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‘Tis was a rainy gloomy Saturday afternoon – my favourite kind of weather I was experimenting with some High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography in 1Borneo. Here are some of the photos – the first three images of each set are the raw images used to create the fourth image (HDR):

New York, New York

Captured: 2010-04-17 14:49:03

elusion Lounge (1Borneo Courtyard Hotel)

Captured: 2010-04-17 17:36:19

This is a pretty nice place – great view of the surroundings.

To read more about HDR imaging, have a look at my post on HDR Imaging on the Nokia N900.

Ever snapped a photo with a bright background and a dim foreground and either had the foreground too dark or the background blown-out?

Time for High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging Its a feature that is far more at home on DSLRs, rather than lowly point-and-shoot cameras, let alone the Nokia N900. Of course, we can’t match the quality (or speed) of those DSLRs with their superior CCDs. On the other hand, it’s just downright amazing that you can actually snap respectable HDR photos with the N900 and automate the process to a high degree – right down to actually processing the HDR right from your own phone – as long as you have CPU cycles to spare..

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Blogging on the WordPress engine couldn’t be easier – just write away and click that “Publish” button. Easy, until you decide to test the bits that happen after you’ve clicked that button..

Case-in-point: Recently, I found myself wondering whether WordPress was sending pings to my configured Update Services. Its pretty hard to tell since pings are sent asynchronously in the background when a post is published. WordPress can then happily chug along without having to wait for all those ping operations to complete. However, it does mean that if a ping operation fails for whatever reason – it will fail silently. No errors. Zip. Na-da.

To be fair, there are errors, but only in the Apache/PHP logs – not the most convenient of places to look. Now, I’m paranoid and insecure – I need some reassurance that my blog is actually behaving the way I’m expecting it to. Oh, did I mention that I’m lazy as well?

In a nutshell, what I needed was a blog ping tester. I googled around. My conclusion: whoever gave “blog ping” its name couldn’t have made it anymore difficult to find useful content about it. The rest of the world is interested in network pings, and rightly so. On the other hand, I’m the poor sod looking for something so automated and ubiquitous (at least in the blogosphere) that nobody bothered to mention it, except when advertising the very services that I feared I wasn’t connecting to.

So, I was stuck with another one of those “itches” concerning this blog (the other one being the blog design, but I digress). To scratch this itch, I wrote a blog ping tester. It’s not based on XML-RPC, even though blog pings are. It’s a dumb script that receives an incoming blog ping, does some rudimentary parsing, then logs it.

And it works! (I think). Just add http://null.invalidfile.name/blog-ping-test/ into your list of sites in Settings > Writing > Update Services, then publish something. If your blog is sending out pings properly (and this website is up), you will see your blog ping show up in the tester log.

Feel free to use this service to test your blog’s ping sending capability and (hopefully) regain your peace of mind.The logs are public, and the server will only keep the 50 most recent pings – it deletes the rest.

For those of you who want to look at the source code, it’s right here.

I really don’t know if there is another service out there that does the same thing. If you know of any, please post the link in the comments.

The usual disclaimer: I make no guarantee of anything whatsoever with regards to the blog ping tester – it may be unfit for your purposes, it may fail occasionally and it might not make you any less cynical or nervous. YMMV.