Bristly Ox-Tongue

Bristly ox-tongue (Picris echioides), an awesomely prickly plant, much more so than the spiny sow thistle (Sonchus asper) that I originally thought it must be.  Really awkward to hold still in a wind when you are trying to photograph it.

A quick search of Google Images suggests that the reddish colour in the petals is unusual, they are normally pure yellow.

Photo taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2009-09-06.

A Green Lacewing and maybe a Green Lacewing Larva

Last night one of these flew in through our open living room window.  It is a green lacewing (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae), probably what used to be called Chrysoperla carnea, but this species has recently been shown to be a group of very similar-looking species which can only be reliably distinguished on the basis of their songs (see here and here for details), so I suppose I should identify it as Chrysoperla sp.

Photos taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2009-09-05.

While looking at the Chrysoperla carnea page at Jim Lindsey's Ecology of Commanster site, I realized that, earlier in the day, I had taken a photo of something that looked very like a C. carnea larva.  It was hunting on a yarrow (Achillea millefolium) flower head.

At the time I took these two photos I assumed that it must be some sort of beetle larva, but the colour and pattern match those of C. carnea rather well.  A tentative identification, I think.

Photos taken in Reading, UK, on 2009-09-05.

Agrimony

Common agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria) growing in the long grass in Reading University grounds.  The flower spikes can grow to over 50cm tall.  When the flowers wither they develop into reddish seeds which are covered in little hooks, rather like burdock only smaller:

When I finished taking these photos I discovered four or five of these seeds attached to the hairs on my arm.  This plant had several flower spikes and several seed spikes at the same time.

The leaves of the plant look like this:

Photos taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2009-09-05.

Apache can't write to /var/www/images

In Beginning PHP6, Apache, MySQL Web Development (Timothy Boronczyk et al, Wiley, 2009), Chapter 7 (Manipulating and Creating Images with PHP), on page 178 we are told to create a subdirectory in the web documents directory (htdocs or its equivalent, such as /var/www on Ubuntu).  Then we are told create a couple of web pages that attempt to upload an image into that directory. But, when I tried this, the upload failed because Apache did not have write-permission in the images subdirectory.  The problem was that the subdirectory was owned by root but Apache was being run by user www-data.

I was able to fix this by changing the owner of the subdirectory to the user (and group) that the Apache process was run under:

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/images

Now the web pages could successfully upload images to the subdirectory.

(I then had another problem in that the web pages couldn't display the uploaded images, but that was down to me being tidy and putting the web pages in a subdirectory of their own (/var/www/ch07-1).  I fixed this by changing "images" to "../images" in an <img> tag in one of the web pages.)

An Orange-Headed Crane-Fly

I went out for my usual walk this afternoon, not expecting very much as the insects had become noticeably less abundant in the past few weeks with the cooler weather and shorter days.  But, on almost the first leaf I looked at, I found this rather stunning little crane fly.  It is a female Nephrotoma sp (Diptera: Tipulidae).  This identification is based on this image at bioimages.org.uk.  Members of genus Nephrotoma are also known as tiger crane-flies because of the yellow and black stripes on their abdomen (hidden by the wings in these pictures).

Photos taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2009-09-05.