/dev/random

Gunther (also known as Ernie) is a very friendly Hemingway cat that needs a home badly. He’s already been to the vet and is neutered. I’ve been feeding him for a while and a few other people are also feeding him. He’s been trying to get into my apartment, but I can’t take him in [...]

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MSR Asirra: A Human Interactive Proof
An alternative to captchas, in which you pick out pictures of cats.
(tags: spam captcha cats)

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “links for 2008-05-29″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/29/links-for-2008-05-29/” });

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Shame on Dunkin’ Donuts for pulling their ad featuring Rachel Ray because right-wing douchebag Michell Malkin says her frilly black & white scarf looks like Yasser Arafat’s kaffiyeh.

Never mind that a kaffiyeh is merely a piece of wardrobe worn by most people in the Arab world, which has nothing to do with political beliefs. It [...]

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Bypassing Objective-C’s Message Passing Mechanism for Speed
The author compares the performance of objC message passing, calling the method directly, and a C function. In this case, 53% of the CPU time is spent in objc_msgSend.
(tags: cocoa programming obm)

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “links for 2008-05-28″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/28/links-for-2008-05-28/” });

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I installed the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update a few hours ago, so far with no problems. One feature Apple didn’t mention in the release notes is that Address Book can now sync with Google contacts. The sync happens automatically with a .Mac sync, as well as when syncing with an iPhone. It worked very [...]

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Since Chris24 twittered that he hates MAMP, I had to come to MAMP’s defense.
For a long time I never saw any reason to use MAMP, since I used the standard system installation of Apache & PHP with MySQL installed via mysql.com’s installer package. After using MAMP for a while I came to appreciate it and [...]

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Photoshop and Digital Photography Tips, Articles & Tutorials @ Earthbound Light
Using Levols on individual channels rather than the image as a whole they can be used to adjust color balance and correct color casts.
(tags: photoshop tips)

Photoshop Adjustment Layers 101 - Photo Tips @ Earthbound Light
(tags: photoshop tips)

AJAX Libraries API - Google Code
The AJAX Libraries API [...]

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Today marks the fifth birthday of WordPress. For those of you in San Francisco, the developers are throwing a party at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM tonight.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Happy Birthday, WordPress”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/27/happy-birthday-wordpress/” });

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FriendFeed has become very popular lately, in part due to Twitter’s unreliability. FriendFeed still can’t replace Twitter, since it can’t be accessed via SMS or IM, although FriendFeed can be more conversational, since you can comment on a particular item rather than just reply to the user as you do on Twitter.
A few days ago, [...]

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// Internet Duct Tape

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “links for 2008-05-24″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/24/links-for-2008-05-24/” });

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I’ve been working on my manual focus skills with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. I found that trusting the focus indicator light in the view finder is the key to proper focus. The subject will appear to be in focus across a range of settings, but it’s only in perfect focus when the indicator lights up. [...]

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There have been suggestions that Obama should choose Hillary as vice president for a ‘Dream Ticket’. It would actually be more of a nightmare. Clinton would be constantly defying Obama, making deals behind his back, and in effect running her own parallel government. She’s much too outspoken to remain in the background. Edwards would probably [...]

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He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died
Amazing collection of Polaroid photos taken every day for 18 years.
(tags: photography)

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “links for 2008-05-22″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/22/links-for-2008-05-22/” });

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Many websites which provide an API require developers to register and request a key, while others like Twitter and FriendFeed are completely open. Flickery, a new desktop client for Flickr, demonstrats why restricted APIs are bad. Flickr decided to revoke the developer’s API key because it was causing too much traffic, causing the Flickery application [...]

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I wrote a simple sidebar widget that answers the question “Is Twitter Down?”. You can download the widget here. Simply place it in wp-content/plugins, enable it in the plugin admin screen, and add it to your sidebar.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Is Twitter Down?”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/21/is-twitter-down/” });

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60 Photography Links You Can’t Live Without
(tags: photography)

Digital ProTalk: I Don’t Think I’m Dumb, Maybe I’m Just Stupid
David Ziser learns the beauty of shooting RAW instead of JPEG.
(tags: photography)

Social Graph API - Google Code
The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them.
(tags: web2.0 development)

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “links for 2008-05-21″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/21/links-for-2008-05-21/” [...]

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Dragonflies seem to be swarming since yesterday. Luckily this one remained still long enough that I was able to get a few good shots of it.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Photo of the day”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/20/photo-of-the-day-2/” });

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Paulo Jordao is planning a photo walk in Fort Lauderdale some time next month. The details haven’t been finalized, but most likely it will be on June 21 or 22. The location is yet to be determined, possibly around Las Olas.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Photowalk in Fort Lauderdale”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/20/photowalk-in-fort-lauderdale/” });

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Last week I ordered a new battery for my MacBook Pro, since my current one is losing capacity. It was supposed to be delivered last Thursday, but FedEx didn’t even attempt to deliver it because it was damaged in transit.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
After FedEx tracking showed that it was delivered to Apple’s warehouse today, I [...]

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My great aunt was able to identify the people in the photo I posted a few days ago. It was taken in New York in 1909 or 1910. The girl at the top left is my grandmother.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Mystery Solved”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/05/19/mystery-solved/” });

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