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 because of my other cats. When he sees me, he rubs against my legs and wants to be petted.

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

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 takes a big stretch of imagination to even suggest that Rachel Ray’s frilly scarf vaguely resembles a kaffiyeh.

I plan to join the boycott against Dunkin’ Donuts. No more Sunday morning coffee & bagels from them.

• 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)

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 nicely for me, although I had a few duplicate entries to clean up.

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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 I finally upgraded to MAMP Pro.

With MAMP or MAMP Pro, you can start Apache only when you need it, rather than having it run all the time and waste memory. MAMP’s bundled version of Apache also takes less virtual memory than the standard 64-bit version.

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One of the major advantages of MAMP over the system standard Apache/PHP setup is that it lets you easily switch between PHP 4 & 5 and enable Zend Optimizer with eAccelerator or XCache.

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MAMP Pro also gives you a nice user interface for enabling & disabling Apache modules.

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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 is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access
  (tags: google ajax javascript)
• MuxFind: Search for Muxtapes
  search muxtape.com for songs, artists, or tapes.
  (tags: music mp3)
• baconfat.muxtape.com
  I *MUST* have the Vampire Weekend/Fela mashup from this muxtape!
  (tags: mashup vampire_weekend)

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.

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, FriendFeed added rooms, a good idea although it still seems a bit rough around the edges. The big limitation of rooms is that there’s no way to see a list of rooms or find a particular room unless you know the name, although Andy Beard found a way to find rooms through Google.

The API seems to be lacking some features needed to fully support rooms. In particular, it isn’t possible to get all rooms a user belongs to. You also can’t get messages from multiple rooms. I’m sure they’ll continue to refine this feature.

I’m trying to decide how to add room support to my FriendFeed iPhone app without making it too cluttered. I’d welcome feedback & suggestions on how the application can be improved.

• // Internet Duct Tape

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. In order for it to work properly, it’s necessary for the subject to be in the proper focus area (which has a red indicator when you press the shutter halfway).

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 be his best choice.

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

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 to stop working.

Requiring developers to sign up for a key before they start developing applications for a website will stifle development and make it less likely that we’ll see new and innovative applications. Twitter has maybe hundreds of third party applications thanks to their open API, while Pownce, which requires a key (even though it’s quick & free to sign up), has very few.

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.

• 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)

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.

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.

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.

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After FedEx tracking showed that it was delivered to Apple’s warehouse today, I called Apple’s customer service line to see what happened. My first pleasant surprise was that I didn’t have to wait on hold. My call was picked up immediately. The very nice lady I spoke to took care of everything, entering the return request for the old battery and shipping a new one overnight at no charge. I should have it tomorrow or Thursday.

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.