RED, that I have made to this library to get it working with version 2.4 of Python.

RavenPlus Version 1.0.506 - Post Scheduling In Blogger/Blogspot

I have a confession. I actually had the 'post scheduling' feature included in RavenPlus during development. But I had it removed a few days before releasing RavenPlus Version 1.0.505.

While under development, I noticed that one of my blog post had its URL set to my blog homepage. The reason (after much tracing): my PC was running about 60 seconds ahead of the Blogger/Blogspot server - it became a schedule post, which is technically correct. Because of this, I wrongly assumed that it was better to let Blogger/Blogspot set the publishing time of a blog post, rather than by RavenPlus, without realising that I had mistakenly taken the 'post scheduling' feature away.

I am now undoing my mistake with RavenPlus Version 1.0.506. My apologies.

RavenPlus Version 1.0.505

I am releasing RavenPlus version 1.0.505 today. This release, although half-baked, is of special interest to existing users of Zoundry Raven and RavenPlus who are facing problems in publishing to Blogger/Blogspot. Google shutdown 'ClientLoging' completely in late May 2015, resulting in Raven and older versions of RavenPlus getting crippled.

At the moment, only the following Google OAuth2 aware publishing functions are available to users of Blogger/Blogspot: