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Upgrading to Drupal 6 is still very painful, with a lot of modules still broken. I still haven't been able to upgrade any of my sites. I'm now thinking of switching to something else instead of Drupal.
links for 2008-09-30
Links
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Sep 302008
Not a hate crime?
News and Politics
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Sep 302008
How is this not a hate crime?
DAYTON — A 10-year-old girl sprayed in the face with a chemical Friday, Sept. 26, while at a local Islamic mosque was not the victim of a hate crime, police Chief Richard Biehl said.
The girl was watching children whose parents and relatives had gathered at the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, 26 Josie St., to celebrate Ramadan when she noticed two men standing outside a basement window about 9:40 p.m., according to police.
One of the men then sprayed something through the open window and into the girl’s face from a white can with a red top, according to a police report. The girl said she immediately felt burning on her face and felt “sick to her stomach,” the report stated.
Other children and a woman in the room felt affects from the chemical and the mosque was evacuated.
If they weren’t Muslims, it would be all over the news and it would certainly be called a hate crime. The attack is widely believed to be inspired by a terror scare DVD being distributed by a pro-McCain group.
Sep 292008
I’m becoming very disappointed with Drupal, due to version 6′s lack of backward compatibility. A lot of very basic modules still haven’t been upgraded to work with Drupal 6, yet they’re already working on Drupal 7. I still haven’t upgraded any of my sites to Drupal 6 and I probably won’t upgrade them. I doubt if I’ll be able to upgrade to version 7 either, without first upgrading to 6.
Corey Smith wrote about moving from WordPress to Drupal, but I’m thinking of going the opposite way. Daniel first brought up the idea of moving MacMegasite to WordPress, which I discounted at first because it would lose a lot of functionality.
I would be losing the forums, buddy lists, the point system, and some of the less-used features like feed aggregators & user blogs. Some of these features could be implemented with WordPress plugins and a separate forum system. The most critical feature is the ability to have multiple authors, which WordPress supports.
On the plus side, WordPress is a lot more attractive, with more professional looking themes, and a much nicer content entry screen. I’m concerned that WordPress seems to use more GPU according to MediaTemple’s GPU usage report. My Drupal sites use anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.0014 GPUs per hit, while this site uses 0.0017 or more GPUs per hit. It may be a due to the plugin configuration.
I’ve seen a few articles about moving from Drupal to WordPress, so I know it’s been done. It would be a big project, so I probably won’t do it until after I finish my current projects and release the iPhone apps I’m working on.
links for 2008-09-29
Links
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Sep 292008
The D90 is selling fast
Programming
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Sep 282008
I like to check Flickr’s camera finder page every few days to see how popular the D90 is. As I write this, the D90 is ranked 15 of 102 Nikon models. Less than a week ago, it wasn’t even listed. Yesterday it was #19, a jump of 4 places in one day.
Here’s a shot I took today with my 50mm lens at f1.8. I love being able to use auto focus with that lens.
links for 2008-09-28
Links
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Sep 282008
HDR Comparison: Hydra vs. Photomatix
Photography
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Sep 262008
I took a few shots of tonight’s very spectacular sunset using the D90′s exposure bracketing and created an HDR image from them. I tried both the Hydra plugin for Aperture 2.1 and Photoshop with the Photomatix tone mapping plugin. I found that Photomatix produces a much more vivid image with more detail.
 Hydra Plugin |
 Photoshop + Photomatix Plugin |
Using a WebKit view for help
Programming, iPhone
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Sep 262008
Since the F**KING NDA makes it difficult to find iPhone programming tips & sample code, I thought I’d share this little tidbit.
Sometimes the easiest way to display a help or information screen is a UIWebView. It’s very easy to display the contents of an HTML file stored in the application’s resource bundle.
NSData *info = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile: [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"info" ofType:@"html"]]; [webView loadData:info MIMEType:@"text/html" textEncodingName:@"utf8" baseURL:nil];
However, if you have any external links, they will open in the same web view, which you probably don’t want. I found a very nice work-around to have any clicked URLs open in Safari. You’ll need to specify a delegate for your web view that implements the webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType method. The code is very simple.
- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType { if (navigationType == UIWebViewNavigationTypeLinkClicked) { [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: [request URL]]; return NO; } return YES; }
links for 2008-09-26
Links
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Sep 262008
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A Palin presidency as a bad Disney movie.
Isn’t it a bit early?
News and Politics
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Sep 262008
Although tonight’s debate hasn’t happened yet (and until just recently it wasn’t certain that it would take place), McCain’s campaign is already running an ad saying they won the debate.
Upload to multiple sites at the same time
Photography, Web
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Sep 252008
Pixelpipe is a new service that lets you upload your photos & videos to multiple services at the same time. You set up all of your photo & video sharing sites with Pixelpipe. You can then either email a photo or video to a personal address at Pixelpipe or use their free software to upload it. The photo or video will then be sent to all of your chosen sites.
Pixelpipe has an iPhone app, a Mac uploader app (based on Flickr Uploadr), a Firefox 3 extension, and an iPhoto export plugin. Unfortunately the Eye-Fi card doesn’t currently support it.
The D90′s Eye-Fi Surprise
Photography
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Sep 252008
I haven’t been using my Eye-Fi card because I prefer using a higher capacity 8G card with the D40x & D90′s large file sizes. I also prefer to choose which pictures to upload and do any necessary touchups rather than just upload everything immediately.
When I heard about the D90′s Eye-Fi support I decided to give it a try. The D90 recognizes an Eye-Fi card and adds a new item to the setup menu which lets you choose whether you want it to upload automatically. The D90 also adjusts its power settings to avoid shutting off while pictures are uploading.
When I do upload from the Eye-Fi card, rather than uploading to Flickr, where I prefer to be a bit more selective, I always used Picassa as sort of a dumping ground. I also have it upload to a folder on my MacBook Pro, where I can import it into Aperture, do any necessary touchup, and upload the best to Flickr.
Slow motion train wreck
General
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Sep 252008
Whenever I watch an interview with Sarah Palin I feel like I’m watching a slow motion train wreck. She actually makes Dan Quayle seem intelligent and articulate. When McCain picked her, I lost what little respect I still had for him. There has to be more qualified people he could have picked. Choosing Sarah Palin was one of his most transparent political moves.
McCain Calls Time Out
News and Politics
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Sep 242008
WTF? Shouldn’t the president be capable of doing more than one thing at once? I guess it might cut in to his nap time.
links for 2008-09-24
Links
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Sep 242008
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MP3s of Sufi music from Senegal
links for 2008-09-23
Links
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Sep 232008
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How to debug crashes in objc_msgSend() in Cocoa applications
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I Can Has Cheezburger meets Wall Street Journal.
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Hidden VMWare settings & tricks.
links for 2008-09-22
Links
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Sep 222008
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Mr. McCain's selection of an inexperienced and relatively unknown figure was unsettling, and the campaign's decision to keep her sequestered from serious interchanges with reporters and voters serves only to deepen the unease.
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"people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues."
The thesis goes on to postulate that this instinct is the root of the politics of fear that supposedly works so well on conservatives. -
A workflow for creating WordPress themes.
Disk space eater
Macintosh
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Sep 222008
Today I suddenly noticed that the free space on my MacBook Pro was down to 7.6 GB. The culprit turned out to be caches in /private/var/folders, in this case Pukka. According to the author of Pukka, these caches are created by the system. He’s actively looking into it and working on a solution.
Nikon introduces their first AF-S prime lens
Photography
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Sep 222008
Nikon has announced a new 50mm/f1.4 AF-S lens, their first prime lens with an internal auto focus motor. Unlike their current prime lenses, including the popular 50mm/f1.8 AF, this new lens will support auto focus on the D40, D40x, and D60. One of my reasons for upgrading to a D90 was the D40x’s lack of internal auto focus.
The new lens will be available in December for $439 in the US.
R.I.P. Verda
Local
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Sep 192008
I found out that one of my elderly neighbors, Verda, died yesterday. She was a former condo association president & still came to every board meeting, until she became too weak. Verda worked at the polling place for every election as long as I’ve lived here. She took care of every stray cat & had a few of her own, but she wasn’t the stereotypical “crazy cat lady”.
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